Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Forget those quiet Moscow nights of song. There are not enough evenings in the month now to attend all the theater premieres, art exhibitions, poetry readings, film previews and cultural debates taking place in the Soviet capital. Time has to be set aside for watching trend-setting "musical- information shows" such as View or the monthly video digest Before and After Midnight, or for perusing the thick monthlies like Novy Mir and Znamya, which Soviets affectionately call the "fat journals." If the short-lived liberalization that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was known as "the thaw...
Though the country's cultural life is being invigorated by a transfusion of the best of six decades of banned Soviet and emigre art, the competition has exposed the mediocrity of many established artists. The freshly released crop of classics has also set exceedingly high standards for aspiring artists, who were spoon-fed notions of official culture that are now held up to ridicule. Says Sergei Zalygin, editor in chief of Novy Mir: "Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the past century, our artists need to find a new style and a new way of thinking if they hope to create...
...sense that the artist has a prophetic mission in society has haunted Russian culture since the 19th century. That heavy burden crushed novelist Nikolai Gogol, who was never able to equal his masterpiece Dead Souls. It ultimately led other writers, like Leo Tolstoy, away from art and into dogmatic polemics. The weight can be felt today on the Soviet artistic community. But the essential paradox of glasnost is that when cultural leaders raise their voices, they can no longer be heard above the excited babble of an entire nation learning to speak for the first time...
Some younger artists question whether an obsessive concern with the raw realities of daily life may prove to be as intellectually numbing as the . pompous official art of the past. They have turned inward to explore the realm of the subconscious and myth. Others have followed a completely different path, setting art aside to take up journalism, history and politics. The diversity, even the confusion, has been welcomed after decades of conformity. "We need time to get over our feeling of shock and process all this new information," says Okudzhava. "The masterpieces will come later. Now we must editorialize, speak...
...that those attitudes are beginning to change. The Soviets seem determined to make up for lost time. In the past year as never before, TV shows have been alluding unashamedly to sex and even offering occasional nudity, while films have had explicit sex scenes. Last December at an erotic-art exposition in Moscow, a woman was covered in whipped cream and men in the audience were invited to lick it off; the scene was later shown on late-night TV. The capital even boasts its first touch of Times Square raunch, at the Tramway Workers' House of Culture, which last...