ABSTRACT
Just as Tom Braden arrived in Washington to shape the Congress’s fortunes within the Agency, another figure was starting work at the Congress’s Paris office. After several delays, Nicolas Nabokov came to Paris in April 1951 to assume the post he had been promised six months earlier in Brussels, SecretaryGeneral of the Congress. He arrived with one major objective: to mount “a large Congress Festival for the arts” forthwith.1 Having observed the “festival frenzy” of the past few years – European musical festivals had “replaced the sedate spa of the nineteenth century” for tourists – Nabokov decided that the Congress needed one of its own, on a grand scale.2 The Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century Festival would, Nabokov proposed, rebut the propaganda that has “plant[ed] in our own minds doubts of the validity, strength, and vitality of our Western culture” and showcase the achievements of artists freed from the “narrow restrictive rules” of a “totalitarian regime.”3
