SAGA OF ALEXANDR KUPRIN
to his 130th birthday
By V. Zherdeva
"A prominent sculptor was asked:
- How can art be reconciled with revolution?
He pulled the curtain open:
- Look.
They saw a marble statue of a slave, his muscles strained in a desperate
attempt to tear off his chains.
One of them exclaimed:
- How beautiful!
Another said:
- How true to life!
And the third uttered:
- Now I do understand the joy of struggle".
This is a parable from a story by the Russian classical writer Alexandr
Kuprin. Some of his contemporaries admired the way he eulogized female
beauty and tenderness as in "Olesya", "Sulamif" and
other lyrical stories. Others were drawn by his truthful and to a large
extent documentary picture of the plight of workers as in "Moloch"
or the cruelties of military service as in "Duel". Still others
applauded his revolutionary articles.
"A
am a wanderer passionately in love with life. I worked as a metal turner,
a type-setter, a seed sower, a tobacco seller, a stoker, an actor, a circus
assistant. It wasn't poverty that drove me on. I wanted to live the inner
life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes...", Kuprin
wrote about himself. Another classical Russian writer and a future Nobel
Literature prize laureate, Ivan Bunin, described Kuprin as "a nice,
clever and talented man". By contrast, Kuprin's biographer Batiushkov
felt that "there was a crack in him, a sore spot resulting from the
vicissitudes of life, which accounted for his prejudice against some people".
The same dualism was inherent in Kuprin as a writer.
Says expert in the 20th Russian literature Anastasia Zryacheva: "To
be able to grasp the peculiarities of Kuprin's creation one must take a
look at his literary surroundings. He published his first stories in the
1890s when Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov were at the peak of their fame
and when Maxim Gorky burst into Russian literature on the crest of his
youthful romanticism. Another literary trend emerging at that time distanced
itself from social problems. Focused on purely artistic values, it was
characterized by mysticism, eroticism and individualism. Kuprin belonged
to both trends. Many of his stories abound in melodramas and "fateful"
personages, revealing the writer's profound interest in the dark sides
of human soul.
After finishing a military schools Kuprin entered a military academy.
His mother insisted on his becoming a serviceman.
In 1889 Kuprin, still a military student, published his first story
"The Last Debut" about a young actress whose unrequited love
forced her to commit suicide during a performance. The unauthorized publication
cost him several days in the guard-room.
In 1893 Kuprin was preparing to enter the Academy of the General Staff
when he was summoned back to his regiment. The reason was a report by a
policeman whom Kuprin forced to apologize for an insult. The incident prompted
him to resign from the army.
Kuprin's stories written at the turn of the 19th century are strikingly
in tune with modern times. The same cynical nouveaux-riches dividing stolen
money, intellectuals trying to adapt themselves to new realities, and time-tested
eternal values - love, decency and kindness ...
CLASSICAL IN MODERN
to the 75-th birthday of composer Boris Tchaikovsky
Contribution from our staff writer Nina Yakhontova
The 10th of September 2000 was the 75th birthday of the Russian composer
Boris Tchaikovski (died in 1996).
His contemporary colleague Georgi Sviridov described him as the creator
of a musical world where personal and artistic 
originality
reigns supreme and Russia's heritage holds centre stage. Tchaikovski openly
ignored his time's musical experiments, which mostly aimed at winning easy
acclaim or producing shock. Appropriately for a bearer of so famous a surname
as his, he worked in the classical vein. Schooled at the Moscow Conservatory
by giants like Nikolai Miaskovski, Dmitri Shostakovich and Vissarion Shebalin,
he forged ahead in his field by building on the classical legacy rather
than revising it. 'Modern content in classical vessels' is the best critical
evaluation of his musical output.
Although not averse to chamber and even more intimate forms, Tchaikovski
devoted most of his creative effort to symphony. The conductor Boris Fedoseyev,
who led many premier performances of Tchaikovski's works, says his music
represents a mighty union of high spirituality and enlightened patriotism.
It reflects the eternal struggle in which Good takes the upper hand over
Evil.
THE SEBASTOPOL SYMPHONY, widely regarded as Tchaikovski's main masterpiece,
is a dramatic musical reconstruction of a heroic battle in 1941-42 to defend
the historic Russian naval base of Sebastopol on the Black Sea against
besieging Nazi troops. Tchaikovski told our radio it took him 10 years
of fits and starts to compose the work. And in composing it, he met the
formidable challenge of embracing the terror of war and the frustration
of defeat together with the vision of a serene sky and the jubilation of
victory. He wanted to highlight Sebastopol as a powerful symbol of Russia's
nature, past, future and readiness to defend itself.
Apart from symphonies and chamber pieces, Tchaikovski's legacy contains
an opera several cantatas, vocal suites, musical fairy tales and also music
for plays and almost two dozen films. His music for the TV serial THE ADOLESCENT
after a novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevski formed a popular symphonic
poem. A paper in Stockholm reacted to the poem's first performance there
by saying the Russian music had produced two equally great Tchaikovskis
- Piotr and Boris.
This Boris extensively composed music to philosophical poems by the
19th-century Russian poets Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Tiutchev and by
the 20th-century poets Alexander Blok, Marina Tzvetayeva and Nikolai Zabolotski.
Poems by Zabolotski, in combination with music by Boris Tchaikovski, formed
what we know as the ZODIAC cantata.
Critics praise Tchaikovski for spurning all things low-brow and vulgar
and pushing spiritual exaltation, refined taste, crystal style and beautiful
melody to the fore .
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