The book offers unprecedented access to primary sources that have been unavailable in English, or which lay unknown on archival shelves. Music and Soviet Power offers cultural history told through documents - both colourfuland representative - with an extensive commentary and annotation throughout.

This volume is a comprehensive and detailed survey of music and musical life of the entire Soviet era, from 1917 to 1991, which takes into account the extensive body of scholarly literature in Russian and other major European languages. In this considerably updated and revised edition of his 1998 publication, Hakobian traces the strikingly dramatic development of the music created by outstanding and less well-known, ‘modernist’ and ‘conservative’, ‘nationalist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ composers of the Soviet era. The book’s three parts explore, respectively, the musical trends of the 1920s, music and musical life under Stalin, and the so-called ’Bronze Age’ of Soviet music after Stalin’s death. Music of the Soviet Era: 1917–1991 considers the privileged position of music in the USSR in comparison to the written and visual arts. Through his examination of the history of the arts in the Soviet state, Hakobian’s work celebrates the human spirit’s wonderful capacity to derive advantage even from the most inauspicious conditions.

This book investigates the place of music in Soviet society during the eras of Lenin and Stalin. It examines the different strategies adopted by composers and musicians in their attempts to carve out careers in a rapidly evolving society, discusses the role of music in Soviet society and people's lives, and shows how political ideology proved an inspiration as well as an inhibition. It explores how music and politics interacted in the lives of two of the twentieth century's greatest composers - Shostakovich and Prokofiev - and also in the lives of less well-known composers. In addition it considers the specialist composers of early Soviet musical propaganda, amateur music making, and musical life in the non-Russian republics. The book will appeal to specialists in Soviet music history, those with an interest in twentieth century music in general, and also to students of the history, culture and politics of the Soviet Union.

Mention twentieth-century Russian music, and the names of three &"giants&"&—Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitrii Shostakovich&—immediately come to mind. Yet during the turbulent decade following the Bolshevik Revolution, Stravinsky and Prokofiev lived abroad and Shostakovich was just finishing his conservatory training. While the fame of these great musicians is widely recognized, little is known about the creative challenges and political struggles that engrossed musicians in Soviet Russia during the crucial years after 1917. Music for the Revolution examines musicians&’ responses to Soviet power and reveals the conditions under which a distinctively Soviet musical culture emerged in the early thirties. Given the dramatic repression of intellectual freedom and creativity in Stalinist Russia, the twenties often seem to be merely a prelude to Totalitarianism in artistic life. Yet this was the decade in which the creative intelligentsia defined its relationship with the Soviet regime and the aesthetic foundations for socialist realism were laid down. In their efforts to deal with the political challenges of the Revolution, musicians grappled with an array of issues affecting musical education, professional identity, and the administration of musical life, as well as the embrace of certain creative platforms and the rejection of others. Nelson shows how debates about these issues unfolded in the context of broader concerns about artistic modernism and elitism, as well as the more expansive goals and censorial authority of Soviet authorities. Music for the Revolution shows how the musical community helped shape the musical culture of Stalinism and extends the interpretive frameworks of Soviet culture presented in recent scholarship to an area of artistic creativity often overlooked by historians. It should be broadly important to those interested in Soviet history, the cultural roots of Stalinism, Russian and Soviet music, and the place of music and the arts in revolutionary change.

The Three Apostles of Russian Music looks at three figures in the Soviet avant-garde who led modernist music in the 1920s. Mosolov, Popov, and Roslavets were popular composers who are now unfortunately forgotten. These remarkable musicians produced compositions like the sensational machine music Foundry by Mosolov. The first symphony by Popov attracted musicians in Europe and America but was banned after the premiere, while Roslavets discovered serialism before Schoenberg, opening up a new trend in modernism. This book is the first study in English of the work, lives, and legacies of these “apostles” of the Russian avant-garde.

Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich is very much today’s lingua franca both in the concert hall and on the soundtracks of international blockbusters from Hollywood. Meanwhile, the innovations of Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the past century. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries for each of Russia’s major performing organizations and performance venues, and on specific genres such as ballet, film music, symphony and church music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Music.

Challenging what is widely regarded as the distinguishing feature of Russian music--its ineffable "Russianness"--Marina Frolova-Walker examines the history of Russian music from the premiere of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar in 1836 to the death of Stalin in 1953, the years in which musical nationalism was encouraged and endorsed by the Russian state and its Soviet successor. The author identifies and discusses two central myths that dominated Russian culture during this period--that art revealed the Russian soul, and that this nationalist artistic tradition was founded by Glinka and Pushkin. The author also offers a critical account of how the imperatives of nationalist thought affected individual composers. In this way Frolova-Walker provides a new perspective on the brilliant creativity, innovation, and eventual stagnation within the tradition of Russian nationalist music.

Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the textural relationships inscribed into musical scores, as in the case of Elliott Carter's 'polyvocal' compositions. Pioneers of musical indeterminacy sought to democratise the relationship between composer and performers by leaving open key decisions about the realisation of a work. Musicians have involved audiences in active participation to liberate them from the passivity of spectatorship. Free improvisation groups have experimented with new kinds of egalitarian relationships between performers to reject old hierarchies. In examining these different approaches, Adlington illuminates the achievements and ambiguities of musical models of democracy. As a result, this book not only offers an important new perspective on modern musicians' engagement with a central political idea of the past century, but it also encourages a deeper and more critical engagement with the idea of democracy within present-day musical life.

Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies The Soviet Writers’ Union offered writers elite status and material luxuries in exchange for literature that championed the state. This book argues that Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin chose leaders for this crucial organization, such as Maxim Gorky and Alexander Fadeyev, who had psychological traits he could exploit. Stalin ensured their loyalty with various rewards but also with a philosophical argument calculated to assuage moral qualms, allowing them to feel they were not trading ethics for self‐interest. Employing close textual analysis of public and private documents including speeches, debate transcripts, personal letters, and diaries, Carol Any exposes the misgivings of Writers’ Union leaders as well as the arguments they constructed when faced with a cognitive dissonance. She tells a dramatic story that reveals the interdependence of literary policy, communist morality, state‐sponsored terror, party infighting, and personal psychology. This book will be an important reference for scholars of the Soviet Union as well as anyone interested in identity, the construction of culture, and the interface between art and ideology.

The book is a substantial contribution to international Dostoevsky research, exploring Dostoevsky’s contemporary relevance from a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective. It offers some fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s texts, presenting new complex studies on the writer and his works in the mirror of several arts of the last three decades. The book is divided into three Parts, featuring researchers from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine. Part One deals with conceptual issues, treating Dostoevsky above all as a prophet and philosopher, and thus determines the ideological system of coordinates for the studies presented in the rest of the book. Part Two examines Dostoevsky’s legacy through the lenses of literary theory, music, and Illustration art, and Part Three, via world cinema and theatre. The volume has gathered together an array of original and innovative studies from world leading experts in Dostoevsky’s creative universe, to make an authoritative input into the field.