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When Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died of cholera in 1893, he was without a doubt Russia’s most celebrated composer. Drawing extensively on Tchaikovsky’s uncensored letters and diaries, this richly documented biography explores the composer’s life and works, as well as the larger and richly robust artistic culture of nineteenth-century Russian society, which would propel Tchaikovsky into international spotlight. Setting aside clichés of Tchaikovsky as a tortured homosexual and naively confessional artist, Philip Ross Bullock paints a new and vivid portrait of the composer that weaves together insights into his music with a sensitive account of his inner emotional life. He looks at Tchaikovsky’s appeal to wealthy and influential patrons such as Nadezhda von Meck and Tsar Alexander III, and he examines Russia’s growing hunger at the time for serious classical music. Following Tchaikovsky through his celebrity up until his 1891 performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall and his honorary doctorate at the University of Cambridge, Bullock offers an accessible but deeply informed window onto Tchaikovsky’s life and works.
Russia in Britain explores the extent of British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture from the 1880s up to the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War.
This edition provides the full set of letters in English translation. It is complemented by the letters' online availability in their original language. Rosa Harriet Newmarch [1857-1940] was well-known in her lifetime as the leading British authority on Russian music, yet she also enjoyed a long and close friendship with the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius [1865-1957]. This edition traces a personal and professional relationship that lasted more than three decades, as documented in more than 130 letters, notes and telegrams currently held in the National Archives of Finland. The correspondence, conducted in a mixture of French and German, reveals the intense friendship between Sibelius and N...
Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951) is increasingly regarded as one of the greatest writers of the Soviet period. His linguistic virtuosity, philosophical rigour and political unorthodoxy combined to create some of the most captivatingly absurd works of literature in any language. Unsurprisingly, many of these remained unpublished in his lifetime, and indeed for many years thereafter. In this lively and original study, Philip Bullock traces the development of feminine imagery in Platonov's prose, from the seemingly misogynist outrage of his early works to the tender reconciliation with domesticity in his final stories, and argues that gender is a crucial feature of the author's audacious utopian vision.
Philip Bullock looks at the life and works of Rosa Newmarch (1857-1940), the leading authority on Russian music and culture in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century England. As an inveterate traveller, prolific author, and polyglot friend of some of Europe's leading musicians, such as Elgar, Sibelius, Janácek, Newmarch deserves to be better appreciated. Drawing on both published and archival materials, the details of Newmarch's busy life are revealed, followed by an overview of English interest in Russian culture around the turn of the century. The main focus of the book is on the themes that dominated Newmarch's engagement with Russian culture and society: nationalism, the role of the intelligentsia and feminism.
A wealth of previously unpublished letters and personal documents drawn from the family archives of the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.
Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states. The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements o...
Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.
Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin. These twenty-seven essays encompass a diverse range of topics, from dance and classical music to live poetry and from viral video to public jubilees and political protest. As a whole they comprise an integrated, compelling intervention in Russian studies. Challenging the primacy of the written word in this field, the volume fosters a larger intellectual community informed by theories and practices of performance from anthropology, art history, dance studies, film studies, cultural and social history, literary studies, musicology, political science, theater studies, and sociology.