1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 97, 1, 2019 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK & PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH Long before the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union had questioned the notion that 1917 might constitute some kind of single, decisive rupture, whether in historiography or history itself. In particular, historians have come to see the October Revolution as an expression of Russia’s broader experience of modernity, revealing continuities between Imperial Russia and what was to become the Soviet Union, disputing narratives of exceptionalism, and proposing affinities with models of social development arguably more characteristic of Western European countries.1 Literary scholars too had long grasped the significant connections between pre- and post-revolutionary instantiations of Russian modernism, even if these were often disputed by émigré authorities unable, or unwilling, to admit that the Soviet Union might have any claims on culture. Vladimir Nabokov, no less, offered a survey course at Cornell University in 1950 on ‘The Modernist Movement in Russian Literature’, which included Tolstoi, Chekhov, Blok, and even the nineteenth-century lyric poets, Fet and Tiutchev, yet pointedly avoided anything written in Soviet Union after 1917.2 Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College, Oxford, and Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. 1 See, for instance, David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, Basingstoke, 2000; Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930, Ithaca, NY and London, 2008; Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, Pittsburgh, 2015; Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Search for the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925, Ithaca, NY and London, 2002, and Matthias Neumann and Andy Willimott (eds), Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide, London, 2018. 2 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, London, 1992, p. 171, cited in Catriona Kelly (ed.), Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts, 1905–1940, London, 1999, p. xix. PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK & PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH 2 This was, though, an extreme position. More typical were those scholars who explored the continuation of the so-called ‘Silver Age’ well into the 1920s, or those, by contrast, who saw the roots of Soviet modernism in the pre-revolutionary era or even the fin de siècle.3 Intellectual historians were equally alive to the impact of pre-revolutionary thought on Soviet culture, not just in the form of the precursors of the Marxist-Leninist canon, but also as represented, perhaps more surprisingly, by the complex and ambiguous legacy of Nietzsche or Russia’s engagement with psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud and Jung.4 But what of music in this context, and how have musicologists conceived of the impact of the October Revolution? Superficially, at least, the notion of 1917 as a dramatic caesura is one that still continues to inform aspects of historical musicology. In part, this may be related to the very obvious fact that some of Russia’s most prominent composers left around the time of the revolution — most notably Sergei Prokof´ev, Sergei Rakhmaninov and Igor´ Stravinskii. Even if their motivations were very different, their collective stories nonetheless give the impression of a radical discontinuity. The fact that within Soviet Russia itself, it was the young Dmitrii Shostakovich who came to symbolize the cultural aspirations of the new state further corroborates this impression of a clear divide. Indeed, the whole history of twentieth-century music could be provocatively read through the binary oppositions seemingly represented by the pairing of Stravinskii and Shostakovich: Russia Abroad versus the Soviet Union; freedom versus tyranny; pure music versus musical meaning; modernism versus Socialist Realism, and so on. Such an account would, of course, be facile and reductive, yet is nonetheless often implicitly there in popular narratives, even whilst it has been comprehensively challenged in much of the academic literature. Staying with the biographical context for a moment, it is instructive to compare the story of Russian music with that represented...