While I knew I would enjoy the contents of this book, I did not think I would find it to be very readable. After all, it has been lingering on my shelves for close to five years. It outlasted all of my Fitzgeralds, including The Last Tycoon, which I had expected to be the last book I would finish in my mission to read all of the books I own. But The Magical Chorus surprised me by not being dry and dense. It was translated from Russian, so this may have to do with the translator, but I found it to be easy to read (although it did take me over a month to finish, but a lot of that had to do with life rather than the book).

In The Magical Chorus, Solomon Volkov examines the ties between Russian culture (writers, directors, composers, performers) and the leadership of the Soviet Union. He begins just before the 1917 Russian Revolution, and continues, following a mostly chronological path, to the early 2000s, when Putin came to power. I have always been interested in Russian history, and this book played to that interest without going into an overwhelming amount of detail. If you are at all familiar with global politics of the 20th century, you will not get lost in this book. I do not know much about Russian culture (beyond passing familiarity with Tolstoy and Chekov), and Volkov did a good job of explaining the individuals in this book without relying on the reader to know all of the names.

I think that what I liked about the book—its accessibility—would be considered a flaw by many people. If you have a deeper understanding of the Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, and especially if you are familiar with Russian culture during the Soviet era, then this book probably seems to oversimplify and generalize a complicated time period and people. Volkov grew up in Soviet Russia, and, as we entered the second half of the 20th century, he began writing about people that he knew well or had at least met. This familiarity made the book seem less scholarly and more gossipy (although, based on its accessibility, I don't think scholarly was the goal). Perhaps to a seasoned Russian scholar, the whole book may have come across that way. I know that I enjoyed the first two-thirds much more than the last third, although that may have also had something to do with the significant role that the intelligentsia played in the Revolution and the way that Volkov described Stalin's political approach to them. However, I would have expected culture to play as much of a role in the changes of the 80s and 90s, and I did not enjoy the section detailing those quite as much.

All of that being said, I liked this book a lot. I am glad that I picked it up for its pretty cover and that I finally read it.