Elina Viljanen (University of Helsinki)
1948 as the Midpoint of Listening: Asaf’ev’s “Sounding Books”
It is clear that despite his obsessive patriotism, the “father of Soviet Musicology” Boris Asaf’ev was by no means only a party apparatchik or a Soviet cultural engineer with a readymade plan in his head. Asaf’ev’s philosophy of music is full of creative potential that can allow for various interpretations, which I see as being the exact reason that made him a suitable figure for Soviet cultural political usage for decades. Asaf’ev’s ambitious patriotism led him use his strong authoritarian voice to articulate all the influences that he acquired from his travels around Europe during the 1920s through nationalism.
“I can assure you”, Asaf’ev wrote to his readers in besieged Leningrad, “that I faithfully transmit the mood and feelings of people”. This obviously made an impression on many people, among others, Daniel Zhitomirskii, who wrote in 1940: “the strength and honesty of spontaneous sensation of music, that is reflected in his writings is so great; the observation and thought of the author is so voluptuous and meaningful that one is willing to bury one's head in the depths of Glebov’s spell many times in order to reveal time and time again new values of the content”. Asaf’ev wrote in 1947: “...for it is necessary not only to read this book, but also to hear it. Indeed this is the basic property of almost all my books.” When Asaf’ev died in 1949, he had a full membership of the USSR Academy of Sciences and was the head of the Union of Soviet Composers. The afterlife was guaranteed. Indeed, his former associate, Pjotr Suvchinskii was quite wrong when he wrote to Maria Yudina in 1961, that the influence of Asaf’ev had perhaps came to an end. The editor of the 2005 reissue of Asaf’ev’s book on Russian painting proclaims that “there is no laborious nonsense of deliberate theorization in Asaf’ev’s books, which is the sin of the many scholarly works written on art. They contain only the eudaemonist joy of the knowledge of Beauty and the aspiration to deliver it to the readers ‘to provoke’ it”.
My paper will continue the speculative work done by musical historians on the obscure phenomenon of Asaf’ev; the dubious spell cast by the eminent patriot and his ambiguous path towards the top of Stalinist musical society. I will start with Asaf’ev’s speech of 1948, which was read in the First All-Union Congress and mirror it against his overall philosophy of music. My main focus lies in Asaf’ev’s autobiographical writings, which I approach through the question; “what were the methods and style of his self-expression?” Boris Asaf’ev’s literary output, including his published autobiographical pages of four decades (1914?1948) reads like a history of the then folding Soviet culture. His writings are diverse in style as well as rhetoric and accord with the cultural/political climate of his fatherland yet they also contribute to and expand on it; – Asaf’ev creates a philosophy of landscape (Russkii peizazh) and himself in it.
