Grappling With a Woman-Thinker: Representations of Female Pianists in the Writings of Alexei Losev (Professor Marina Frolova-Walker FBA, University of Cambridge)

Тhe last third of the 19th century saw great advances in the professionalisation of female pianists in Russia. The two conservatories, founded in the early 1860s, issued their best graduates a diploma that declared them to be “free artists”. The society was highly stratified, but not rigidly so, and this new social status gave women the opportunity to build a prestigious career in music, long before such possibilities opened in other professions. Russian belles-lettres was slow to reflect this momentous change, and although the literary type of the “konservatorka” (female conservatory graduate) became an occasional symbol of the liberated woman, the treatment was often satirical. Against this background, four works of fiction by Alexei Losev stand out, since each of them features a female protagonist who is a concert pianist. They were all written in 1932-33, when Losev returned to society after serving in a labour camp, and they were all inspired by the concert pianist Maria Yudina, whom he knew personally. In each case the male character engages in some kind of “battle” with the woman, which can end in tragedy: the pianist of the novel The Woman-Thinker, for example, is humiliated, raped and killed. My aim in this paper is twofold: first, to unravel the reasons for this strange desire to “battle” a female concert pianist, which lies deep at the heart of Losev’s philosophy of music; and second, to explain the total blindness of previous Losev commentators to the disturbing nature of this recurring narrative design.

MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER is Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where she is also Director of Studies in Music. Between 2018 and 2019, she was Visiting Professor of Russian Music and then Professor of Music from 2019 to 2023 at Gresham College where she delivered lectures on ‘Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes’, ’Russian Piano Masterpieces’, and ‘Music Under Stalin’, amongst others. Her many awards and appointments include a Fellowship of the British Academy, and the Dent Medal awarded by the Royal Musical Association in 2015. Marina has published extensively on Russian music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and her most recent book (co-written with Jonathan Walker) which explored Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. Grappling With a Woman-Thinker: Representations of Female Pianists in the Writings of Alexei Losev stand out, since each of them features a female protagonist who is a concert pianist. They were all written in 1932-33, when Losev returned to society after serving in a labour camp, and they were all inspired by the concert pianist Maria Yudina, whom he knew personally. In each case the male character engages in some kind of “battle” with the woman, which can end in tragedy: the pianist of the novel The Woman-Thinker, for example, is humiliated, raped and killed. My aim in this paper is twofold: first, to unravel the reasons for this strange desire to “battle” a female concert pianist, which lies deep at the heart of Losev’s philosophy of music; and second, to explain the total blindness of previous Losev commentators to the disturbing nature of this recurring narrative design.