Between Heaven and Hell. The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia

Inbunden bok. Viking. 1998. 514 sidor.

Nära nyskick. Skyddsomslag i mycket gott skick. Fotoillustrerad i färg & sv/v. Språk: Engelska. "How did a country with such a tormented past bring such stunning works of art into being? To answer this question, W. Bruce Lincoln explores ten centuries of artistic endeavor in a land uniquely suspended between East and West, past and future, sacred and secular. Surveying art in all its forms, 'Between Heaven and Hell' tells the stories of Russia's greatest novelists, poets, painters, composers, dancers, architects, and filmmakers as they struggled to extract beauty from their nation's painful life, and shaped the masterpieces that the world now acclaims as purely and uniquely Russian. No one has ever written on such a scale about Russia's artists and the forces that shaped their lives. Opening with the arrival of Eastern Orthodoxy in Kiev at the end of the tenth century and concluding with Solzhenitsyn's poignant return from exile after the end of the Soviet era, Lincoln transforms exhaustive research into a spectacular human story. From some of the dominant figures in the world's culture - novelists Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Nabokov, the poets Pushkin and Josephn Brodsky, composers Musorgskii, Chaikovskii, Rimskii-Korsakov, painters Marc Chagall and Natalia Goncharova - to other lesser-known artists considered by Russians to be among their greatest talents, Lincoln re-creates a rich mosaic of cultural evolution over a thousand years. We experience the silent mysteries of Byzantine Christianity, the brilliance of medieval iconography, the dazzling splendor of the czars' courts, the building of the great cathedrals, the flourishing of the Imperial capitals and palaces, even the development of the language itself. Focusing always on the lives of the artists in context, 'Between Heaven and Hell' brings the triumph and tragedy of the Russian artistic experience into full view. It vividly illustrates the workings of the creative process in a land in which politics and the arts have been closely intertwined. And it keenly describes the unique fashion in which Russian artists created their work through assimilating and transforming other cultural forms - giving birth to masterpieces unlike any others on earth".