IF ARTISTS MUST BE REBELS, WHERE IS SHOSTAKOVICH
List, Kurt
If Artists Must Be Rebels Where Is Shostakovich? By KURT LIST Kurt Lift, our guest columnist this week, is a well-known composer and music critic, Editor of the music magazine, Listen,...
...When Ezra Pound infuses his poetry with half-baked fascist and anti-semitic concepts, ill-conceived though they are, he does so in defiance of a world without culture...
...Literature, as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, is polemical in its relation toward life...
...SEEMINGLY APOLITICAL ARTISTS have poured their rebelliousness into the form of the art work...
...List is now completing a book on the psychology and sociology of music to be published soon by Harcourt, Br*ace...
...The reading of a novel, the observation of a play, the listening to a symphony give man the feeling of a new, mysterious power...
...Art gives man the sense of a dignity which, at least at the moment of appreciation, elevates him beyond his limitations and those of society...
...While Mr...
...But the artist exists as artist only by the very spirit of his rebelliouness...
...How evil, how terrifying must a society be when it can snuff out so fully the last remaining corner of a secret yearning for freedom which is the artist's one inviolate domain...
...To explain the general compliance with political directives only by either the proverbial naivete of the artist or the fear for his life is not enough...
...THE RECENT REMARKS OF PAUL ROBESON, suggesting a change in the lyrics of the song OV Man River to fit the Stalinist "peace program," once more draw attention to one of the most insidious aspects of communist ideology—control of the arts by politicians...
...On the other hand, perhaps, we should expect more from Shostakovich than from Kravchenko, who had only his dignity to lose...
...The act of creation in, for them as for everyone else, an act of liberation from a social yoke...
...Artists are rebels Dy the very nature of their work...
...And the dangers that threaten him arc no greater than those that threatened the many courageous men and wpmen who, at the opportune moment, defied the Soviet Union...
...It is precisely this spirit of mental and emotional polemicism Which the Soviet Union, having already killed all other aspects of human dignity, has eliminated...
...There is also no reason why one should expect a higher sense of moral responsibility from them than any other human being...
...Robeson can only plead for voluntary compliance with his ideological gleichschaltung in America, his political confreres in the Soviet Union have more effective means at hand to enforce it...
...Granted his family was held as hostage...
...The Soviet citizen's existence in limbd has pounded all sense of an even imaginary rebellion out of him...
...But of greater concern than the loss of a few good novels and fine symphonies are the quality and power of the monstrous force which makes some of the finest lalents of our era, such as Prokofieff and Shostakovich, comply with every single directive of the Politburo...
...But does not Shostakovich have to sacrifice the entire essence of himself and his life work, a goal for which many artists have undergone untold hardships...
...The damage done to civilization is obvious...
...By abdicating it he is not naive but suicidal...
...With full justifiestion the detrimental results of the stifling of originality, infusion of political issues in artistic plots and styles, and the ruin of artistic genius have been pointed out...
...Even worse—creative talent too has abdicated the idea of rebellion...
...Insofar as the more abstract arts set themselves up as formal explanation of man and nature, thoy too are polemical...
...True artists are exceptionally naive...
...Lven conservative and reactionary artists are rebels in their art...
...Not only such advertised foes of organized society as Dante or Beethoven or Shelley, but almost every great and sensitive artist has found himself in contradiction with the restrictive forces of society whether these were logically motivated or not...
...But so.were the families of many others who made the decisive step to prove to the world that the spirit of human dignity is not wholly destroyed in the Russian individual...
...Similarly, the audience feels itself transported beyond all social bonds when it enjoys art...
...The oppression of artists and the rape of individual creativity In Russia have evoked much comment in the past...
...Shostakovich could have walked out of the Waldorf-Astoria to be a free, respected artist in a free world...
...By KURT LIST Kurt Lift, our guest columnist this week, is a well-known composer and music critic, Editor of the music magazine, Listen, and music critic for Commentary, Air...
Vol. 32 • July 1949 • No. 31
