Open to LC/King's Students and Staff only

King’s Language Centre and Great Britain-Russia Society cordially invite King’s staff and students to a series of talks on the subjects of history, culture and politics.

The second talk in the series will take place in hybrid mode on Teams and on campus in room K2.40 King's Building, Strand Campus at 7.00 pm on Thursday, 16th November 2023. The talk will be followed by Q&A.

Roger Cockrell - Leo Tolstoy and the Force of Music: From Chopin to Wagner

In this talk Roger Cockrell will explore Tolstoy’s attitude towards music, aiming to show how his response reflected the fundamental split in his character between a deeply engrained puritanism on the one hand and an equally profound sensuousness on the other. The talk will include references to Chto takoe iskusstvo? (What is Art?, 1897), Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin’s autobiographical reminiscences, and will be illustrated with extracts from Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner. There will be a hand-out including the most important quotations.

Roger Cockrell, who is a long-standing member of the Society, graduated from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University and, after a year at Moscow University as a British Council scholar, was appointed as a lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. In 1979-80 he was a visiting associate professor at the University of Toronto, and from 1980 until 2004 was head of the Russian Department at Exeter. He has published widely on many aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century of Russian literature and culture, and is currently an honorary research fellow at Exeter. His literary translations, for Alma Classics, include Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories and A Calendar of Wisdom and, most recently, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Forthcoming translations include Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants, and Gustav Mahler and Russia.

Please, register by 6pm, 10th of November, indicating your preferred option – on campus or online. Please, note, the number of places is limited and will be offered on the first come first served basis.