A riveting ride through Russian culture

AS its subtitle suggests, this engaging book, translated from its author’s mother tongue, Russian, into clear, elegant English, is sweeping in its scope.

Clearly someone unafraid of biting off a lot, Solomon Volkov has done justice to his subject. Readers of his passionate study, “Shostakovich and Stalin,” will not be surprised at the enormously high level of engagement he brings to this latest enterprise. The good news for them is that, four years on, he has shed some of the hothouse, insiderish manner that at times rendered the earlier book somewhat inaccessible to those less informed than he is about all things Russian. “The Magical Chorus” is an ideal guide, clear but still subtle and nuanced, to the rich complexity of Russian culture, its splendors, controversies, achievements and tragedies throughout the 20th century.

In its first decade, Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest European novelist, was still active, a glorious iconoclast questioning not only Russian autocracy but also the very way people lived their lives. Anton Chekhov was writing groundbreaking plays until his premature death in 1904, and Konstantin Stanislavsky was producing them (and many others) at his Moscow Art Theater, perhaps the most avant-garde venue in Europe. Idealist philosophy dominated Russian culture: Individualism was the order of the day. Volkov evokes the excitement of that far-off time with compelling immediacy.

The czarist regime, though brutal, was less interested in stifling cultural expression than political heresy. By contrast, the leaders of the Soviet Union, especially Lenin and Stalin, were keenly aware of the uses of culture and the dangers it posed to a collectivist dictatorship. Lenin exiled the nation’s best and brightest intellectuals. Under Stalin, terror, backed up by firing squads and the Gulag, minimized dissent. This dictator was highly opinionated when it came to culture, imposing his own tastes -- ironically, rather conservative and anti-modernist -- on his nation. Volkov reports that as early as 1929 Stalin argued that “without making the entire population literate and ‘cultured’ they [would] not be able to raise the level of agriculture, industry, or defense.”

But he had more sinister motives for harnessing culture, as Volkov notes with characteristic pithiness: “Stalin regarded Soviet culture as a huge hose for brainwashing his subjects before what he considered the inevitable Third World War, in the course of which Communism would at last conquer the whole world.”

Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Volkov, who now lives in New York, powerfully depicts the contradictory emotions the regime engendered. He recalls as a boy “the fear and horror I felt when on the dark and damp morning of March 6 [1953] as I was getting ready for school I heard the radio announcer speak slowly and with bathos” of Stalin’s death.

He continues: “I did not know then that on the same day, and also from brain hemorrhage, Prokofiev had died. The composer was weak and the tension that was in the air in the last days of Stalin’s life had apparently hastened his end.” Volkov uses the coincidence as a telling cultural symbol, but he also adds little details forgotten (or never known) except by those who were there: “[I]t was difficult to scrape up flowers for [Prokofiev’s] coffin because all the flowers and wreaths in Moscow had been requisitioned for Stalin’s funeral.” There was a baleful side to the treatment of even those artists the regime favored: When they were told to play at Stalin’s funeral, pianist Sviatoslav Richter and violinist David Oistrakh “and the other musicians were not allowed to leave the Hall of Columns for several days and nights, kept there on dry rations.” Details like this enliven the book.

Volkov’s vast and intimate knowledge of his subject and beyond is displayed throughout, whether he’s discussing the effects of Prokofiev’s devotion to Christian Science or the current Russian version of imperialism: “Contemporary Eurasianists call for the creation of a new empire on the ruins of the Soviet Union, with Russia at its center. The United States is the great Satan for the neo-Eurasianists, and they see the mission of the Russian people as stopping the American-sponsored expansion of the Western liberal model of economic and cultural development. They propose creating new geopolitical axes: Moscow-Beijing, Moscow-Delhi, and Moscow-Tehran, and also uniting with the Arab world. Consequently, they argue, Russia’s cultural priorities must be Eastern, not Western.”

In Russia, the intertwining of culture and politics is supercharged, as Volkov shows in his tour d’horizon of this corner of the world’s turbulent preceding century. He ends on a somber note: “Once again, as it was at the start of the twentieth century, Russia -- anxious, brooding, enigmatic -- is at a crossroads, choosing its way.”

No one reading “The Magical Chorus” will doubt which way Volkov hopes it will choose. His experiences of his beloved nation under the iron heel of Marxism-Leninism have taught him the necessity for freedom of expression and action. And his book celebrates liberty, idealism and humanism -- all that is most valuable in Russian culture.

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Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”