In J. D. Salinger's collection of short stories, For Esme with Love and Squalour, there is one that I especially like called 'De Daumier Smith's Blue Period'.
Comic and deadly, it is a portrait of youthful self-absorption, obsession and innocent ignorance, and I think it appeals to me because it reminds me unerringly of what I might call my 'Russian Period'.
In September 1952, I was working on a plan, at that stage unrevealed, to convince my parents to buy a radiogram. Radiograms and the emerging Long Playing microgroove records were just beginning what would be their relatively brief dominance of the music-listening world before Compact Discs and the replacement of valves by transistors supplanted them.
For a nearly sixteen-year-old, hormone-besieged young bloke plotting to ambush loving parents who, in his opinion, needed some re-education, the radiogram was heaven-sent. It was a music player which looked like a piece of furniture. Substantial, polished, pretending to be fashioned by hand from this or that kind of wood, radiograms cleverly concealed their essential artiness, their capacity to resound with symphonies and choirs or riff and rage with traditional jazz behind or beneath a façade entirely acceptable to any respectable, middle-class suburban lounge room.
I reasoned, however, that to make the case for a radiogram convincingly, I would have to show how and why it was necessary for the proper completion of my life and well-being, and how a lack of it would be desolating and possibly cause me to fall into dangerous decline. In short, I needed to know something about the music which only the radiogram could dispense. This task suited me very well because I was embarking with genuine enthusiasm and a degree of dogged determination on a self-tutoring course in classical music, aided by a program on ABC Radio, the name of which I forget, but which I turned to each Saturday once the counter attraction of football had either waned or ended.
I don't know how it was that I became so engrossed with and especially appreciative of Russian composers. Whatever the explanation, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Khachaturian, Ippolitov — all one way or another goose-bumpingly romantic — became my special favourites, though Ippolitov perhaps partly because I loved sounding the drum roll of his full name: Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov.
It was difficult for me in those intense days to choose a favourite from among these melodic Slavs whose tortured lives and gloomy sensibilities appealed strongly to a teenager imagining himself to be similarly tortured, lovelorn and dramatically gloomy.
My radiogram campaign, impeccably conducted, and orchestrated with such subtlety and calculated restraint that my parents could not ignore it but would not feel badgered by it, bore fruit early the following year. A radiogram took its place in our lounge room and my education in classical music, while still rather random and driven by tumultuous adolescent emotions, continued.
When Josef Stalin died on 5 March 1953, a couple of months into my Matriculation year, my Russophile leanings seemed about to be intensified. Research in those days was a matter of consulting encyclopaedias, or, if possible, going to the Public Library, but in Stalin's case the newspapers were full of reports, history, anecdote, judgement and various degrees of relief, so there was suddenly plenty of information.
I was quite shocked to find that one of my heroes, Khachaturian, whose Gayne and Masquerade suites had suffused my soul with 'tragic inevitability' — a phrase I thought I'd invented but later abandoned in embarrassment — had been accused by Andrei Zhdanov's Agitprop ( the 'Department for Agitation and Propaganda') of 'formalism' in 1947. Essentially, formalism described art that was beyond the comprehension of the masses though the aesthetic theory was more sophisticated than that. Among Khachaturian's co-accused were Prokofiev and Shostakovich. All three tendered apologies but Khachaturian's, I learnt, was immediate, fulsome and successful in safeguarding his career and position.
I don't know what I expected of him. I didn't know enough about any of them to have much of an opinion, yet I was obscurely disappointed. Somewhere in my ferment of romanticism, intellectual curiosity and generalised excitement about literature and music and creativity lurked the understanding that ideologues and art don't mix and that artists do not apologise to ideologues. Easily said, of course, in the safety of an antipodean lounge room with its new radiogram. Zhdanov had the direct backing of Stalin and there were formalists who were imprisoned or were simply 'disappeared'.
The heat went out of my Russian prepossession, a cooling off partly engendered by Khachaturian's apostasy as I saw it, but mostly, it must be said, by the passing of time and, above all, the discovery of Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, Dvorak, Brahms, Sibelius — 'funeral music', my father remarked in a Zhdanovian moment — among many others.
The wondrous radiogram lost its polish and new marvels replaced it. The room faded from memory, the house changed hands, the family aged or went their ways. Time ran over it all, but the music at least lives on.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.