Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays by Richard Taruskin

Taruskin, Richard. Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. 561, ISBN 0-691-01156-7

I’m the kind of critic who reads epigraphs symptomatically. I also write them symptomatically. For example, by opening Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) with Proust (“Who would ever have detected that the rapid, nervous, charming style with which M. de Charlus played the Schumannesque passage of Faure’s sonata had its equivalent—one dare not say its cause—in elements entirely physical, in the Baron’s nervous weakness?”), I meant to imply that my writing style is rapid, nervous and chamring as well—and that it expresses my own “nervous” sexuality. So when Richard Taruskin cites Salman Rushdie at the beginning of Defining Russia Musically (“I feel like everything I say or do is treated as an allegory of my situation. The point is that I’m trying not to be defined explicitly by this situation.”), I find myself considering his own situation, treating the book as an allegory of that situation, and wondering why he resists such treatment.