ABSTRACT
After the 1951 Berlin meeting, and the decision to create to carry the work forward, Nabokov and Josselson, installed in a Paris office, had to decide how to launch the CCF as an ongoing organisation. This they achieved in extravagant style with the 1952 Paris festival, 'L'Oeuvre du XXeme Siecle'. Reviewing the festival for Commentary, Herbert Luethy drew attention to the lopsided nature of the event. Ironically, Nabokov had anticipated both arguments and set out to defuse them in his December progress report to the American Congress for Cultural Freedom (ACCF). The task confronting Nabokov was to create a grand arts festival that was credible within Congress at a political level. By the early 1960s there had been four festivals: Rome was followed in 1958 by the Venice conference on 'Tradition and Change in Music', and then by the large-scale Tokyo 'East-West Music Encounter' of 1961.
