Rosamund Bartlett - Böcker

This volume presents recent research into Dmitri Shostakovich's life (1906-1975) and work by leading British, American, Russian, and Israeli scholars. It is occasioned by the ever-growing interest in a composer whose significance in and for the history of twentieth-century music is, as Richard Taruskin has commented, immense, possibly unparalleled and above all, continuing. The authors of the thirteen articles are musicologists, Russian literature specialists, biographers, and cultural historians, whose diverse fields of expertise are reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the materials collected here. The collection presents Shostakovich and his legacy in a variety of different contexts and its interdisciplinary nature will also serve to open up discussion. In this way, it breaks from previous tendencies to focus on the purely extrinsic qualities of the composers musical oeuvre, which has so often been interpreted in terms of autobiography. The chapters span the composer's entire career and contain substantial amounts of new information about Shostakovich and his musical legacy.

Wagner is often held to have exerted a greater impact on modern culture than any other artist, yet the history of the reception of his works in Russia has remained largely unexplored. This book, which draws extensively on unpublished archival materials and other contemporary sources, aims to show that in certain important respects, Wagner's music and ideas found more fertile ground in Russia than anywhere else in Europe. Beginning with the first mention of Wagner's name in the Russian press in 1841, and ending almost 150 years later when the composer was finally rehabilitated during the years of glasnost, this study provides a detailed account of Wagner's visit to Russia in 1863, and a history of the productions of his works in Russia. The book pays special attention to Wagner's important influence on the Russian modernist movement, focusing particularly on his impact on the leading Symbolist writers, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok.

Wagner is often held to have exerted a greater impact on modern culture than any other artist, yet the history of the reception of his works in Russia has remained largely unexplored. This book, which draws extensively on unpublished archival materials and other contemporary sources, aims to show that in certain important respects, Wagner's music and ideas found more fertile ground in Russia than anywhere else in Europe. Beginning with the first mention of Wagner's name in the Russian press in 1841, and ending almost 150 years later when the composer was finally rehabilitated during the years of glasnost, this study provides a detailed account of Wagner's visit to Russia in 1863, and a history of the productions of his works in Russia. The book pays special attention to Wagner's important influence on the Russian modernist movement, focusing particularly on his impact on the leading Symbolist writers, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely and Aleksandr Blok.

What made Chekhov tick? We know what made him feel gloomy – his work is full of acutely observed studies of human failings, albeit depicted with warmth and humour. But what served as a positive source of creative inspiration in his life? What moved him? In answering these questions, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life focuses on the writer's intimate relationship with the places he lived and travelled in: provincial Taganrog and the southern Russian steppes, Moscow, Petersburg, Siberia, the French Riviera and Yalta all held him in their thrall. By looking at his life through the prism of these landscapes, it is possible to gain a far greater insight into one of the most inscrutable and elusive writers who ever lived. A century after his death Chekhov's writing and world view are as acute as ever, and ripe for rediscovery. Affectionate yet dispassionate, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life restores humour and warmth to a man too often seen as merely melancholic, and reminds us why Raymond Carver described him as ‘the greatest short-story writer who has ever lived’.

The Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, first staged in 1913 in St Petersburg, was a key event of the Russian avant-garde, notorious for its libretto, its unconventional score and its pioneering abstract sets and costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich. The iconic importance of Victory over the Sun as a theatrical event is universally acknowledged.This volume brings together the first fully annotated translation of the libretto of this ‘anti-opera’ and other important primary source materials, including the score, the set and costume designs and contemporary newspaper reviews. The second part of the volume provides a wide-ranging collection of interpretive essays which explore the artistic, literary and musical dimensions of the staging, its theatrical and historical context, its relationship to Italian Futurism, and its position within the Russian modernist movement.You can read more about the Pushkin House event on 22 November 2012 on the Russian Art and Culture website by following this link http:// www.russianartandculture.com/victory-over-sun-book-launch-pushkin-house/ (will open in a new window).And you can see and hear more in Alexander Kan's report on the BBC Russian site by following this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/multimedia/2012/11/121127_futuristic_dinner.shtml (will open in a new window).In 1913, the year in which the Romanovs celebrated their tercentenary, the premieres of two revolutionary theatrical events brought Russian artists to the forefront of the European avant-garde. With its nonsensical ‘trans-sense’ libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, experimental score by Mikhail Matiushin and pioneering abstract sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich, the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun may be compared in terms of its radical assault on artistic convention to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring.This interdisciplinary volume brings together a distinguished team of international scholars to discuss the artistic significance of this epoch-making ‘anti-opera’, which is now recognised as a key event of avant-garde cultural production, and a turning point in stage history.The book offers new insight into the theatre practice and history of Russian Futurist performance, which, to date, has received little attention from theatre scholars despite its influence on the development of European drama in the twentieth century.As well as an annotated translation of the libretto, the book includes reproductions of the score and contemporary newspaper reviews.Illustrated throughout, and with a colour plate section containing twenty-seven colour images of costume designs, posters and other work by the abstract artist Kazimir Malevich.

In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station attended by the world's media. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history. Born into a privileged aristocratic family, he seemed set to join the ranks of degenerate Russian noblemen, but fighting in the Crimean war alongside rank and file soldiers opened his eyes to Russia's social problems and he threw himself into teaching the peasantry to read and write. After his marriage he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded as two of the greatest novels in world literature.Rosamund Bartlett's exceptional biography of this brilliant, maddening and contrary man draws on key Russian sources, including the many fascinating new materials which have been published about Tolstoy and his legacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This volume presents the first comprehensive annotated edition of Chekhov's earliest stories in English. Translated as part of a unique project involving 85 volunteers from 9 countries, the 58 stories were all written between 1880 and 1882, when Chekhov was in his early twenties, and still at medical school. They make up volume 1 of the 10 volumes of short stories in the authoritative thirty-volume Academy of Sciences edition of Chekhov’s Complete Collected Works, and have been arranged in chronological order. Ranging from comic tales, hilarious skits, literary parodies, outrageous pot-boilers and poignant novellas, the stories are all aimed at a wide audience, and offer a revealing window into the unknown early chapter of Chekhov's life and literary career.