A strong relationship between the arts and politics, particularly between various kinds of art and power, occurs across historical epochs and cultures. As they respond to contemporaneous events and politics, the arts take on political as well as social dimensions, becoming themselves a focus of controversy and even a force of political as well as social change.
Nabokov said that throughout 1800, the government by Russian Tsars Nicholas I and II, "remained aware that anything outstanding and original in the way of creative thought was a jarring note and a stride toward Revolution."
A widespread observation is that a great talent has a free spirit. For instance Pushkin, who some scholars regard as Russia's first great writer, attracted the mad irritation of the Russian officialdom and particularly of the Tsar, since he "instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants."
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