REVIEWS 123 Viktor Val'ter (Walter), and the appearance of a number of essays from this volume in an easily available German translation ought to do much to bring the composer to the attention of a variety of scholars and music lovers. The volume includes Val'ter's own biography of the composer, as well as brief accounts of Liadov's vocal works and folksong arrangements, and further memoirs by Val'ter (ofLiadov as a teacher) and theAcmeist poet turned Soviet opera librettist,Sergei Gorodetskii. There is an account of Liadov's piano music by the Soviet critic,Aleksandr Alekseev, and a newly commis sioned survey of the orchestral music by SigfridNeef. By far themost interest ing and important of the individual sections is a set of extracts fromLiadov's own letters, which record his reactions to contemporary cultural events and illustrate the breadth of his reading, from his enthusiastic response to Chekhov's Tri sestry and various stories, to his distaste for the utilitarianism of Gor'kii and Tolstoi's Chto takoe iskusstvo? His reading also encompassed Dickens, Wilde, d'Annunzio, Huysmans, Hamsun and the Kalevala, as well as Andreev and Merezhkovskii. As a guide to one creative individual's reading at the turnof the century, thispart of the collection will be of interest tomore than justmusicologists. The volume concludes with a list of Liadov's compositions and a biblio graphy of secondary literature (but note that Kiui's brief article on the songs ismore easily consulted in his Russkii romans:ocherkego razvitiiaof 1896 rather than in its original form in the journal Nedelia). Given thatmuch scholarship on Russian music concentrates primarily in the three areas of nineteenth-century nationalism, early-twentieth-century modernism or the politics and aesthetics of the Soviet era, the appearance of a volume on an underappreciated figure of an often neglected age is to be especially welcomed. Wadham College,Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Tomoff, Kirill. CreativeUnion: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers I939"I953- Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2006. xiv + 321 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $57.50: ?32.95. Studying a Soviet artistic union requires a grasp of Soviet political and cultural history, but also an understanding of an artistic profession and its practice. The Writers' Union, for example, is interesting not just for Soviet reasons, but literary ones, which are not at all the same thing. When the union chosen is the Composers' Union ? made up of compos ers and musicologists (ormuzykovedy, a word with slightiydifferentassociations) ? there is an extra dimension for the researcher to confront: not only the importance (or otherwise) ofmusic and musicians in theUSSR, and theplace of the union in the story of twentieth-centurymusic, but the fact that this organization was the professional home of two of the most familiar, contro versial and internationally reputed composers of the twentieth century, Prokof ev and Shostakovich, whose work is a matter of debate and study 124 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 outside theborders of Soviet cultural history or academic music. Most people who have heard of the Composers' Union have done so because theywere exploring themusic and lives of these two. This iswhy there has been for some time, as a colleague recendy put it to me, 'an urgent need' on all sides for a scholarly history of the Composers' Union. Apart from Boris Schwarz's excellent but now very old survey of Soviet musical life (most recendy issued as Music andMusical Life in Soviet Russia, igij-81, Bloomington, IN, 1983), there is no authoritative source to which all can turn for an account of this surprisingly significant organization. Kiril Tomoffs new book is not thatwork and does not pretend to be, but it is an energetic and enthusiastic contribution to the discussion thatwill eventually produce that history, involving as itdoes a considerable amount of material derived from the author's hands-on readings in Russian archives. Tomoff is at his most exciting when he delivers us the relatively unmedi ated results of these readings. There are wonderful written exchanges to be found inwhat he has discovered ? letters, memoranda and so on. His work becomes more problematic when he seeks to draw wider conclusions. Partly this is...