Fear and the Muse Kept Watch: The Russian Masters from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein Under Stalin

by Andy McSmith

In this dazzling exploration of one of the most contradictory periods of literary and artistic achievement in modern history, journalist Andy McSmith evokes the lives of more than a dozen of the most brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Taking us deep into Stalin's Russia, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch asks the can great art be produced in a police state? For although Josif Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history, under him Russia also produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense and lasting power―from the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to the opera Peter and the Wolf , the film Alexander Nevsky , and the novels The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago .

For those artists visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them, it was Stalin himself who decided whether they lived in luxury or were sent to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police, to be tortured and sometimes even executed. McSmith brings together the stories of these artists―including Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many others―revealing how they pursued their art under Stalin's regime and often at great personal risk. It was a world in which the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose bright yellow tunic was considered a threat to public order under the tsars, struggled to make the communist authorities see the value of avant garde art; Babel publicly thanked the regime for allowing him the privilege of not writing; and Shostakovich's career veered wildly between public disgrace and wealth and acclaim.

In the tradition of Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth and Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives , Fear and the Muse Kept Watch is an extraordinary work of historical recovery. It is also a bold exploration of the triumph of art during terrible times and a book that will stay with its readers for a long, long while.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography

416 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2015

Reviews

[Julian Douglass · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book on art and culture in the early era of the Soviet Union. Really cool to see a different side of the USSR. Mr. McSmith shows us that the the early years of the country was not just industry and death.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gotta admit. Soviet Russia, and creativity despite, seems to be the right thing to be revisiting right now. Things aren't as bad as that, yet, anyway, and so we can feel a little better, while being inspired, just in case.

This book is helpful in places, but mostly just a compression of biographical information available in more depth elsewhere. Not the best, either, at providing insight into the internal process of creation under these circumstances. But a good place to start if you are otherwise unfamiliar with these giants and the context within which they labored. Or found joy.

[Anna Kurasova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful read for everyone who's ever wondered where art comes from

[Forest Ormes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author covers poets, novelists, film directors and composers who suffered under Stalin: Pasternak, Babel, Ahkmatova (a favorite of mine, along with Pasternak), Eisenstein, Shostakovich, Prokofiev. While his writing does not match Orlando Figes (Natasha's Dance, Revolutionary Russia, A People's Tragedy), he is thorough. We read not only what happens to the artist, but to his/her persecutor -- often the same fate, the Gulag or the firing squad. Stalin respected genius, though dogma prevented him from always recognizing it. Consequently, Pasternak never got arrested. Nor Sholokov. Tragically, those party officials who had the depth to recognize artistic talent, and who had conscience enough to oppose Stalin and his policies, were fated for the bullet. McSmith renders their fates in a dozen and more brief details. Tsvetaeva's long-term exchange of letters with Pasternak gets a succinct but fine rendering. Catherine Ciepiela wrote a fine book on this correspondence, "The Same Solitude." McSmith devotes space to the danger Eisenstein experienced for being gay. Sadly, the same danger exists in Russia today, as Masha Gessen has documented in her book, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. One of the clerks at the medical clinical I have been blessed to attend is Russian. Whenever I mention the current book/s about Russia and the Soviet Union I am reading, she reveals an immediate familiarity with the poets and writers of her mother country. She is a living testimony to her generation of how Soviet citizens knew and loved their poets, novelists and composers. In spite of having fallen into disfavor, when one of Shostakovich's symphonies was performed, not only was the house sold out, but the audience stood to applaud for half an hour at its conclusion. This during Stalin! During one of the most evil regimes in history, great works of art came out of Russia from the pens and camera and ear of her artists. Andy McSmith has done a fine job of documenting the tragedy which befell these artists during an evil time. I add one critical addendum to my review. What I missed throughout this book was an author's voice, let alone the proverbial, "distinctive voice." I would have liked to have gotten a sense, now and then, of the author's own outrage and horror at the evil and tragedy he unfolds for me, the reader. I never got it.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focused, unflinching and brutally compelling, McSmith’s opus traces the travails (and often violent ends) of Soviet artists during the Stalin regime and immediately afterwards. All the big hitters are considered - Einstein, Pasternak, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Akhmatova (the title comes from one of her poems) - as well as any number of lesser artists, sycophants, careerists and back-stabbers. A sobering work that keeps from sliding into the maudlin thanks to McSmith’s clear-sightedness and love of art.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkably insightful look at that remarkable generation of artists from early Soviet days, all the more stunning because it comments insightfully on the careers of composers, poets, and writers of various kinds. It clarifies many things that had mystified me over my years of reading that period --- for example, why Sergei Prokofiev and Maxim Gorky returned to Soviet Russia, why Isaac Babel wrote so little for so long (and how he got swept up in the Yezhov scandal), what Sergei Eisenstein was doing between Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky (and what he was up to in Mexico), how Mikhail Bulgakov and Dmitri Shostakovich survived all those years and how Boris Pasternak did as well, writing well-loved verse and polishing that one incredible novel.
It is remarkable how well Andy McSmith sketches out how upper-level Soviet politics, in particular Stalin's objectives at any given moment, affected everything from the famous phone calls to Politburo meetings, decisions on which writer's or composer's organization had the upper hand and which writer was lauded, criticized, sent to the gulag, or shot.
He is skeptical about Gorky's late-stage career, although he does not subscribe to the theory that the writer was poisoned. On the critical issue of Stalin's miscalculation regarding Nazi German intentions, he makes the novel argument that the Soviet leader didn't trust Hitler, he just underestimated how quickly he would be betrayed. Of course shooting his generals didn't help.

[Joseph Raborg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome account of the struggles of directors, playwrights, novelists, and poets to produce art under the repressive regime of Stalin. We are treated to an interesting cast of characters, and one is fascinated by their varied manners of defying the regime.

[anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was great, some of the material was covered by other writers Orlando Figes and Solomon Volkov, but this head a wealth of new info for me Nd read as a page turner, I almost couldn't put it down.

[dillon · Rating 2 out of 5]

very interesting but very dense. maybe i just don't like historical nonfiction.

[Gordon Hilgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I have read countless books by mainly novelists and poets who experienced Stalinist censorship and imprisonment for disobedience, books ranging from Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" to Pasternak's "Doktor Zhivago" and his poetry, I found "Fear and the Muse Kept Watch" by Andy McSmith especially informative because the book focuses on how a politicized elite decided to rein-in a nation's cultural apparatus for politicized ends almost always with negative results for creative individuals, their families, and for Russian society at large. While it is somewhat hilarious to note how Stalin himself was so full of a neurotic or psychopathic need for self-aggrandizement he actually believed he was the singular cultural critic who could say what is and what is not "cultural". That Stalin knew nothing about the culture he controlled is almost beside the point. What is especially saddening is to read about all these sensitive individuals with visions far more encompassing than the pathetic materialism that essentially ruled Stalin and his crew being forced to kow-tow to his squelchy vision and phantasmagoria.

Aside from that, given the knee-jerk reaction us creatives in the United States are expected to cultivate, the reaction that we have it so much better here, I could not help but laugh at and look for the third-rate Stalins in my life here in Dallas, Texas. There always has to be a "maestro" who pulls the strings and herds us creatives, but for what reason no one knows. Here in Dallas, creative people continually have to go through the throes of the limited cultural viewpoint that "only suffering feeds the creative", and boy howdy, are the creative put to harm simply to perform under that crazy regime. So Stalins in Texas, yes. Are they important? No.

Long have I heroized Anna Akhmatova's stubborn refusal to "sit still" while the crazies around her demanded she conform. "You will learn to fear me," she publicly told Stalin. He did fear her. He could not use the knife because her international profile protected her. After all, crazy boy Stalin killed everyone who did not please him, did he not?

McSmith here never goes polemic on us, and his writing is concise and well-thought-out. He blends in various personalities throughout the book, and I found this quite informative, perhaps even more informative to those who live in oppressive circumstances, beaten about the legs by the Stepford Wifes or even worse the Jethro Bodines of the world.

[Phillip Ramm · Rating 4 out of 5]

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