On the eve of Stravinsky’s return to his homeland in September 1962, Boris Schwarz published an article in the Musical Quarterly, ‘Stravinsky in Soviet Russian Criticism’, in which he accurately sums up the three periods of Soviet Stravinsky reception prior to that moment: ‘Soviet evaluations of Stravinsky range from wholehearted approval in the 1920s through cautious reappraisal in the 1930s to rigid rejection in the 1940s and 1950s’.1 As the USSR found its footing in the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet cultural authorities were constantly changing their understanding of what constituted good art, or what constituted art at all for that matter. This changing landscape made the reception of Stravinsky, who by the 1930s cut a large figure on the worldwide music scene, increasingly difficult for Soviet cultural authorities, hence Schwarz’s accurate depiction of the demise of Stravinsky’s reputation in the USSR up until his 1962 visit. But there are interesting exceptions to this tripartite division concerning, for example, early negative and later positive Soviet views of Stravinsky which underscore the complexity of Soviet Stravinsky reception.

‘I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth,’ Stravinsky told Robert Craft.1 There are modernist writers – Proust, Nabokov – who see childhood joys as a vital stimulus to art. For Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, it was recollected disgust that shaped the adult self: ‘I loathe my childhood and all that survives of it’.2 Stravinsky’s relations with his early life lay somewhere midway. In Chroniques de ma vie and his late conversations with Robert Craft he underlined the importance of the sound environment in which he grew up and his early exposure to professional music making. Yet he also stressed the emotional, aesthetic and psychological distance between that early world, where the values of his parents and teachers prevailed, and his own adult self. He constantly emphasised, too, his solitude, with just his brother Guri and his German nurse, Bertha Essert, as soulmates in the family apartment on Kryukov Canal, and few companions and friends beyond.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.

While artists and writers within the empire were asserting their freedom and power as artists, arts impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his associates were doing so abroad. Their innovative mix of music, art, and dance in Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) changed ballet forever. In the glow of fame, Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) went still further in The Rite of Spring (1913), the succès de scandale of which added to their glory and their impact. That many in their elite foreign audiences had political and economic stakes in tsarist Russia and were predisposed to welcome all things Russian does not diminish the artistic accomplishments of the Ballets Russes. Its creators advanced Russia’s national cultural identity, further repositioning art and artists in relation to the autocracy. Although the Ballets Russes affected indifference to the political content of their works, Diaghilev’s finances were highly politicized from the beginning. Furthermore, in Rite the creative team depicted a shocking denigration of women’s agency and a fantasy that appealed to Russia’s contemporary extreme right (although it was not performed in Russia); that of an ancestral Slavic culture at once patriarchal, ethnically pure, and notably free of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and other minorities.