Abstract
Around 1950, when the members of the anti-Nazi alliance found themselves locked into a political and ideological stalemate that none of them could afford to escalate into another ‘hot’ war, culture assumed unprecedented significance as the domain for the performance of superpower rivalries and the negotiation of détentes. Drawing on
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unpublished sources from governmental and private archives in the United States, Europe, and Japan, this dissertation reconstructs and assesses the ambitions, successes, and failures of the music festival-conferences organized by Russian émigré composer Nicolas Nabokov in his capacity as the secretary-general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Founded in West Berlin in June 1950, the Congress presented itself as a non-governmental international coalition of politically engaged intellectuals united by their concern over the expansionist ambitions and evident appeal of the Soviet Union. In reality, the Congress was part of an anticommunist counteroffensive coordinated and subsidized by the American and British secret intelligence agencies, a fact shockingly brought to light in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War. Chapters 1-4 analyze and contextualize Nabokov’s aesthetical and political positions, tracing his entanglements with the forces that eventually convinced the Truman administration to invest in the promotion of the United States as the paragon of cultural liberalism. Nabokov’s ideal of artistic autonomy is brought into dialogue with the views of those who expected socio-political engagement from artists, such as the supporters of the 1948 Manifesto of the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague, or those who welcomed Dmitri Shostakovich as one of the Soviet delegates to the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York. Generally construed as Moscow-controlled manifestations aimed at advancing Zhdanovist poetics and politics beyond the Soviet Union, I argue that the Prague and New York assemblies emanated in fact from, and appealed to, widely shared concerns among non-aligned Americans and Europeans about the commercialization and increasing politicization of culture in East and West. Chapters 5-8 investigate the tumultuous rise and consolidation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a seemingly civilian association engaged in cultural representation and diplomacy. Detailed case studies of Nabokov’s festival-conferences—‘Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’ (Paris, 1952), ‘Music of the Twentieth Century’ (Rome, 1954), ‘East-West Music Encounter’ (Tokyo, 1961), and ‘Tradition and Change in Music’ (New Delhi, 1964)—reveal the dissonances between the cosmopolitan values they intended to convey and the local political dissensions in which they invariably became embroiled. Nonetheless, Nabokov’s festival-conferences succeeded in forging a global network of music professionals from the ‘free’ and ‘non-aligned’ worlds who shared the notion that their respective governments responded inadequately to the corruptive influences of communism abroad and the ‘culture industry’ at home in what they conceived as the universal, apolitical realm of ‘high culture’—a concept proven deceptive by the CCF’s covert sponsorship.
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