Boris Asaf'ev and the Soviet Musicology - E-thesis

other contributors left the journal together with Asaf’ev. 116 According to Stephen
Walsh, Suvčinskij, who was a good friend of Stravinskij told him about this event and
its reasons when they met in Berlin in 1922. 117
Asaf’ev started to write to a magazine called Russkaja volja (Russian Will/Freedom) in
1917. According to Orlova Asaf’ev had already published about 25 articles in two
months of which few were not signed and thus they are not attached to his record. One
of the central figures of his writings was Šaljapin, whose performances he called “the
pulse of life”. 118
In the summer of 1917 there was an arising plan to start a new journal Muzykalnaja
mysl’, where Asaf’ev was planned to function as the chief-editor, accompanied by
Suvčinskij (as the financial investor) and a poet and scholarly critic Vasilej V. Gippius
(1890–1942). The ideas of the journal that appear in Asaf’ev's letters to the people he
wished to join as colleagues were strongly symbolist. 119
The monthly journal did not succeed because the First World War among other
uncertainties interrupted it. The project was decided to reform into collections of articles
– Knigi o muzyke (Books about Music) that was later renamed as Melos (Vol. 1
published in 1917 and Vol. 2 published in 1918). It concentrated in its pages especially
on the elements of Russian music – songfulness 120 . Among the people mentioned above
a group of other professionals contributed Melos: Aleksandr Blok, Andrej Belyj,
Nikolaj Losskij (1870-1965), Boris Ejhenbaum and some other notable cultural figures.
The editors were Igor Glebov (Boris Asaf’ev) and Pjotr Suvčinskij. Asaf’ev’s most
notable article in Melos were “Puti v buduščee” (Pathways to the Future) (1917) and
116
Biography 1984, pp. 78–81; Taruskin 1996, pp. 1121–1124.
117
Walsh 1999, p. 357; Taruskin 1996, p. 3.
118
Russkaja Volja, (1917), No. 236; quoted in Biography 1984, pp. 81–82.
119
Participants of the journal were the following names from different fields of culture: Apsenij
Mihajlovič Avraamov (1886–1944), Semen Semenovič Bogatyrev (1890–1960), Nadežda Jakolevna
Brjusov (1881–1951), Viktor Mihalilovič Beljaev (1888–1968), Rejnhol’d Moricevič Glier (1874–1956),
Aleksandr Dimitrievič Kastal’skij (1856–1926), Nikolaj Dmitrievič Kaškin (1839–1920), Georgij
Eduardovič Konjus (1862–1933), Evgenia Eduardovna Linjova (1853–1919), Antonin Viktorovič
Preobraženskij (1870–1929), Nikolaj Nikolajevič Čerepin (1873–1945), Julij Dmitrievič Engel’ (1868–
1927). See the List of names on the back. The plans have been discussed elsewhere in this work.
120
This term concerned later during the era of socialist realist aesthetics essential aesthetical quality in
music.
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