Grappling with a Woman-Thinker: Representations of Female Pianists in the Writings of Alexei Losev

• In Event: Feminine Histories and Identities in Russian and Ukrainian Music

Abstract

My paper examines four novels of the early 1930s, written when Losev returned to society after serving in a labour camp, all inspired by the concert pianist Maria Yudina, whom he knew personally. Each of these features an encounter between a male philosopher (modelled to some extent on Losev himself) and a distinguished female performer; in each, the male character engages in some kind of ‘battle’ with her, which can end in tragedy: the pianist of The Woman-Thinker is humiliated, raped and killed; the pianist in The Tchaikovsky Trio also meets her death as a result of the encounter. My aim in this paper is twofold: first, to unravel the reasons for this strange desire to ‘battle’ a female concert pianist, which lies deep at the heart of Losev’s philosophy of music, shaped by the pre-revolutionary Symbolist culture of his earlier years; and second, to explain the total blindness of previous Losev commentators to the disturbing nature of this recurring narrative design.

Author

• Marina Frolova-Walker, U of Cambridge (UK)