Please join us for a talk with Klára Móricz, Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Professor at Amherst College.
On March 16, 1937, Serge Lifar opened his exhibition “Pushkin and His Epoch” in Paris at the Salle Pleyel to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. Lifar organized his Pushkin exhibition to assert publicly his Russian heritage and his central role in emigrant Russian culture. In this lecture Klára Móricz explores the cultural significance of the Pushkin anniversary for the Russian emigrant community in Paris, contrasting it with the extravagant, state-sponsored Pushkin jubilee in Soviet Russia, which served as a rehearsal for the politically more significant twentieth-anniversary of the October Revolution, both celebrations taking place at the height of political show trials. Paris, with the Popular Front in power, listened eagerly to the ritualistic sounds emanating from Moscow, which threatened to block out the voice of the Russian emigrant community that desperately tried to voice its own, separate cultural identity. The story of Lifar’s exhibition, although told by the over-garrulous and notoriously unreliable dancer, demonstrates the confusion over what Apollon Grigoriev’s well-worn slogan – “Pushkin is our everything” – could have meant in a divided Russian culture. Ultimately, the cult of Pushkin was not strong enough to dissolve the conflict: instead of Pushkin unifying the divided Russian culture, the two cultures divided Pushkin into two irreconcilable parts: an Apollonian figure of clarity whose commemoration evoked an aristocratic past of tsars and Russia’s European ambitions, and a supposedly utopian dreamer whose art foretold the revolutionary wave that destroyed tsarist Russia.
Klára Móricz is Joseph E. and Grace. W. Valentine Professor at Amherst College. Her book Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music was published by University of California Press in 2008, and the volume Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, co-edited with Simon Morrison, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Her edition of volume 42 (Concerto for Orchestra) of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition (G. Henle Verlag, Edition Musica Budapest) appeared in 2017. She is co-editor of two anthologies for The Oxford History of Western Music. Her articles appeared in Journal of American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, American Music, Journal of Jewish Identities, Pushkin Review, Vienna Slavic Yearbook, and Twentieth-Century Music. She has contributed essays, among others, to Western Music and Race (2007), Stravinsky and His World (2013), and Modernism and Opera (2016). She was co-editor of Journal of Musicology (2009–2015) and has served on the board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Oxford Handbooks on Music, Jewish Music Forum, AMS Jewish Studies, and the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition. She has recently completed a book, In Stravinsky’s Orbit or Composing in Russian Paris.
