Tag Archive: 0Russia

As many of you may know, I also write choral music, and am always on the lookout for interesting texts to set. Early last year, a friend sent me an English translation of a poem she liked by Anna Akhmatova, thinking it may appeal. The translation didn’t rhyme and, curious, I went to find Akhmatova’s […]

Last Friday we posted a list of 27 books currently in stock which reflect British engagement with the Continent, and vice versa, from the 18th to the early 20th century. Though diverse in subject, all 27 reflected a keenness, on both sides, to engage with…

A fascinating survival: the plates for the first volume of Georgi’s Beschreibung aller Nationen des Russischen Reichs (4 vols, 1776–80), ‘the first demographic study of the peoples of Russia’ (Howgego I-G36), still loose and yet to be coloured, in the printed sheet they were wrapped in as they left the printshop.  Translations of Georgi’s book, […]

As regular readers of this blog will know, my interests include Russia, music, and lithographic printing.  So it was with some excitement that I came across the following book: Published in 1885, and lithographed throughout from a manuscript original, this is a copy of the second version of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular course on harmony, a […]

I’ve written before about First World War material on this blog (such as here and here), but even though there is a lot on the market you still come across things you’ve never seen before. Published around 1914, these little Russian song-sheets were both edited/arranged by Aleksandr Chernyavsky (1871–1942), a pianist and composer, particularly of […]

‘The death of Stalin in 1953 brought about a gradual, partial relaxation of the terror that for decades had governed the attitudes of the Soviet populace, and particularly the intelligentsia.  At the height of the cold war, Soviet isolation from the West had been so complete and Soviet doctrine so rigid that genuine cultural contacts […]