Tassie, Gregor Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 749 Russian philosophy as a special national ‘path’, ‘destiny’, or ‘mission’ unique to Russia as the ‘new Jerusalem’. The new wave tends to perceive the monomania on theology as a hindrance to the development of philosophy in Russia. The current tendency rather consists in moving towards a more international conception of the discipline, increasingly opening up to the contemporary global philosophical scene. On this view, there is no contemporary prototypical national philosophy, but rather a plurality of philosophical trends. And that is partly what the title of the book — The End of Russian Philosophy — aims at suggesting, namely that Russian philosophy in the russkii sense of ‘Russian’ may have now come to an end. This informative book is recommendable to anyone seeking a window, however small, into the contemporary situation of philosophy in Russia. Institut Jean Nicod, Paris Frederic Tremblay Tassie, Gregor. Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music. Rowan and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, Toronto, ON and Plymouth, 2014. xviii + 395 pp. Illustrations. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Discography. Catalog of works. Index. $84.00: £51.95. The career of Nikolai Miaskovskii is simultaneously a gift and a curse for biographers and critics. It represents a gift precisely because a detailed study of his life and works remains to be written in English, despite the availability of a wide array of sources, whether published and archival. It is equally a gift because over the course of nearly seventy years, Miaskovskii lived through some of the most gripping historical and cultural developments his country had ever witnessed. Yet his life might be felt to be a curse for very similar reasons. Unlike, say, the diaries of Sergei Prokof´ev, the documents pertaining to Miaskovskii’s life do not really illuminate his coy personality to anything like the same extent. And making sense of his involvement in such distinct and complex artistic phenomena as pre-war Russian modernism, the 1920s avant-garde, Socialist Realism and the machinations of Soviet arts institutions means that the biographer must range far beyond the narrow confines of the life itself. To be sure, Miaskovskii does not seem to present the critic with the kind of dilemmas or difficulties that beset scholars of Prokof´ev (his return to the Soviet Union, his treatment of his first wife, the nature of his Christian Science beliefs), Shostakovich (his joining of the party under Khrushchev, his willingness to write ideological works to order, his tendency to sign — usually unread — letters and articles dictated by apparatchiks) or Stravinskii (his moral tractability and constant self-mythologization), and in Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music, Gregor Tassie charts his way through his subject’s SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 750 life in commendable and confident detail. There is plenty of information on the vast corpus of works that the composer left behind — not just twenty-seven symphonies,butalsothirteenstringquartets,ninepianosonatasandavastbody of songs — and there are walk-on parts for a huge array of other characters too, whether the military figures who characterized his early life, or the composers, performers, teachers and administrators who made up his social and artistic circle thereafter. As for Tassie’s view of Miaskovskii’s character, then the subtitle of his biography spells this out clearly enough; for all that he was the recipient of a number of Stalin prizes and played a crucial role in the institutionalization of Soviet music as an editor, teacher and administrator, Miaskovskii did somehow manage to stay on the right side of posterity’s judgement. Beyond this, Tassie is unwillingtospeculateanyfurther,whetheraboutpoliticsorpersonality.Rightly noting that the composer’s enigmatic nature might well have stemmed from the tricky situation of being ‘the son of a tsarist general and a former officer in the imperial armed forces’ (p. 166), he nonetheless leaves much uncommented. He quotes Miaskovskii’s own claim that he had ‘no matrimonial inclination’ (p. 25) and summarizes Prokof´ev’s observations that ‘his colleague’s singlemindedness […] led him to obliviousness to the female gender’ (p. 41), yet the readerisnotinvitedtospeculateanyfurtherastothesignificanceofsuchleading comments. Readers wanting informed detail about Miaskovskii’s role in Soviet cultural politics will also have to look elsewhere. But the main problem with the book is that frequent errors and imprecisions of...