Word: formalist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Doctor Zhivago is "partly autobiographical." Like Zhivago, he grew up in a cultured home; Pasternak's father illustrated one of Tolstoy's novels. In the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, Boris Pasternak wrote symbolist poetry accented with vivid and highly personal imagery. Attacked as a "decadent formalist," he switched to translating, e.g., Shakespeare, Goethe. During the purge trials, he risked death by refusing to sign a denunciation of "traitors," but fellow writers covered up for his defection...
Into Budapest streamed delegates from the Communist musical world to honor Hungary's late great Bela Bartok, once dismissed as a decadent "formalist," but restored to Red favor two years ago. The hit performers of last week's festival turned out to be not Communist musicians but a clutch of wandering Americans: Violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the men of the Juilliard String Quartet...
...every conscientious Soviet composer knows (or at least has been clearly told), music stood still 50 years ago. Even the best of them-Dmitry Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and the late Sergei Prokofiev-learned that lesson. In 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party accused them of representing "the formalist perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music. The music savors of the present-day modernist bourgeois music of Europe and America, which reflects the decay of bourgeois culture." Last week the Central Committee took another look at the nation's three ranking modern composers and decided that none...
...decree criticizing "unhealthy trends" in recent musical works. To disassociate himself from the dangerous moderns, third-rate Composer Vano Muradeli, 50, chimed in with an expression of gratitude for the Central Committee's "justified criticism" of his opera, The Great Fellowship, added that he had edited all the formalist perversion right out of the score...
...Crowd. Khachaturian, 53, was even bolder. In a blistering statement he denounced Western avant-gardism, but went on to enthusiastic praise for an unregenerate formalist, Hungary's late Bela Bartok. Continued Khachaturian: "The seeking and daring artist is worth more than the well-trained craftsman who blindly copies . . . the great past masters." What added to his statement's interest was a list of young Soviet composers Khachaturian considers promising. This gave the West virtually its first glimpse of an almost unknown younger generation of composers. Among them: ¶Boris Tchaikovsky, 31, whose Slavic Rhapsody for Orchestra has stirred...