ABSTRACT
In his 1975 autobiography Nabokov describes the far-reaching personal consequences which can be traced back to his meeting 'Chip' Bohlen and Isaiah Berlin in the early 1940s. This was followed by one on Prokofiev and another on Shostakovich for Harper's Magazine the following year. The first consequence of this was that he began to write on music and politics, and an article titled 'Music under Dictatorship' duly appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1942. Most of these pieces have some element of reportage, of the author detailing current or recent events in the world of Soviet music. His analyses of Shostakovich and the state of Soviet music served as the foundation for this reciprocal argument, which would later come into its own as part of the rationale for the Congress for Cultural Freedom's CCF's first large-scale event, the 1952 festival in Paris.
