People and events:

• "TO SEE EVERYTHING, KNOW EVERYTHING AND EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING…" (125th birth anniversary of Maximilian Voloshin)
• "A WINDOW WIDE OPEN TO THE WORLD…" (80th foundation anniversary of the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow)
• IN THE OCEAN OF SOUNDS (a portrait of composer Yuri Saulsky)

"TO SEE EVERYTHING, KNOW EVERYTHING AND EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING…"

(125th birth anniversary of Maximilian Voloshin)

By Y. Andrusenko
The land near Koktebel village on the north-eastern coast of the Crimean peninsula was half-wild and uninhabited when Maximilian Voloshin and his mother settled there in the 1890s. For the romantic-minded 15-year-old gymnasia pupil, who read Homer, Ovid and Virgil, everything about the place was mysterious and exciting: antique ruins, Scythian idols, marble plates and strange inscriptions on them. It was there, in Koktebel, that the future poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin wrote lines that became his motto: "To see everything, understand everything, know everything and experience everything…"
In 1897 Maximilian Voloshin entered the Law Department of Moscow University. He was expelled a couple of years later for taking part in student rallies. Voloshin then made up his mind to go abroad. He took lectures in philosophy in Berlin University, went to best European libraries, attended courses in museum-keeping and art studio run by the Russian painter Yelizaveta Kruglikova in Paris. Kruglikova's studio was a sort of get-together club for Russian artists of the Silver Age (poets Balmont and Gumilev, painters Petrov-Vodkin, Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Benoi, and lots of others) during their stay in Paris. "Quite soon Voloshin became the club's central figure", Kruglikova recalled. "Once he persuaded us to make a journey by foot. Max brought maps and drew up the route. He designed incredible waterproof suits with lots of pockets for albums, paints and brushes; high boots with crampons and berets. With all that stuff on, we looked like scarecrows. The suits proved inconvenient for walking. But it was too late to back off". Voloshin always never parted with his album and crayons, while traveling. When World War I broke out in 1914, he was in Crimea. "One couldn't paint outdoors", Voloshin recalled later. "Anyone who did was suspected of spying. So I began doing watercolors from memory. Watercolors tolerate no superfluous touches, an artist's hand must move freely as if performing a dance. In this freedom and rhythm of gesture lie the essence and charm of Japanese painting that eludes us, painstaking and academic Europeans. In my approach to nature I share the viewpoint of Japanese classics Hokusai and Utamaro, for example, in depicting plants. Japanese artists depicts a tree with all defects that appeared on it in the course of time, which goes to say that they must know the laws of growth".
He never ceased writing poems. When asked whether he was a poet or a painter, Voloshin replied: "Of course, I am a poet", and added: "and a painter". A great connoisseur of European art, he drew the attention of Russian art collectors to Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin and other French impressionists fairly unknown in Russia. In his articles for Russian art magazines, Voloshin acquainted the readers with cultural developments in the early 20th century Paris. "Painters are the eyes of humanity", we wrote in one of them. "They discover images no one else has been able to see". Voloshin was very attentive to his talented compatriots. He organized art shows and patronized young poets. The doors of his hospitable Koktebel house, where he returned in 1917, were open for guests. From reminiscences by poetess Marina Tsvetayeva: "Voloshin's body didn't weigh on the earth and his friendship didn't weigh on his friends' souls. He climbed the rocks like a reckless goat. His broad foot clung to a ledge as if there was some trust, some unity between him and the rock. Max resembled a huge gnome with pillars instead of legs, aquamarine instead of eyes, dense forest instead of hair, and having all earthly and marine salts in his blood. You know, Marina - he used to say - our blood is an ancient sea".
"I spent the first half of my life in travels", Voloshin wrote. "Now I travel in my watercolors through the land I know as the palm of my hand. A landscapist should depict the earth on which one can walk, the sky in which one can fly… I am proud of the fact that my watercolors won appraisal from geologists and glider pilots and that a local viticulture magazine published my sonnet "Afternoon". It proves how accurate they are".
Maximilian Voloshin is one of the brightest figures of the Silver Age. An ancient Japanese saying "a poem is a talking picture and a picture is a silent poem" best-suits to define his legacy.

 

"A WINDOW WIDE OPEN TO THE WORLD…"

(80th foundation anniversary of the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow)

By Y. Monich
This year the Margarita Rudomino Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow, celebrates its 80th birthday.
Originating from a small collection of books in foreign languages set up at Moscow's Neo-philological Library in 1922, it gradually expanded into one of Russia's biggest libraries under its head and real enthusiast of librarian science Margarita Rudomino. Today its huge fund boasts some 5 million books and periodicals in 140 languages: fiction; literary and linguistic studies; books on history, politics, art, philosophy and religion.
Of special interest is a unique collection of rare books (about 40 thousand). These are incunabulae - books printed in Europe until 1501 as well as antique works published in the 16th century with comments by well-known scholars. Another precious collection offers books by prominent European writers, philosophers, theologians, explorers and military strategists of the 17th-20th centuries. The library has a collection of newspapers and magazines of the 17th-20th centuries, a rich fund of religious books and books by Russian emigre authors. Says the Library's scientific secretary Vladimir Skorodenko: "The fund came into being in 1990 with an exhibition-fair organized by the Paris-based IMKA Press publishing house. It was then that works by a whole constellation of Russian philosophers and theologians such as Nikolai Berdyaiev, Sergei Bulgakov and others were handed over to our library along with a unique collection of esoteric and occult literature. Among the gifts we received in the 1990s is the personal library of Nikolai Zernov, a professor at Oxford University, church historian and prominent activist of the ecumenical movement". The Library offers wide access to versatile information about the world, using its own sources or resorting to other libraries and cultural centers. "We have about one thousand users every day", Skorokodenko says. "The library was initially conceived as a center providing assistance in the study of foreign languages. Up to now it remains our top priority".
The Linguistics Hall has a comparatively small (around 4 thousand books) but thoroughly selected collection of literature on the theory of linguistics and methods of teaching foreign languages. One of the most frequently visited halls is the one at the Linguistics-Training Center, fitted out with up-to-date equipment for individual and collective training. The Art Hall boasts a rich collection of specialized dictionaries and reference books on all branches of art and offers free access to the Internet. There is also a special hall for children offering a wide choice of literature for readers aged from 5 to 16 as well as various programs focused on aesthetic education and foreign language courses.
Currently operating at the Library are several foreign cultural centers, including the American Center with an impressive fund of modern literature published in USA, among them books and periodicals on law, business, management and economics. The center actively cooperates with the Mortenson Center of International Library Programs at Illinois University, the Library of the US Congress and other such institutions.
In recent years the Library and foreign cultural centers teamed up to conduct various projects: exhibitions "Anglophilism at the Throne", "Germans in Russia and Russians in Germany", "The Moscow Czar in Europe. Peter I and His Diplomatic Activity"; meetings with writers, translators, scholars and art figures; annual festivals of the French literature; retrospective film shows in foreign languages; seminars, and other events.
By popularizing foreign cultural treasures in Russia and Russian culture abroad, the Rudomino Library of Foreign Literature sort of "flings a window wide open into the world". According to President of the International Federation of Library Associations Robert Wagevurt, this is the brightest and liveliest library and a major cultural center in downtown Moscow.

 

IN THE OCEAN OF SOUNDS

(a portrait of composer Yuri Saulsky)

One more memorial flagstone appeared on Star Square in front of the Rossiya hotel in Moscow on May 15. This one is devoted to the well-known Russian composer Yuri Saulsky. Saulsky, aged 73, is one of the brightest figures in the Moscow music elite. A brilliant composer, conductor, professor, the organizer of a whole number of music festivals, the founder of the Moscow Jazz Association, all in one person, he is also a modest and very charming person. His charm attracted people, especially women who went crazy about him. The latter fact earned him many a joke on the part of his colleagues. "A composer is not the one who can write music but the one who cannot help writing it". This aphorism by Petr Tchaikovsky became Saulsky's motto.
"As a composer, I work in different genres", Saulsky says. "I write ballets, musicals and symphonic music, and many songs, too. Jazz has been a separate sphere for me since childhood. As soon as I first heard Ellington, Tsfasman, Varlamov, Utesov, I realized that it was unusual, mysterious music and fell in love with it. Born on the onset of the 20th century, jazz has, in a sense, become its artistic symbol. Dynamic improvisational jazz exerted strong influence on such classical composers as Stravinsky, Khachaturian, Shedrin. There were two non-intersecting lines in my life: I received academic education - played the piano, cello, French horn, took a course in the theory of music and composition at the conservatory, but continued to love jazz. In the long run, these seemingly non-intersecting lines intersected: my jazz soul and academic training stopped contradicting each other".
Coming from a musical family, Saulsky was doomed to become a composer. His grandmother, an opera singer, sang on one stage with Shalyapin and Sobinov; his mother and uncle were singers, too; his father was an excellent pianist. At home his parents often played symphonies by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and other composers, arranged for four pianos. Yuri Saulsky first learnt to play the piano and later mastered the French horn. In May 1945 he played with the orchestra of the Moscow garrison at the historic Victory Parade on Red Square. After the war Saulsky enrolled in the Moscow conservatory. A cum lauder diploma and a gold medal secured him a seat at a post-graduate department - a luring prospect Saulsky rejected in favor of pop music and jazz.
"In the late 40s, the early 50s there was a real anti-jazz campaign in Russia", he recalls. "The late 50s brought the first signs of improvement followed by an official "thaw" in the 60s. Relative though it was, it inspired hope".
A highly-educated and authoritative composer, Saulsky did much to popularize jazz. He arranged pieces for Dmitry Porkass and Eddie Rozner, and later founded his own band at the Central House of Art Workers in Moscow.
Numerous arrangements of Saulsky's unpretentious song "Black Cat" can often be heard on the air. Composed in 1963, it became very popular with music lovers, yet was somehow rejected by the Soviet cultural authorities of the 60s.
In 1966 Saulsky introduced vocals into his new jazz band VIO-66.
What about jazz in modern Russia? Yuri Saulsky is convinced that jazz in this country has its audience and a fairly nice future. More and more young musicians choose jazz. At the same time it has been and remains a complicated, elite genre requiring fine taste and good training. There are lots of jazz clubs in Russia today. Moscow, St.-Petersburg, Yekaterinbourg, Novosibirsk, Tver, Yaroslavl and other cities host regular jazz festivals. An organization called "Moscow Jazz Engagement" organizes concerts, club parties and jazz shows.