Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0396/03969.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 24KB | 452 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03969}
$Pretitle{295}
$Title{Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Culture}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Hippocrene Books, Inc}
$Affiliation{Embassy of USSR, Washington DC}
$Subject{soviet
books
writers
russian
culture
libraries
library
literature
book
cultural}
$Date{1990}
$Log{Miss Europe*0396901.scf
}
Country:     Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Book:        USSR Yearbook '90
Author:      Hippocrene Books, Inc
Affiliation: Embassy of USSR, Washington DC
Date:        1990

Culture

[See Miss Europe: Courtesy Embassy of USSR, Washington DC.]

     Soviet culture is a blend of the spiritual traditions of many nations,
traditions that are diverse, highly original and, in some cases, rooted deeply
in bygone centuries. Its foundation lies in the culture of Ancient Rus and in
the art of Russia in the 17th-19th centuries, the art which put forward
humane, lofty and elucidating ideas. It is based on the literature and arts of
Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the peoples of Central Asia, whose cultural
heritage dates back to ancient and biblical times. At the same time, the
culture of the Russian Empire before the Revolution and that which has formed
after it developed and is developing through a process of continuous mutual
exchange of ideas and of spiritual values with the culture of Europe and the
culture of the East, as well as with that of Africa and Latin America.

     The Great October Socialist Revolution was the point of departure for
Soviet culture.

     The Russian Empire in 1917 was inhabited both by peoples who had long
been participating in the development of world civilization, and those without
even their own written language. The Revolution proclaimed their political
equality, but this was not enough to overcome their backwardness. That is why
not only industrial equipment but scientists and teachers, who helped the
backward ethnic minorities to create their own written languages, trained
local teachers and contributed to the establishment of their own
intelligentsia, were sent to the north and the east from Central Russia.

     About 50 national minorities acquired written languages after the
Revolution. Today literary works are published in around 100 languages in the
USSR, and theatres stage plays in 50 languages.

     Contemporary Kirghiz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov took a line from the poem
by Grigor Narekatsi, a medieval Armenian poet, as the epigraph to his novel A
Day That Longer Than an Age Does Last-something that would have been most
improbable seventy years ago, for at that time the Kirghiz people knew nothing
of Narekatsi or Armenian literature. Today Aitmatov's books have been
translated into fifty languages.

     Every nation, no matter how small, keeps and develops its national
traditions and language. Love for one's own culture and respect for the
cultures of other peoples is the basis of the Soviet multinational culture,
which has gone through various periods.

     There was, in the twenties, a period of innovative quests, with the
working class now in power creating a proletarian culture. It sometimes
happened that national and classical traditions were mistakenly renounced as
being anachronistic to the spirit of the new age. Experience has shown,
however, that the new is built on the basis of what was best in the old
heritage.

     There was a time when traditions were canonized, with politicians
demanding that art should merely illustrate slogans. Unconventional art came
to be viewed as a betrayal of socialism. From the mid-1930s until recently
bureaucratic supervision over art put obstacles in the way of artistic works
critical of Soviet reality. This could not but damage the tradition of
realism, which has always been inherent in literature and the arts of the
Russian people and other peoples inhabiting the USSR.

     In the 1930s and 1940s, the years of the Stalin personality cult, many
painters, writers, directors, actors and musicians who refused to obediently
follow the directives of the ideological apparatus were persecuted; many of
them died in jails and concentration camps. Their works were kept away from
the public, were "put on the shelf", to use the current expression, until just
recently, when finally they have reached their readers, their viewers, and
lovers of art.

     The years of the Stalin personality cult, the arbitrary repressions of
artists in the time of Khrushchev and finally the stagnation period linked
with the name of Brezhnev certainly did considerable harm to Soviet culture,
but failed to check its progress and, naturally, could not pull it away from
the historic cultural process in the world.

     The treasure-trove of 20th-century world culture includes the novels of
Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Yevgeni
Zamyatin, Andrei Platonov, Chinghiz Aitmatov and Valentin Rasputin; the poems
by Nikolai Gumilyov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova,
Marina Tsvetayeva, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergei Yesenin, Konstantin Simonov and
Alexander Tvardovsky; and the symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei
Prokofyev and Georgi Sviridov. The development of classical ballet is
inconceivable without the dancers Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya, and of
operatic art-without Ivan Kozlovsky and Yelena Obraztsova. The stage directors
Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov made a
profound contribution to the history of world theatre.

     The Soviet Union has always taken an active part in the world cultural
process. It leads the world in the number of published translated books by
foreign authors, of staged plays by foreign playwrights and of films shown
from other countries.

     Although the socialist revolution unambiguously expressed its attitude to
the country's cultural heritage, it has happened that while in one part of the
country millions were spent to restore an ancient architectural monument,
somewhere else a similar monument was demolished for some mundane reason.

     Today, the protection of monuments has become an issue of great urgency.
This is confirmed by the unprecedented public-spirited activity of the
population, setting up societies for the protection of monuments, the heated
discussions at congresses of writers, artists and architects and the sharply
critical publications in the press. The Cultural Foundation of the USSR,
founded in 1987, has played a great role in the preservation and restoration
of cultural monuments. From the very first days of its existence it showed
that the protection of the cultural heritage was in the hands of the people
and that they were not about to pardon even the slightest deviation from the
law.

     In Moscow, Leningrad and other cities people began picketing in front of
historic objects that were to be demolished, appealing for help to the mass
media.

     Nowadays, with the growing democratization and openness, unions of
workers in the arts and literature are taking on an ever greater role,
actively coming out against all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles and
restrictions. Political leaders of all ranks are now obliged to heed the voice
of the artistic intelligentsia. Writers, filmmakers and theatre figures are
by no means sitting back and merely watching the process of perestroika under
way in this country.

LITERATURE

     Western readers are still at the point of "discovering" contemporary
Soviet literature, of whose very existence they have always had only a rather
vague idea. This was not, however, because Soviet writers had nothing to say.
Chinghiz Aitmatov, one of a few authors whose books have lately been published
in the West, remarked in this connection: "We have always had ideas and a face
of our own, and we are an inalienable part of modern literature in the world."

     The restructuring now under way in the nation's culture and the assertion
of openness have had a remarkable impact on literature, which, in its turn,
is gaining a growing influence on the entire course of changes taking p