“Dear Boris Vladimirovich”: Friendship and Conflict in Leningrad Musicology of the 1920s

While Boris Asafyev was only a few years older than most of his students, they revered him as a trailblazer. In 1921, Asafyev's pupil Alexey Finagin and eleven of his fellow students at the State Institute of Art History in Petrograd wrote a letter to their teacher, thanking him for being "a person who managed to attract the younger generation and thus laid the foundation for his own “'school'.” Asafyev, in turn, often confided his intellectual breakthroughs to his protégé Finagin; their correspondence from the early 1920s preserved a relationship of mutual trust and respect.
In 1928, Asafyev and his younger colleague found themselves on the opposite sides of the power struggle for ideological control over scholarly infrastructure and publicly disavowed loyalty to each other. Asafyev accused the Department and Finagin of “fleeing from life,” studying the “past for the sake of the past,” and thus being formalistic and irrelevant to the Soviet reality. Finagin penned an enraged letter to the Directorial Board, signed by thirteen members of the department – a complete opposite of the admiring letter from 1921 – protesting the “insult” that Asafyev dealt to the Department. This conflict spelled out the end of the diverse and enthusiastic musicological enterprise at the Institute and the beginning of a different era in Soviet musicology, when the Marxist method ceased to be a voluntary research paradigm and, enforced by the State, became an instrument of ideological exclusion.
This case study shows that adapting one’s convictions to the changing ideological climate during the Cultural Revolution put strain on personal, as well as professional relationships. Based on the correspondence between Asafyev and Finagin, public statements, and private letters I will trace the story of this ruptured friendship and analyze ideological underpinnings of this conflict, which bled from public into private space.