Agenda

Centered on Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, this talk reconstructs the afterlife of a forged Cossack document as it moves across centuries and genres: from a seventeenth-century Polish forger to a nineteenth-century Ukrainian historian, to a leading Russian realist artist, to a leading French surrealist poet, and finally to a late-twentieth-century Soviet composer. Shaped by protest, erasure, and survival, this chain condenses the tragedies of anti-imperial wars, misreadings of transcultural transmission, and the fragile heroism of memory. The final passage was mediated by an almost vanished figure -- the Gulag survivor and translator Mikhail Kudinov (1922–1994), for whom political falsification became a vehicle of historical truth.