Essays in Russian Literary and Musical Culture

The volume contains essays and reviews written over thirty years, linked loosely by three themes. First is the global resonance of Mikhail Bakhtin as moral philosopher, theorist of dialogue, and cultural totem. How does his worldview complement that of his friendly rivals the formalists (and later semioticians), and which aspects of his value-system have been most cogently criticized? Second is an application of Bakhtinian principles of transposition to successive musicalized Russian classics (among them Pushkin’s and Meyerhold’s Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky’s and Prokofiev’s Eugene Onegin, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Pushkin’s and Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka). A final theme is the creative—or capricious—reading of one literary master by another master, much later in time: Tolstoy’s reading of Shakespeare, Nabokov’s reading of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Krzhizhanovsky’s reading of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. Great writers, like great composers, absorb and transform earlier greatness into a new synthesis, and it is this activity that is commemorated in this volume.