In case you didn’t realize, this topic is nothing I can speak about from personal experience, nor is it anything I really know much about. It is also an incredibly large, complicated, and even sensitive topic, about a very dark era in a large part of the world.

This won’t be a history lesson, but it very easily could be. If you want to do some research, check out the below:

The Russian Revolution

Music in the Soviet Union

Russian Classical Music (specifically this section)

That should be plenty for now.

As I was saying to a friend the other day, classical music encompasses everything: love, hate, fears, joy, sorrow, humor, sarcasm; it reflects historical events and personal ones. There’s so much not only to enjoy but also to learn. Had it not been for preparing to write this article (or this entire series, really) I wouldn’t have done nearly as much reading about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution as I have, and I’m still fuzzy.

That all being said, the main point is that when something big, important, especially tragic and history-altering happens, and especially when there are people affected, displaced, killed, in the process, the result is bound to be shown in the literature of that culture, at some point or other. The result may not be retaliation. In some cases, it’s merely reaction. We’ve talked before and will some more about government sanction on art and expression and all the rest, but in either way, in some way, history and life leave their marks on art, or suffice it to say, they are part of art, just like ripples in a lake are also part of the lake; they too are made of water.

That sounded cliché. Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and as we make the transition from last week’s piece to this week’s, there is a marked difference in mood, character, subject matter, whatever you want to call it, that will stick with us for the rest of this series. Granted, it’s about a jump of a decade, which is a long while for Russia at this point in time, but next week, we will actually get back to the decade we’ve skipped over when we finally get around to a few revisits from the early days of the blog, almost two years ago, when I (still) had no idea what I was doing.

So, with this week, we enter the Soviet era.