This generously illustrated book records the story of Russia's bells--the thousands of awe inspiring instruments that gave voice to the visual splendors of Russian Orthodoxy and to the political aspirations of the tsars. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Throughout his career as composer, conductor, and pianist, Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was an intensely private individual. When Bertensson and Leyda's 1956 biography appeared, it lifted the veil of secrecy on several areas of Rachmaninoff's life, especially concerning the genesis of his compositions and how he was affected by their critical reception.These pages are fabulously peopled. Here we find the Tchaikovsky brothers, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Glazunov, and Stravinsky, as well as Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Chaliapin, Fokine, Hofmann, and Horowitz.This biography reflects direct consultation with a number of people who knew Rachmaninoff, worked with him, and corresponded with him. Even with the availabilty of such sources and full access to the Rachmaninoff Archive at the Library of Congress, Bertensson, Leyda, and Satina (Rachmaninoff's cousin and sister-in-law) were tireless in their pursuit of privately held documents, particularly correspondence. The wonderfully engaging product of their labours masterfully incorporates primary materials into the narrative. Almost half a century after it first appeared, this volume remains essential reading.

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.

Recording Russia examines scenes of listening to "the people" across a variety of texts by Russian writers and European travelers to Russia. Gabriella Safran challenges readings of these works that essentialize Russia as a singular place where communication between the classes is consistently fraught, arguing instead that, as in the West, the sense of separation or connection between intellectuals and those they interviewed or observed is as much about technology and performance as politics and emotions. Nineteenth-century writers belonged to a distinctive media generation using new communication technologies—not bells, but mechanically produced paper, cataloguing systems, telegraphy, and stenography. Russian writers and European observers of Russia in this era described themselves and their characters as trying hard to listen to and record the laboring and emerging middle classes. They depicted scenes of listening as contests where one listener bests another; at times the contest is between two sides of the same person. They sometimes described Russia as an ideal testing ground for listening because of its extreme cold and silence. As the mid-century generation witnessed the social changes of the 1860s and 1870s, their listening scenes revealed increasing skepticism about the idea that anyone could accurately identify or record the unadulterated "voice of the people." Bringing together intellectual history and literary analysis and drawing on ideas from linguistic anthropology and sound and media studies, Recording Russia looks at how writers, folklorists, and linguists such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Dahl, as well as foreign visitors, thought about the possibilities and meanings of listening to and repeating other people's words.

A timely study of the "new Russia" at the end of the twentieth century.