Moscow's legendary Bolshoi Theater and a well-known writer complained Thursday [3 March] of Stalin-style cultural censorship after the Russian parliament said it would "verify" the morality of an avant-garde opera scheduled to premier later this month.
"This stinks of comrade Stalin," Vladimir Sorokin, a popular if controversial author who wrote the libretto for the production, said in an interview published by the daily Izvestia. "Our state wants control over every area, including culture."
A spokeswoman for the Bolshoi Theater was equally angered after 293 members of the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, voted Wednesday [2 March] in favor of a resolution requesting the legislature's culture committee to inspect the opera's content.
"We are outraged," Bolshoi spokeswoman Katerina Novikova told AFP. "We do not want to return to the 1930s, when authorities could ban shows. It is above all worrying that deputies voted overwhelmingly in support of such measures."
The lawmaker who introduced the resolution, Sergei Neverov, a member of the United Russia party that holds an absolute majority in the Duma and whose central platform is to support the policy choices of President Vladimir Putin, told AFP he wanted to "send a message" with the move.
"The Bolshoi should produce the great classic shows such as Giselle or Swan Lake," Neverov said. "If it stages modern works, they must be acceptable from a public morality point of view."
In 2002, Sorokin was investigated following a complaint from a pro-Putin youth organization that one of his novels was pornographic.
The Bolshoi production in question, an opera called The Children of Rosenthal, was contracted by the theater with Sorokin asked to produce the libretto and Russian avant-garde composer Leonid Desyatnikov commissioned to write the music.
The opera tells a tale of a meeting in Moscow of clones
created by a Russian scientist of five great classical composers —
Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Verdi.
