Borodin's Letters

Abstract

T HE English-speaking world has long been familiar with Borodin's epistolary activities through Rosa Newmarch's translation of his reminiscences of Liszt,' and Gerald Abraham's well-known monographs, as well as an article by David Lloyd-Jones.2 But it is not too well known that Borodin, after Tchaikovsky, was one of the most prolific letter writers of all Russian composers of the nineteenth century. And although just over a hundred of Borodin's letters (the source of Newmarch's material) were published by V. V. Stasov in 1889,3 it was not till sixty years later that S. A. Dianin (the son of Borodin's adopted son and heir, A. P. Dianin) completed his mammoth four-volume collection of the composer's letters in 1950.4 A further 148 letters were included in the second edition of Dianin's biography of the composer,5 while other letters