Book Review

Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov's Struggle Against Communism and Middlebrow Culture. By Ian Wellens. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. ISBN 0-7546-0635 (cloth). Pp.xiii,151.

After World War II, the United States embarked on a new type of foreign war as the Soviet Union redoubled its efforts to win the support of Western intellectuals. A series of "Cultural and Scientific Conferences for World Peace" was perhaps the Soviet Union's highest-profile effort to demonstrate that the arts and sciences were well supported and socially relevant in communist societies. One of these "Peace Conferences" took place in New York City in 1949, sponsored by prominent American writers, scientists, scholars, and musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Olin Downes, and attended by a Soviet delegation including Dmitri Shostakovich. Most, however, took place in Europe, and since U.S. governmental support for the arts was relatively limited, of the two superpowers the Soviets seemed to many Western intellectuals to hold the cultural high ground.