“He spreads the terrible contagion of anarchy and disbelief throughout Russia. … It is obvious that he is the enemy of the Church, the enemy of all government and of all civil order.”

The target of this 1896 proclamation, by the high procurator of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod, was the world’s most renowned Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy. He was excommunicated five years later. “Contemporaries tried to pin him down as a repentant aristocrat, or the voice of the patriarchal Russian peasantry, or a Christian anarchist, and even as a diehard revolutionary,” Solomon Volkov writes in “The Magical Chorus” (Knopf, 352 pages, $30), in which the case of Tolstoy is laid out as the first modern example of the commingling of Russian culture and politics.

Mr. Volkov, who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1976 and eventually settled in New York City, is a musicologist whose earlier works on Russian cultural lions have received plaudits (“Conversations With Joseph Brodsky,” 1998) and allegations of plagiarism (“Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich,” 1979). In “The Magical Chorus,” so called for the students of poet Anna Akhmatova in the 1960s, Mr. Volkov widens his scope to include all the leading lights in Russian culture, and their relations with the state and its rulers throughout the 20th century.

Tolstoy and fellow writers Maxim Gorky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn serve as the anchors of Mr. Volkov’s thesis. “They wanted to influence the regime,” he writes, “while the authorities attempted to manipulate them.” (Mr. Solzhenitsyn, he points out, would be denounced by the Soviet Politburo in much the same terms as the Church did the count 75 years earlier.)

Mr. Volkov describes the 20th century, and especially the Soviet period, as a time when politics was forced into the cultural life of Russia in a “brutal experiment.” After 1917, Vladimir Lenin recognized the usefulness of culture as a political tool, both in Russia and abroad.

His first culture minister, Anatoly Lunacharsky, promoted theretofore unheralded avant-garde artists, including the Suprematists, now known for Kazimir Malevich and his “Black Square,” and the Futurists, whose most famous member was Vladimir Mayakovsky; before his suicide in 1930, Mayakovsky said famously: “I’m not a poet, but first and foremost someone who has placed his pen at the service of … the Soviet government and the party.”

The avant-gardists soon fell out of official favor, to be replaced later by the über-communist social realists, and many future Western stars headed to Europe, among them Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky. There they joined an earlier wave of émigré artists, writers, dancers, and musicians who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution.

Lunacharsky remarked proudly of Soviet culture in the mid-1920s: “This is the first time in history that art is properly posited as the vital element of people’s lives and not as dessert for the gourmands.”

This was a rebuttal to the model of the émigré ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who staged Russian ballets across the grand halls of Europe to great acclaim. Eighty years later, Mr. Volkov notes, it is the more practical Diaghilev model that survives.

While writers and artists deemed “anti-communist” were arrested and some executed, those whose work was judged most inspiring to the masses — among them, surprisingly, a few former arrestees, including “Children of the Arbat” author Anatoly Rybakov — were given the country’s highest honor, the Stalin Prize, later renamed the Lenin Prize.

Still, the highest cultural award was Sweden’s Nobel Prize, used to propagandistic effect by both sides in the Cold War. When Josef Stalin lobbied for his favorite, Gorky, to become the first Russian to receive the literary honor, the Swedes chose the anti-Bolshevik exile Ivan Bunin. After Boris Pasternak smuggled his epic “Doctor Zhivago” to the West, where it was first published, the Soviet regime compelled him to reject his Nobel; later, anti-communists rallied around the Nobel laureates Mr. Solzhenitsyn and the poet Joseph Brodsky. Only Mikhail Sholokhov’s win appeared to please the Politburo, though his relationship with the authorities was at times volatile. “In the Soviet era art was seen as a direct tool for improving human nature, and the didactic element in culture came to the forefront,” Mr. Volkov writes. Stalin, a big reader and lover of opera and film, vetted all the “in-favor” writers, composers, and directors.

His successors were less accomplished at directing culture for their own aims. Nikita Khrushchev in particular, despite being known for his late-1950s cultural “thaw,” would humiliate and shout at leading writers and artists, Mr. Volkov writes.

In bringing the reader from the late tsarist period up through perestroika and beyond, Mr. Volkov introduces a dizzying array of names, some famous to Western readers and others largely unknown outside Russia. But for lovers of Russian culture, his vignettes and portraits of these figures are a joy to consume, as is his analysis of their legacies.

Perhaps most fascinating are Mr. Volkov’s pages on perestroika and post-Soviet Russian culture. His book ends with President Yeltsin handing power to a young unknown from St. Petersburg at the end of the century, as Russia has transformed from a nation that would subscribe to a literary journal by the millions and sell out a performance by Alfred Schnittke in seconds, to one more recognizable as capitalist, consumed with American films, good and bad, and mass market romance novels.

How will Russian culture respond to what Mr. Volkov sees as the dominant theory of the Kremlin today, that of “cultural Eurasianism, according to which Russia, as the great state on the border of Europe and Asia, has its own unique path and role in global geopolitics”? One must wait for a sequel to “The Magical Chorus.”

mmercer@nysun.com