The Cultural Canon of Russian Music in the Series “The Lives of Wonderful People” (From the End of the 19th to the First Decades of the 21st Century)

Abstract

The subject of the study is the modeling and transformation of the cultural canon in the field of academic music by the example of the series “The Lives of Wonderful People.” The main sources used were biographies of Russian and Soviet composers, published between 1892 and 2019. Analysis of these texts is carried out within the framework of receptive research; cultural-historical and historical-genetic methods, and the theory of cultural recycling are applied. Florenty Pavlenkov’s narratives about Russian composers have already become an important part of the formation of the musical picture of the world among the readership of the Russian Silver Age. These biographies (of Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Serov and Alexander Dargomyzhsky) account for almost a third of the total number of books about musicians in the series, whereas one single author – Sergei Bazunov – forms the narrative canon. In the Soviet period, with the change of the mass reader orientation and the presence of rigid ideological attitudes, a different cultural canon of selected composers was elaborated. In period of Stalin they were Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Piotr Tchaikovsky. In the second half of the 20th century (before 1991), the following composers were added to the list: Dmitri Bortnyansky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Sergei Prokofiev. Subsequent political changes have entailed the transformation and rebranding of the biographical canon of this series. In the post-Soviet era, there has been a rapid expansion of the circle of musical names: both composers of the beginning of the 20th century (Alexander Scriabin) and from the Soviet period (Isaak Dunaevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Tikhon Khrennikov, and Valery Gavrilin) have been included there. A recycling of biographical narratives of the Soviet era (for example, Tchaikovsky and Glinka) has been carried out. Along with the composers, an array of biographies of those artistic activists without whom Russian music of the Silver Age would not have taken place – philanthropists, producers and performers (for example, Sergei Diaghilev, Savva Mamontov, and Fyodor Chaliapin) – has also emerged. Keywords: biographies of composers, the series “The Lives of Wonderful People,” cultural recycling, the Soviet canon