Crack! Crack!

The whip that cracks loudest and most potently in Russia is the Communist Party newsorgan Pravda ("Truth"), in which Joseph Stalin's lightest whims and heaviest commands, usually unsigned, often appear first. Last week that prominent Old Bolshevik, the editor of the Soviet Government newsorgan Izvestia ("News"), famed Nicolai Ivanovich Bukharin, expressed the editorial opinion that the Russian people were "a nation of Oblomovs" (i. e., lazy, good-for-nothing dreamers like Oblomov, principal character in the famed Goncharov novel) prior to their glorious awakening by the Revolution of 1917. Crack!--Pravda came out with an editorial flaying Old Bolshevik Bukharin. Promptly Editor Bukharin abjectly crawled, withdrew editorially everything he had said, apologized. Even so, Bukharin was left not quite sure whether it had been Stalin who took umbrage at "Oblomov" or somebody else in the Party's inner circle. CRACK!--even louder that same day Pravda lashed out against Composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom every Soviet music critic has hailed as the Revolution's most brilliant genius in the realm of operatic and symphonic composition. Not only has Comrade Shostakovich been Bol- shevism's musical darling, but Capitalism in Manhattan put on its boiled shirts and sped to the splendiferous Metropolitan Opera House premiere of his master work, Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (TIME, Feb.11, 1935). Pravda called Shostakovich's compositions "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric and tuneless." The devastating Communist epithet "bourgeois" was tagged to them. Rehearsals of his latest ballet Limpid Stream, on which the Corps de Ballet of Moscow's great Bolshoi Theatre have been working diligently for months, were canceled. As Soviet critics leaped to a new point of view which would save their jobs last week, they discovered that James Joyce's Ulysses, previously so esteemed in Moscow that it has been appearing serially in a leading Soviet review, is confused, obscene and "written in English that can hardly be understood by an Englishman." Moscow critics urged Soviet composers to turn back to Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov; Soviet writers to turn back to Shakespeare, Goethe and Pushkin. In the general Bolshevik artist furor this week it was everywhere believed, although not officially confirmed, that Joseph Stalin early last week heard for the first time some of Shostakovich's music, then translated his personal reactions into the lashing Pravda editorial which called the Red Genius' works "muddle instead of music, fragments of melody dissolving into a general roar, scrunch and scream."

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