The Relentless Cult of Novelty
By Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The following address was
delivered when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the National Arts Club Medal of Honor
for Literature in 1993. It was translated by Solzhenitsyn's sons, Ignat and
Stephan. The title was provided by The New York Times, where the
essay was first printed.
Nothing worthy can be
built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts
and culture as a whole.
There is a long accepted
truth about art that "style is the man" ("le style est
l'homme”). This means that every work of a skilled Musician, Artist or Writer
is shaped by an absolutely unique combination of personality traits, creative
abilities and individual as well as national experience. And since such a
combination can never be recreated, art (but I shall here speak primarily of
literature) possesses infinite variety across the ages and among different
peoples.
The Divine Plan is such that
there is no limit to the appearance of ever new and dazzling creative talents,
none of whom, however, negate in any way the works of their outstanding
predecessor, even though they may be 500 or 2,000 years removed. The unending
quest for what is new and fresh is never closed to us, but this does not
deprive our grateful memory of all that came before.
No new work of art comes into
existence (whether consciously or unconsciously) without an organic link to
what was created earlier. But it is equally true that a healthy conservatism
must be flexible both in terms of creation and perceptive to the old and to the
new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without
which no future can ever be born.
At the same time the artist
must not forget that creative freedom can be dangerous, for the fewer artistic
limitations he imposes on his own work, the less chance he has for artistic
success. The loss of a responsible organizing force weakens or even ruins the
structure, the meaning and the ultimate value of a work of art.
Every age and ever form of
creative endeavor owes much to those outstanding artists whose untiring labors
brought forth new meanings and new rhythms. But in the 20th century, the
necessary equilibrium between tradition and the search for the new has been
repeatedly upset by a falsely understood “avant-gardism"--a raucous,
impatient "avant-gardism” at any cost.
Dating from before World War
I, this movement undertook to destroy all commonly accepted art--its forms,
language, features and properties--in its drive to build a kind of
"super-art" which would then supposedly spawn the New Life itself.
It was suggested that
literature should start anew "on a blank sheet of paper." (Indeed,
some never went much beyond this stage.) Destruction, thus, became the
apotheosis of this belligerent avant-gardism. It aimed to tear down the entire
centuries-long cultural tradition, to break and disrupt the natural flow of
artistic development by a sudden leap forward.
This goal was to be achieved
through any empty pursuit of novel forms as an end in itself, all the while
lowering the standards of craftsmanship for oneself to the point of
slovenliness and artistic crudity, at times combined with a meaning so obscured
as to shade into unintelligibility.
This aggressive impulse might
be interpreted as a mere product of personal ambition, were it not for the fact
that in Russia (and I apologize to those gathered here for speaking mostly of
Russia, but in our time it is impossible to bypass the harsh and extensive
experience of my country) this impulse and its manifestations preceded and
foretold the most physically destructive revolution of the 20th century.
Before erupting on the
streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic revolution erupted on the pages of the
artistic and literary journals of the capital's bohemian circles. It is there
that we first heard scathing imprecations against the entire Russian and
European way of life, the calls to sweep away all religions or ethical codes,
to tear down, overthrow, and trample all existing traditional culture, along
with the selfextolment of the desperate innovators themselves, innovators who
never did succeed m producing anything of worth.
Some of these appeals
literally called for the destruction of the Racines, the Murillos and the
Raphaels, "so that bullets would bounce off museum walls." As for the
classics of Russian literature, they were to be "thrown overboard from the
ship of modernity."
Cultural history would have
to begin anew. The cry was "Forward! Forward!"--its authors already
called themselves "futurists" as though they had now stepped over and
beyond the present, and were bestowing upon us what was undoubtedly the genuine
art of the Future.
But no sooner did the
revolution explode in the streets, than those "futurists" who only
recently, in their manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste," had preached an "insurmountable hatred toward the existing
language" these same "futurists" changed their name to the
"Left Front," now directly joining the revolution at its leftmost
flank. It thus became clear that the earlier outbursts el this
"avant-gardism" were no mere literary froth, but had very real
embodiment in life.
Beyond their intent to
overturn the entire culture, they aimed to uproot life itself. And when the
communists gained unlimited power (their own battle cry called for tearing the
existing world "down to its foundations," so as to build a new Unknown
Beautiful World in its stead, with equally unlimited brutality) they not only
opened wide the gates of publicity and popularity to this horde of so-called
"avant-gardists," but even gave some of them, as to faithful allies,
power to administrate over culture.
Granted, neither the ragings
of this pseudo "avant-garde" nor its power over culture lasted long;
there followed a general coma of all culture. We in the USSR began to trudge,
downcast, through a 70-year long ice age, under whose heavy glacial cover one
could barely discern the secret heart-beat of a handful of great poets and
writers. These were almost entirely unknown to their own country, not to
mention the rest of the world, until much later. With the ossification of the
totalitarian Soviet regime, its inflated pseudo-culture ossified as well,
turning into the loathsome ceremonial forms of so-called "socialist
realism."
Some individuals have been
eager to devote numerous critical analyses to the essence and significance of
this phenomenon. I would not have written a single one, for it is outside the
bounds of art altogether: the object of study, the style of "socialist
realism," never existed.
One does not need to be an
expert to see that it consisted of nothing more than servility, a style defined
by "What would you care for?" or "Write whatever the Party
commands." What scholarly discussion can possibly take place here?
And now, having lived through
these seventy lethal years inside Communism's iron shell, we are crawling out,
though barely alive. A new age has clearly begun, both for Russia and for the
whole world. Russia lies utterly ravaged and poisoned; its people are in a
state of unprecedented humiliation, and are on the brink of perishing
physically, perhaps even biologically.
Given the current condition
of national life, and the sudden exposure and ulceration of the wounds amassed
over the years, it is natural that literature should experience a pause. The
voices that bring forth the nation's literature need time before they can begin
to sound once again. However, some writers have emerged who appreciate the
removal of censorship, and the new unlimited artistic freedom mostly in one
sense for allowing uninhibited "self-expression."
The point is to express one's
own perception of one's surroundings, often with no sensitivity toward today's
ills and scars, and with a visible emptiness of heart; to express the author's
personality, whether it is significant or not, to express it with no sense of
responsibility toward the morals of the public, and especially of the young,
and at times thickly lacing the language with obscenities which for hundreds of
years were considered unthinkable to put in print, but now seem to be almost in
vogue.
The confusion of minds after
seventy years of total oppression is more than understandable. The artistic
perception of the younger generation finds itself in shock, humiliation,
resentment, amnesia. Unable to find in themselves the strength fully to
withstand and refute Soviet dogma in the past, many young writers have now
given in to the more accessible path of pessimistic relativism. Yes, they say,
communist doctrines were a great lie, but then again, absolute truths do not
exist anyhow, and trying to find them is pointless. Nor is it worth the trouble
to strive for some kind of higher meaning.
And in one sweeping gesture
of vexation, classical Russian literature--which never disdained reality and
sought the truth--is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is
deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has once again become fashionable
in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature,
steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially
toward those who suffer. And in order to facilitate this operation of
discarding, it is announced that the lifeless and servile "socialist
realism" had in fact been an organic continuation of full-blooded Russian
literature.
Thus, we witness, through
history's various threshold, a recurrence of one and the same perilous
anti-cultural phenomenon, with its rejection of and contempt for all foregoing
tradition, and with its mandatory hostility toward whatever is universally
accepted. Before, it burst in upon us with the fanfares and gaudy flags of
"futurism"; today the term "post-modernism" is applied.
(Whatever the meaning intended for this term, its lexical make up involves an
incongruity: the seeming claim that a person can think and experience after the
period in which he is destined to live.)
For a post-modernist, the
world does not possess values that have reality. He even has an expression for
this: "The world as text," as something secondary, as the text of an
author's work, wherein the primary object of interest is the author himself in
his relationship to the work, his own introspection. Culture, in this view,
ought to be directed inward at itself (which is why these works are so full of
reminiscences, to the point of tastelessness); it alone is valuable and real.
For this reason, the concept of play acquires a heightened importance--not the
Mozartian playfulness of a Universe overflowing with joy, but a forced playing
upon the strings of emptiness, where an author need have no responsibility to
anyone.
A denial of any and all
ideals is considered courageous. And in this voluntary self-delusion,
"post-modernism" sees itself as the crowning achievement of all
previous culture, the final link in its chain (A rash hope, for already there
is talk of the birth of "conceptualism." a term that has yet to be
convincingly defined in terms of its relationship to art, though no doubt this
too will duly be attempted. And then there is already post-avant-gardism; and
it would be no surprise if we were to witness the appearance of a
"post-post-modernism.") We could have sympathy for this constant
searching, but only as we have sympathy for the suffering of a sick man. The
search is doomed by its theoretical premises to forever remaining a secondary
or tertiary exercise, devoid of life or of a future.
But let us shift our
attention to the more complex flow of this process. Even though the 20th
century has seen the more bitter and disheartening lot fall to the peoples
under Communist domination, our whole world is living through a century of
spiritual illness, which could not but give rise to a similar ubiquitous
illness in art. Although for other reasons, a similar
"post-modernist" sense of confusion about the world has also arisen
in the West.
Alas, at a time of
unprecedented rise in the material benefits of civilization, and ever improving
standards of living, the West, too, has been undergoing an erosion and
obscuring of high moral and ethical ideals. The spiritual axis of life has
grown dim, and to some lost artists, the world has now appeared m seeming
senseless, as an absurd conglomeration of debris.
Yes, world culture today is
of course in crisis, a crisis of great severity. The newest directions in art
seek to outpace this crisis on the wooden horse of clever stratagems----on the
assumption that if one invents deft, resourceful new methods, it will be as
though the crisis never was. Vain hopes. Nothing worthy can be built on a
neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture
as a whole Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be
discerned shimmering here beneath the surface---shimmering not with light but
with an ominous crimson glow.
Looking intently, we can see
that behind these ubiquitous and seemingly innocent experiments of rejecting
"antiquated" tradition, there lies a deep seated hostility towards
any spirituality. This relentless cult of novelty, with its assertion that art
need not be good or pure, just so long as it is new, newer, and newer still,
conceals an unyielding and long sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule and
uproot all moral precepts. There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is
chaotic, all is relative, "the world as text," a text any
post-modernist is willing to compose. How clamorous it all is, but also, how
helpless.
For several decades now,
world literature, music, painting, and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn
tendency to grow not higher but to the side, not toward the highest
achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit but toward their
disintegration into a frantic and insidious "novelty." To decorate
public spaces we put up sculptures that aestheticize pure ugliness--but we no
longer register surprise.
And if visitors from outer
space were to pick up our music over the airwaves, how would they ever guess
that earthlings once had a Bach, a Beethoven, and Schubert, now abandoned as
out of date and obsolete?
If we, the creators of art,
will obediently submit to this downward slide, if we cease to hold dear the
great cultural tradition of the foregoing centuries together with the spiritual
foundations from which it grew, we will be contributing to a highly dangerous
fall of the human spirit on earth, to a degeneration of mankind into some kind
of lower state, closer to the animal world.
And yet, it is hard to
believe that we will allow this to occur. Even in Russia, so terribly ill right
now, we wait and hope that after the coma and a period of silence, we shall
feel the breath of a reawakening Russian literature, and that we shall witness
the arrival of fresh new forces--of our younger brothers.
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