Between Heaven and Hell: A Thousand Years of the Russian Artistic Experience

How did a country with such a tormented past bring such stunning works of art into being? America's leading Russian historian, W. Bruce Lincoln, finds answers in a land uniquely suspended between East and West, past and future, sacred and secular, and in its suppressed artists' creative search for identity and inner freedom under tyranny. Examining Russia's masterpieces through the prism of its social and political history, Between Heaven and Hell synthesizes accounts of music, painting, architecture, literature, iconography, ballet, and cinema into a gripping saga. Transforming exhaustive archival research into a passionate story, this gorgeously illustrated volume brims with the silent mysteries of Byzantine Christianity, the dazzling Imperial splendor of the czars, and the poignant return of brutalized exiles to their homelands. The roster of artists--Pushkin, Tolstoy, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky, Pavlova, Chagall, Pasternak--carries straight through to the contemporary ordeals of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky. A fabulous gift for Russophiles, history buffs, and connoisseurs of all the arts, Between Heaven and Hell shows how the collision of social contradictions, imported art forms, and creative genius gave birth to the quintessential Russian experience.

This slim volume tackles an overwhelming subject: 1,000 years of Russian achievements in the arts, from medieval ikons to the novels of Tolstoy to the films of Eisenstein. Much has been written about the subject over the years, but Lincoln poses himself a slightly different task: to depict not so much the history of Russian arts as the history of the country's "artistic experience," including the "social and political forces" that shaped artistic creation. Author of such histories as Romanovs and Nicholas I, Lincoln ably provides the context such a task requires. Unfortunately, Lincoln's purple prose can sometimes be distracting. No one ever seems to merely wear a medal, they wear it "proudly"; a building is not simply painted turquoise when it can be "brilliant" turquoise. Here, for instance, is Lincoln on the music of Rimsky-Korsakov: "Oceans churned, storms thundered, the sun sparkled in wintry forests, and in the new warmth of spring nightingales sang and golden fish leaped from crystal streams." Overall, however, Lincoln's marriage of history and the arts is a happy one, demonstrating how the peculiarly Russian tension between East and West and between politics and the arts helped produce artistic works that were both uniquely beautiful and uniquely Russian.