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A Tale of Three Cities

RegistrationParticipants and partners
London skyline at night, with a street lamp in view
A Tale of Three Cities: London, Petersburg, Moscow 1910-1925
An interdisciplinary symposium

The aim of this symposium is to explore the influences, relationships and interactions across these cities.

This interdisciplinary event is designed to be an exploratory one, where some of these questions are addressed through focusing on the cities in a certain time period. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches as well as local studies on the topic - especially those that focus on culture and ideas more broadly.

Although over the past 60 years, literature has been investigated in critical depth, there is still much that remains to be discovered about the relationship between Russia and Britain. We have chosen this 15-year period as all three cities were undergoing a period of change and reflection in response to two colossal socio-political events: the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

This symposium focuses on cultural interactions between the three cities, all caught up in the vast, complex and devastating upheavals of the period. Remote from each other geographically, historically and culturally, they were also long-standing imperial rivals, and from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 onwards divided by an almost unbridgeable ideological gulf.

Yet each city remained a source of inspiration and fascination to the other. Alongside the political happenings, many ‘firsts’ occurred in the cultural sphere, from ballet to cinema to the first electronic instruments.

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Post-1910, London was gripped by 'Russophilia' (Beasley 2020) particularly among modern artists connected to Vorticism. Russian musicians, writers, artists and activists were frequent visitors to Britain, and vice versa.

In 1915, Rebecca West wrote ‘Russia is to the young intellectuals of today what Italy was to the Victorians; as their imaginations, directed by Turner and the Brownings, dreamed of the crumbling richnesses of Rome and Venice, so we today think of that plain of brown earth patterned with delicate spring grass and steel grey patches of half-melted snow and cupped in a round unbroken skyline, which is Russia’. Rebecca West, ‘The Barbarians’, New Republic (9 January 1915), 19-21.

Russians were intrigued and fascinated by Anglo-Saxon rationality and technology: London was the centre of an empire with global reach. In every respect - language, religion, history, philosophy, Great Britain represented a fascinating 'Other' to Russia; nowhere is this more evident than in these key cities.

There is much insight to be gained by cross-cultural comparisons. But there is also the question of mutual influences and exchanges, which were considerable.

We hope that these discussions through invited keynotes, conference papers, and lecture recitals, will offer a model of scholarly investigation, and chart the development of important thinkers in the field, in order to gather a coherent body of work as a tool for future research.

A poster advertising a Russian ballet event in 1914 at Drury Lane

A poster from 1914 advertising a Russian ballet event being held at Drury Lane

Registration

Registration for this symposium opened on 1 February 2022.

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Participants and partners

We are delighted to feature keynotes by Professor Simon Morrison (Princeton University), Art Historian Dr Louise Hardiman and Dr Graham Griffiths (City University, London). Professor Natalia Savkina (Moscow Conservatory) is another invited guest.

A curated concert will bring to life music from the St. Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music, drawn directly from archival materials. This concert will give us a sense of the sounds and sights of contemporary Russia of the period.

Another session, curated by the project directors, will explore underperformed repertoire from the period to give a sense of contemporary London.

The in-person event will feature an exhibition of special items from the RCM collections directly connected with the themes of this symposium.

The Royal College of Music Keyboard Festival in 2022 will also feature talented RCM students exploring repertoire from this period.

We are grateful to our friends at Wigmore Hall for their support of these events.