Boris Asaf'ev and the Soviet Musicology - E-thesis

possible. As a composer you could never be sure whether you were awarded or
accused 76 . During the Stalin terror the given rules in music were often paradoxical.
Many things were at the same time required and forbidden. Levon Hacobian has divided
these into positive and negative program: in the positive program it was tried to create a
consistent or monolithic cognition whereas in the negative program was listed the
hierarchy of risks 77 . The party wanted to show what would happen if you didn’t follow
the official line 78 . The theory and practices appeared sometimes opposites to each other.
This was the case for example when the Party advised to avoid ‘orientalism’ in music
but at the same time to exploit the material of folk music of different Soviet republics 79 .
The dubious atmosphere left the artists to live in a vacuum and with a constant fear. The
fear was personified in Stalin, but in many ways people had been creating their own
reality for a long time. In this sense I agree with the revisionists’ view that Stalin was
some kind of causal peak of certain development, culminated into people who started to
guard each other and to convince each other of the party line’s righteousness.
Eventually the fear made them to consolidate the system as they started to act according
to the rules. Stalin carried out along with the party leadership the totalitarian monolithic
art requests to the extreme with a help of mental cruelty and brute force 80 . However,
even though he wasn’t alone responsible for the system, it is doubtful that any of the
early revolutionaries who used same kind of rhetoric could have hoped such executing
results.
The aforementioned article of Edmunds (2003) reveals yet an important aspect: the
human contradictions and the human frailties. In reality there were simultaneous
features present in one’s mind: the traditional and modern, nihilistic and pluralistic; and
yet how distressed people from different ideological stand points speak against their
76
Best example of that is Šostakovič. (See for esample Fay, Lauren E. Shostakovich: A Life. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.)
77
Hacobian 1998, p. 96.
78
One of the most famous cases in the field of art was when the official Party publication Pravda
published an article (28.1.1936) “Sumbur vmesto muzyki” [Chaos Instead of Music] of the opera Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk by Šostakovič which was until that held as an achievement of Soviet culture.
79
Marina Frolova-Walker has written what kind of difficulties the ‘national-composers’ of different
Soviet Republics had to got through to compose desireable music. Uzer Gajbekov for example had major
difficulties to “Westernize” Azerbaijanian folk themes into his opera and to satisfy the examiners of
Moscow and Leningrad Concervatories. (See Frolova-Walker 1998, pp. 331–371).
80
The Great Terror began in the mid 1930s and touched all layers of society, the party members and the
ordinary people.
26