Dictionary of Literary Influences

Santayana, George

joined her. His parents’ permanent separation affected Santayana, a retiring artistic boy. His early childhood experience of desertion contributed to his mature thought. Years later, in the first volume of his autobiography, Persons and Places, The Background of My Life (1944), he candidly and ironically examined how the circumstance of his birth and early years shaped his philosophy. Although never physically abused, Santayana cast a cold eye upon the world, and by temperament, by experience, and by reading widely he was always the outsider. He wrote essays and poetry. He painted and drew. Poets such as Horace, Racine, and others were a part of his reading. Spinoza was a major influence.

Santayana graduated from Boston Latin School and went on to study philosophy at Harvard and in Germany. He received his Ph.D. and taught at Harvard, where he had a small student following, from 1889 to 1912. Walter Lippmann claimed Santayana was essential to a sound education. Santayana influenced T. S. Eliot’s development as a poet. Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Felix Frankfurter, among others, felt Santayana’s influence. By 1912 an inheritance and his own economies allowed him to leave America. He never returned.

His unpleasant childhood experiences, his alienation from America, and possibly his being a repressed homosexual meant a critical distance between himself and the world. Three events led to his metanoia: the death of a young student, witnessing his father’s death in 1883, and the marriage of his half-sister Susanna. The personal became the philosophical. “To possess things and persons is the only pure good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a burden and a snare.” It was a naturalism without the Darwinian desires of conflict and conquest, expressing his reading in classical materialism. In Three Philosophical Poets (1910)—Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—Santayana examined such a creed. His “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” caught the spirit of his age as an ascetic dedicated to work and sexual repression while believing itself to be an acme of moral material progress. The Last Puritan (1936), a novel, analyzed the Boston of his youth. It was one of three books selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Santayana was conservative, believing the Enlightenment had limits. Politics provided limited goods and services. Freedom (that is, order) was problematic in this naturalistic world for the mind had the same essence (Dominations and Powers, 1951). Never religious, Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) demonstrated that humans sought the eternal despite the evidence that no such condition existed.

In 1941 he took shelter in the Clinica delle Piccola Compagna di Maria, governed by Roman Catholic nuns. Santayana died in 1952 and is buried in the Panteon de la Pia española located in Rome’s Campo Verano cemetery.

Archives

The University of Texas, Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Waterloo (Canada) have major holdings of Santayana’s manuscripts. The MIT Press will publish 20 volumes of a critical edition of Santayana writings.

Printed Sources

Butler, Richard. “Catholic Atheist,” Spirituality Today, 38 (Winter 1986).

Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. A History of Philosophy in America, 2 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). A basic source.

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Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Essential for historical context.

Levinson, Henry. Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Demonstrates Santayana’s far-ranging influence.

Lyons, Richard C. (ed.). Santayana on America: Essays, Notes and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). Explores Santayana’s complex attitude toward the United States.

McCormick, John. George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1986).

Michelson, John Magnus “The Place of Buddhism in Santayana’s Moral Philosophy,” Asian Philosophy 5 (March 1995).

Saatkamp, Herman J. Jr., and John Jones. George Santayana: A Bibliographical Checklist, 1890–1980 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

Donald K. Pickens

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (1905–1980)

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris, France. His childhood and his early intellectual formation are described in the autobiographical novel Les Mots (1964)/The Words (tr. 1964). He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he became friends with Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan, taught for a short time at the lycée du Havre, and then continued his studies in philosophy at the Institut Français in Berlin. In 1929, he took first place at the Agrégation de philosophie, and met Simone de Beauvoir shortly after, who, in spite of his numerous affairs, remained his lifelong companion. Sartre was taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1940, managed to escape, and was later involved in the Resistance. He confessed that his imprisonment was a turning-point in his life: from an individualist he was transformed into a “socialist” deeply concerned with the values of the community. After the war (1945), he founded together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty the periodical Les Temps Modernes. Sartre’s political sympathies have always been communist, and his refusal to criticize the Stalinist trials contributed to his estrangement from his friend Albert Camus, which culminated in 1951 after the publication of Camus’s L’Homme révolté. In 1958, Sartre was among those who realized that de Gaulle’s personality was dangerous for a “republican state,” and 10 years later, he participated at the students’ movement in Paris. When he was offered the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964, he declined. In 1973, he founded another important periodical,

Libération.

The philosophers that most influenced Sartre’s thought and who are at the basis of his existentialist philosophy are Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and, to a lesser degree, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. According to Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre had been reading Heidegger (both in the original and in translation) since the late thirties. The Heideggerian concept of Dasein (which literally means in German “being there,” and which was transformed by Heidegger into a philosophy of the openness of Being) inspired Sartre’s vision of man as a Being-in-the- World. This idea, as well as the critique of the Western subject-object relation (also taken from Heidegger) has permeated many of Sartre’s works, from Being and Nothingness (tr. 1953)/L’Être et le néant (1943) to the novel Nausea (tr. 1949)/La Nausée

(1938). The latter, catalogued by literary critics as belonging to the “literature of the absurd,” was also influenced by two other important figures in Sartre’s intellectual formation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Andre Gide. The novel is reminiscent of

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the Nietzschean definition of subjectivity as self-production and of Gide’s continuous regeneration of the self. As a whole, Sartre’s philosophy is known as “existentialist,” that is, a coherent system of thought founded on several principles: existence precedes essence, individual freedom is the source of all human values, man can become free through his choices and actions. From the phenomenology of Husserl, Sartre developed the idea that all consciousness is consciousness of something; therefore what man is, is revealed in his acts. Echoes of this philosophy are present in many of Sartre’s plays, which usually present a hero confronted with a situation-limite—an event which forces him to act in an authentic way. Some of Sartre’s most famous plays are: Les mouches (1943), Huis clos (1945), La putain respectueuse (1946), Les Mains sales (1948), Le diable et le bon dieu (1951).

As a writer of fiction (novels, short-stories, plays), Sartre expressed his views on literature in his critical essays on Flaubert (L’Idiot de la famille, 1972), Baudelaire (Baudelaire, 1947, tr. 1950), Genet (Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, tr. 1963/Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, 1952), and, more specifically in What Is Literature?

(tr. 1966)/Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947). His view on literature is based on the premise that language in poetry and language in prose are essentially different. This distinction comes from Stephane Mallarmé and has informed an aesthetic ideal (which is also that of Heidegger) according to which all true literature is written in poetic language. Sartre, however, uses the distinction in order to prove that prose should be a vehicle for moral principles, or, in other words, it should be engagé. This view is complemented by an opposite idea, namely that art, “of its essence, is opposed to that which exists,” and, as such, art has as its own and only goal freedom itself. These two views of art and literature are often confounded in Sartre.

Archives

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France: Miscellaneous correspondence and draft manuscripts.

Printed Sources

Goldthorpe, Rhiannon. Sartre: Literature and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Halpern, Joseph. Critical Fictions. The Literary Criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976).

Hollier, Denis. The Politics of Prose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

———. Politique de la prose (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Jeanson, Francis. Sartre par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1969).

Kern, Edith (ed.). Sartre. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962).

Lévy, Bernard-Henri. Le siècle de Sartre (Paris: Grasset, 2000). Lilar, Suzanne. À propos de Sartre et de l’amour (Paris: Grasset, 1967).

Daniela Hurezanu

SCHÖNBERG, ARNOLD (1874–1951)

Arnold Schönberg was born in Vienna, the son of a Jewish salesman and of Pauline Nachod, who taught him his first musical notions. As a result of his father’s death he

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was forced to leave school when he was 15, but he continued his musical study as an autodidact: he wrote to a friend that his teachers had been primarily Bach and Mozart and secondarily Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. The influence of Richard Wagner and of Gustav Mahler is evident in his first important compositions: Transfigured Night (1899) and the Songs of Gurre (1899–1901). In these works Schönberg clearly shows he has moved beyond the post-romantic harmonic tradition toward expressionist music, as in Pelleas and Melisande op. 5 (1902–3) and in the Kammersymphonie op. 9 (1906).

The first years of the century were particularly important for the development of his musical theory: his association with the artists of the Blaue Reiter, such as Franz Marc and Vassily Kandinsky, led to the publishing of a fundamental essay, “The relationship to the text” (1911–12). Schönberg developed in this article the aesthetic and ethical principles of expressionism. The theory found a practical application in the Lieder op. 15 (1908), after some verses by Stefan George, and in the Pierrot Lunaire op. 21 (1912), one of Schönberg’s most famous compositions and the actual manifest of musical expressionism. Starting from 1904 the composer had gathered around him a group of disciples, among whom were Alban Berg and Anton Webern: the results of those years of theoretical meditations and teaching activity are contained in The Manual of Harmony (1911), a very strong criticism of the traditional teaching being done in music academies. In this work Schönberg explains the concepts of atonality and of Klang farbe Melodie, looking to social commitment and religion for new themes allowing him to create a new poetic that was evident in Die Jakobsleiter (1912), inspired by Swedenborg, and Die Satiren op. 28 (1925).With the accession to power of Adolf Hitler, Schönberg fled to France and then took refuge in the United States, where he decided to abjure the Catholic faith and to convert to Judaism as a protest against Nazism. To this period belong the compositions Moses and Aron (1946) and Survivor from Warsaw op. 46 (1947), Fantasy op. 47 (1949), De Profundis op. 50 b (1950) and Dreimal Tousend Jahre op. 50 (1949). Arnold Schönberg died in Los Angeles in 1951.

From the point of view of the musical language, Schönberg has gone along the most radical and progressive path of postromanticism, from the negation of tonality to atonality and finally to the development of dodecaphony. This last puts all the twelve notes of the chromatic scale on the same level, all of them being fundamental for the composition and not in a hierarchical rank as in traditional harmony.

Both the musical and the theoretical heritages of Arnold Schönberg were gathered by his disciples Berg and Webern and, partially, by Igor Stravinsky. Thomas Mann was inspired by Schönberg’s theories in his depiction of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn in Doctor Faustus. Relevant evidence of Schönberg influences can be seen in the musical aesthetics of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, and in the works of John Cage and of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Archives

Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna: Music manuscripts, text manuscripts, paintings and drawings, correspondence.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Correspondence to and from Arnold Schönberg.

Printed Sources

Milstein, Silvina. Arnold Schönberg. Notes, Sets, Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992).

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Schuman, Jean-Baptist Nicolas Robert

Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schönberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). Schönberg, Arnold. Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form (Lincoln

and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

———. The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique and Art of Its Presentation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Maria Tabaglio

SCHUMAN, JEAN-BAPTIST NICOLAS ROBERT (1886–1963)

Robert Schuman was born in Luxembourg, the son of an originally French Lorrainer, Jean-Pierre Schuman, half-Luxembourgeois by birth, a prosperous rentier who chose to take German nationality in 1872 after France ceded Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, and his Luxembourgeoise wife, Eugénie Duren. Schuman grew up in Luxembourg, speaking Luxembourgeois, French, and German fluently, and attending the academically rigorous Atheneum of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where he also learned Greek, Latin, and English and became known as a brilliant student. Schuman, then aged seventeen, chose to study law in Germanspeaking Lorraine at the Universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Munich, where he again excelled, and in 1910 he began to practice law in Metz. During the First World War he fought in the German army, and when Germany’s defeat returned AlsaceLorraine to France, Schuman remained in Metz, specializing in German legal problems, especially those arising from the region’s repeated transfers. In 1919 Schuman, a devout Catholic and committed Democrat, joined the Catholic Popular Democratic Party and won election to the French chamber of deputies, remaining there for 40 years. When Germany invaded France in 1940, he refused to join Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government, but returned to AlsaceLorraine, where his public condemnation of German expulsions of French residents soon caused his arrest. Escaping the Gestapo, Schuman participated in wartime resistance propaganda efforts, helping to found the Popular Republican Movement, France’s Christian Democratic Party. As French governments rapidly succeeded each other after liberation in 1944, Schuman became France’s finance minister (1945–47), premier for seven months (1947–48), foreign minister (1948– 52), and justice minister (1955–58). Working closely with Jean Monnet, in 1950 Schuman was instrumental in creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the foundation of the future European Union, which integrated key sectors of the French, German, Italian, and Benelux economies, thereby greatly reducing the possibility of future European hostilities. In 1958 he became the first ECSC and European Economic Community president.

Known for his intellectual brilliance, in high school Schuman excelled in Latin, history, and mathematics (Lejeune 2000, 31) and at university studied both philosophy and law, preferring the civil law’s careful detail to broad legal theory (Pennera 1985, 29). A somewhat austere bachelor and, like his parents, a lifelong devout Roman Catholic, in 1904 Schuman joined the ultra-Catholic student organization “Unitas,” and became a leading Catholic layman, deeply versed in religious literature, whose pronounced social conscience and commitment to democracy made him a prominent founder of France’s Christian Democrat political movement. During his wartime refuge in assorted monasteries, orphanages, and churches, Schuman read extensively in theology, including the works of St.

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John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, history from the Roman Empire onward, and current political affairs (Lejeune 2000, 118–19). Schuman’s borderland heritage, liberal Catholicism, and democratic outlook all guided his dedicated efforts to accomplish West European reconciliation and prevent further devastating wars.

Archives

Papers of Robert Schuman. Archives of the French Foreign Ministry, Paris, France. Official correspondence and papers.

Papers of Robert Schuman. Series 34J, Departmental Archives of Metz, France. Official correspondence and papers as deputy for Metz.

For security reasons many of Schuman’s pre-1940 personal and official papers were destroyed.

Printed Sources

Lejeune, René. Robert Schuman: Pére de l’Europe 1886–1963: La politique, chemin de sainteté

(Paris: Fayard, 2000).

Pennera, Christian. Robert Schuman: La jeunesse et les débuts politiques d’un grand européen, de 1886 à 1924 (Sarreguemines: Éditions Pierron, 1985).

Poidevin, Raymond. Robert Schuman: Homme d’État, 1886–1963 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1986). Fullest biography.

Rochefort, Robert. Robert Schuman (Paris: Cerf, 1968).

Priscilla Roberts

SEUSS, DR. (1904–1991)

Born Theodore Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts, he attended Dartmouth College, where he edited the school’s humor magazine and graduated in 1925. He pursued a Ph.D. in English literature at Oxford University from 1925 to 1927, where he met and married Helen Palmer. He lost interest in his studies, dropped out of Oxford, and returned to America, where he began publishing cartoons and humorous articles for magazines such as Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, and Liberty. He first attained national exposure as the ad illustrator for the pesticide Flit. In 1937, he published And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, his first children’s book, set in rhyme. During World War II, he served as a documentary writer for the U.S. Army and won an Academy Award for his short animated work, Gerald McBoing-Boing. In 1954, a critical story in Life magazine by American novelist John Hersey suggested illiteracy rates among children were caused by their boring textbooks. In response, Geisel and his Houghton Mifflin editor compiled and narrowed a list of important words children should know, and 225 of them formed the principle vocabulary of The Cat in the Hat. The tremendous success of the book led Geisel to write and illustrate over 44 children’s books including How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), and Horton Hatches an Egg

(1966). In 1984, he received the Pulitzer Prize, and he eventually accumulated a Peabody, two Emmy Awards, and three Academy Awards. He continued to write and illustrate children’s books until his death in 1991.

In high school, Geisel came under the influence of Edwin A. “Red” Smith, an English teacher, who introduced him to the works of Hilaire Belloc, two of which in particular—The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and Cautionary Tales—stimulated Geisel’s interest in rhyme, and he attributes the bulk of his artistic style to Belloc’s influence.

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Though he was exposed to the major British authors at Oxford (Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, among others), their influence is more ephemeral. His notebooks from the Oxford period (1925–27) do portray occasional scenes illustrating literary episodes in a whimsical proto-Seussian style. He did find Jonathan Swift’s satire, Gullivar’s Travels, particularly enjoyable, and Swiftian stylistic elements are evident in his later writing, such as The Lorax (1971). While traveling in Europe in mid-1926, he read Lytton Strachey’s biography, Queen Victoria (1921), and C. Grant Robertson’s Bismarck (1918). He even thought of translating Emile Ludwig’s Napoleon (1926), but he quickly abandoned the attempt. Indeed, in 1926 he lost interest in any systematic study of literature, which coincides with his departure from Oxford. The remainder of his life exhibits the topical reading he engaged in typically dealing with historical and cultural events of the moment, which eventually filtered into his work.

Archives

Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, California. Principle repository: contains original drawings, sketches, proofs, notebooks, manuscript drafts, books, audioand videotapes, photographs, and memorabilia spanning 1919–91.

Printed Sources

Morgan, Judith, and Neil. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996).

Weidt, Maryann N. Oh, the Places He Went: A Story about Dr. Seuss–Theodore Seuss Geisel

(New York: First Avenue Editions, 1995).

Joseph E. Becker

SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH (1905–1984)

Mikhail Sholokhov, the only Soviet establishment writer to receive the Nobel Prize (1965), was born in Russia’s Don Cossack Military Region to lower-class merchants with roots as gunners in service to Peter the Great (1715) and serfs in Ukraine’s Chernihiv area. Sholokhov grew up amid widespread illiteracy and was heavily influenced by the oral culture and traditions of the Don Cossacks. His father collected a classical library and hired a teacher to teach him to read, later sending him to Moscow’s Grigorii Shelaputin School and Boguchar Gymnasium (1914–18). Sholokhov’s early readings included Nikolay Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Taras Bulba, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and stories by Lev Tolstoy. In Boguchar, in the home of the teacher-priest Dmitri Tishansky, where he boarded, Sholokhov heard discussions about Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Értle, Aleksandr Kuprin, Vladimir Korolenko, and Ivan Bunin. Additionally he read works by Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyuchev, and Nikolay Nekrasov, and he tried his hand at writing poetry, fiction, and comical plays based on Gogol. Later he also had access to the works of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx.

Civil war (1918) ended Sholokhov’s formal education and forced the 14-year-old to make life-defining decisions. During the War, Sholokhov joined the Bolsheviks, becoming a tax collector. At the same time he took part in a theatrical group that

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performed comedies by Denis Fonvizin, Gogol, Nikolay Ostrovsky, and Anton Chekhov, secretly composing farcical plays and recording his horrific, formative war experiences in autobiographical short stories.

In postwar Moscow (1923), Sholokhov joined the proletarian group “Young Guard” and briefly participated in seminars led by the Formalists Viktor Shklovskii and Osip Brik. He married at age 18 and had four children. In 1925, he met his mentor, the Cossack writer Alexander Serafimovich, who introduced his Tales of the Don (1926), critiqued his works, and recommended publication of his controversial epic, And Quiet Flows the Don. Later he was befriended by Gorky, whose intervention with Josef Stalin facilitated publication of book three of his epic.

Sholokhov always described himself first as a communist. He joined the Party in 1932 and took part in the formation of the Writers Union (1934), serving on its board from 1934 to 1984. He promoted socialist realism and spoke out against literary modernism and writers who resisted the Party line. Although his loyalty was questioned, he survived the purges and became a member of the Supreme Soviet (1936), a delegate to Party Congresses (1936–84), and a member of the Presidium (1966–81), the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1939), and the Central Committee (1961). His early autobiographical works were influenced by Gogol and Chekhov. His epic novel additionally shows traces of Tolstoy’s novels War and Peace and The Cossacks; Slavic folklore, especially the medieval epics Zadonshchina and The Song of Igor’s Campaign; and historical sources. Gorky and Socialist realism influenced Sholokhov’s collectivization novel Virgin Soil Upturned.

Archives

Sholokhov’s papers remain uncollected. Moscow’s State Publishing House (GIXL), the Gorky Institute of World Literature (IMLI), the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), and the Russian Institute of Literature and Art (IRLI), St. Petersburg, hold some papers.

Printed Sources

Abramov, Fedor, and Viktor Gura. M. A. Sholokhov: seminarii (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1962).

Ermolaev, Herman. Mikhail Sholokhov and His Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

Klimenko, Michael. The World of Young Sholokhov (North Quincy, Mass.: The Christopher Publishing House, 1972).

Medvedev, Roy A. Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

Petelin, Viktor, and Vladimir Vasil’ev (eds.). Sholokhov na izlome vremeni (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995).

Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. Collected Works (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1984).

———. Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1985–86).

Shtavdaker, L. A. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’ (Rostov-na- Donu: Rostovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1980).

Stewart, David. Mikhail Sholokhov: A Critical Introduction (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967).

Yakimenko, Lev. Sholokhov: A Critical Appreciation (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973).

Ludmilla L. Litus

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Shostakovich, Dmitri Dimitrievich

SHOSTAKOVICH, DMITRI DIMITRIEVICH (1906–1975)

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg. From 1919 to 1925 he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory. The Soviet government invested in this talented composer and sent him in 1927 on a trip to Berlin for the First Symphony’s premiere under Bruno Walter. In 1928 Shostakovich worked as pianist and dramaturge at the Meyerhold Theater in Moscow. At this time he also composed music for some Soviet films. The most innovative of Shostakovich’s early works was the opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk (1932) performed in the next years in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, and Prague. The newspaper Pravda defamed him as a lackey of capitalism and bourgeois society. In 1941 during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Shostakovich composed his monumental Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony. After the war, Shostakovich had been elected chairman of the Leningrad Composer’s Union and the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic before he fell into disgrace. A Central Committee Resolution condemned him for decadent Western tendencies in his music. Nevertheless, in 1949 Josef Stalin allowed him to visit the United States. However, in the cultural thaw after Stalin’s death Shostakovich became the undisputed head of Soviet composers. In the 1960s Shostakovich’s works that had been condemned in the 1930s and 1940s saw their revival. After Shostakovich had a severe heart attack, his late compositions such as the Fifteenth Symphony (1971) were more pessimistic and focused on the theme of death. On August 9, 1975, Shostakovich died of heart disease at the Kremlin hospital in Moscow.

Like his contemporary Sergei Prokofiev, Shostakovich was deeply influenced by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, which he set to music in the 1930s and 1940s for the Soviet theater. Together with Prokofiev, Shostakovich stood for experimentalism in Soviet music and he found Shakespeare’s masterpieces a breeding ground for his own creative work. In the U.S.S.R., Shostakovich set the formative tone of Soviet music and it stood for the East–West symbiosis. This, however, evoked sharp criticism by Soviet propaganda. Stalin found that Shostakovich’s compositions smacked of Western vulgarism. In the 1960s Shostakovich composed the music for the film Hamlet after the translation by

Boris Pasternak.

Archives

Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury I Iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Litera-

ture and Arts), Moscow.

Printed Sources

Norris, Christopher (ed.). Shostakovich. The Man and His Music (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982).

Roseberry, Eric. Shostakovich. His Life and Times (New York: Midas Hippocrene, 1982). Shostakovich, Dmitrii D. O vremeni I o sebe (About Himself and His Times) (Moskva: Sovetskij

Kompositor, 1976).

Eva-Maria Stolberg

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Silone, Ignazio

SILONE, IGNAZIO (1900–1978)

Ignazio Silone was the pseudonym of Secondo Tranquilli. He was marked as a social activist more by his early years in Pescina dei Marsi, Italy, than by his readings in world literature. His lifelong devotion to the cafoni (impoverished farmers) made him a rebel, first in politics and later in literature. After the premature deaths of five of six siblings and then his father in 1911, in January 1915 he witnessed the Marsica earthquake that killed his mother, followed by looting and murder among his extended family. His brother Romolo would be tortured to death by the Fascists. Silone’s political activism dates from the earthquake at age 15. He became a Socialist and then a Communist in 1921 at the founding of the Italian party, remaining a member until his official expulsion in 1931. For his editorial and other political activities he fled Italy and Germany, then was expelled from Spain, France, and even Switzerland, though he finally settled in Davos. Disillusioned by “red Fascism,” he launched his literary production with Fontamara (first in German translation in 1933, revised 1953), denouncing Fascist exploitation in his small Abruzzi village. In his subsequent fiction, drama, and essays he sought to reconcile Christianity and politics through social realism and ethical idealism around the abstract struggle for justice to the humble and oppressed. Bread and Wine (1937, in German), revised as Wine and Bread (1955), brings anti-Fascist Pietro Spina home, much as Silone returned at the end of the European war. While commanding respect in Italy for his quasi-Christian socialist politics, he was until recently more admired abroad for his writing. In 1944 he married Irish student Darina Elizabeth Laracy, who translated some of his works and edited the posthumous Severina.

With Emergency Exit Silone analyzes his experiences in essays that together constitute a spiritual autobiography incorporating his contribution to Crossman’s collection of memoirs by lapsed Communists. After his primary and secondary schooling in private Catholic institutions, poor health and political activism had left him no time for university. A “silent and meditative” boy, Silone read Phaedrus’s Fables at six. At 17 he read Lev Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky to Abruzzi peasants. Tolstoy’s compassion and courage in stories like “Polikushka” attracted the future author’s admiration. Fifty years later, in 1966, Silone again cited Tolstoy first among foreign writers to whom his generation turned for “an echo of their most personal sufferings.” Tolstoy also figures alongside Cervantes and Giovanni Verga as Silone’s favorite storytellers (Rawson 1981, 563). Cervantes’s picaresque work had earlier reconciled Silone’s rebellious activity and spiritual quest. But unlike Verga, Silone was no defeatist. His choice of pseudonym reflects the doubly positive thrust of his lifework. He called himself Ignazio following St. Ignatius of Loyola, but as a spiritual descendant of Q. Pompaedius Silo, he paid homage to the Abruzzese commander of the revolt against Rome in 90 . . All his life Silone wrote about local saints and proletarian heroes, of whom the final exemplar is Pietro da Morrone, better known as Pope Celestine V, who abdicated on finding religious faith incompatible with secular government. Morrone is the subject of Silone’s play

The Story of a Humble Christian. Albert Camus, too, furnished a compassionate model of escape from contemporary nihilism: their respect was mutual. In 1950 Silone’s wife gave him Simone Weil’s Attente de Dieu. Read and reread with Weil’s other works, his scored copy led to Severina. In his mature years he read more his-

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