Zuk, Patrick Frolova-Walker, Marina Russian Music since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 561 more than 15 per cent. The first historians of early Russian film — Veniamin Vishnevskii, Semen Ginzburg, Boris Likhachev, Nikolai Iezuitov — had a unique advantage over contemporary critics: they belonged to a generation that was able to see certain films before they were lost forever. The specialists that followed were unable to better their work, assigned with the modest task of simply filling in whatever gaps in the history they had left. Since then, only Iurii Tsiv´ian’s formative scholarship on the history of early Russian cinema has remained unsurpassed. Julian Graffy, in his review of Denise Youngblood’s The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908–1918 (Madison, WI, 1999), noted that ‘Anyone writing about this subject is conscious of doing so under the vast shadow cast by Iurii Tsiv´ian’s Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino. Kinematograf v Rossii 1896–1930 [Riga, 1991] and by the many connected articles he has published before and since’ (Slavonic and East European Review, 78, 2000, 3, p. 580). This assertion, which was certainly justified at the end of the 1990s, now no longer holds sway, for Morley has probably broken the spell of the ‘magic mirror’. She might be the first to emerge from Tsiv´ian’s shadow, demonstrating that it is possible and necessary to look at pre-Revolutionary cinema from a different angle, to apply contemporary methods to this material. It is entirely possible that Performing Femininity will arouse a new wave of interest in early Russian film, as forceful and influential as the one that began at Pordenone’s ‘Giornate del cinema muto’ almost thirty years ago. National Research University Higher School of Economics Anna Kovalova Moscow Zuk, Patrick and Frolova-Walker, Marina (eds). Russian Music since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery. Proceedings of the British Academy, 209. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017. xxiii + 434 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Index. £85.00. The aim of this ambitious book is to reassess the critical reception of Russian music over the last century. Aimed at the general reader as well as specialists, it largely eschews technical discussion of individual works, and keeps the language of articles accessible. Many of the contributions are by Russian musicologists, and their rendering into English here will, without doubt, be of great help to previously excluded students and scholars of Russian music who do not possess the language. A particular feature is the choice of musicological texts that have resonance with other parts of intellectual and cultural life, such as literature, art, sociology and politics, showing not only how music was shaped by its context, but also how it served, at least in part, to shape the context itself. Another major theme of the volume is the effect of composers SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 562 who left Russia after 1917 on their new musical and intellectual environments, and how their reports of musical life in the Soviet Union did much to influence Western perceptions. It is to be hoped that the volume will help break down received attitudes, and in that way allow a revised version of the canon. The comprehensive Index will guide readers with particular interests to the composers and topics with which they are concerned. The book is derived from selected papers given at an extensive bilingual conference held in the University of Durham in 2011. It comprises, after the editors’ broad historical Introduction, eighteen chapters divided into six parts. Part one, ‘Russian Music History and Historiography Today’ (pp. 25–124), contains four papers, of which the first two by Marina Rakhmanova and Patrick Zuk, survey musicology in and beyond Russia since glasnost´; the other two by Marina Frolova-Walker and Levon Hakobian, concern the difficulties for both Russian and non-Russian musicologists in overcoming entrenched prejudices and preconceptions. Part two, ‘Reappraising the Soviet Past’ (pp. 127–217), also consists of four chapters, the first two of which by Marina Raku and Pauline Fairclough challenge the idea of total control from above, suggesting that music developed its identity to some extent independently of state control; Yekaterina Vlasova discusses the ill-fated Stalin opera project; and Irena Klause presents a preliminary, though immensely thorough, survey of some of the musicians who were exposed...