The Bolsheviks' 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in
Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture
migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new
cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this
book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian
composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas
Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris.
Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative
demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation
of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants' and the Bolsheviks'
contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the
French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic
products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with
Stravinsky's disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions
dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if
they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although
Stravinsky's neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground
between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic
experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky's
neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.