Boris Asafiev and His Soviet Biographers

• In Event: The Practice of Musical Biography in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Former Eastern Bloc

Abstract

This paper explores an issue that has long been acknowledged as important, but still awaits systematic study: the extent to which public discussion of the careers and achievements of notable musicians in the USSR was heavily conditioned by state ideology and the exigencies of censorship. Like mediaeval hagiographies, Soviet biographies were fundamentally didactic in aim, offering carefully composed portraits of exemplary lives as models for contemplation and emulation. These accounts were necessarily partial and avoided inconvenient topics; at worst, they were highly tendentious and perpetrated serious distortions. Soviet-era accounts of the life and work of Boris Asafiev, ‘the father of Soviet musicology’ constitute a piquant case in point. By the time of his death in 1949, Asafiev’s position of authority in Soviet musical life was unrivalled. Lengthy obituaries in the Soviet press lamented the loss of ‘an exceptionally talented artist, an outstanding scholar and composer, teacher and commentator’, ‘a champion of realistic Soviet musical art based on lofty ideological principles.’ These fulsome tributes masked a reality that was considerably more complex. Notwithstanding the abundant source materials available to his Soviet biographers, which included unpublished autobiographical writings and thousands of letters, they could only make highly selective use of them. Aspects of Asafiev’s personality and conduct that would have shown him in a more ambiguous light—his political opportunism, chronic professional unreliability, and envious attitudes towards more successful colleagues—had to be passed over in silence. Asafiev’s compositions and musicological writings were also problematic in numerous respects. My paper analyses some of the principal challenges that the Soviet musicologists faced in their task of appraisal and the strategies that they were obliged to adopt.

Author

• Patrick Zuk, Durham U (UK)