Hitler's aesthetics - only for history lovers.
This essay originated in a surprising little discovery I just made. Like everyone else who is interested in modern history, I knew that the Nazis had a marching song called the Horstwessellied, from an early militant who had died in a street riot. Recently I became curious to hear it
( Read more... )
Theremin: I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play. So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il'yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox. I played a piece [of music]. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il'yich [Lenin], who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka's "Skylark", which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il'yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and he would try himself to play it. He stood up, moved to the instrument, stretched his hands out, left and right: right to the pitch and left to the volume. I took his hands from behind and helped him. He started to play "Skylark". He had a very good ear, and he felt where to move his hands to get the sound: to lower them or to raise them. In the middle of this piece I thought that he could himself, independently, move his hands. So I took my hands off of his, and he completed the whole thing independently, by himself, with great success and with great applause following. He was very happy that he could play on this instrument all by himself.
Lev Theremin, significantly, left Russia for New York City in 1927, and swuiftly becme prominent, like so many other Russian exiles, in an equally red-hot modernist intellectual world. One man who had a lot to do with him, for instance, was Albert Einstein. Then, one day in 1938, he was abducted by Stalin's thugs from his own NY flat, taken to Russia, and forced to work for Stalin's technical apparatus for 55 years. He suddenly reappeared, old and fragile, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
What had happened? Quite simply, the older generation had died out. Stalin, of course, helped it along. But the Bolshevik generation was simply a thin layer spread over the enormous empire of Russia, and even their larger expression - the first generation of the Red Army - did not last long. I remember reading that of the first wave of about 900,000 volunteers raised by Trotsky and the rest in the early days of the civil war, more than half died in the fighting. And as old Bolsheviks died out, and as the spread of Bolshevik power demanded more and more political officers, policemen, bureaucrats, teachers, organization men of all kinds, so any amount of new members were let in and swiftly promoted. The man who did the recruiting and the promoting was Stalin, who was practically the only member of the first Bolshevik generation who had never been abroad.
Reply
Leave a comment