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| Alfred L. Kroeber |
Together with Spengler, Toynbee and Sorokin,
the American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber was one of the four great
philosophers of history in the twentieth-century. Father of the famous science
fiction writer, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, A.L. Kroeber hypothesized that cultural configurations begin with a precursor genius,
continue with a stage of maximum bloom, and then enter a period of decay, more
or less extended in time.
The history of Russia during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries provides two perfect examples for Kroeber’s analysis, two astonishingly
parallel and simultaneous configurations in two different fields of culture:
literature and music.
- In Russian literature
we can point to a clear precursor (Pushkin), a time of maximum
bloom (Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy and
Chekhov), and a period of slow decline (the Russian
authors of the twentieth century).
- In Russian music there was also a precursor (Glinka), a period of maximum flowering (Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov) and another of slow decay (Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich).
