Posthumous Reputation
After Roslavets's death his apartment was ransacked by a group of former "Proletarian Musicians" who confiscated many manuscripts. Roslavets's widow succeeded in hiding many manuscripts; afterwards she handed them over to TsGALI (Central state archive for literature and art, Moscow; now called RGALI, or Russian state archive for literature and art). Some manuscripts were kept by Roslavets's pupil, P. Teplov; now they are in the State Central Glinka-Museum for Musical Culture.
In 1967 the composer's niece Efrosinya Roslavets undertook the first steps to rehabilitate her uncle. It has been found that the composer never submitted to the political repressive measures. This important step, that the refusal to play Roslavets's compositions was justified for the reason that Roslavets belonged "to the arrested peoples’ enemies," did not improve the situation; Roslavets's ouvre was suppressed. In 1967 the employee of the Glinka-Museum, Georgi Kirkor, refused Efrosinya Roslavets access to the museum's materials; Kirkor declared Nikolai Roslavets "to be alien to the people" and accused the composer of "relations with the world of Zionism". This dangerous accusation was caused by the fact that Leonid Sabaneyev, a close friend of Roslavets, had promoted Jewish music; the ASM had also promoted Jewish composers.
For thirty years, Roslavets's name, expunged from the musical dictionaries, was hardly mentioned in Soviet musical literature. His name reappeared in a Soviet musical dictionary in 1978 in a negative context. Typical of the highly negative official attitude towards Roslavets were sentences like those: "Roslavets is our enemy," "he is a composer whose music is not worth the paper on which it is written down," "Roslavets's tomb should be destroyed."
In the West, Detlef Gojowy (1934–2008) had been promoting Roslavets. For his activities Gojowy was constantly ideologically attacked on behalf of the officials of the Soviet Composers' Union, in particular personally by Tikhon Khrennikov, and the magazine "Soviet Music." Until 1989, Gojowy was treated as a "militant anti-communist" and a persona non grata. The copies of his articles which the journalist sent to his Soviet colleagues were confiscated by the Soviet customs; Gojowy himself was not allowed to get a Soviet visa.
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Roslavets
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