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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4.2 (2003) 466-480



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Nelli Grigor'evna Shakhnazarova, Paradoksy sovetskoi muzykal'noi kul'tury: 30-e gody [Paradoxes of Soviet Musical Culture: The 1930s]. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Indrik, 2001. 128 pp. ISBN 5857591554.
Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music. New York: New York University Press, 1956; reprint, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. With a new introduction by David Butler Cannata. xlix + 464 pp. ISBN 0253338174 (cloth); 025321421 (paper). $60 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

The prominent place of music in Russian society and of Russian musicians in the international music world has long attracted the attention of scholars, biographers, and music lovers. This review considers two books that contribute to our understanding of Russian music, but are very different in most other respects. Although both exhibit striking peculiarities that make them especially worthy of attention, these books also illustrate the two most common approaches to writing about Russian music in the 20th century. Nelli Grigor'evna Shakhnazarova's small and readable Paradoksy sovetskoi muzykal'noi kul'tury is a reflective essay about Soviet music in the 1930s by a musicologist who grew up in the Soviet Union during the era of her study. Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda's Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music is the re-publication of a 1956 biography of the émigré composer and pianist co-written by a friend of the Rachmaninoff family (Bertensson) and an American leftist (Leyda). While each book exhibits some frustrating shortcomings, both have much to recommend them.

Since the 1930s, writings about Soviet music — indeed about the Soviet arts more generally — have typically followed two sometimes overlapping traditions. The first of these traditions was founded as early as 1934 in Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform. 1 Eastman, and those who followed the tradition he established, wrote extended and often informative essays about how the Soviet authorities ruined the arts by crushing individual artists' creativity and harnessing mediocre art to political and ideological imperatives. General writings about the arts in the Soviet Union typically started with literature and assumed that music and the other arts followed the template established for literature at the 1934 Congress of [End Page 466] Soviet Writers. 2 More specific studies of the Soviet music world translated the paradigmatic focus into more detail about the oppressive system (typically from which an émigré writer escaped) or to a consideration of a succession of composers. 3

The second tradition is closely related to the first. It is characterized by preoccupation with a lone, humane intellectual — usually one of artistic genius — struggling against the impersonal and inartistic Soviet bureaucratic machine. This tradition has joint roots in the 19th-century romantic tradition of the musical genius and in contemporary Western analysis of the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement in the Khrushchev era. 4 With very few exceptions, Western scholars have concentrated on the two most prominent Soviet composers, Dmitrii Dmitrievich Shostakovich and Sergei Sergeevich Prokof'ev. 5 In fact, Shostakovich studies has grown to a veritable subfield in musicology, a subfield that has been preoccupied with decades-old controversies about the authenticity [End Page 467] of a purported memoir that first appeared in the West in 1979. 6 Whatever their preoccupations, the studies of Shostakovich and Prokof'ev take as their subject the activities of a single prominent composer rather than, despite some protestations to the contrary, primarily the surrounding social, cultural, and political context.

There are of course exceptions to these basic trends. The classic work on Soviet musical life is Boris Schwarz's impressive and even-handed Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia. 7 Based primarily on thorough readings of the available specialized and general press, Schwarz's work avoids both the typical focus on individual composers and the overweening preoccupation with oppression and ideological control. It remains a useful frame for the general developmental contours of Soviet musical life, though the picture Schwarz provides can be clarified, corrected, and enriched by new...

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