Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on transliteration
- Chronology of Political and Musical Events
- October 1917–18: Out of Chaos
- 1919: Depression and Fever
- 1920: Bureaucracy on the Rise
- 1921: Should I stay or should I go?
- 1922: Just Like the Old Days?
- 1923: The Birth of ASM and RAPM
- 1924: ASM in the Ascendant
- 1925: Equilibrium
- 1926: Guests from the West
- 1927: Celebrations
- 1928: At the Crossroads
- 1929: Velikiy perelom – The Great Turning Point
- 1930: RAPM's Glorious Year?
- 1931: RAPM's Fortunes Turning
- 1932: The Rules Change
- Key to Acronyms and Institutional Bodies
- Glossary of Names
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on transliteration
- Chronology of Political and Musical Events
- October 1917–18: Out of Chaos
- 1919: Depression and Fever
- 1920: Bureaucracy on the Rise
- 1921: Should I stay or should I go?
- 1922: Just Like the Old Days?
- 1923: The Birth of ASM and RAPM
- 1924: ASM in the Ascendant
- 1925: Equilibrium
- 1926: Guests from the West
- 1927: Celebrations
- 1928: At the Crossroads
- 1929: Velikiy perelom – The Great Turning Point
- 1930: RAPM's Glorious Year?
- 1931: RAPM's Fortunes Turning
- 1932: The Rules Change
- Key to Acronyms and Institutional Bodies
- Glossary of Names
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Mr Scogan, a character from Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, doubted that people could ever get away from themselves entirely, as if they were to embark forever on a ‘complete holiday’, claiming that they ‘never succeed in getting farther than Southend’. Gombaud, his interlocutor, disagreed:
‘… personally I found the war quite as thorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all the common emotions and preoccupations, as I ever want to have.’
‘Yes’, Mr Scogan thoughtfully agreed. ‘Yes, the war was certainly something of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend, it was Westonsuper- Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe.’
For the Russians, ‘the war’ – World War I – was only the beginning. After two revolutions, they withdrew from that war, only to be faced with invasion from fourteen hostile nations together with a civil war much protracted by funding from the same nations. An enforced holiday from normal life turned into a protracted voyage that took them ever further from their pre-Revolutionary selves. To use an expression from the poet Osip Mandelshtam, people were ‘knocked out of their biographies like billiard balls out of pockets’. For some, a metaphoric holiday trip turned into real exile: abroad, as émigrés, they often sought to reconstitute the past, with little success.
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- Information
- Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 , pp. ix - xixPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012