Where does Russian Music Begin? The Case of Mikhail Glinka in the Biographical Series of “The Lives of Wonderful People”

Abstract

Since the second half of the 19th century, the figure of Mikhail Glinka has become
the dominant one for constructing the total history of Russian music and understanding the
significance of other Russian composers. Among the multitude of historical and theoretic research
works pertaining to Russian musicology, especially noteworthy is the publication of the musician’s
biography in the popular scholarly series “The Lives of Wonderful People” for the period of 1892–
2019. A long-term analysis of the author’s narratives in the historical and cultural context revealed
the mechanisms of cultural recycling in the interpretation of Glinka’s personality and work: the
phenomenon of “forgetting” and the effects of “double recycling” and the “personal approach.”
Several models of biography are traced, the features of which resonate with the historical, cultural,
and political guidelines of the era as well as with the professional preferences of the authors of
these books.
The book about Glinka written during the Silver Age of Russian culture presents a kind of a
“life guide,” which peculiarly conflates the Victorian biographical canon and the psychological
essay bearing a positivist accent. The Soviet image of the composer was being formed gradually,
becoming fixed in the 1940s and 1950s. In its case, both the tendency to visualize narratives
associated with the influence of the cinematograph (from the “novel about the composer” to the
“movie plot for the young generation”) and the ideological partisanship in Glinka’s biography (the
maximal approach to the canons of socialist realism) become characteristic feature. In the 21st
century the leading principle in designing the image of the composer is the demythologization of
the Soviet canon and the fundamental orientation towards the Internet public consisting primarily
of the generation of millennials.

Keywords: Mikhail Glinka, series of “The Lives of Wonderful People,” biographical canon,
cultural recycling, Sergey Bazunov, Ekaterina Lobankova