Showing posts with label hungary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hungary. Show all posts

Monday, February 25, 2008

Who Is Béla Bartók?: Chamber Music Steganography in Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin & Piano

Béla Bartók
E   ven in the first five quartets Bartók remains elusive. One might assume that he possessed something of Yeats’s power to develop continuously, and that this is revealed in his tireless revision of his means of self-expression—but what was he trying to express? One feels in late Beethoven, as in late Mozart, that certain changes in technique reflect a change of temperament, a deepening, a serenity which, in Mozart’s case, gives the music a kind of weight without changing its basic quality of gaiety. But it is not this quality that distinguishes [Bartók]... Bartók struck most of the people who met him as a curiously inexpressive person—remote and aloof. As a small boy he had a skin disease that covered him with sores for six years. During this time he was so ashamed of his appearance that he felt at ease only with his mother. The disease ultimately disappeared. But instead of becoming less introverted, Bartók spent his nights worrying that it might come back... [Bartók was diagnosed with leukemia in 1941, and died of complications of this 4 years later.] The story strikes a Proustian note: it is clear from the beginning that Bartok is one of those with a basic mistrust of life and a desire to retreat into some inner world... ”
  —  Colin Wilson, p. 87.
W   e human beings are governed by the urge to conform and blend in with our surroundings. We follow fashion. We become part of cultures of conformity—religious communities, military groups, sports teams. We take on corporate identities. Likewise, we seem to have the capacity to grow into our built environment, to familiarize ourselves with it, and eventually to find ourselves at home there. We have a chameleon-like urge to adapt, and, given the increasing mobility of contemporary life, we are constantly having to do so. The desire for camouflage is a desire to feel connected—to find our place in the world and to feel at home.”
  —  Neil Leach.
The defining quality in Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1928; revised 1945) is its elusiveness. Hiding the simplicity and forthrightness of Hungarian rural culture within the refined modalities of urban art-music—this is inherent in Bartók’s compositional methods in many of his pieces. And in fact disguising and embedding like this are done by Kodàly and Grieg and Brahms and many other ethnomusicologist-composers, too. But this Rhapsody embodies camouflage of a deeper, psychological sort.

We know from his correspondence and various biographical materials that Bartók was unsatisfied with the metropolitan ethos and urban aesthetics, and this dissatisfaction imbued Bartók’s writing with a highly personalized, proletarian politics.

Of course, folksong transcriptions involve compromises. Faithfulness to their cultural meaning depends on the extent to which the ‘other’ is bestowed with power in the transcription/adaptation. Mere empathy in the musical treatment of the folk idiom is not sufficient; there has to be moral standing and respect and power.

But this Rhapsody subverts its own folk-derived character and its character as a ‘work’ and as an object of dispassionate reflection. Instead, it propels the performer/listener to a new level of active subjectivity. The composer embarks on what amounts to a manifesto for the performers/listeners, about the rules of representation. The piece is not a ‘conversation,’ and it isn’t about what exactly is ‘represented’. It’s violinist and pianist presenting a united-front polemic regarding representation itself: what it is to represent reality and ‘self’ in music. And this inevitably hinges on what is or is not accessible to our senses—and on the fallibility of our senses. How do we know what is ‘real’? How do we know who is Bartók? He eludes us.

A   reception aesthetics calls into question one of the central tenets of analysis—the stability of the work’s identity, its capacity to make its own statement independent of any recognitional condition. Ultimately it calls into question the very possibility of an ontological essence for the musical work.”
  —  Jim Samson, in Cook & Everist, p. 44.
Predator film, 1987
In order to emphasize the quasi-rustic character of the music, Bartók devised ways of blurring demarcations between lines, imparting a faux country ‘roughness’ to them. He devised novel uses of glissandi, lending a throw-down impartiality between the violin and piano parts that dissuades the listener from looking for additional potentially-discorroborating evidence. By sliding the melodic line from one note to the next at the right instants, Bartók conceals the thematic contours and creates the illusion that the piano is ‘merely’ handling the melodic line from the violin. In other words, Bartók uses deceptive musical contours to camouflage personal identities in the complex musical layers. Why else would the glissandi be temporally staggered as they are? The perfect execution of these tightly interconnected glissandi requires an extraordinary level of control in tempi and balance between the violinist and the pianist—and it is a huge challenge to “pull it off”.

Desireé Palmen photo
Spot the ‘invisible’ men and women in artist’s amazing photographs. Daily Mail, 24-FEB-2008.

[ Desireé Palmen, a 44-year-old Dutch artist, stages trompe l’oeil scenes using traditional ‘analog’ methods. She photographs a scene without people in it and replicates portions of these images on clothing by hand. She then has people put on the clothing and carefully poses her subjects in the previously-photographed background scene. ]

I  ’d like people to consider what it means to let the government control our daily lives [with intrusive surveillance, erosion of privacy, and coercive technology]. When we are controlled we hand over our individual responsibilities to the state. I wanted to make a suit for the non-criminal citizen whose house is being watched 24 hours by street surveillance cameras. I’m also responding [to a progressively more prevalent wish that ordinary people have] to disappear [and regain their privacy and dignity].”
  —  Desireé Palmen, 2008.
Desireé Palmen photo
Some years ago, Edward Said showed how musical form asserts itself on important issues of social justice—his analysis of Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio, where Florestan, the hero, undergoes ‘extraordinary rendition’ and imprisonment without trial. Florestan’s silence, Said says, embodies a European conception of the politics of silence, where silence socially has been associated with alienation and with recrimination, and where musically it relies on an historical relationship between sound and silence that back-handedly acknowledges the existence of the Other, acknowledges the existence of what is hidden or denied through silence. That’s the kind of evasion that I hear in this Rhapsody No. 2.

W   hen Florestan is imprisoned for speaking an unacceptable truth, we are to suppose ... that he was once able to speak the truth, and then he was buried in a silent dungeon for having done so. What are we to make of other notions of silence: the case of someone already invisible and unable to speak at all for political reasons, someone who has been silenced because what he or she might represent is a scandal that undermines existing institutions?”
  —  Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 2000, p. 521.

But one can be really silent, and one can be pseudo-silent. The camouflage or ‘disruptive-pattern material’ (DPM) in this Rhapsody seems to manifest—What?—Bartók’s opposition to esotericism? his concurrent and paradoxical wish for privacy at the same time that he desired a more satisfying sense of ‘belonging’? his vehement response to intrusive governments in his own day? He challenges us to try and find him, but he exerts himself to elude us. He increases the musical complexity, much as current encryption and stego software techniques do when attempting to foil automated steganographic detection/decryption.

Renaissance Steganography
Basically, the Hungarian gypsy folk idioms are the nominal ‘scene’ within which the real identities of violinist and pianist and composer are made to dissolve. This work is a standard, two-part Hungarian rhapsody, with a slow opening and enthusiastic folk music gestures, culminating in a high-velocity, virtuosic conclusion. Bartók wrote rustic rural folk sounds throughout. The violin part—chock-full as it is with florid ornaments, trills, and double-stops—might be thought to’ve been designed to bring out the player’s personality, and indeed that’s the chief temptation. But the part’s complexities are more virtuosic obfuscations and fictions than opportunities for matter-of-fact personal revelations.

When this piece is performed without respect for Bartók’s intentions, we hear the personalities of the violinist and the pianist who are in front of us, alive in 2008, in plain-text and undisguised. But when Rhapsody No. 2 is played particularly well, we hear a convincing mid-Century Hungarian illusion, a convincing deception. Surveillance—of the players, of the composer, of the listeners—is futile, and coercion impossible. Confidentiality and privacy remain protected.

W   arfare has changed in the same ways as the composition of pictures... War has become anonymous and now renounces the desire for show.”
  —  Pablo Picasso, 1944, on improving camouflage, letter to Apollinaire, quoted in Belting, p. 336.
James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong will perform Béla Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin & Piano and other works this coming Saturday, 01-MAR-2008, in Kansas City. We look forward to trying to unwrap Bartók’s beautiful enigma. At the very least, we look forward to vicariously concealing ourselves in plain sight, in the pungent folk-music extroversions of introverted Hungarian diaspora.

G  ilroy’s notion of ‘changing same,’ in which reiteration ‘is not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shape-shifting exterior [nor is it …] the sign of an unbroken, integral inside protected by a camouflaged husk.’ [It] is conducive to the dynamic, complex movement that Gilroy deems essential for formation of diaspora.”
  —  Cameron Bushnell, Univ Maryland PhD Dissertation, 2007, p. 118.

Korsyn book, p. 100

W   hat these suppositions together come to is a denial that composers need or want accurate information about music, at least some of the time. Indeed, a more extreme account of the vocational difference wout have it that an occasional outright falsehood may be of use to the composer, even though believing it would be beneath the theorist. This view might leave room for a special discourse that might be called ‘compositional theory’ in a gesture of indulgence to those whose activities depend on occasional self-deception. These ideas seem dubious to me; it is not easy to understand how they can enjoy the credence that the undeniably do in some quarters of our musical culture. Beyond this, I feel obliged to say such ideas are offensive to me: taken to their logical end, they make me out to be too intellectually concerned to be a real composer, yet too uncritical to be a real scholar... Imagine walking in on Beethoven at work. He tapes middle D# a few times on his piano, with evident interest and perhaps a trace of amusement. You can’t hear anything amusing in his D#s, though. In fact, you can’t hear much of anything at all in them. Obviously Beethoven has something in mind that you don’t, that lets him hear something in his D#s that you can’t. What does he have in mind?”
  —  Joseph Dubiel, in Cook & Everist, p. 264.

Belting book


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Thursday, November 1, 2007

Enjambing with Kurtág: Lyricism Doesn’t Need Imagery, Only Rhythm

Kele: Matchstick Man
Jakobson once showed how Pushkin’s famous two-stanza poem ‘I Loved You Once’ (Ia vas liubil) depends only on sound rhythms, not on imagery. The same can be true of minimalist chamber music.

It’s possible to make music with practically nothing.”
  —  György Kurtág.

If you’ve not already done so, you may like to look at the DVD Matchstick Man, Judit Kele’s biographical documentary of renowned composer György Kurtág. Among other things, Matchstick Man sheds light on Kurtág’s sessions in 1957 with psychoanalyst Marianne Stein, who led him to explore his creativity by putting matchsticks together. This simple exercise of arranging matchsticks made a strong impression. Kurtág avers that he still knows nothing about composing, but from time to time his muse or alter ego—some mysterious entity who does apparently know things about composing—pinch-hits for him. Empirical composing, using ‘found’ materials, including rhythmic materials such as poems: the epitome of minimalism.

Kurtag
Here in this DVD we have Kurtág as experimentalist, laboratorian, empiricist—here is Kurtág delighted by his ‘found objects’, fascinated by happenstantial relationships among them, passionately engaged by the symbolic connections that they suggest. The film enables us to see and hear how this self-effacing and modest composer creates. What matters to Kurtág is mostly the present, not the past. He rehearses two young players in Schubert’s ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata D.821 in A minor. Ideally, rehearsal is a paradigm in which all participants (the composer, the librettist, the conductor, and the performers) have a ‘say’ in the creative process. But it often doesn’t turn out that way, as this segment of the film suggests.

I understand music really only if I teach it.”
  —  György Kurtág.

Kurtag
In Játékok, Kurtág finds freedom in minimalism. There are interesting enjambments—rhythmic staggerings and offsets between the parts; couplets and tercets; staggered lines. Just as in poetry where the appeal is partly in the visual instability that the enjambments cause for the eye as we scan the page, so too in this music the appeal is partly in the auditory/motivic instability that Kurtág sets in motion. A tercet always feels that it’s pulling toward the missing line, pulling the eye down with urgency to the next thing, to the thing that must happen. Such imbalance seems appropriate to poems about the human condition. Likewise, Kurtág’s instrumental enjambed phrasing feels like pulling, one line for the next, pulling the ear onward with urgency. The rhythmic ‘pull’ and imbalance are central to the beauty of the music. In that regard, these Webern-like miniatures interspersed with folk music-derived pieces and citations of Bach have something in common with rhythmic structure in hip-hop and rap.

Something in common, too, in terms of their aphoristic idiom, if you think about it. By now, the aphoristic song cycle is Kurtág’s signature. He has set a number of the poems of Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet who has lived in Hungary since 1970. Dalos grew up in the Ural mountains and studied German history at Lomonossow University in Moscow. She currently works at the Budapest office of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Her works include the a volume of lyric poetry entitled ‘Ohne Dich’ (Without You).

Kurtág’s emphasis on metrical qualities of Russian is much broader than the Rimma Dalos settings, though. He borrows epigrams from a number of Russian poets, including Lermontov and Blok. In the 1970s he became deeply fascinated with Russian literature and took courses in Russian to be able to read Dostoyevsky in the original. His compositions are not all Russian gravitas, however. There is humor in Kurtág’s writing; it is not all confessional and dark and sorrowful. ‘O Love, the Edifier!’ (Omaggio a Luigi Nono, Op. 16) and other pieces are passionate and emphatic and and ironic and full of life. (Just the same, ‘Epilogue’, subtitled ‘A dispirited wail’ and marked ‘Desolato’, and other Kurtág meditations do not contradict their dour markings.)

Omaggio a Luigi Nono (poems in Russian, four of the six being by Rimma Dalos) and Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezső Tandori are comprised of short pieces, most of them less than two minutes long. Songs of Despair and Sorrow are much larger; the longest of the seven is about as long as the entire Omaggio a Luigi Nono, whose six movements take just nine minutes. Songs of Despair and Sorrow is scored for accordion, brass, strings, keyboards and percussion—a 28-member ensemble. This orchestration produces a narrative of alienation and angst that is social or ethnic in scale. By contrast, Omaggio is has a highly personal texture.

Kurtág takes each haiku-like aphorism/poem, assimilates its meter, and creates instrumental enjambments that nicely complement the text. Kurtág’s attention to rhythm is extreme. The first foot of the Lermontov piece that opens Songs of Despair and Sorrow, ‘So Weary’, matches the rhythm of the Russian text very closely. The music has a rise and fall that evokes the idea of world-weariness. The Russian rendering is perfect. It’s hard to imagine this being quite as effective in translation into any other language.

The rolling rhythm, the assonance of it, is one of the built-in features of the Russian language. Technically, assonance is the acoustic mimickry between vowels followed by different consonants in two or more stressed syllables. But here the assonance is architectural for the vocal part and the instrumental parts. The voice is an instrument among equals, and no instrument is sentenced to merely accompany. Kurtág delivers these rhythmic features with crystalline perfection. The stresses are dovetailed between the parts, capturing an important slice of what it means to be Russian.

In other words, these poems—and Kurtág’s setting of them—are perfect icons for the thoughtful use of enjambment, or ‘run-on’ lines. Normally the end of a verse is marked by a syntactic break – the end of a sentence or clause. But with enjambment, the break occurs within the line rather than at the end. In one enjambment in a Dalos poem, the words ‘snow’ and ‘blanket’, linked to form a composite ‘snow-blanket’, are separated by an internal prosodic-syntactic pause. The second line contains a carry-over from the first line, the word ‘pokrova’ (blanket), as well as the first word of a second phrase, ‘came’.

In stanza No. 13, the phrases ‘snow-blanket’ and ‘guest-sorrow’ are structurally parallel, but they also take each other’s metric place in the poem. The enjambment separation of ‘blanket’ from ‘snow’ is deliberate and destabilizing. But blanket-of-snow is a commonplace idiom in a way that juxtaposing ‘guest’ and ‘sorrow’ is not. Dalos doesn’t split them but instead puts them next to each other in the same line. The phrase ‘кo мнe гocтья—тocкa’ (sorrow) is an interesting poetical choice—it easily could’ve been something else: ‘gost’ia-pechal’ (guest-sadness), ‘gost’ia-odinochestvo’ (guest-loneliness), ‘gost’ia-pustota (guest-emptiness). But the rhythm of ‘toska’ is what Dalos selected, and what Kurtág respected.


1.
Пpиди,
 я pyкy пpoтянy.
Teплoм cвoим
 твoй xoлoд пpoгoню.
O, кaк дaвнo
 я в yгoлкax дyши
Xpaню нeнyжныe гpoши.

2.
Oт вcтpeчи
 дo paccтaвaния,
oт пpoщaния
 дo oжидaния
пpoлeг мoй бaбий вeк.

3.
Пpocтитe, милocepдныe,
зa cлaбocть мoю жeнcкyю,
зa тo, чтo пoлюбилa я
дyшoю юpoдивoгo.

4.
Пoзвoль мнe
пpикocнyтьcя к тeбe,
pacплaвитьcя, pacтвopитьcя.

5.
Bce выбиpaлa—
 вce пpoглядeлa.
И дocтaлacь мнe любoвь
 изpяднo пoтpeпaннaя.

6.
Cнитcя oдин и тoт жe coн:
близocти твoeй пpoшy.
Tы пpиближaeшьcя,
я oттaлкивaю тeбя.

7.
Гoвopилa, нeльзя,
гoвopилa, пpoйдeт,
гoвopилa, гoвopилa…
Зa тyмaнoм тex днeй
нe видaть aлыx зopь
зa минyтaми cчacтья—
бoли paзлyки.
Былo cчacтьe y нac,
и paзлyкa былa…
Гoвopилa, нeльзя,
гoвopилa, пpoйдeт,
гoвopилa, гoвopилa…

8.
Пpикpoю дyшy
фигoвым лиcткoм
и yбeгy из paя.

9.
И в пик-чacы
кaтитcя бeз пoмex
тpaмвaй дyши мoeй.

10.
Xoтeлocь явитьcя тeбe
 нeбoжитeльницeй
в cиянии звeзднoгo нимбa,
a пpишлocь oтвopить двepь
 зaмapaшкoю
c вeникoм в гpязнoй pyкe.

11.
Я cнoвa ждy тeбя.
Kaк дoлгo
нe пpиxoдит пocлeзaвтpa.

12.
Boт oпять
вocкpeceньe пpoшлo.
Знaчит, нacтyпит cлeдyющee.

13.
B бeлoм xoлoдe cнeгa—
пoкpoвa пpишлa
 кo мнe гocтья—тocкa.

14.
Умнpeт любoвь,
 зaчaтaя
   в вeceннeй
     cпeшкe.
A y тeбя в caдy
 pacтeт
   тpaвa
     зaбвeнвя.

15.
Oт вcтpeчи
 дo paccтaвaния,
oт пpoщaния
 дo oжидaния
пpoлeг мoй бaбий вeк.

1.
Come,
 here’s my hand:
with my warmth
 I melt your frost.
Too long I’ve kept
 in my soul’s depths—
these useless cents.

2.
From meeting
 to parting,
from leave-taking
 to awaiting
—that was my woman’s lot.

3.
Merciful ones, forgive me
this woman’s weakness,
that I so loved
this holy fool.

4.
Allow me
to touch you;
to melt, to dissolve in you.

5.
Here and there I picked and chose
 till all my chances slipped away
and I was left here with this love so
 ragged and tattered, torn
   and frayed.

6.
Every night, the same dream:
I beg you to come near,
You approach—
I push you away.

7.
I said: it cannot be,
I said: it will pass,
I said, I said…
Beyond the mist of days,
the purple dawn cannot be seen,
nor can the pain of parting
beyond the moment’s bliss.
Bliss we had,
a parting too.
I said: it cannot be,
I said: it will pass,
I said, I said…

8.
I cover my soul
with a fig-leaf
and flee paradise.

9.
Even in the rush-hour
the tramcar of my soul
cheerfully rolls along.

10.
I wanted you to see me
 like some goddess in the glory
of the starry sky:
but then I opened the door
 all ragged, a broom in my
dirty hand.

11.
I’m waiting for you again,
How slowly comes
tomorrow.

12.
That’s another
Sunday over.
That means
The next will come.

13.
In a cold blanket of snow
 a visitor called: sorrow.

14.
The love
 conceived
   amid
     the haste
       of Spring
         is dying.
But in your garden
 grows
   the grass
     of oblivion.

15.
From meeting
 to parting,
from leave-taking
 to awaiting
—that was my woman’s lot.”

  —  poems by Rimma Dalos, music by György Kurtág,

     СЦЕHЫ ИЗ POMAHA:
     15 ПЕ СЕH HA СTИXИ
      РИММЬI ДAЛОШ.

In stanza No. 13, ‘gost’ia’ and ‘toska’ are closely connected through the sibilant ‘s’ sound, which is also present in the first line of the poem—the word ‘cнeгa’ (snega, snow). So we get ‘snow’, ‘guest’, and ‘sorrow’ in one evocative metric group. The metaphor ‘gost’ia-toska’ is beautiful, but if the two words were separated from each other on the page, Dalos would have made the reader wonder. If the cimbalom and violin and double-bass parts were separated from the voice in Canto No. 13, Kurtág would’ve made the listener wonder. So Dalos transmutes words: she pairs ‘blanket’ with ‘snow’ and comingles ‘warmth’ with the image of snow and cold; she uses enjambments to separate two opposites while simultaneously uniting them. And Kurtág’s writing can be regarded as doing the same thing—transmuting meanings; pairing cool phrases with warm ones; juxtaposing a phrase that evokes doubt with a phrase that doubts the very validity and worth of the act of doubting.

Maybe Sofia Gubaidulina’s composition ‘Jetzt immer Schnee’ (a setting of poems by Gennady Aigi) is a close comparable in terms of a felicitous pairing of composer and poet and in terms of a composition’s respecting a poem’s enjambment and other metrical features. These enjambments function like the conduction system in the heart. The heart is under a compulsion to beat, up until the moment we die. Diastole on one line leads to a systole when we begin the next line of the poem, the continuation of the phrase in Kurtág’s music or Gubaidulina’s music. Our understanding and enjoyment of Kurtág’s music—especially these existential and rhythmic qualities of it—are significantly enhanced by this Kele film. Our understanding and enjoyment of Kurtág’s music were also enhanced by Marino Formenti’s exquisite performance last April at the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, and by studying the scores from Editio Musica Budapest, in which the rhythmic linkages are readily apparent. Beautiful!

T he only political duty ... is a duty to translate the fiction and poetry of other countries so as to make them available to readers in his/her own language. I consider translation a political act because the relations between any two countries are not determined by economic and political interests alone, but also by the degree to which the inhabitants of each are able to understand what the inhabitants of the other are thinking and feeling, and the novelists and poets of this country are the only people who can give one this understanding.”
  —  W.H. Auden, The Plough and the Pen, p. 10.

Kurtag
(Beginning at age 14, Kurtág took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits at Temesvár. When he was 19 he moved to Budapest in hopes of studying with Bartók at the Franz Liszt Academy, a hope that was preempted by Bartók’s death. Kurtág and György Ligeti became friends during their time together as students in Budapest. At the Budapest Academy, Kurtág studied the piano with Pál Kadosa, composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, and chamber music with Leó Weiner. Kurtág graduated in piano and chamber music in 1951 (at age 25), and received his graduate degree in composition in 1955 (age 29). In 1957 Kurtág worked in Paris with the Hungarian psychologist Marianne Stein and did coursework with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. Between 1960 and 1968, he worked as répétiteur for the Hungarian National Philharmonia. In 1967, he became Professor of piano and chamber music at the Budapest Academy. He retired from those positions in 1986. )

W as wissen wir von Rußland und den Russen? Daß die Russen eine »bipolar Mentalität« besitzen, die in sich die widersprüchlichsten Gefühle der »rätselhaften russischen Seele« vereinigt und widerspiegelt, und zwar mit einer Spannweite des Verhaltens, die »von Sanftmut bis zum Zorn, von der Erstarrung bis zum Aktionismus, von der Entsagung bis zum zügellosen Genuß, von der Entwicklung großer Ideen bis zum Phlegma« reicht? Und daß diese Widersprüchlichkeit und Zerrissenheit, die Koexistenz extremer Polaritäten, ein immerwährendes charakteristisches Merkmal der russischen Kultur sind? Dies alles kann man auch heute in verschiedenen westlichen »Reiseführern durch die Labyrinthe der russischen Seele«. Da findet man wieder die beliebigen Stereotypen und Klischees vom ewigen exotischen Russen, eine alte Erfindung des Westens.

[ What do we know of Russia and the Russian? That Russians possess a ‘bipolar mentality’ that unites and is reflected in the contradictory feelings of the ‘mysterious Russian soul’ and expansive behavior, from meekness to wrath, from stiffness to berserking, from self-mortification to unrestrained hedonism, from big ideas to the phlegmatic picayune? Is the coexistence of extreme polarity a fundamental characteristic feature of the Russian culture? One can read this and more in different western guides through the mazes of the ‘Russian Soul’. There one finds again the perennial stereotype and cliché of the eternal exotic Russian, an old invention of the West. ]”
  —  Russische Dichtung.

Wachtel

Kurtags


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