Jews From Russia

"Sokolnikov: Or they would utilise us, if we became simply an appendage of German Fascism, which would utilise us and then throw us away like a dirty rag, we would be condemned, disgraced and proved to be utter nonentities. Vyshinsky: And did you expect any other fate than to be utilised by Fascism and then thrown away like a useless rag? Sokolnikov: Of course. If we had counted only on such an end we ought to have liquidated the bloc completely. Vyshinsky: You thought you could retain some independence? Sokolnikov: I am saying what we thought at that time. We figured that we had certain chances. Where did we see them? We saw them in the play of international contradictions. We considered that, let us say, complete sway in the Soviet Union could never be established by German Fascism because it would encounter the objections of other imperialist rivals, that certain international conflicts might occur, that we could rely on other forces which would not be interested in strengthening Fascism."

"By their critisism of the existing system, which repeats the Social-Democratic critisism almost word for word, the Bolshevik opposition is preparing minds ... for the acceptance of the positive platform of Social-Democracy. ... Not only among the mass of the workers, but among communist workers as well, the opposition is rearing the shoots of ideas and sentiments which, if skillfully tended, may easily bear social-democratic fruit."

"Firstly for the design I decided that the two joined figures should be depicted upright [in Zadkine's first attempt the two brothers were sitting shoulder to shoulder].. ..two or three days later I was able to send him a photo of my new attempt, in which the two brothers are not only standing, but where the bond – the main idea is projected onto the statue in a hollow, in the heart of the composition the viewer can see a knot of hands, a symbol of the double inspiration."

"We lived in a large wooden house, with one room succeeding another [Zadkine, recalling in this quote his childhood's days in Smolensk, Russia]. The house was at the end of a blind alley. On one side were a beautiful garden and an orchard. In the summer there was an atmosphere of fragrance and peace. A large room with three windows looked out into the courtyard. Bookshelves along the walls with books and more books; a black table and six ugly Viennese chairs, also black, and in the center of the bare, inhospitable table, a sort of vase in coloured plaster representing a hand holding a goblet. It was the only piece of sculpture in the house!"

"At first, I thought I had found in this second figure [a bronze Orpheus, Zadkine made shortly after his return from New York to Paris, in 1944] the perfect solution, but a surprise awaited me. One day my coal merchant delivered to me, here in my studio, some wood for heating; among these logs I found a rudimentary but completely mysterious wooden figure of a man. He seemed to be walking in great strides, his torso suggested by only two simple boards which, in their structure, were very much like an ancient lyre. I immediately began working on a new 'Orpheus', in which the [music-]instrument had truly become part of the man. [c. 1960]"

"This exchange – mainly in the form of letters [between the brothers van Gogh] – was not only about painting and art, but covered everything to do with one's existence and the philosophical or religious colouring, in a word: for the reader of the letters written by Vincent to his brother a total of human behaviour is revealed that of the dual being of van Gogh. This is how my first wish and then obsession was started, to build a monument for the two van Gogh brothers."

".My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change of diet. After a steady diet of moulding plaster models for bronzes, I enjoy returning to a discipline of carving stone or wood, and the wood or the stone Inevitably suggests to me a shift of principles or of aims."

"Were I to concentrate exclusively on the body of Prometheus, I would be seriously limiting the scope of my rendering of the demigod; but because I concentrate also on the myth of Prometheus, on all that the great poets have written about him, I expand the meaning of the demigod's physical form and try to communicate.. ..the basic message of the legend of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and taught man to cook his foods, to smelt metal ore and to forge his tools and weapons. [c. 1960]"

"But a sculpture which sets out to achieve the same ends demands an almost unbelievable effort of concentration. Practically none of the episodes or moments of such a legend, [of Prometheus ] really lends itself to sculpture, and the sculptors of the nineteenth century were often quite careless or foolish in the choice of the moment which they set out to represent. Their works could thus become cluttered with all sorts of narrative details which detract from the monumental quality of the whole.. .That's why, in my 'Prometheus', I represent the fire as an integral part of the presence or appearance of the hero; he stands there before us in all his awe-inspiring grandeur, a human figure that seemed in the eyes of the men who first saw him to be actually consumed by the fire that he was bearing. [c. 1960]"

"Arms, hands [of the two van Gogh brothers, Vincent and Theo], like rifles, thrust out like non-stop ideas thoughts. Enormous thick veins like the ropes of a ship through which flow thoughts and inspirational excitement. They join the two brothers like nerve connections that pass from one body to the other, channeling the waves and opening up both in a magnetic ring of work and passion."

"I repeatedly told myself that the life of Vincent van Gogh and his colossal oeuvre – are not an individual outburst but a special and rare occurrence based on the special bond between the two brothers, only broken by Vincent's suicide."

"Because the scope of the sculptor's subject remains so limited, we must be careful to concentrate as much meaning or emotion as possible in the few forms that remain at our disposal. [c. 1960]"

"I alternate my aims; at one time, I concentrate on poetry, on a more expressionist kind of sculpture; at other times on form – I mean on a kind of sculpture that concerns itself with formal relations rather than emotions or ideas. I suppose that this principle of alternating my aims leads to a kind of oscillation in the evolution of my own particular style as a sculptor, but I feel that it prevents me from repeating myself. [c. 1960]"

"In every human being, there are dormant memories which suddenly rise to the surface of the conscious mind. Niobe, for instance, developed out of one of my most remote childhood recollections. A cholera epidemic had broken out in the Smolensk area, and there were many casualties. One day, on the top of a hill, I saw a giant of a peasant with arms raised toward the sky crying out his grief at having lost his children. From this image, which emerged from my subconscious mind many years later, came the statue of Niobe."

"As a matter of fact, these attributes are their fate, no longer separate objects they can carry.. ..part of their actual presence. I try to signify this by reorganizing the objective form of such a legendary figure so as to create an allegorical form that is complete in itself, no longer requiring an attribute that must be carried like the German businessman’s briefcase; the lyre becomes part of the poet's presence, its text written all over his body, as if tattooed on his skin. [quote, c. 1960, in France]"

"Fortunately, a sculptor's style and aim are, to a great extent, dictated to him by his materials. To make a sculpture seem at all moving or inspiring, an artist must, of course, be gifted with a certain personality that speaks movingly through the subject and materials of his work. But he must select appropriate materials, and use them appropriately, too.. .My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change in diet. [c. 1960]"

"But Orpheus has always haunted me, and I am not so sure I've exorcised his spell on me. For all I know, I may yet be tempted to try a sixth or a seventh 'Orpheus' in years to come. Besides the scale of each figure makes it necessary to conceive it differently. [c. 1960]"

"..the bond is then shown to be a sort of identity of thought, of reaction to the endless small changes, taking place in one brother and immediately passed on to the other, because feeding an idea was always a double barrel, and was eventually enforced after the echo had passed between the two [brothers Van Gogh]."

"It is in a sculptor's interest that there should exist a close relationship between his art and that of the poet. Otherwise, his sculpture may lack human or emotional content and become too strictly architectural. We sculptors pay a heavy price for the limited freedom that we enjoy as a result of our being able to create in three dimensions; we must sacrifice color and whole realms of subject matter, such as landscape, that scarcely lend themselves to a representation in three dimensions. [c. 1960, in France]"

"A cry of horror against the inhuman brutality of this act of tyranny."

"In October 1945 I returned from America, where I had stayed during the war. I arrived in Le Havre, full of ruins, a carcass of a city. It took one night to reach Paris on a train with no windows. That night I got the idea for the monument. I sketched it on paper and forgot about it, until I visited Rotterdam for the first time in 1947. I saw a city without a heart. I saw a crater in the body of a city. And I remembered that night, the sketches. I made a small terracotta model and sent it to an exhibition of French art in Germany."

"I do not believe that art must develop on national lines, but I am convinced that there never was and never will be an international art. There is and was French, German, Italian, and Flemish art. But I deny those specific definitions so fashionable with adepts of fascism which make of every country an hermetic cell from which all foreign artists are excluded. [shortly after the end of the German occupation]"

"Whatever the apparent aim of the artist, he is called upon first to move the spectator, after having been himself struck by a design or color composition which may or may not have a relation to natural objects. His predilections, his preferences, crystallize afterwards in the choice of means to interpret those natural objects; these means are always, obligingly, of imaginary essence."

"In my own researches and findings I have always insisted on plastic and sculptural values, and also on what I call a poetic climate. The object, whether it is a book, a bottle, or a human body, once it is visualized and expressed by means of clay, stone, or wood, ceases to be a document and becomes an animated object in stone, wood, or bronze and lives its independent life.."

"How should one approach the person of van Gogh in order to be able to build a statue of him? How can one place him outside of himself, separate him from the tragic character of his life? How can one build a statue in the open air which simultaneously evokes the rare and the new person who was van Gogh, as also the enormity of the new aspect of the current and future art of painting?"

"..I write you from the French front where I'am serving as a soldier in the Russian ambulance Corps. How are you feeling and what are you doing? How are your friends, Lissitsky, Libakov [also former students of Pen], Mazel, Mekler, and Chagall? Please, for God's sake, answer me. I would be so glad to hear how everyone is. I'm in fine health, but tired of it all – it's utterly disgraceful, makes the soul turn cold. If only it [the war] would just end. What are you working on, what are you doing? Please write me. – Yours Zadkine."

"The image of the city and the obliterated streets of Rotterdam haunted me. When I returned to Paris, I made a draft model for a statue in clay which attempted to express the combination of confusion and horror.. ..to stimulate emotion in the onlooker, to exude something which captivates the spectator, which opens up to them an unsuspected pathway in their own soul."

"At heart, I have always been a carpenter, who, instead of making a table or a door, was led to carve images in wood."

"He had such a keen sense of color, it was said, that he would pack a tie to match his pale complexion on days when he was seasick. In any case, one calm day he was kind enough to open up his portfolios, which were full of impressive drawings."

"The mysterious musicality, the organic intermarriage of its forms convex and concave, the high singing phrase of a straight line bordering a plane and its sudden dropping into a scarcely traceable curve, and feel deeply, sharply, the profound peace, the philosophy awakened by the even distribution of light and shade, wandering from one curved plane into a deep clarity of light, enriching a carefully carved stone plane. One will understand at once that those awakened sensation have nothing to do with anatomical considerations, exactitudes observed or not."

"The spectator of a sculpture, modern or ancient, is not called to examine his own or the sculptor's knowledge of anatomy but to participations, so to say, a participation where the motions which have strangulated the carver, while working, must operate the same mysterious attraction and inexpressible miracle of forms and lines, its dramaticism, its graphic tragedy, or its smiling gaiety and happiness: its words carved out of forms and sown with lines into phrases of philosophy, religion."

"The composition, harmonies and proportions of those 'intended shapes' is the great and most difficult problem which the modern sculptor attacks, for sculpture is only forms, only spaces embraced by lines which demonstrate them. The secrets of a never dying piece of sculpture is to be had only by undergoing experience."

"For him [Zadkine] the tree was Nature to such a point that he mistrusted his own reactions. He told me, when we were in Cortina, what had happened to him when he had sculpted a nude in a large tree trunk, 'One day, the tree burst just at the place of the heart of the figure and then a mushroom grew out of this very place, like an offering.' I almost think he believed in the suffering of a cut down tree just as some primitives of Oceania identify themselves with the tree from which they hollow a canoe."

"The sculptors of the cathedral porches of the Middle Ages already knew that we can identify many legendary figures by their attributes, not their physical appearance. How is one to recognize Orpheus without his lyre, or Saint Lawrence without his grid? At the same time it seems a bit absurd, In an art that claims to be realistic, to have Orpheus always carrying his lyre, like a German businessman his briefcase. There must have been moments when Orpheus and Saint Lawrence left their lyre or their grid at the checkroom, for instance.. [c. 1960, in France]"

"Zadkine was a man filled with deep impulses and that is what made him so endearing and also so vulnerable. While he was working on the Van Gogh monument [sculpture of Vincent & Theo van Gogh, 1964], he re-read to me a letter from the painter, and I saw the tears which came to his eyes at this reading. He quoted to me then, as though to excuse himself for this tenderness, the words of w:Stefan Zweig: 'If I were God, I would take pity on the hearts of men.'"

"My huge monument to the bombing of Rotterdam [in 1940, by the German aircraft], for instance, was the third and final version of this figure. Once the model had been accepted in principle and the scale agreed on, I began working on a new version of it, conceiving it to a great extent in terms of the effects of the changes of lighting in which such a monument would been seen in the open air. [c. 1960]"

"Prokofiev had a lifelong love of the sonata form. Ever since learning the basic rules during his childhood years, he strove to master them; … In 1941, describing his Sonatinas op. 54 (1931), he remarked, “I liked the idea of writing a simple work in such a superior form as sonata.” One can learn a lot about the composer’s growth by tracing his progress from the early sonatas, which cautiously dare to bend the textbook rules, to the masterful treatment of the form in his late works."

"In spite of the many valuable books available today, the state of Prokofiev scholarship cannot be considered adequate: suffice it to say that the detailed catalogue of his works has not been updated since it was published in 1961. At present, there is no edition of the Prokofiev sonatas free of errors. I have tried to do my best in pointing out some obvious mistakes, as well as certain doubtful readings. Many questions cannot be answered with certainty, as the manuscripts for some of the sonatas have been lost; those that have survived are not easily available for inspection. To get to some of them, I was fortunate to have the help of Russian colleagues in overcoming the restrictions of the current gatekeepers in Russia."

"Within the vast, virtually limitless piano repertoire, the piano sonatas of Sergei Prokofiev occupy a special place. Apart from Alexander Scriabin early in the century, Prokofiev was the only major twentieth-century composer to pay such consistent attention to the form, … They are a constant presence in concert programs and are considered an indispensable part of the repertoire by almost every serious concert pianist."

"Prokofiev’s creative path traversed many countries and was affected by wars and revolutions. Life brought him into contact with some of the most prominent and influential artistic figures of his time. Observing the magnificent panorama of Prokofiev’s oeuvre, one sees that the composer’s musical style evolved significantly over the course of his creative life. The reasons for the changes of direction have been much discussed and debated."

"One of the most winning characteristics of Prokofiev’s music is its indomitable energy. In expressing this quality, stability of tempo is particularly important."

"Prokofiev had a particular talent for creating a fully identifiable mood within the first notes of a piece, passage, or theme."

"It is essential that a pianist meticulously observe the composer’s indications regarding tempo, dynamics, and articulation. These are all crucial in creating full characterizations of individual themes and passages. Far too often one hears unidiomatic performances of Prokofiev’s music in which speed and loudness seem to be the only parameters that matter to the pianist."

"Many pages of Prokofiev’s oeuvre continue the important tradition of Russian music based on fairy tale–inspired imagery."

"Prokofiev was especially active as a pianist during his years in the United States. The titles of numerous reviews seem to refer as much to his compositions as to his performances: “A titan of a pianist,” “Volcanic eruption at the keyboard,” “Russian chaos in music,” among others."

"The piano plays a central role in Prokofiev’s oeuvre. Not only are his works for piano solo or piano with orchestra numerous, but they also rank among his more important compositions. The piano was the first instrument Prokofiev heard and the only one he mastered."

"Examining the musical language of Prokofiev in a more detailed way, we must acknowledge that for him melody was always the most important element of music, one that determined the quality of the composition"

"Prokofiev’s music is usually based on a firm sense of tonality. Whatever tonal uncertainty and ambiguity one experiences, mainly in developmental passages, they are mostly short-lived."

"Prokofiev’s playing of lyrical music is especially noteworthy. His phrasing can be exquisitely beautiful in its dynamic molding (second theme of the Andante assaifrom Sonata No. 4; the middle section of Vision fugitive,op. 22, no. 11), and his polyphonic voicing can be clear and expressive (Sonatina pastorale, op. 59, no. 3)."

"Young Prokofiev was attentive to new musical trends. We can find traces of various influences in his early compositions. Some of the piano works from the set Visions fugitives,op. 22 (1915–17), are reminiscent of Debussy; the Andante assai section of the First Piano Concerto, op. 10 (1911–12), sounds like Rachmaninov; and the harmonies of the symphonic poem Osen neye(Autumnor Autumnal Sketch), op. 8 (1910), harken back to Scriabin. These, however, were rather passing influences. Others proved to be more enduring. One of them was the fairy-tale streak in Russian music. Russians have always been fond of fairy tales, which to this day continue to be an important part of every child’s upbringing. ... Another significant influence was the Classical style."