Variations on the Theme

Volumes of Russian-language memoirs, diaries, and letters by and about composers in the former Soviet Union continue to pour forth, at a rate that even the most assiduous reader would find hard to digest, adding to the huge quantity of material that in an ideal world would constitute essential Source Readings. It would take a small army of translators to rectify this situation, and no one has done more single-handedly to help the cause than translator-turned-publisher Ernst Kuhn. Admittedly, his extraordinary productivity comes at the price of variable standards of editorial control. In this latest volume the translation itself—into English by the author's daughter—is especially creaky; Jeannie for Gianni Rodari, whose poems Ustvolskaya set in her First Symphony, is just one of the howlers to be laid at her door (p. 67). Typos are abundant, and footnotes and bibliography barely adequate. There are also lengthy discursive endnotes, many of which a more demanding editor would either have placed in the main text, or, where their content is too thin to merit preservation, simply have deleted. The book's title itself is a cop-out, excusing what is essentially a loose assemblage of snapshots. None of Bokman's 21 ‘variations’ is given a subheading, and the contents page is therefore practically useless, while the index confines itself to names.

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