A Musical Utopia: Suvchinski, Eurasia, and Stravinsky’s Poetics

Abstract

This article examines the influence of Piotr Suvchinski on Igor Stravinsky’s aesthetic thought, focusing on the contributions of the Russian philosopher to the lectures the composer delivered at Harvard during the 1939-1940 academic year, which were published in 1942 under the title Poétique musicale. Through a thorough review of sources and documents from various archives, it is argued that Suvchinski played a key role in the conceptual structuring and organization of these lectures. The conclusions reveal that the ideas of Eurasianism, a movement to which Suvchinski was closely linked as one of its founders, form the primary philosophical and cultural foundation of the fifth lecture, “The Transformations of Russian Music”.