ought to be discarded) in the twentieth
century than to expand modality into
tonality in the sixteenth and seven–
teenth centuries?
4) Mr. Nabokov deplores the con–
clusion of Mr. Leibowitz that the later
career of Stravinsky represents a con–
sistent decline. But what work of Stra–
vinsky is it that Mr. Nabokov mentions
here with special respect and admira–
tion? Not something written in the last
decade-but precisely
Le Sacre du Prin–
temps!
...
The "great composers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries"
whom Mr. Nabokov invokes in defense
of Stravinsky's latter-day convention–
alities
began
with the. conventions of
their time and gradually, as they be–
came more mature, found the way to
their characteristic innovations. To put
it in the crudest terms, they started as
conservatives and ended as radicals.
This was the process followed, too, by
the great composers of the nineteenth
century-and, in our day, by Schon-
berg, who confirms such a view in one
of his favorite paradoxes: "I am a
conservative who was forced to become
a radical." In the case of Stravinsky
(and of a disturbingly large number
of our other renowned contemporaries)
the process seems to have been reversed;
they begin as radicals and end as con–
servatives. Is there not then legitimate
ground for the suspicion that their
original "radicalism" started from bas–
ically unsound premises and that thus
their decline is inevitable?
Or does the music culture of the
twentieth century really want to claim
as its special merit the feat of having
reversed, for good and all, the natural
development of composers? Are we re–
quired to give our allegiance to those
who (as Artur Schnabel once said)
begin as field-marshals and end as
privates?
Di~a
Newlin
Westminster, Maryland
-politics
•
looks at
C!.S.S.B.
Forty pages of the new "Politics"
will be devoted to a special section on
USSR. Partial list of contents:
Nicolas NABOKOV:
The Music Purge
Vladimir WEIDLE:
Origins of Soviet Literature
Dwight MACDONALD:
USA
v.
USSR
Walter PADLEY:
Free Union-or Empire?
Walter KOLARZ:
Soviet Panslavism
Life Inside Russia-
12 pages of interviews
Books on USSR-
a Layman's Reading List
This issue will also contain three other
important articles:
I. Ernest G. Schachtel's "Mem–
ory and Childhood Amnesia," a
847
brilliant contribution to sociology
and to psychiatric theory.
2. Irving Howe's "Notes on
Mass Culture"-how does it af–
fect the psychology of its con–
sumers?
3. Peter Blake's "AMG in Ger–
many-a Study in Stalinist Pene–
tration." By a former military in–
telligence officer.
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