Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Looks at the origins and impact of World War I, discusses the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet, and analyzes public opinion of the period

In a trailblazing, iconoclastic work of cultural history, Eksteins links the modern avant-garde's penchant for primitivism, abstraction and myth-making to the protofascist ideology and militarism unleashed by WW I. For Eksteins, professor of history at the University of Toronto, the seminal modernist artwork is Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring , a celebration of life through sacrificial death. Moving easily between the cafes of Montmartre and the battlefields of Flanders and Verdun, this brilliant, eloquent study ties the modernists' flight from history to the warring powers' preoccupation with speed, regimentation and newness, the Germans' mythic invocation of a tribal and folk past, Mussolini's esthetic of brutality. Eksteins observes that the bloody Western Front in WW I was a "surrealistic" landscape before poet-soldier Guillaume Apollinaire invented the term in 1917. He interprets Lindbergh's solo crossing of the Atlantic in terms of Gide's "perfectly free act," one devoid of meaning other than its own inner energy and accomplishment. This provocative and disturbing reappraisal of modernism rings with authority. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A brilliantly conceived and wonderfully written book of cultural and intellectual history that considers the impact of World War I on the 20th century. Ekstein (history, Toronto) begins by arguing that the ballet The Rite of Spring prefigured the mass psychology that was necessary to the waging of the war. He then carefully elucidates how the soldiers who fought experienced and internalized the horrors of the trenches. The last third of the book deals with the postwar era, considering Lindbergh's flight and its effect on Europe, the best seller All Quiet on the Western Front , and the Hitler phenomenon. Like Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (LJ 7/75), this will likely become required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the central importance of the Great War to the decades that followed. For both public and college libraries.
- Ann H. Sullivan, Tompkins Cortland Community Coll. Lib., Dryden, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.