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TURIN — Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, the city of Milan tore up the invitation for Valery Gergiev — arguably the best conductor alive at the time — to lead Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony at La Scala.
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That decision made no sense to me. It’s a rare thing to put two Russians together and come up with such an extraordinary artistic result.
Still, at least you could fault Gergiev for being friends with Vladimir Putin.
Moral watchdogs
It is a whole lot harder to find fault with Leo Tolstoy, and yet the Del Monaco Theater in the northeastern Italian city of Treviso, Italy is now facing backlash for staging a theatrical adaptation of the legendary Russian author’s Anna Karenina.
On social media, a chorus of moral watchdogs is accusing the theater of falling for pro-Russian propaganda. Amid all the podium-worthy nonsense circulating these days, aiming moral outrage at Tolstoy is gold medal material.
After the Iliad
It was, after all, in Crimea, Ukrainian territory long before Russia seized it by force, where Tolstoy enrolled and first began to form the ideas about war and humanity that would later flow into the vastness of War and Peace.
It’s the West’s second great epic about force.
A beautiful 1971 essay by Nicola Chiaromonte, Credere e non credere (“Believing and Not Believing”) argues that for its complete stripping away of war’s illusions, for tearing it down from the pedestal of divine will or historical destiny and reducing it to something random, petty, and cruel, born of arrogance, War and Peace is the second great Western epic about force — in the way it fully grasps how fragile force really is. The first epic, of course, was the Iliad.
As has been said before: if Tolstoy were alive today, Putin would ship him off to Siberia.
