...Reading Volkov's chatty, well-informed and in many ways enlightened book, you wonder whether he even suspects just how badly, how devastatingly, how possibly lastingly, he and his friends have lost....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Gessen-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print

May 4, 2008
Pen and Sickle
By KEITH GESSEN

THE MAGICAL CHORUS

A History of Russian Culture From Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn.
By Solomon Volkov.Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.
Illustrated. 333 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

On March 2, Russians went to the polls and dutifully voted for Dmitri Medvedev, the presidential candidate handpicked by Vladimir Putin, just as they'd once voted for the handpicked Putin. Three days later, it was reported that the F.S.B., itself a handpicked successor to the K.G.B., was holding a contest to find "the best artistic portrayal of its work." And the next day, the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf released Solomon Volkov's "Magical Chorus," a history of 20th-century Russian culture.

The more things change, the more they. ... But they do change, actually. The F.S.B. contest notwithstanding, the Russian 20th century is over, and not just chronologically. Never again will culture be imbricated with politics in the way Volkov describes in this book. Never again will a dictator seek moral and political guidance from a novelist, as Stalin did from Maxim Gorky in the 1930s. And never again will a new novella be read aloud to a dictator to see if it should be published in a literary journal, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was read to Khrushchev in 1962. (He liked it.) In this sense, at least, Russia has entered the modern age. When Solzhenitsyn returned from exile in 1994, the new Russian state paid him the highest compliment it could think of: a 15-minute talk show on state television. But Solzhenitsyn didn't know how to use the medium - instead of inviting celebrity guests, he just talked at the camera about the country's problems - and the show was canceled after six months. "The unceremonious canning of Solzhenitsyn's program, which pleased some," Volkov writes, "was seen as a sad symbol of the era by others." Volkov seems to think it was a sad symbol, but it's a little hard to tell.

It's hard to tell because nothing would appear less "magical" - Volkov's title comes from Anna Akhmatova's description of the young poets, led by Joseph Brodsky, who appeared in Leningrad near the end of her life - than the string of exiles, suicides, torture sessions and murders that make up the history of 20th-century Russian culture. Volkov knows about all of these and does not leave any of them out; in fact, in 300 pages of thumb-nail sketches of artists, writers, musicians (Volkov is a musicologist by training) and filmmakers, as well as the dictators and secret police chiefs who hounded them, Volkov manages to leave out almost nothing. He has kept up with the latest developments in the historical record as they have emerged in memoirs and archives. And he dutifully provides quick physical descriptions of the major players. Mayakovsky? "Tall and handsome." Pasternak? "Dusky Bedouin face, burning eyes." The émigré feuilletonist Sergei Dovlatov was "very tall, dark and handsome, resembling the actor Omar Sharif." Lenin at least is accorded the honor of being described by Gorky.

The only thing missing from Volkov's book is moral outrage. Despite his background as a quasi dissident - his first book, a series of conversations with Shostakovich, caused an international sensation upon its publication in 1979, after the Soviets mounted a strenuous campaign against it - the lone score Volkov is interested in settling (and this only in a footnote) is with the British historian Orlando Figes, who panned his last book in The New York Review of Books.

Volkov is not outraged because, in his view, he is telling a triumphant tale. In the book's livelier second half, he narrates the post-Stalin era as a story of the irreversible liberalization of the arts, a liberalization that eventually spread to the rest of Soviet life. He may overstate the political significance for the arts, but even the crudest of crude oil determinists will admit that the yearning of the Soviet intelligentsia toward the West helped demoralize the regime. Volkov also spends some time on his own milieu, the émigrés and exiles who came to Paris, Boston and especially New York in the 1970s. Solzhenitsyn, thundering from his Vermont hermitage against the Soviets and, increasingly, the decadent West, was a distant presence for these émigrés; their true avatar was Brodsky, of Mount Holyoke and the West Village.

For a 20th-century Russian writer, Brodsky was notably apolitical - or, put another way, art was his politics. His poetry, partly confessional, partly metaphysical, held as its highest value the sanctity of the private self. Brodsky was anti-Soviet as a matter of course, but also a cosmopolitan. "Like a despotic sheik ... untrue / To his vast seraglio and multiple desires," he wrote in "Lullaby of Cape Cod," "I have switched Empires." The only constant was poetry, music and art. "I close my eyes and almost see them standing in their dilapidated kitchens, holding glasses in their hands, with ironic grimaces across their faces," Brodsky wrote about his generation. "'Liberté, égalité, fraternité. ... Why does nobody add culture?'" This is the world that Volkov came from (it is also the world this reviewer's parents came from), and though Brodsky is not given disproportionate space in "Magical Chorus," he is still the ruling spirit. What makes this book such an interesting document is that it represents the current state of mind - I'm tempted to say the final word - of that generation of which Brodsky was the finest specimen. It is a generation that has been powerless to stop Putin from terrorizing their country, not because they feared him, but because after the destruction of the Soviet Union they retreated into "private life," which is what they wanted all along.

Lacking strong political convictions, Volkov replaces them with a form of sophistication. An awful lot of space is devoted to the politics of the Nobel; collaboration with the regime and betrayal of talent interest Volkov less than the "ambition" of a Gorky or Solzhenitsyn or even Brodsky. Borrowing from the poststructuralist borrowings from Russian Formalism, he speaks of "life scenarios" and "self-fashioning"; he refers to intellectual "brand names" and "trendsetters." This is not a quirk of translation; post-Soviet Russia has imported these terms alongside the realities they describe. Likewise, the post-Soviet Volkov is determined to show that he will not be gulled by old-fashioned Russian culture-worship.

But gulled he is. In the year 2008, he has published a book about the "magical chorus" - it sounds like a TV show for children - of 20th-century Russian culture. What do all the murders and exiles matter, he seems to suggest, when the masterworks have outlived the regime that terrorized them? One of the most curious aspects of this book is the respect it accords Stalin for his interest in high culture and his voracious reading of contemporary literature. (He is favorably compared with Khrushchev in this regard.) In Volkov's book he becomes a kind of high-stakes tastemaker - Oprah with a gun.

And in a way, if you thought, as Volkov thinks, that this story has a happy ending, that the anti-Soviet writers and artists won, then this would make some sort of sense. But the story does not have a happy ending - because it is happening again. Opponents of the regime are being killed; art is again dragged into conformity and the service of the state. This time it is happening under the banner of a mutant neo-nationalist neoliberalism instead of a mutant internationalist communism; and it is being done with the silent connivance of a vast majority of the great Russian intelligentsia. Reading Volkov's chatty, well-informed and in many ways enlightened book, you wonder whether he even suspects just how badly, how devastatingly, how possibly lastingly, he and his friends have lost.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1. His novel, "All the Sad Young Literary Men," has just been published.