How Russian culture liberates a concert hall
NewsThe LA Times has a chilling report from its roaming Middle East bureau chief Nabih Bulos, himself a violinist, on the shameless Russian destruction of cultural assets in large parts of Ukraine.
Nabih took the pictures, too.
If your eyes focused on the stage — ignoring the chandelier that had smashed into the theater seats, or the maw where the shell had punched through the ceiling, or the muddy mix of pulverized masonry and rainwater carpeting the ground — you could almost hear the music in Rubizhne’s Cultural Palace….
Read on here.
Disgusting, but how very Putinesque – that’s Vladimir Putin, champion of arts and culture.
Still waiting for the Palmira-style ‘victory’ concert.
It was not Russian culture that destroyed the building, but the paranoia of one, entirely uncultured man.
(And the RuNazis, of course.)
It’s not putin sitting in those bombers, it’s not putin shooting civilians, it’s not putin voting for himself in the elections. A man has as much power as other people will allow him to have. It’s the Russians doing it, the RUSSIANS. Russian culture is the culture of the Russian empire, it grew out of conquest. There has never been another (unlike, say, Germany, which went through different phases).
I don’t think so.
The artists who contributed to the large body of Russian works of art, had – most of them, at least – nothing to do with war, conquest, killing.
Artists are not responsible for the regime of the country in which they happen to be born – unless they go out of their way to specifically support the regime’s actions.
What about Bach being paid by feudal princes and a suppressing, bigotted church? Haydn being paid by a prince? Beethoven with his republican ideas being paid by three music-loving aristocrats? Wagner being saved by a frustrated king who wasted tax money on private castle building? Mahler being paid for his conducting by the court of a crumbling, suppressing empire? Etc. etc….
There definitely seems to be a disposition in Russia to respond to strong, dictatorial leadership. They reacted against the injustices of the czarist reigns, but when the equally dictatorial Bolshevik regime was overturned many people stated frankly that they missed it. There has always been dissent — courageous and dangerous in many if not most cases — but it has always been a (large) minority position.
Maybe geography IS history. It takes a pretty firm, perhaps a tyrannical, hand to rule such a vast space.
Doesn’t seem to apply here in the second-largest country in the world, but there are fewer of us to manage.
Barbarians!