I’m delighted to have a new article out in the journal Music & Letters, ‘‘Formalistic Freaks in Music’: ‘Ilya Golovin’, Shostakovich, and Zhdanovshchina for the Masses’. The article examines a very unusual play from 1949 for a new perspective on the 1948-1949 crackdown on the arts in the Soviet Union, with several key figures, including Sergei Mikhalkov, Aram Khachaturian, Vasily Toporkov, and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Thanks to generous support from my institution, the article is available open access here.
Abstract:
Amidst all the art, literature, music, and theatre of the ‘Zhdanovshchina’ (the post-war Soviet intervention in arts policy), one play stands out: Sergei Mikhalkov’s Ilya Golovin. In this play, a leading Soviet composer is chastised for his formalism but sees the error of his ways and again writes music of sufficiently socialist character. Ilya Golovin is noteworthy not just because it presents a crude parody of Shostakovich and his music, but because it reveals the wider context of the ideological campaign against artists and shows us something of how different artists responded. In this article, I argue that Ilya Golovin is not simply a bizarre example of multiple artists toeing the ideological line: instead it reveals the uglier side of late Stalinism in the form of vehement anti-Semitism, as well as demonstrating the xenophobic Cold War patriotism that served as the ultimate motivation behind the Zhdanovshchina itself.
Further details/extras:
You can listen to the audio recording of the original stage production in the following video (skip to 13:00 to hear Golovin’s ‘Fourth Symphony’ played on piano):
I’ve made an English translation of the entire play script, currently sitting in my notes. If anyone was interested in a staging/reading, get in touch…
Daniel Elphick 