Introduction: neoclassicism

In his homage to Stravinsky, Milan Kundera explains that Stravinsky's experience of forced emigration triggered a change in his musical style no less reactionary than irrevocable. Also an émigré, Kundera sees emigration as a wound – the ‘pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign’. Stravinsky, like any émigré artist, suffered estrangement from the ‘subconscious, memory, language – all the understructure of creativity’ formed in youth. Leaving the place to which his imagination was bound caused a kind of ripping apart. Kundera believes that emigration erased Russia for Stravinsky. After that, his homeland became the historical landscape of music, and his compatriots were the composers that populate that history. Kundera describes the advent of Stravinsky's neoclassical style as a metaphorical recognition – and achievement – of a new home with the ‘classics’ of European music: