1 About the origin of the designation ‘Silver Age’ in Russia, see Omry Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, Sign/Text/Culture: Studies in Slavic and Comparative Semiotics 1 (Amsterdam, 1997).

2 In The Case of Wagner Nietzsche characterised literary decadence as a result of fragmentation, in which ‘the whole no longer lives at all: it is a composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact’. Quoted in Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siècle (Madison, Wisc., 2005), 17.

3 In her book Matich describes Vladimir Solovyev's antiprocreative philosophy and advocacy for erotic celibacy, the celibate marriage of Alexander Blok and Lyubov' Dmitriyevna Mendeleyeva, and the gender-binding life style of Zinaida Gippius.

4 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), II, 1585.

5 Lourié's date of birth is listed both as 1892 (New Grove Dictionary of Opera, www.grovemusic.com and his gravestone in Princeton, New Jersey) and as 1891 (Mikhail Kralin, Artur i Anna: Roman bez geroya, no vse-taki o lyubvi [Artur and Anna: A Novel Without a Hero, but Still About Love] [Tomsk, 2000], 7–8).

6 The manifesto was also signed by Gregory Yakulov and Benedict Livshits. For the facsimile of the manifesto, see Benedict Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass., 1977), 174.

7 I. Nest'ev, ‘Iz istorii russkogo muzïkal'nogo avantgarda’, Sovetskaya muzïka (1991), 75.

8 Blok greeted the Revolution with enthusiasm and inspired Lourié to join the revolutionaries ‘with all his body, all his heart and all his mind’. (Alexander Blok, ‘Intelligentsia and Revolution’, quoted by Irina Graham in ‘Arthur Sergeevic Lourié – Biographische Notizen’, Hindemith-Jahrbuch [Mainz, 1979], 203.)

9 About the activities of Narkompros, see Neil Edmunds, The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement (Oxford, 2000), especially chapter 2.

10 Lourié was replaced by Boris Krasin, former head of the Moscow Proletkult's Music Department. Lunacharsky placed Lourié at the Petrograd Institute of Art History where he taught together with musicologist Boris Asaf'ev (1884–1949) and music critic and composer Vyacheslav Gavrilovich Karatïgin (1875–1925).

11 Artur Lur'ye, ‘Na rasput'e (Kul'tura i muzïka)’ (On the crossroad [Culture and Music], Strelets, 3 (Petrograd, 1922), 146–75, quoted in Marina Lobanova, ‘Artur Lourié: Aufstieg und Sturz eines “Musikkommissars”’ in Kultur, Bildung, Politik: Festschrift für Hermann Rauhe zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Wolfgang Hofstein and Hanns-Werner Heiser (Hamburg, 2000), 245.

12 In a letter to Alexander Petrovich Baulin his former colleague Boris Asaf'ev accused Lourié of stealing ideas from others and presenting them as his own. ‘As a writer he is without talent. As a musician he is somewhat gifted, but base as Mime’, Asaf'ev wrote, probably in an effort to make his colleagues forget how sincerely he advocated Lourié's music before the composer's departure. (30 March 1923, quoted in T. Grosse, ‘…Neprestanno uchit'sya i otdavat’ sebya drugim…', K 90-letiyu B. B. Asaf'eva [‘He studies incessantly and gives himself to others…’ To the 90th anniversary of B. B. Asaf'ev's birth], Sovetskaya muzïka, 8 [1974], 78.)

13 Nest'ev, ‘Iz istorii russkogo muzïkal'nogo avantgarda’, 75.

14 Quoted by Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, II, 1587.

15 Nest'ev, ‘Iz istorii russkogo muzïkal'nogo avantgarda’, 75.

16 Lourié, ‘Nash marsh’ (Our March) Novïy zhurnal (The New Review), 94 (March 1969), 127–8. Theatre director Nikolay Evreinov (1879–1953) disapprovingly described the emigrant Lourié: ‘This former commissar of MUZO has become Eurasian now, renounces what he was earlier in the Party, marries a rich woman and “does not give a damn”’, Nest'ev, ‘Iz istorii russkogo muzïkal'nogo avantgarda’, 84. Evreinov refers to Lourié's close ties to Pierre Souvchinsky (1892–1984), one of the founders of the Eurasian movement, and to Lourié's second wife, the wealthy Tamara Mikhailovna Persits, who provided the composer with financial independence during their short-lived marriage in Paris.

17 When Lourié left Berlin, Vladimir Shcherbachev (1889–1952), who was visiting the German capital at the time, ironically remarked: ‘The beautiful Lourié travels to Paris because the German atmosphere has an unfavorable effect on him and apparently Paris awaits him with intense enthusiasm’. Nest'ev, ‘Iz istorii russkogo muzïkal'nogo avantgarda’, 84.

18 The ethnically Jewish Lourié converted to Catholicism in 1912 in order to marry his first wife, the Polish Catholic Yadviga Tsïbul'skaya. In Russia mixed marriages were prohibited at the time.

19 Quoted by Robert Craft in Retrospectives and Conclusion (New York, 1969), 194.

20 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, II, 1587. Regarding Maritain's artistic views, see Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto, 2005).

21 About Stravinsky's relationship with Lourié, see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, II, 1584–1591; and Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring. Russia and France, 1882–1934 (New York, 1999), especially 384, 432–4 and 456–62. For Lourié's letters to Stravinsky, see I. F. Stravinskiy, Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami: materiali k biografii, vol. 3, 1923–1939, ed. V. P. Varunts (Moscow, 2003).

22 About the planned performance, see Lourié's letters to Jacques Rouché between 1938 and 1939, preserved in the Bibliothèque-musée de l'opéra, Paris.

23 Lourié facilitated Kousevitzky's emigration from the Soviet Union in 1920. At the conductor's suggestion Lourié wrote Kousevitzky's biography in 1931 (Sergei Koussevitzky and His Epoch: A Biographical Chronicle, trans. S. W. Pring [New York, 1931]).

24 Important performances of Lourié's work in the United States after 1941 include: Kormchaya (Symphony no. 2, 1939), by the Boston Symphony with Koussevitzky in New York, 1941; La Naissance de la beauté, by Hugh Ross at the Berkshire Festival in 1946; Lament from Dante's Vita Nuova, for women's voices and string orchestra (1921), performed in New York by the Schola Cantorum with Hugh Ross conducting in 1948; Symphonic Suite from the Feast During the Plague for reduced orchestra, mixed chorus and soprano solo, performed by the Boston Symphony with Koussevitzky in New York, 1948; Concerto da camera, by Eleazar de Carvalho at the Berkshire Music Festival 1948; and The Blackamoor Suite, by Leopold Stokowski in St Louis, 1961.

25 Andreev to Kralin, 7 October 1970, quoted in a letter by Kralin to Graham, 18 July 1973. In German in Detlef Gojowy, Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus (Regensburg, 1993), 253.

26 Lourié to V. B. Sosinsky, 20 January 1962, in Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, trans. Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova (New York, 1994), 282.

27 Lourié to Salomeya Andronikova Halpern, 5 March 1962, in Kralin, Artur i Anna, 101, partially translated in Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (New York, 1994), 486.

28 Caryl Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great: Pushkin's Exotic Ancestor as Twentieth-Century Opera’, in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny and Ludmilla A. Trigos, Studies in Russian Literature and Theory (Evanston, Ill., 2006), 333.

29 Lourié's letter to Anna Akhmatova, March 1963, in Kralin, Artur i Anna, 12; translated in Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 332.

30 For more about Lourié's life, see Gojowy, Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus; Graham, ‘Arthur Sergeevic Lourié – Biographische Notizen’; and Nest'ev, ‘Iz istorii russkogo muzïkal'nogo avantgarda’; in English Felix Roziner, ‘The Slender Lyre: Arthur Lourie and His Music’, Bostonian (Fall 1992) and Larry Sitsky, Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900–1929 (Westport, 1994).

31 In a diary entry on 17 April 1949, Lourié wrote: ‘Three days ago Koussevitzky reported that his fund decided to commission a symphonic piece for the Koussevitzky Festival’, but, the composer wrote, ‘I asked for an opera and offered the “Arap”. He agreed.’ In L. Z. Korabel'nikova, ‘Amerikanskiye dnevniki A-a Lur'ye (K probleme muzïkal'noy emigratsii ‘pervoy voynï’)’ American diaries of Arthur Lur'ye [About the problem of musical emigration in the first war], in Keldïshevskiy Sbornik: Muzïkal'noye-istoricheskiye chteniya pamyati Yu. V. Keldïsha (Keldish collection: music-historical readings in memory of Y. V. Keldish), ed. M. G. Aranovskiy et al. (Moscow, 1999), 233–4.

32 Lourié also planned to write an opera on Pushkin's other little tragedy, Mozart and Salieri (see libretto in New York Public Library, Lourié Collection, PerfArts-Music, JPB 92–61).

33 Lourié to Graham, 2 March 1949, in Irina Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, in Novoye Russkoye Slovo, 8 January 1993, 21, translated in Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 338. Graham claimed that she deposited thousands of pages of correspondence (310 letters) between herself and Lourié concerning the writing of the opera in the New York Public Library (Graham to Salomeya Andronikova, 1 November 1966, quoted in Kralin, Artur i Anna, 149). Detlef Gojowy saw the letters in 1986 (see his preface to the publication of the English translation of the libretto in ‘Materialien zur Oper Arap Petra Velikogo / The Blackamoor of Peter the Great by Arthur Lourié’, in Studien zur Musik des XX. Jahrhunderts in Ost- und Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Gojowy [Berlin, 1990], 129). Today no such letters can be found in the library's Lourié Collection. Only parts of eight letters are available, published by Graham in Novoye Russkoye Slovo in 1993 and Gojowy in ‘Materialien zur Oper Arap Petra Velikogo’.

34 ‘The performance is planned for the theatre in Tanglewood in the 1950 season. Now I have to start the work, and the greatest problem is the libretto.’ Lourié's diary entry, 17 April 1949, in Korabel'nikova, ‘Amerikanskiye dnevniki A-a Lur'ye’, 233–4. In 1961 Munch wanted to perform scenes in Tanglewood, but this plan was not realised, either. See Lourié to Maritain, 16 April 1961. Archive Cercle d'études J. et R. Maritain, Kolbsheim, France. Original in French, translation mine. Special thanks to Stefan Hulliger, head of the Lourié Gesellshaft in Basel, who discovered these letters and shared their content with me.

35 Lourié to Graham, 2 March 1949, quoted in German by Gojowy, ‘Materialien zur Oper Arap Petra Velikogo’, 130–1.

36 ‘It is not only about reading the manuscript … if this opera interests you, the cultural attaché of Yugoslavia (Mrs Carla Douhar) promised to try to arrange the world première in Belgrade or Zagreb – your choice.’ Lourie to Stokowski, 2 March 1961, Irina Graham Collection, Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Original in French. I am grateful to Stanley Rabinowitz who gave me access to this collection.

37 Information about the involvement of Munch and Stokowski in looking for a venue for the opera is found in the correspondence between Lourié and Maritain.

38 Stokowski was also considering Rome as a possibility for mounting the opera. Lourié's friend Jean Laloy arranged a private hearing of parts of the work in Paris, hoping to win the support of the Minister of Culture André Malraux for a Paris première. See Lourié's letters to Maritain.

39 Lourié to Jacques Maritain, 1 March 1962. The City Opera refused The Blackamoor because it claimed that it did not have the facilities for such a monumental opera.

40 Anthony Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, trans. Wendy Rosslyn (New York, 1991), 80. Caryl Emerson points out Akhmatova's ‘flattened view of Western culture’ and unawareness of the ‘twentieth-century tradition of representing blackness in art’. See Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 333.

41 ‘I feel the bad forces that surround me here from all sides. They have harmed me so much already that it is not surprising at all that I became prone to superstition.’ Lourié to Maritain, 24 March 1961.

42 Lourié to Maritain, 21 September 1961. About art's power to change the world, see James West, ‘The Nabis and the “Younger Symbolists” in Russia’, in Symbolism and After: Essays on Russian Poetry in Honor of Georgette Donchin, ed. Arnold McMillin (Worcester, 1992), 5.

43 Gutman's conversation with the composer is reported in a letter by Lourié to Maritain, 24 July 1963. The last effort to produce the opera was a planned concert première sponsored by Gidon Kremer in 1992 in conjunction with a Lourié centenary festival in Cologne; like previous attempts, this one also came to nothing, this time apparently because of disagreements surrounding the opera's copyright. Eva Schütz's email communication (KölnMusik GmbH, Öffentlichkeitsarbeit/Archiv) on 22 November 2006 and 3 January 2007

44 Lourié, ‘Golos poeta’ (The voice of the poet), Orfey, 1922, 55.

45 Korabel'nikova, ‘Amerikanskiye dnevniki A-a Lur'ye’, 233. Lourié's reference is to Solovyev's ‘Neskol'ko slov v zashchitu Petra Velikogo’, Vestnik Yevropï, later published as part of Natsional'nïy vopros v Rossii, in Sobraniye sochinenii Vladimira Sergeyevicha Solov'yeva (1911–1914), ed. Solovyev and E. Radlov, 2nd edn (Brussels, 1966), V, 161–80.

46 About representations of Peter the Great in Russian culture, see Kevin Platt, Ivan and Peter: Towards a Cultural Historiography of Russia (forthcoming).

47 About Solov'yev's attack on conservative nationalism see Greg Gaut, ‘Can a Christian be a Nationalist? Vladimir Solov'ev's Critique of Nationalism’, Slavic Review, 57/1 (Spring 1998), 77–94.

48 Nabokov to Dobuzhinski, 15 May 1943, and 20 February 1949, in ‘Perepiska Vladimira Nabokova S. M. V. Dobruzhinskim’, Zvezda, 11 (1996), 101 and 103.

49 Lourié to Graham, 2 March 1949, in Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, translated in Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 336.

50 Nabokov described Gannibal as a ‘sour, groveling, crotchety, timid, ambitious, and cruel person’, who was ‘a good military engineer, perhaps, but humanistically a nonentity; differing in nothing from a typical career-minded, superficially educated, coarse, wife-flogging Russian of his day, in a brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favoritism, Germanic regimentation, old-fashioned Russian misery, and fat-breasted empresses on despicable thrones’. Nabokov's commentary about Gannibal occurs in the third volume of his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Bollingen Series 72 (Princeton, 1975), 438.

51 ‘Of course one can use a Pushkin poem for the Moor's part, and not only Pushkin …’ quoted in German by Gojovy, ‘Materialien zur Oper Arap Petra Velikogo’, 130–1.

52 Graham quoted from the book Polis by Karion Istomin (1650–1717), the first representative of the Russian Enlightenment and the teacher of Peter's son Alexei. The quoted passage was an historically correct addition, but it also reads as an insider joke in an opera written by a Russian composer living in the United States: ‘America is the fourth part of the world, a newly discovered continent, unknown for centuries, surrounded by bitter seas. Naked folk roam there.’ Three versions of the libretto of Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great survive: the earliest is a Russian libretto (Lib1); a modified English version (Lib2) (Irina Graham Collection, Amherst Center for Russian Culture); and the published version of the English libretto (Lib3) in Irina Graham, ‘Materialen zur Opera Arap Petra Velikogo/The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, in Studien zur Musik des XX. Jahrhunderts in Ost- und Ostmitteleuropa (Arvo Spit, 1990). A marked up copy of Lib3 is in the New York Public Library, Lourié Collection, no. 68b. The above quotation comes from Lib2.

53 For the countess's aria in the third scene, for instance, Lourié advised Graham to find something by Michelangelo, or Lorenzo di Medici, or something Florentine. (Lourié to Graham, 14 March 1949, in Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21.)

54 Lourié also allowed Graham to combine phrases by different poets, creating lines like the one in scene 8 (‘O, kak rastet trevoga k utru blizhe … i ot sudeb zashchitï net'’ [‘The growing worry in the night … There is no refuge from the Fates’]), which is a compilation of lines by Blok and Pushkin. First Lourié worried that the Blokian intonation was too strong to fit seamlessly into the Pushkinian text, but he convinced himself that the stylistic divergence was appropriate since it juxtaposed St Petersburg's two greatest poets. Lourié to Graham, 21 April 1949, in Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21. The two combined phrases are: ‘The growing worry in the night!’ (Blok, 30 December 1912) and the last line of Pushkin's The Gypsies, ‘There is no refuge from the Fates’, trans. Antony Wood, in Alexander Pushkin, The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems (Boston, 2006), 31.

55 Alexander Pushkin, The Stone Guest, in Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford, 2007), 141–2.

56 Ol'ga Rubinchik, ‘V poiskakh poteryannogo Orfeya: kompozitor Artur Lur'ye’ (In search of a lost Orphus: composer Arthur Lur'ye), Zvezda,10 (1997), 203. Graham saw the book with the inscription at Lourié's place (see Artur i Anna, 28).

57 Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, 175.

58 Lourié's letter to Stokowski, 2 March 1961.

59 Lourié to Graham, 2 March 1949, in Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21.

60 Most of the Russian poets Graham and Lourié quote were either symbolist, like Blok, or related to symbolism. The Romantic Trediakovsky and Baratynsky were both revived by the symbolists; Fet's irrational poems were considered an important source for symbolism; and Merezhkovsky, Graham's main historical inspiration, gave the symbolist movement its name by calling his 1892 collection of poems Symbols. Among Graham's Western sources, four – Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rilke – had strong connections to the symbolist movement.

61 Caryl Emerson, ‘Three Hypotheses on Black Doubles, a Decadent Don Juan, and the Death of Melody’, paper presented at Harvard University, 4 April 2008.

62 In Erotic Utopia Matich describes the symbolist inspiration for the fin-de-siècle fashion of celibate marriages.

63 Simon Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley, 2002). Morrison discusses Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, Rimsky Korsakov's Legend of Kitezh, Scriabin's Mysterium and Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel.

64 Lourié to Graham, 21 April 1949, in Graham, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21.

65 Lourié to Graham, 19 March 1949, ibid.

66 Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 342.

67 About the historical Gannibal's fascinating life and career, see Hugh Barnes, Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg (London, 2005).

68 Probably in order to gain a new identity, Avram Petrovich forged the name Gannibal when he purchased the small estate Kyrkyla, south-west of Reval. See Barnes, Gannibal, 209. The acquisition of a surname also showed Gannibal's ascent on the social ladder (serfs had only Christian names and patronymics).

69 Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, ‘The Telltale Black Baby’, in Under the Sky of My Africa, 150.

70 Alexandr Pushkin, ‘The Moor of Peter the Great’, The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin, trans. Gillon R. Aitken (London, 1966), 11.

71 Quoted in Barnes, Gannibal, 157.

72 Although from his own research Pushkin must have known that the tsar was in Moscow at the time of Ibrahim's arrival and the scene was historically unfounded, he could not omit this flattering detail. Integrating legends into his historical novel was also central to Pushkin's understanding of the ‘domestic’ as historical in fiction. As Viazemsky maintains, the meeting between Ibrahim and the tsar, although historically untrue, is psychologically feasible for it ‘corresponds to Peter's character, to his impatient and fervent nature, to the simplicity of his manners and his character’. P. A. Viazemsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii (St Petersburg, 1878–86), II, 376, quoted and translated in Svetlana Evdokimova, Pushkin's Historical Imagination (New Haven and London, 1999), 148.

73 Through the representation of Korsakov Pushkin was able to bring into sharp contrast what Evdokimova describes as the French chronotope of the salon (‘emblematic of France's decline and stagnation’) and the Russian chronotope of the workshop (‘the place where Russian history is being forged’). Korsakov embodies all that looked appalling to the old boyar class: ‘speech, clothes, manners, disregard for old Russian rituals and their sense of hierarchy, frivolous attitude towards women’. Evdokimova, Pushkin's Historical Imagination, 163.

74 Ibid., 151.

75 This episode, which Pushkin borrowed from Golikov's The Deeds of Peter the Great, in which Golikov describes Peter's marriage arrangement for his attendant Rumiantsev with Count Malveyev's daughter, is also historically fictitious, although true to the spirit of the Petrine epoch. Like the other legendary episode that made its way into Pushkin's story, this one also romanticises the relationship between the tsar and the former slave. Evdokimova, Pushkin's Historical Imagination, 147.

76 Pushkin, ‘The Moor of Peter the Great’, 38.

77 ‘My life up to now so wandering, so stormy; my character so changeable, jealous, susceptible, violent and weak, all at the same time – that is what gives me moments of painful recollection. Ought I to unite to so sad a lot, to so unhappy a character, the fate of so sweet and beautiful a being?’ Pushkin's letter is quoted in T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (London, 2002), 252.

78 Pushkin decided to marry because ‘his former bachelor way of life was no longer appropriate for his years and social position’ (Binyon, Pushkin, 253). Ibrahim also considers marriage as a way to secure his position in society: ‘“To marry!” thought the African. “Why not? … The tsar is right: I must secure my future. Marriage with the young Rzhevskaya will unite me to the proud Russian nobility, and I shall no longer be a stranger in my new fatherland. I will not demand love from my wife, but will be content with her fidelity.”’ Pushkin, ‘The Moor of Peter the Great’, 35.

79 Theimer Nepomnyashchy, ‘The Telltale Black Baby’, 154. Vladimir Nabokov was sceptical about this memoiristic evidence concerning Pushkin's intended ending. See Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 335 and 361. Alexander Mitta's film version of Pushkin's story, Skaz proto, kak tsar' Petr arapa zhenil (San Francisco: ARK Intervideo), provides a much more optimistic ending by letting Natasha gradually fall in love with the noble-hearted Ibrahim, who, angering the tsar, refuses to marry the girl against her wishes.

80 Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 351.

81 The hymn must have been a later insertion into the opera (it is dated in the score ‘Christmas 1952’), since in the original Russian libretto the chorus sings a Russian text entitled ‘The Road to Music’ behind the scenes. Saint Benedict the Moor (1526–89) was a historical figure who, like Gannibal, rose to prominence from slavery. Born to an Ethiopian father who worked as a slave in Sicily, the pious Benedict first became a hermit and then a Franciscan monk, ending his career as the head of a Franciscan convent in Palermo. After his canonisation in 1807 he became the patron saint of Palermo, and later the patron saint of all African Americans in North and South America. A saint canonised twenty-six years after Gannibal's death could not have been his patron saint, but chronologically untenable associations are part and parcel of Lourié's thick web of symbolist references.

82 Lib2.

83 Lib2.

84 Lib1.

85 Lourié to Graham, 23 March 1949, in Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21.

86 Lourié asked Graham to check the difference between the words Blackamoor and Blackamour, possibly hoping to discover some etymological connection with the French Eros. Graham's research remained inconclusive. (‘These are my over the week-end findings with regard to “Blackamoor” versus “Blackamour”, yet both transcriptions seem equally bewitching to me – phonetically as well as visually.’ Graham to Lourié, 22 October 1961, Irina Graham Collection, Amherst Center for Russian Culture.)

87 Lib2.

88 ‘[H]is musical portrait makes me to visualise him not as a lion but as a black panther.’ Graham to Lourié, 22 October 1961.

89 Graham's characterisation is quoted in a letter by Lourié to Graham, 14 March 1949, Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21.

90 Lourié to Graham, 23 March 1949, translated by Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié's The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 340.

91 Lourié to Graham, 19 February 1949, Grem, ‘Arap Petra Velikogo’, 21.

92 ‘Our operatic Eros is none other than Pushkin.’ Graham to Lourié, 22 October 1961.

93 In the libretto Eros's black face is indicated only at his first appearance.

94 The outfit of Eros matches that of the adolescent Pushkin at the Lycée. See Emerson, ‘Arthur Vincent Lourié'sThe Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, 351.

95 Lourié knew intimately all three works. He quotes from The Stone Guest in the Blackamoor. He set Blok's The Steps of the Commendatore in 1920 and five fragments from Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero in 1959.

96 Lourié, ‘Variations sur Mozart’ (1930), in Profanation et sanctification du temps: Journal musical, Saint-Pétersbourg – Paris – New York, 1910–1960 (Paris, 1966), 64.

97 Liszt's piano fantasy, Reminiscences of Don Juan (1830), reaches a similar conclusion, although there the unification of the two characters implies more Don Juan's assumption of a demonic character than the demon's consumption of the Don.

98 Lib2.

99 The appearance of Don Giovanni and Leporello is missing from all the librettos, but present in both the piano reduction (KölnMusik, Öffentlichkeitsarbeit Archive, nf 14, 1, 889 pages, bound; also in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Laloy Collection) and the full score of the opera (New York Public Library, Lourié Collection, JPB 92–61 no. 85, 646 leaves, ink on transparent paper).

100 Meyerhold on Don Juan, in Edward Braun (ed.), Meyerhold on Theatre (New York, 1969), 102.

101 Pushkin, The Stone Guest, 142.

102 David Glenn Knopf, Authorship as Alchemy: Subversive Writing in Pushkin, Scott, Hoffmann (Stanford, 1994), 32.

103 Anna Akhmatova, ‘Pushkin's Stone Guest’, in Anna Akhmatova, My Half Century: Selected Prose, ed. Ronald Meyer (Ann Arbor, 1992), 203.

104 David Herman, ‘Don Juan and Don Alejandro: The Seductions of Art in Pushkin's Stone Guest’, Comparative Literature, 51 (Winter 1999), 10.

105 Lourié, ‘An Inquiry into Melody’, Modern Music 1/7 (December–January, 1923–31), 7.

106 ‘[T]he melody exists by itself, and its main characteristic is precisely the fact that it is free of all function.’ Lourié, ‘La technique’ in Fragments, in Profanation et sanctification du temps, 100. Original in French.

107 Graham to Mikhail Kralin, 19 June 1973, quoted in Kralin, Artur i Anna, 68.

108 Herman, ‘Don Juan and Don Alejandro’, 10.

109 The draft of the article survived among Irina Graham's papers, now at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. Sections from the essay appeared in Lourié, Profanation et sanctification du temps, in the part ‘Fragments (1930–1960’), more specifically in ‘La conscience de l'artiste’, ‘L'artiste et la loi morale’, ‘L'artiste et le saint’, ‘Les artistes et l'évangile’ and ‘Le combat spirituel’, 116–22. The missing page (p. 11) from the Amherst copy might correspond with ‘Art et religion’.

110 ‘…The heart is free: what is it worth / To undertake what can't be done, / Unlove what's / loved by everyone, / Not covet paradise on earth?’ Pushkin, The Tenth Commandment, in The Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin, trans. Walter Arndt (Downham Market, 2000), II, 67.

111 Lourié, ‘An Inquiry into Melody’, 3–5.

112 Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘The Fairground Booth’, in Meyerhold on Theatre, 137.

113 Under the dedication ‘Pro Aris et Focis’ (‘For our altars and our hearths’) in the score Lourié wrote another Latin saying that often appears on Roman tombs: ‘Dis manibusque sacrum’ (‘A place sacred to gods and shades’). Annensky chose the same epigraph to his drama Thamyris the Cythara Player.

114 Matich, Erotic Utopia, 18.

115 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge and London, 1997), 263.