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Oppressed Forms Of October Revolution And Composers

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October Revolution and Composers The democratic and socialist ideals of October caught the attention of the oppressed classes and also influenced artists and composers, who were strongly involved with the cause of the revolution. Talented people like the poets Alexander Blok and Sergei Yesenin deeply sympathized with the revolution. Composers such as: Rachmaninov and Stravinsky stayed overseas. Another Great Russian composer, Sergei Prokovìfiev, went abroad himself as well. Prokofiev left for the United States in May 1918, no one tried to stop him from leaving: a dramatic contrast with the situation under Stalin and Brezhnev. He returned later when Stalin was already in power, and for this he paid a heavy price. The years of the revolution …show more content…

The lava of the revolution had not yet cooled and solidified into a crust of bureaucratic conservatism, as it would later happen with the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. From the turbulent period of the October Revolution a young generation of writers, artists and composers was born. Some of them had an understanding of the politically established disputes and dilemmas, but impulsively gravitated towards the October Revolution and Bolshevism, which in some way corresponded to their own rebellious spirit, to the emaciated rejection of the old and the strained effort towards new forms of artistic expression. At this stage, the idea that the party or the state ordered writers or composers what they could or could not write was inconceivable. The party was obviously not indifferent to artistic tendencies and engaged in lively polemics, criticizing certain tendencies as bourgeois or petty bourgeois, but it was a friendly and constructive dialogue, not a bureaucratic monologue in which an omnipotent state could dictate not only what men and women had to do, but also what they had to think and feel. The first symphonies of …show more content…

The defeat of the socialist revolution in Europe, the result of the betrayals of the social democratic leaders, led to the isolation of the Russian Revolution in conditions of terrible backwardness. In place of the previous revolutionary enthusiasm, Soviet workers fell into apathy and exhaustion. After Lenin's death in 1924, the Soviet bureaucracy headed by Stalin became increasingly determined; a new caste of careerist bureaucrats pushed the workers aside and occupied key positions in the state and in the party. In his thirties in 1936, Shostakovich was known for two operas and three entire ballets, as well as numerous scores for theater and cinema; vice versa, only a purely orchestral symphony, and a string quartet, had been performed in public. But after this meteoric rise to fame Shostakovich was now irremediably (and increasingly dangerously) in contrast to the new spirit of the

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