15 replies to this topic

[Mel Johnson]

Jenny, you could write a five-pager on WHETHER the Communist Manifesto applied to the Soviet Union at all, taken from a strictly economics and poli. sci. standpoint!  Especially after the death of Lenin.  My own quicky list on sources for an expansive topic like this would be the International Encyclopedia of Dance and follow the articles in there, and use the bibliographies for them to fill out your writing.  I know we're not supposed to use encyclopedias, but this isn't like cribbing from Britannica, it's a highly specialized and huge collection of very useful articles.  I hope you have access to a set!

[doug]

Try Elizabeth Souritz's "Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s" (Duke University Press, 1990).

[Mel Johnson]

I do believe that the IED would be worth the trip to the hour-away library.  I know that there is a dedicated article to ballet in Russia and the Soviet Era.  A long, long, article!

[Farrell Fan]

Among the "various dancers that left Russia for more freedom to express themselves" were Valery Panov and Galina Ragozina Panova. Panov wrote a book about their ordeal, "To Dance", published in 1978. I remember it as a great book, although I've forgotten it all. I don't know if it would help you, but you might find it interesting, since at one time, Panov was so well regarded by the regime that he won the Lenin Prize in 1969.

[fondu65]

You might want to look into the link between the ballet Spartacus and Karl Marx. From Google:

Karl Marx on Taxation:  "Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services  list-the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in  embryo is taxation."

http://www.spicyquot...x_Taxation.html


24. Khachaturian: Ballet Music:  The Soviet composer Khachaturian, of Armenian extraction, won particular fame for his ballet scores. Gayane was first staged in 1942 and subsequent productions have introduced variants into the basic story. Set on a collective farm in Armenia, it deals, in outline, with the drama of the peasant girl of the title, her cruel treatment and later rescue by a gallant leader of a Red Army group. The wedding of hero and heroine provides a scene for varied regional dances, including the well-known Kurdish Sabre Dance. The ballet Spartacus takes as its hero the leader of the slave rebellion against Rome in the first century B.C. It may be recalled that Karl Marx regarded Spartacus as the first great proletarian hero, who had, after all, nothing to lose but his chains. There is a lyrical celebration of the love of the hero and his beloved Phrygia and various characteristic dances, introduced in part as entertainment for the Roman general Crassus, who, historically, later met his death in Armenia. The Naxos issue of ballet music by Khachaturian also includes incidental music for Lermontov's play Masquerade, with its series of dances.

http://www.naxos.com/edu/ext_124.htm

'Grigorovich could only benefit from the fact that when he and Khachaturian were creating the ballet, the figure of Spartacus was serving as a kind of double agent in the former U.S.S.R. On the one hand, the Communist leaders endorsed him as the ultimate worker-hero (Karl Marx called him "the true representative of the proletarian of antiquity").'

http://www.city-puls...020116/theater/

[pumukau]

I agree with Mel; it's hard to see much of what Marx wrote in the society that Stalin created.  But it is always instructive to study how Russia's unique mix of genius and brutality, freedom and repression, xenophobia and xenophilia (?), wealth and poverty shaped and was shaped by art.

"Between Heaven and Hell....The story of a thousand years of artistic life in Russia"  by W. Bruce Lincoln is a great read and a good resource to give you a perspective.  The chapter on Socialist Realism applies to your paper.  The index backs up Mel's observation; in a 500 page discussion of art and repression in Russia there is not a single reference to Karl Marx!  So I guess you might want to examine how Lenin and Stalin distorted the Marx, although if your teacher is looking for an indictment of Marx that's probably what you should give her.

Ballet at the time of the revolution was the showpiece of Russian culture, in part because Russia's brilliant literature did not export well to European languages and print.   It was a major conduit for conveying the artistic enthusiasm and idealism that infused the revolution.  How ironic that the real realists were Diaghilev and Balanchine and the many dancers who knew enough to flee the realities of Social Realism!  By the time Stalin was in charge novels had to be dumbed down to what a factory worker could read after shovelling coal for 12 hours.  Sort of like cable TV come to think of it.

Here's what I think: great art is a gift of God to individuals in a vital social context.    For my money there is no greater metaphor for this process, or tool to carry it on, than ballet.  Societies that either decide that there is no God or that only the supreme rulers are in touch with the divine inevitably destroy themselves.

[Mel Johnson]

Keith's point is well-taken.  What I'm really curious to know is the relationship that Agrippina Vaganova had toward keeping the ballet as a state organization.  The Conventional Wisdom has her convincing the Communist authorities personally that Russian Ballet was a national treasure rather than a bauble of the Empire and thus retained support for the art when so many forms of expression were being squashed.

[pumukau]

One other thought, Jenny, could you post your paper when you finish it?  You don' t have to of course, but I've always thought that threads that begin "I have to write a paper about...."  should at least end with the finished product!

[Mme. Hermine]

mel, what do you know of the role of anatoly lunacharsky in convincing the government to keep ballet alive after the revolution?  i've heard some things and even seen a little bit of film of him giving a speech but haven't been able to find much else.

[Mel Johnson]

He was the first Commissar of Education for the USSR.  He's sometimes mistaken in films for Lenin, as they looked somewhat similar.  He was the local delegate for Petrograd to the National (Supreme) Soviet before Sergei Kirov, so he would have been a natural for Vaganova to buttonhole about the ballet schools, which had been, before the Revolution, a state function, as opposed to government.  He didn't last very long, dying sometime in the early thirties, but at least from what I know, Stalin didn't absolutely hate him, so he would have been able to get his programs through.

PS. All I know about Lunacharsky comes from a study of the Russian Civil War of the early twenties.

[citibob]

Griskovic's "Ballet 101" book discusses this issue.