Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva (review)

the Baltic countries but in the West. In recognition of the critical and commercial success of his tintinnabuli works, he received Award of the Year from the Ministry of Culture of the Estonian SSR in May 1978 (p. 119). Yet in 1979, Pärt and his family emigrated from Estonia, following the infamous speech the composer made at the XI Congress of the Estonian SSR Composer’s Union in February 1979 in which he declared himself a dissident, which drew immediate repercussions. His contemporaries Schnittke and Gubaidulina would also soon leave their home country and start a new chapter abroad in Germany. Karnes’s consideration of Pärt’s career becoming a tabula rasa once in Vienna hauntingly mirrors the current situation that many Russian musicians and artists who do not support the Putin regime find themselves in during the ongoing escalation of the RussoUkrainian war since 24 February 2022. In the later part of the book, Karnes continues to trace Lediņš’s professional trajectory following the festivals, for his career did not end with the unfortunate cancellation of the discotheques. In 1978, he moved on to record his own music and further explore Soviet soundscapes during his walks to Bolderāja (a neighborhood in Riga) with the artist Juris Boiko. These walks “extended a distinctly Soviet strain of experimentalist performance art—one that regarded the ritualized journey beyond the city as a means of experiencing social and expressive freedom— into the socially cohering, broadly accessible realm of the disco hall” (p. 134). Karnes is aware and transparent that there is no photographic or recorded evidence for some of these events; they are not fixed and remain ever-changing memories of the participants in this conversation. Nevertheless, these fragments piece together a Baltic landscape of artistic support and underground creative freedom that allowed Pärt to share and establish a musical identity that is internationally known today. Alexei Yurchak also describes intriguing new physical and mental temporalities that emerged in the sphere of Soviet visual and literary arts in the 1960s and 1970s and served as an escapism of sorts—a space of refuge from the imposing authoritarian governance. He defines this space as vnye, which for him means “being simultaneously inside and outside of some context—such as, being within a context while remaining oblivious to it, imagining yourself elsewhere, or being inside your own mind” (Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006], 128). Arguably, Lediņš’s creation of the discotheque spaces within the Soviet system allowed individuals like Pärt, Martynov, and many others to exhibit their religion, as reflected so intimately in their music, and to survive spiritually and creatively in restrictive Soviet surroundings. Karnes’s attentive text is vital to the studies of Arvo Pärt, his contemporaries, and Soviet music and culture in the 1970s.