Surveilling the Imagination: Akhmatova, Shostakovich, and the Plight of the Artist in Stalinist Russia

A seminar with

Prof. Julia Trubikhina, Professor of Russian Literature at the Division of Russian and Slavic Studies at Hunter College, CUNY

James Melo, musicologist for the Ensemble for the Romantic Century and Senior Editor at RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

The seminar will examine the troubled relationship between artistic creation and totalitarianism through the perspective of the lives and careers of two emblematic artists working in Stalinist Russia: the poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Akhmatova’s status as an icon of Russia culture will be discussed through an analysis of her lyrical and elegiac cycle Requiem. Shostakovich’s career as a composer who worked under the auspices of the regime will be examined in parallel with the different paths taken by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, addressing the relationship between art and politics and the power of art to convey political ideology.

Thursday, April 21, 2015
5:30-7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Room 9205, 9th floor

FREE ADMISSION
For more information: jmelo@gc.cuny.edu; 212-817-8606

Presented by the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, CUNY, and the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in connection with ERC’s theatrical concert The Heart is Not Made of Stone at BAM. To find out more about ERC’s theatrical concerts, visit our website: www.romanticcentury.org

Julia Trubikhina received her PhD in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Slavic studies from New York University. Until Fall 2008 she taught in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University where she also coordinated the Russian Program. From 2009, Julia Trubikhina teaches in the Department of Classics and Oriental Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, where she is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Russian in the Division of Russian and Slavic Studies. Her book The Translator’s Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of Translation (Academic Studies Press, 2015) has been awarded the Samuel Schuman Prize in Nabokov Studies in 2016. In addition to many scholarly articles and reviews in academic journals, Julia Trubikhina (as Julia Trubikhina-Kunina) also published translations and contributed original poetry to Russian, European, and American anthologies and literary journals. She is currently working on two translation projects: editing and translating a bilingual edition of poetry by Vladimir Aristov, an important contemporary poet, for Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming Spring 2016), and a volume of poetry and prose by a seminal contemporary woman poet and writer Elena Shvarts.

James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, Austria, and the United States, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 60 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfonica in Uruguay, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording of Villa-Lobos’s complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos on Naxos. He has written program notes for all of ERC’s original productions and authored several scripts.