REPUTATIONS

posted by James Reel

    A couple of weeks ago I tweaked Terry Teachout for letting Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s affiliation with Nazism color his opinion of her artistic work. I’m happy to report that Terry has now laid out a quite sensible guide to evaluating the sins of artists. Here’s his first point:

Be historically aware. Judging the sins of the past by the standards of the present can be a shortcut to self-righteousness. Make sure you have all the facts—and that you understand their historical context—before passing sentence. Robert Conquest, author of "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties," was reluctant to condemn the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for toadying to his Soviet masters. "We might yet accept," he explained, "that in Soviet circumstances [Yevtushenko's] record, with all its shifts and compromises, may merit, on balance, a positive assessment." As Mr. Conquest knew, Soviet artists like Yevtushenko and Dmitri Shostakovich lived in fear of being jailed—or shot—for saying the wrong thing. Are you sure you would have done differently in similar circumstances?