Live not by Lies with Ignat Solzhenitsyn
Clifton Duncan Podcast | Clifton Duncan and Ignat Solzhenitsyn
A must-listen conversation with FAIR in the Arts Fellow Clifton Duncan and Ignat Solzhenitsyn, world-renowned composer, pianist and son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The two discuss the impact of Russia’s difficult history on art, how Russian writers speak for the people and the truth, the chasm between “speaking truth to power” in Russia vs. America, the historical clustering of artistic creativity, how a nation and its art can recover from the spiritual and physical annihilation of its artists, and the necessity of the artist to be free, to live free, and to speak the truth.
Our show notes/minute markers:
The first part of the conversation focuses on music and the craft, progressing into art as part of our culture and our current moment.
20:43: We’re experiencing a crisis of meaning in America, a spiritual dearth, something seems amiss
21:36: There’s a significant regard for art in Russia as opposed to in the the U.S., why?
22:23: It’s far too complex to get into here, but it has a lot to do with Russia’s difficult history, a more difficult history than America…that means more suffering…more dead people…most pages of Russian history are difficult
24:38: In Russia, the writer has long been considered as a second government, a second authority…the people’s point of view is not represented by the government in a country like Russia with very little democracy in its history
25:15: The writer speaks for the people, speaks the truth
25:31: In the West, people scoff at the notion of truth, that it’s relative…my truth, your truth, doesn’t it just depend on your point of view, but in Russia the word truth is ingrained in the national consciousness…there’s a sense that the truth is absolute, that facts are facts
26:21: There’s truth and there’s lies, there’s truth and there’s anti-truth
26:47: Russian artists follow the notion that art is speaking the truth, it’s about speaking truth to power
26:52: Speaking truth to power in the U.S. is actually the opposite of Russia, because in the U.S. you’re engaging in language or speech that is guaranteed to get you approval of your peers, it’s guaranteed to get you a pat on the back, to check off your virtue, the virtue signaling…that’s not speaking truth to power
27:24: Speaking truth to power is actually when you’re taking a risk, when you’re actually risking your life in limb or liberty
29:19: There are people who say they are suffering, but they’re not really suffering and thus their work lacks the kind of weight we’re speaking of
30:13: Creativity goes in peaks and valleys collectively… in the bigger picture, societies produce clusters of great men and women (the ancient Greeks, the great classical musicians)…the equivalent is that we go through lulls…it’s possible we’re in one of those times
34:37: Shostakovich was a popular artist but also a political symbol
36:57: Can we bounce back from current state of art in the U.S.—can we recover, has Russia recovered… with Russia, we’re talking about from the direct annihilation of people
37:54: Starting in 1936/36, for the next 20 years in Russia, thousands of artists, writers, musicians were killed, executed or sent to the gulag—how can you rip out three-quarters of the nation’s heart and expect it to keep functioning, a nation so disfigured by genocide and a genocidal regime for 75 years, especially when the artists were its conscience, its truth tellers, the geniuses…it’s a hard time recovering from that
39:23: Even more terrifying was the killing of people’s souls
39:34: What Shostakovich struggled with as a kind of archetype of the Soviet artist, he struggled with trying to tell the truth, trying to live not by lies to use my father’s later expression, while surviving in a very high-profile position in this anti-human, totalitarian nightmarish regime…somehow he managed but many didn’t, many caved fully and sold their soul to save their skin
40:26: The moral consequences, the artistic consequences (of cavings of the soul) are frightening to calculate
42:45: If we’re making that comparison, that American art is under assault from a relentless political drum beat, where everything has to be politicized…we will certainly recover, and hopefully prosper, and most of all, speak truth, which really just means speaking honestly
45:44: The answer ultimately lies in freeing yourself, free your mind… it’s up to you whether to free it or not
46:02: One of the fascinating things said about my father, how did this miracle happen inside this totalitarian country, there’s this quote that Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, a nuclear physicist dissident, “began to live as free people in an unfree country”
47:45: It’s this thrilling notion that it was a decision, it’s the choice they made, they made a choice, I will live as a free person, I will no longer bow down to these idols of slavery, these idols of coercion, I will speak my mind and behave as if there are no consequences to my behavior or my speech as if in a free, a truly free society
48:59: If they could do it in the Soviet Union, then certainly it can be done in the West
48:49: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a singular example of how you can take great suffering…plus the necessity of the artist to be free and live free but also to tell the truth…that’s what we should strive for as artists all the time
51:01: I don’t know if we have a culture right now, at least in our arts, that fosters that kind of transcendent beauty even out of ugliness…but we must persevere
52:55: What is classical music today, what it must achieve…goes beyond mere entertainment or pleasure… to strive to educate or enlighten…to share something, to share a truth… the truth about oneself, at least
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