The Great Britain -
Russia Society
The Great Britain -
Russia Society
In this talk Roger Cockrell will explore Tolstoy’s attitude towards music, aiming to show how his response reflected the fundamental split in his character between a deeply engrained puritanism on the one hand and an equally profound sensuousness on the other. The talk will include references to Chto takoe iskusstvo? (What is Art?, 1897), Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin’s autobiographical reminiscences, and will be illustrated with extracts from Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner. There will be a hand-out including the most important quotations.
Roger Cockrell, who is a long-standing member of the Society, graduated from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University and, after a year at Moscow University as a British Council scholar, was appointed as a lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. In 1979-80 he was a visiting associate professor at the University of Toronto, and from 1980 until 2004 was head of the Russian Department at Exeter. He has published widely on many aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century of Russian literature and culture, and is currently an honorary research fellow at Exeter. His literary translations, for Alma Classics, include Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories and A Calendar of Wisdom and, most recently, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Forthcoming translations include Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants, and Gustav Mahler and Russia.
This is the second in a series of talks which King’s College, London have agreed to host on the Society’s behalf. Booking will close 48 hours before the scheduled date for the event, i.e. by 7.00 pm on Tuesday, 14th November, so that we can notify KCL in advance of the names of those who have booked to attend in-person. GBRS will disseminate the Microsoft Teams link by email to online attendees on Wednesday, 15th November, the day before the talk on Thursday, 16th November.
As with Zoom, those attending the Microsoft Teams meeting will be able to take part in the Q & A session, either by putting questions orally or by the Chat mechanism.
This event will also be attended by KCL staff and students. For GBRS members and non-members booking via the GBRS website, 30 tickets have been allocated for in-person attendees and 30 tickets have been allocated for online attendees. Tickets, particularly for in-person attendance, are likely to be taken up very quickly and so, if you would like to attend in-person, you are encouraged to book early.
It would be helpful if on 16th November you could aim to arrive at the Strand Building between 6.30 pm and (at the latest) 6.45 pm so as to register in good time at reception. KCL will kindly be providing drinks from 6.30 pm on.