In order to achieve this, I develop and utilize a hermeneutical approach grounded in Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind to examine and gauge Rakov's musical aesthetics.

In this dissertation, I therefore turn my attention to the aesthetic side of Rakov's music in order to reevaluate his works. They evoke colorful images and feelings that draw the audience into Rakov's own compositional world despite his reputation of technical simplicity and uninventive language at a glance. It is in that spirit that I turn to Rakov, whose works carry his artistic idea of irresistible beauty, elegance, irony and charm. Within music scholarship, alternative perspectives on Soviet art remain largely unexplored. There are, however, other approaches to understanding art created in Soviet Union. Nikolai Rakov (1908-1990), a Soviet-era composer, is also all too often received as a second-class socialist realistic composer.

This ideology conditioned artists to make art accessible and nationalistic to serve the perceived needs of the Russian proletariat. It also has been interpreted as peasant kitsch art because of its seemingly unacademic and unchallenging theoretical language utilized in order to meet the expectations of Soviet communism. It has been considered 'synthetic art,' which ordinary citizens were forced to admire under the Soviet regime. Much socialist realism art from Soviet-era Russia has been misunderstood by scholars.

Rakov piano pdf