Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was on the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it, through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals, liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. These were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist liberalism. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume III – Marius; Book Fourth – The Friends of the A B C, Chapter I, A Group which barely missed becoming Historic.]

Of what is revolt composed? . . . . Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations, instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change, the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love, the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors, disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitions that are hedged about, whoever hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the rabble, that mud which catches fire,--such are the elements of revolt. That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants, vagabonds of the cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who, each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to revolt. Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for riot, and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away with the whirlwind. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Tenth – The 5^th of June, 1832, Chapter I, The Surface of the Question.]

In the fifteenth century everything changes.

Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus’s letters of stone.

_The book is about to kill the edifice_.

The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.

. . . from the moment when architecture is no longer anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,—it has no longer the power to retain the other arts. So they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves off, each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains by this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music. One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the arts. The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious unity. Before the invention of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a revolution . . . .

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? This does not mean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here and there. We may still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army from melted cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will be printed.

And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law of literature, which formerly received the law from it. The respective positions of the two arts will be inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true, resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naïvete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Fifth, Chapter II, “This Will Kill That”.]

Gertrude Stein “strove to reshape literary conventions.”

• Gertrude Stein, Ida: A Novel (1941).
• Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation (1956).
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914).
• Gertrude Stein, 3 Lives (1909).

Poetry

Poems:

• John Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion” (analysis)

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 (“The Year 1905”) (1957) (approx. 61-63’), is about a slaughter of innocents under the Tsar. “On January 22 [O.S. January 9], 1905, a date which is remembered as ‘Bloody Sunday,’ thousands of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators marched to St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. They intended to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. Many supported the Tsar and believed that he would help to address their economic, political, and social grievances. Assembled in the square, they sang God Save the Tsar; but a frightened Nicholas II had fled the palace. Inexplicably, the Imperial Guard opened fire, killing around 1,000 protesters and turning the snow red with blood. . . . The Russian Revolution of 1905 set the stage for the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the birth of the Soviet Union.” “Coming as it did after the Soviet Union had brutally repressed the Hungarian uprising in November 1956, the Symphony struck some listeners as being as much about 1956 as 1905, despite the specificity of the music (though the use of a Polish resistance song might support the notion).” “After the première an elderly lady was overheard saying: ‘Those aren’t guns firing, they are tanks roaring, and people being squashed.’ And when this was related to Shostakovich, he is reported to have replied: ‘That means she understood it.’ Even the composer’s own son apparently asked his father: ‘Papa, what if they hang you for this?’ But he was not hanged. In fact the work was a huge success and resulted in a Lenin Prize for the composer the following year. It is ironic that the symphony should have been so praised by a régime that it was probably secretly denigrating.” Top performances are conducted by Stokowski in 1958, Mravinsky in 1959, Mravinsky in 1967, Kondrashin in 1973, Haitink in 1983, Rostropovich in 2002, Vasily Petrenko in 2009, Wigglesworth in 2010, Gergiev in 2014, Nelsons in 2018, Storgårds in 2020; and Payare in 2020.

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. 112 (“The Year 1917”) (1961) (approx. 37-40’), generally is not regarded to be among Shostakovich’s best works. “Hardly Shostakovich's most profound or ponderable symphony, ‘The Year 1917’ is in effect almost a cycle of thematically connected mini-tone poems.” This could be because his heart was not in it.  This “symphony’s nickname was a calculated political decision in a life-or-death strategy for artistic survival. When he named his Symphony No. 12 ‘The Year 1917,’ it was an emphatic political gesture referencing the year of the Russian Revolution. The symphony itself is a heroic biographical narrative honoring a principal figure of that revolution, Vladimir Lenin. Shostakovich wrote the symphony in 1961, a year after joining the Communist Party, and eight years after the death of Joseph Stalin.” The State had been pressuring him to join the Party. “When the Twelfth Symphony was first heard at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, the critics were appalled at this crude piece of blatant, poster-painted Soviet propaganda. After all, that was exactly what it sounded like, lacking even the one redeeming feature of the much-maligned Second Symphony, that extraordinary, undisciplined crucible in which Shostakovich forged his mature style. The Second was seen as experimental, the Twelfth seemed merely excremental.” Perhaps Shostakovich intended the work to be a satire, in keeping with the satirical character of each of his symphonies, beginning with the Fifth. Excellent performances are conducted by Barshai in 1995, Vasily Petrenko in 2009, and Jansons in 2019.

Music commemorating revolution:

• Social justice songs;
• Protest and political songs.

Music from revolutionary periods:

• Music of the American Revolution;
• Music of the Mexican Revolution;
• Music of the Soviet Revolution; Russian Civil War Songs;
• Music of the French Revolution;
• Music of the Irish Revolution; songs of Irish rebellion;
• Music of the Chinese Revolution;
• Music of the Cuban Revolution; and
• Music of the Greek War of Independence.

Other compositions:

• László Lajtha, Symphony No. 7, "Revolution," Op. 63 (1957) (approx. 31’): “Lajtha wrote the Revolution Symphony in response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, mercilessly crushed by Russian and Warsaw Pact forces.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• The Beatles, “Revolution” (lyrics)
• John Lennon, "Power to the People" (lyrics)
• The Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man" (lyrics)
• Blaise Siwula, Nicolas Letman-Burtinovic & Jon Panikkar, “Insurrection”
• Sérgio Assad, Clarice Assad & Third Coast Percussion, “The Rebel”

Visual Arts

• Marc Chagall, The Revolution (1937)
• José Clemente Orozco, Zapatista's Marching (1931)
• Eugene Delacroix, The Liberty Leading the People (1930)
• Diego Rivera, The Perpetual Renewal of the Revolutionary Struggle (1926)
• Pavel Filonov, Formula of the Revolution (1925)
• Boris Kostudiev, February 27 (1917)
• David Burliuk, Revolution (1917)

Film and Stage

• Battleship Potemkin, a silent film portraying in microcosm the Russian revolution of 1905
• For many Russians, Alexander Nevsky represents resistance against a German invasion.
• Spartacus: a revolt of slaves in the Roman Empire
• Bloody Sunday, “the re-creation of the 1972 outbreak of violence during a pro-I.R.A. civil-rights march in Londonderry, Northern Ireland”
• If . . .: British boarding school students revolt in this 1960s counter-culture film
• Viva Zapata! About the Mexican revolutionary hero
• Chicken Run, about standing up for yourself and others, so you’re not all used as ingredients for chicken pies