TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.002

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.0 KB | 172 lines

                                                                                THE ARTS, Page 108

FREEDOM WAITING FOR VISION


From theater to painting, from movies to books, from television
to magazines, the cultural thaw has turned into a spring flood.
But where is the new Soviet Renaissance?

By John Kohan/ MOSCOW


    A Cyclone fence and metal bars encircle the stage. Like a
caged animal, a slender young woman in black paces back and
forth. Suddenly, she rattles the prison door, her pale features
exposed by the spotlight. "Three hundred forty-nine days! Three
hundred forty-nine days!" she screams. "Bite on your hat,
anything to keep from sobbing!" Few in the audience at Moscow's
Sovremennik Theater stifle the emotion inspired by such searing
scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey
into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges,
the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches
and endless nights during which she covers her ears to block out
the cries of the torture-d. In a final, chilling tableau, she
even welcomes assignment to the labor camps as a liberation.
Viewers leave speaking in hushed tones, bludgeoned by the past.

    In the colonnaded auditorium of the House of Physicians,
other Muscovites listen transfixed to a recording of poet Anna
Akhmatova reading her long-banned poem Requiem in a deep,
rasping voice. When the melancholy cadences end, literary
historian Lydia Chukovskaya, 82, recounts how she memorized the
verse from scraps of paper that Akhmatova had handed her before
the poet burned them in an ashtray.

    The lights come up at the House of Composers after a
screening of The Puppy, director Alexander Grishin's new film
about a young defender of perestroika who loses his battle to
expose corruption. At least one viewer is disturbed by a final
scene showing the body of the youth floating in factory waste
water. "Why can't the film have a positive ending?" asks the
decorated war veteran. "Everything is so negative today." He is
interrupted by hoots of protest from the audience.

    Forget those quiet Moscow nights of song. There are not
enough evenings in the month now to attend all the theater
premieres, art exhibitions, poetry readings, film previews and
cultural debates taking place in the Soviet capital. Time has
to be set aside for watching trend-setting "musical-information
shows" such as View or the monthly video digest Before and After
Midnight, or for perusing the thick monthlies like Novy Mir and
Znamya, which Soviets affectionately call the "fat journals."
If the short-lived liberalization that followed the death of
Joseph Stalin in 1953 was known as "the thaw," the cultural
revolution set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev has proved to be
nothing less than a spring flood.

    Culture has not remained the exclusive domain of Moscow
intellectuals. On the Arbat pedestrian mall, would-be Pushkins
and Pasternaks peddle their autographed poetry for a ruble or
more a page. Sunday painters in Izmailovo Park display their
labored tributes to the Russian futurists, suprematists and
constructivists of the early 20th century. More than 200
experimental studio theaters have sprouted in Moscow alone. The
cultural explosion has been felt as far away as the Pacific port
of Nakhodka, where local artists set up a puppet theater
workshop, and in Yaroslavl in the Soviet heartland, scene of a
rollicking street festival celebrating the arts.

    Artistic exiles and emigre art have been joyously welcomed
home. Director Yuri Lyubimov is working again at Moscow's
Taganka Theater, with the company he led until he was forced
into exile in 1984. Literary journals print works by emigre
writers like Georgi Vladimov, whose chilling moral parable of
a Gulag guard dog let loose in society, Faithful Ruslan,
appeared two months ago in Znamya. Nobel laureate Alexander
Solzhenitsyn remains an exception, awaiting official
rehabilitation from his sylvan refuge in Vermont.

    Rejected works such as Boris Pasternak's epic novel Doctor
Zhivago and Vasili Grossman's saga of the Battle of Stalingrad,
Life and Fate, now occupy their rightful places on Soviet
bookshelves. Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 1940, has been
accorded more recognition today than he enjoyed when he was
alive; dozens of productions of his plays and prose works have
been staged in Moscow since the advent of glasnost, including
his satiric tale of Soviet social engineering, The Heart of a
Dog. Says literary critic Vladimir Lakshin: "Even if perestroika
were to end today, what has already been accomplished in the
past three years will go down in the history of Russian
literature."

    Soviet audiences once delighted in conspiring with
performers to find double meanings and nuances in every turn of
phrase. Reading between the lines of classic and seemingly
innocent plays became a form of art, a weapon against
literal-minded censors who failed to perceive the broader
message. The loosening of state controls over the press has made
such clever stratagems irrelevant. Blunt social criticism can
be found in the latest copies of the weeklies Ogonyok and Moscow
News. Says theater critic Vilas Silunas: "When the press can say
everything in black and white, why resort to stagings of
Shakespeare?"

    The most vigorous response to the new demand for bold and
open debate has come from documentary filmmakers. The problems
of growing up in the Soviet Union have been unblinkingly
presented in such films as Is It Easy to Be Young?, a group
snapshot of Soviet teenagers, from heavy-metal fans to
Afghanistan war veterans. Director Marina Goldovskaya vividly
exposed the brutality of the first Soviet labor camps in
Solovetsky Power and profiled a farmer fighting against
bureaucrats in The Peasant of Archangel. This new style of
"critical realism" has found echoes in feature films like Little
Vera, a blistering psychological portrait of family life in a
hellish industrial town.

    Yet the new freedoms have not inspired anything approaching
a Soviet Renaissance. The two landmark works that represent
glasnost in the West, Tengiz Abuladze's film Repentance and
Anatoli Rybakov's novel Children of the Arbat, were completed
before the new period of liberalization. Says theater critic
Igor Shagin: "Our artists now have freedom, more money, the
right to travel abroad and meet foreigners here. People want to
know where all the masterpieces are."

    Poet Bulat Okudzhava, one of a handful of artists whose
works captured the spirit of the first post-Stalinist era of
reform, wonders about the aftereffects of the long period of
stagnation. "The `thaw' generation is tired and burned out," he
says. "But the next generation is simply not prepared to carry
on the reforms." Filmmaker Elem Klimov, the head of the Cinema
Workers' Union, admits that the transition has been difficult,
like "struggling to break down a wall, only to confront yourself
on the other side." Says he: "For so long we have said, `Give
us our freedom, and we will show you!' But having freedom is not
so simple. Many have discovered they have nothing to say."

    Though the country's cultural life is being invigorated by
a transfusion of the best of six decades of banned Soviet and
emigre art, the competition has exposed the mediocrity of many
established artists. The freshly released crop of classics has
also set exceedingly high standards for aspiring artists, who
were spoon-fed notions of official culture that are now held up
to ridicule. Says Sergei Zalygin, editor in chief of Novy Mir:
"Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the past century, our artists
need to find a new style and a new way of thinking if they hope
to create a psychological portrait of society today."

    The sense that the artist has a prophetic mission in
society has haunted Russian culture since the 19th century. That
heavy burden crushed novelist Nikolai Gogol, who was never able
to equal his masterpiece Dead Souls. It ultimately led other
writers, like Leo Tolstoy, away from art and into dogmatic
polemics. The weight can be felt today on the Soviet artistic
community. But the essential paradox of glasnost is that when
cultural leaders raise their voices, they can no longer be heard
above the excited babble of an entire nation learning to speak
for the first time.

    Some younger artists question whether an obsessive concern
with the raw realities of daily life may prove to be as
intellectually numbing as the pompous official art of the past.
They have turned inward to explore the realm of the subconscious
and myth. Others have followed a completely different path,
setting art aside to take up journalism, history and politics.
The diversity, even the confusion, has been welcomed after
decades of conformity. "We need time to get over our feeling of
shock and process all this new information," says Okudzhava.
"The masterpieces will come later. Now we must editorialize,
speak out, make our confession and repent." And perhaps weep,
like the audiences at Journey into the Whirlwind.