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This chapter examines the extreme split in Stravinsky’s music between his attempt to solidify Christian dogma on heterosexual marriage through archetypal musical dramaturgy and his hidden expressions of desire. This split can be explained within the context of the debate about Stravinsky’s Russianness after the revolution, in which Boris Asafyev articulated the pre-Stalinist humanist and later Soviet materialist, Boris de Schloezer a humanist, Western European, aestheticist, and Pyotr Suvchinsky a Eurasianist view. Stravinsky reacted to this dialogue by hiding behind neoclassical “poses” or “manners,” and by fashioning himself into Suvchinsky’s vision of a Russian creative genius with a dialectical character split between a private vitalist sphere of mystical revelation of the material world and a public sphere of Christian subjugation to universal laws. These attitudes determined how Stravinsky represented desire in Perséphone, which this chapter compares to Ravel’s melancholic expression in Le Tombeau du Couperin. Stravinsky’s approach results in a fractured musical form that resembles Walter Benjamin’s modernist allegory.

This chapter interprets Stravinsky’s faith by analyzing how he composed the opening of Perséphone, and the central gesture of Demeter entrusting Persephone to the nymphs. The goal is to demonstrate how Stravinsky, in contrast to Gide, submitted his will to Christian dogma, rather than trusting in individual action. In dialogue with his Christian friends, Pyotr Suvchinsky, Charles-Albert Cingria, and Jacques Maritain (and to a lesser degree Domenico de Paoli and Ernst Ansermet), Stravinsky developed a Christian compositional approach that led to a sacred formalism based on revelation through artistic materials, mythical consciousness of music history, the promulgation of dogma through emblematic gesture, and sound as a divine force. This led him to side with Demeter as a representative of Church authority, rather than with Gide’s sensitive Persephone. Stravinsky’s approach put him diametrically at odds with André Gide.

This chapter takes up the politically charged subject of Lourié’s involvement with the Eurasianist movement in interwar Paris and its lasting mark on his, and temporary mark on Stravinsky’s, aesthetics. The chapter includes analyses of Lourié’s Sinfonia dialectica and Second Symphony, the “Kórmtchaïa, in comparison with Stravinsky’s neoclassical output, while also taking into account Lourié’s appropriation of liturgical and quasi-liturgical music and anhemitonicism. Lourié’s critical reception in Paris is a point of focus, likewise his diverse writings on melody, harmony, and the future of music as defined by the composers of the Second Viennese School, Soviet composers, and French neoclassical composers. The writings of the cultural critic and Eurasianist ideologue Pyotr Suvchinsky provide a context for Taruskin’s sociopolitical discussion.

Chapter 8 examines Persephone’s rebirth and return to the underworld with the goal of understanding what its emancipatory promise and historicity—or relationship to the past, present, and future—tells us about the politics of modernist neoclassicism. Gide introduces the cardboard figure of Triptolemus as a symbol of renewal he associates with the Soviet Union, and with Orpheus’s “backward glance” and the anxious politics of his pédérastie. Rubinstein, Copeau, and Stravinsky, in contrast, think of Persephone’s rebirth in terms of the resurrection of Christ. Stravinsky interprets resurrection from Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist perspective as related to the notion of cyclical history, and to the political idea of Russia resurrecting as a theocracy after the Bolshevik revolution. In his music he realizes the temporal idea of the simultaneity of past, present, and future by composing music that functions as a “vitalist” sculpture, and that can be compared to Aby Warburg’s notion of the Pathosformel. The chapter ends with reflections on how Perséphone failed on the night of its premiere, and the heterogeneity of interpretations it elicited.