In Stravinsky's Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris

by Klara Moricz

Overview

The Bolsheviks’ 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris.
 
Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants’ and the Bolsheviks’ contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky’s disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky’s neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520344426
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Series:	California Studies in 20th-Century Music , #26
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Klára Móricz is the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Professor of Music at Amherst College. She is the author of Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music, coeditor of Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié, and editor of volume 24 of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition: Concerto for Orchestra.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments xi

List of Abbreviations xiii

Note on Transliteration xiv

Introduction 1

1 Double Narratives or Dukelsky's The End of St Petersburg 21

2 Soviet "méchanique" or the Bolshevik Temptation 58

3 Neoclassicism à la russe 1 or Reclaiming the Eighteenth Century in Nabokov's Ode 97

4 Neoclassicism à la russe 2 or Stravinsky's Version of Similia similibus curentur 123

5 1937 or Pushkin Divided 151

6 A Feast in Time of Plague 173

7 Epilogue or Firebird to Phoenix 207

Notes 225

Selected Bibliography 267

Index 281