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The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin by Simon Nicholls and Michael Pushkin

2020; Music Library Association; Volume: 76; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2020.0037

1534-150X

Nikita Braguinski,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin by Simon Nicholls and Michael Pushkin Nikita Braguinski The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin. Translated by Simon Nicholls and Michael Pushkin. Annotations and commentary by Simon Nicholls. Foreword by Vladimir Ashkenazy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xxi, 263 p. ISBN 9780190863661 (hardcover), $78; also available as e-book (ISBN and price varies) and in Oxford Scholarship Online.] Illustrations, biographical notes, bibliography, index. With the 150th anniversary of the birth of Aleksandr Scriabin (Alexander Skryabin) in 2021 fast approaching, performances of his music, as well as related academic conferences and publications, are likely to become more numerous, and this volume will be useful to both audiences. It offers translations of Scriabin's personal notebooks and other writings and complements this material with the editor's extensive [End Page 590] commentary, mostly derived from historical opinions on Scriabin's work and life. The translations are accurate and reliable, which is remarkable given the sometimes ambiguous formulations of the Russian original. When compared to the Russian text, translations of both the historical academic prose and Scriabin's own poetic and often paradoxical language are correct. Correspondingly, poetry has been translated here with an emphasis on accurate rendition of the contents, not on rhyme or poetic meter. This book will be a source of inspiration for performers of Scriabin's music and a welcome addition to the academic reader's palette of sources. It is an interesting supplement to current academic publications, such as the Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore by Lincoln Ballard and Matthew Bengtson, with John Bell Young (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), which was recently reviewed in Notes (vol. 75, no. 3 [March 2019]: 492–95). In the introduction, the editors state that the purpose of the book is to present the documents that record the development of Scriabin's "world view" (p. 1). Thus, this book is first and foremost a kind of a vast archive, waiting to be examined and probed by the reader. Extensive links between individual snippets of Scriabin's thought, his life, and his contemporaries' views are sure to lead the reader of this book onto the road of puzzling and fascinating discovery. The notes offered by the editor Simon Nicholls consist of two main parts: the introduction (pp. 1–27) and the commentary (pp. 175–230). They give a broad overview of Scriabin's life and thought—especially as seen through the lens of his contemporaries' accounts—and quote and cite numerous sources that often belong to the immediate surroundings of Scriabin himself. This enormous network of historical opinions, now meticulously transferred to English, will be a valuable source for scholars interested in Scriabin's music and Russian culture during his lifetime. Some of these historical opinions come from connoisseurs of Scriabin's work such as Leonid Sabaneyev (1881–1968), but some are merely anecdotal, like the following quote: "Varvara Dernova, analyst of Skryabin's harmonic system, was told by Rimsky-Korsakov's grandson Georgii Mikhailovich, who remembered meeting Skryabin in Rimsky-Korsakov family meetings, that Skryabin once remarked: 'One must be able to walk all round a chord'" (p. 6). The editor's comments do not rely nearly as much on recent musicological literature as they do on historical opinion. Readers might see this as a rare chance to escape current discourse and take a look at a past culture as if from within. But, at the same time, this is also a disadvantage, since current musicology already offers general introductions, in Grove Music Online (https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic) and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (2nd ed. [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994–2008]), and specialized research in scholarly publications. Overall, the reader should be aware of this volume's strong focus on historical interpretations. Scholars of music with an additional interest in such areas as critical cultural studies or gender studies—to name only two—will find these fields of inquiry largely absent from the editor's comments. The book's authors collaborated with Russian institutions devoted to Scriabin (p. xix). Especially the inclusion of numerous illustrations, mostly coming from the archive of the A. N. Scriabin Memorial Museum in Moscow (Memorial'nyĭ muzeĭ A. N...