Russia: Information about graffiti on trains was recognized by a court as forbidden

May 11, 2018

Now websites containing methods of applying graffiti on trains have become a new target for regional prosecutors. The Ershov Transport Prosecutor’s office secured the blocking of one of them through the court.

“It is established that texts, photographs, illustrations and links to video files and other Internet resources, whereby an indefinite circle of persons in a social network, including minors, are told about graffiti on wagons as an opportunity for leisure activities are freely available. According to the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection”, the dissemination of information for this criminal act is prohibited,” said the press service of the Southern Transport Prosecutor’s Office said.

Since the vandalism of railway property is provided for by administrative liability under Article 11.15 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, the Transport Prosecutor of Ershov appealed to the court, requesting to prohibit the distribution of information posted on the Internet that “encourages graffiti on railroad cars.” The court ruled in the prosecution’s favor and ordered to block the community of graffiti lovers.

RoskomSvoboda has repeatedly written about questionable prohibitions and proactive regional persecutions, which they are fairly easily sanctioned by regional courts. Consideration of such cases occurs in the absence of site owners, so we are placing high hopes on the verdict of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation that banned the conduct of hearings without the participation of owners of internet resources. Perhaps this will finally stop the dubious practice of arbitrary blocking of websites by prosecutors, and enable more transparent trials.

Translated from RoskomSvoboda (https://roskomsvoboda.org/38783/)

Viktor Kosenko

Viktor Stepanovych Kosenko (Born on November 11 , 1896, in St. Petersburg, Russia – Died on October 3, 1938, in Kiev, Ukraine) was a Ukrainian composer, pianist, and teacher. He had a successful career and is remembered as one of Ukraine’s greatest Romantic composers.

Biography

Viktor Kosenko was born in St. Petersburg in 1896. He was the son of a major general, Stephan, who wanted Viktor to follow him in this line of work. The family moved to Warsaw in 1898. His immediate family did not include any musicians, but they liked to sing and improvise at home and organize musical events at their house. [1] He began piano lessons at age six with Ydisky. At age nine he started receiving piano lessons from Alexander Michalowski and Mikhail Sokolovsky.

Kosenko’s older sister Maria received piano lessons as well. She deliberately hid her music from others when she left the house. In one anecdote, she was practicing a Beethoven sonata and hid it from others as usual. However, one day she came home and heard someone playing it – Kosenko was playing it by ear. He had an exceptional musical memory.

Following the outbreak of World War 1, Kosenko’s family moved back to St. Petersburg. Kosenko went to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and studied piano under Iryna Miklashovskaya and Mikhail Sokolovsky. He showed exceptional talent in sight reading and transposition. He also studied composition.

Alexander Glazunov gave Kosenko a scholarship to study for free on account of his talent. He also gained income from working as an accompanist at the Marinsky Theatre. He graduated in 1918 with a degree in piano performance.

In 1919, Kosenko moved to Zhytomyr in the Ukraine, where his family lived. He formed a piano trio with violinist Vladimir Skorokhod and cellist Vasyl Kolomyitsev, and they performed many concerts from 1919 to 1923.

Kosenko married Angelina Kanepp in 1920. She was a previously married woman with two children. They were poor but charitable, and often shared their food with people from the streets.

In 1921, Kosenko helped to found the Leotovyek Music Society. In 1922 in Zhytomy, he gave his first concert of his own music. He started teaching piano and music theory at the Music Technicum in Zhytomyr. Later he became the director of the Zhytomyr music school.

In 1924, Kosenko moved to Moscow to further his career. Due to conflicts with the Soviet government, Kosenko moved to Kiev. In 1929, he accepted a teaching post at the Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama.
In 1932, he began teaching at the Kiev Conservatory. He taught piano, chamber ensemble, composition, and music theory.

Kosenko died of kidney cancer in 1938. He is buried at the Baikov Cemetery in Kiev.

Musical Style and Legacy

Kosenko is known in Ukraine as one of the country’s greatest Romantic composers. He wrote in a lyrical, national, Romantic style.

Kosenko wrote more than 250 pieces. Of these, over 100 are piano pieces, including preludes, sonatas, mazurkas, nocturnes, and waltzes. He also wrote concertos, trios, quartets, ballads, choral works, symphonic works, folk arrangements, songs for children, film scores, and more.

References

[1] https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3641&context=thesesdissertations
http://www.pianosociety.com/pages/Kosenko/

Click to access viktor-kosenko.pdf

Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky

Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky (Born on August 20, 1881 in Novogeorgievsk, Poland – Died on August 8, 1950 in Moscow, Russia) was a Russian composer and teacher. He is known in particular for his symphonies. He served as a teacher at the Moscow Conservatory for 29 years, and counted among his students Aram Khachaturian, Dmitri Kabalevsky, and Alexander Mosolov.

Biography

Nikolai Myaskovsky’s father was a military engineer and later a general in the Russian army. His mother died in 1890, and he was thereafter raised by his aunt, a former singer. He began composing young, with pieces stylistically resembling Chopin. In 1903, he studied harmony with the composer Reinhold Gliere. He had been referred to Gliere by Sergei Taneyev, a composer and teacher at the Moscow Conservatory.

Myaskovsky studied at the Russian Academy of Military Engineering, then left the army to go to the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1906. He earned a scholarship with his first symphony in 1908. He was taught by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatoly Liadov. During this period he began a lifelong friendship with Sergei Prokofiev. Mysaskovsky graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1911.

Mysaskovsky participated in World War 1 on the front for three years, then as a military fortifications man. He wrote parts of his fourth and fifth symphonies during his time as a soldier.

In 1921, Myaskovksy started teaching composition at the Moscow Conservatory. He held this position for the rest of his life. Among his notable students were Aram Khachaturian, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Rodion Shchedrin, and Alexander Mosolov. He was loved as a professor and known for his generosity. In 1922, he became an editor for the Music Publishing House. He held this position until 1931.
In 1937, Myaskovsky’s former student Mosolov was arrested and sentenced to eight years of forced labor. Myaskovsky and Reinhold Gliere intervened, as a result of which Mosolov’s sentence was reduced to nine months.

Myaskovsky received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the Moscow Conservatory in 1940. During World War 2, he went to the Caucasus, including Tbilisi, and then later Kyrgyzstan
As with many other Russian composers, Myaskovsky wrote patriotic music in order to please the Soviet authorities. These include the fourth movement of his sixth symphony, and his entire twelfth symphony, which was written to commemorate the Russian Revolution celebrate collective farming.

In spite of his patriotic compositions, Myaskovsky was criticized alongside other great Russian composers (Shostakovich, Prokofiev) for his modernism and formalism in 1948. He was not harshly persecuted and in fact won three Stalin Prizes. After his death he was praised by the Soviet authorities as an “outstanding Soviet musical worker and people’s artist.”

Musical Style and Legacy

Myaskovsky was a prolific writer of symphonies. Among his works are 27 symphonies, 13 string quartets, 9 piano sonatas, and more. His style has been described as modern, although less so than some of his contemporaries. He was among the prominent members of the Association for Contemporary Music, founded in 1923 and disbanded in 1932.

His life and works have been covered in detail in English with the publishing of Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music by Gregor Tassie.

References

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/nikolay-myaskovsky-mn0001623979/biography

https://www.naxos.com/person/Nikolay_Myaskovsky/24632.htm

http://www.kith.org/jimmosk/schissel.html

Article written by me for Lunyr (https://lunyr.com/article/Nikolai%20Myaskovsky)

Nikolai Roslavets

Nikolai Andreyevich Roslavets (Born January 5, 1881 in Dushatino, Ukraine – Died August 23, 1944 in Moscow, Russia) was a Russian composer who developed a unique style of dodecaphonic serial composition independently of the Second Viennese School. He drew inspiration from Alexander Scriabin, who preceded him in producing atonal music in Russia. Roslavets was censored and declared a “non-person” by the Soviet authorities, and he died in obscurity. Nevertheless, his works have received new attention following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Biography

Roslavets came from a peasant family in the Ukraine. He had a talent for the violin and studied with Arkady M. Abaza. He then entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1901, which was during Alexander Scriabin’s tenure as a piano professor there. Roslavets would go on to draw inspiration from Scriabin’s style. Roslavets studied under Sergei Vasilenko, Ippolitov, Ivanov, and the violinist Hřímalý. He graduated in 1912.

Around 1912, Roslavets began crafting pieces using his new system. He considered his system perfected in 1919. He helped to found a group that later became the Association for Contemporary Music, and was a leading member of this group upon its creation in 1923. This Association also included Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Gavriil Popov, and Valdimir Shcherbachev, among others. The Association for Contemporary Music was condemned by the more popular Association of Proletarian Musicians because of its appreciation for avant-garde Western music. The Association of Proletarian Musicians favored simple patriotic music, and the two associations fiercely criticized each other. They were both dissolved by the Soviet government in 1932.

In 1924, an all-Roslavets concert took place in Moscow. Roslavets was optimistic about the future of his new musical system at this time and published an article predicting that this system would replace prior methods of composition. He thereafter received negative attention from the Soviet authorities, which compelled him to mass-produce ordinary music with folk themes. He later publicly rejected his early works, describing them as experiments. In 1931, he moved to Tashkent and worked at the music theatre there for two years before returning to Moscow.

Roslavets had a stroke in 1939, and from then on lived on a military pension. His name was removed from all encyclopedias and documents as the Soviets sought to erase his from the people’s memory. Roslavets died in 1944 and was buried without a headstone. The Soviet secret police seized many of his works, while others were preserved by his wife and one of his pupils.

Musical Style

Roslavets developed a musical system inspired by Alexander Scriabin. This system revolved around “sintetakkords”, just as much of Scriabin’s later music revolved around the “Mystic Chord” or variations thereof. In 1927, Roslavets wrote a manual for his musical system using the “sintetakkord”, but it has not come down to us. The “sintetakkord” is a synthetic chord containing from six to nine tones, arranged in a manner that allows the basic elements of ordinary harmony to be derived from them.

Many of Roslavets’s works are believed lost, although they have been periodically rediscovered in recent times. His extant works include three symphonies, two violin concerti, a number of symphonic poems, five string quartets, three piano trios, a chamber nocturne, and many sonatas for the violin, viola, cello, and piano.

References

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/nikolai-roslavets-mn0001785098/biography
http://www.grandpianorecords.com/Composer/ComposerDetails/16334
https://www.secret-bases.co.uk/wiki/Association_for_Contemporary_Music

http://www.classical-music-review.org/reviews/Roslavets.html

Article written by me for Lunyr (https://lunyr.com/article/Nikolai%20Roslavets)

Russian Animal Symbols and White India

On the summer solstice in a St. Petersburg Hall in 2017, another lecture of the “White India” project was held, titled “Restoration of Character”. Guests were delighted to hear the leader of the “New Scythians”, Pavel Zarifullin, the St. Petersburg writer Herman Sadulayev, and the philosopher Alexander Sekatsky. The meeting was devoted to a topic as simple as it in confusing: the animal symbol of Russia.

Lecturers conceived the idea of ​​changing the “Russian bear” to another symbolic animal and thus returning Russia to its original Eurasian path. In the roster for the animal-patron were some amazing options.

Symbol Wars

The bear became a symbol of Russia relatively recently, having previously been not an emblem of Russia, but rather a taboo. It’s not for nothing that Russian language has lost the true name of the bear and retained only a euphemism meaning “in charge of honey.” In fairy tales, the bear rarely acts as an assistant to the protagonist, but often hurts him. The bear destroys the house in which animals settle, he is stupid, he is deceived with the sharing of “tops and roots”, he is lazy, sluggish, sleeping most of the year, slovenly, and spiteful. His appointment as the symbol of Russia could only occur as a result of a defeat in the Great Symbol War.

However, despite this, the true symbols are breaking through from the sleeping collective unconscious. For example, the wolf Zabivak was immediately liked by people when football championship’s advertising campaign began.

One of the true symbols of Russia, according to Paul Zarifullin, could be a Scythian deer, which was recently present in the sky in the form of a distinct constellation. But after a congress of astronomers 100 years ago it was expelled and replaced by two bears: Big and Small.

As a result of the symbolic slaughter and change of the star chart, the earthly affairs also changed. The projection of the bears filled Russia, and the country plunged into a continuous symbolic dissonance, losing direction and historical creativity. The “New Scythians” movement prepared an ultimatum demanding the return of the Scythian golden deer to the sky. This Scythian deer is the patron of all Scythian peoples, from the Saxons to the Mongolian nomadic tribes.

Political projects

The German Sadulayev spoke about the need for the symbolic unity of the people, and why it must necessarily be zoomorphic.

The birth of descendants is a lottery. If we get “red” seven times in a row, a boy is born, and we can confidently say that the genus comes from some ancestor. In practice, girls are often born, and other factors interfere — war, confusion with other births, and other events that interrupt the family tree. In addition, the best do not survive. The best die, saving the rest. Therefore, in all seriousness, it can be said that a person maintains a symbolic rather than genetic relationship with the ancestor. And in order to avoid conflicts, it is better if this ancestor is not a specific person, and is instead relegated the symbolic realm.

For Russia, in Sadulayev’s opinion, the wolf would be best suited for Russia. First, the wolf has a special position in Slavic culture. For example, in the fairy tale Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf he really exists like a symbol — he appears at the right moment, shares his patronage and strength, and helps the hero in difficult moments.

The bear is alien to a Russian person, just as the wolf is alien to the west. The wolf hunts the Little Red Riding Hood and performs quite villainous acts.

Sadulayev sees the most important effect being in the political realm. The image of the wolf is related to the Slavic and Turkic world. This is a single patriotic animal that allows us to symbolically reconcile the peoples of Russia and integrate them into a single field of discourse.

Symbol market

Alexander Sekatsky believes the bear should not be dismissed so easily. Despite the fact that the bear is a rather uneconomic symbol, the very fact that it was he who emerged victorious from the symbol wars, having defeated the wolf, deer, and even a double-headed eagle, says a lot.

In his opinion, behind the processes of ethnogenesis, as well as other codes of civilizations, there is a very powerful structure of the universe. Some codes do not live long, while others, like Rome or the Scythians, are repeated for millennia and go through many versions — the first, second, third, maybe even the fourth Rome. This structure, the cosmological constant, spreads in an inflationary way among the human population, manifesting itself in various fields of knowledge. When an ethnos finds for itself such a cosmological constant, this provides it with explosive growth and development. This is a further development of Gumilev’s ideas of ethnogenesis.

A bear, no matter how uncomfortable it may feel to us, can be a part of this process. It fully meets all the requirements of a good symbol — it is a wild animal that gives strength and invulnerability to the one who associates with it. And perhaps its properties and benefitts for the Russian people just have not been fully revealed yet.

Translated from gumilev-center.ru (http://www.gumilev-center.ru/totemy-dlya-novykh-plemjon-belojj-indii/)