Almost a hundred years after their initial publication in Russian (“Zapisi A.N. Skriabina,” Russkie propilei, 1919), Aleksandr Skriabin's notebooks have been translated into English at last by Simon Nicholls and Michael Pushkin, allowing anglophone readers to hear the charismatic Symbolist composer for the first time in his own words. The Notebooks detail the trajectory of Skriabin's thought from early religiosity, spiritual disenchantment, and self-deification to the collectivity of his unfinished apocalyptic Mystery, which aspired to transfigure the world by conflating music, poetry, light, and dance. Save for a few musical sketches, Skriabin's poetry preserved in The Notebooks is all that remains from this grandiose project: an early opera libretto; a solipsistic, erotic text for the symphonic Poem of Ecstasy; and the verse for The Preliminary Action to Skriabin's Mystery. Recreating the original edition with Boris de Schloezer's preface, Mikhail Gershenzon's editorial footnotes, and Skriabin's drawings, Nicholls and Pushkin offer a highly readable translation, making a welcome contribution to Slavic studies.
In an accessible introduction and commentary, Nicholls tells the fascinating story of Skriabin's life and thought by touching on his major influences. Generous, well documented, and concise, the annotations are supplemented with a selection of previously untranslated letters and crucial texts by, among others, music critic and associate Leonid Sabaneev. Packed with compelling stories and captivating facts, the commentary draws myriad connections, beautifully situating Skriabin in his Russian Silver-Age milieu. It offers a helpful roadmap to newcomers, synthesizing key ideas from Skriabin scholarship in sections focused on German idealism; Russian philosophy and Symbolism; theosophy; poetic practice; and music-color notions. Diligent cross-referencing allows readers to chart their own itineraries through the The Notebooks.
While scholars have encountered quotations from The Notebooks in Faubion Bowers's Scriabin: A Biography [1969] (1996), Nicholls's translation and commentary give access to the full text and correct Bowers's problematic elision of sources. English readers can now judge for themselves such myths as Skriabin's madness, messianism, and megalomania. Within the full purview of his writings, Skriabin's enraptured ravings: “I am God! / I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life” (70), familiar from Bowers, present him not just as the Maker, but also as a thinker working out how minds can create all. Only based on the premise that “Every person creates the world for himself (unconsciously)” does he argue, “Everything is my creation” (102).
Despite its insights, the commentary does omit two significant facts. Although Skriabin's color-tonality correspondences are given following Sabaneev, there is no mention of the autographed score of Prometheus held at Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Skriabin detailed his colored keys there and added instructions to the score, themselves worthy of translation. Skriabin's alleged synaesthesia is also danced around, perhaps due to recent debates on the topic. But Nicholls and Pushkin's very translation and commentary balance this neglect by directing our attention to Skriabin's sensitivity to color, interest in perception, and passages from the notebooks that suggest genuine synaesthetic experiences of emotional light-shapes: “you, crags of my anger,” “tender lines of my caresses,” “stars, lightning flashes of my gaze” (67, 233).
Skriabin's heady mix of instrumentals, syntactical inversions, sensuous abstractions, and, alas, poetic imprecision might pose a great difficulty for translation. With their ceaseless creation and destruction, affirmation and negation, Skriabin's texts necessitate the generative potential of the instrumental, or creative case to engender a world teeming with life. While the translators nicely render the Wave urging the golden Ray: “Awake in me as consciousness” (Probudis΄ vo mne soznaniem, 166; 243), they stumble over other instrumentals. Ty sebia poznaesh΄ skazkami / Raskolovshikhsia luchei, for instance, suggests “You will come to know yourself” through tales, not “as tales / Of fragmented rays” (167; 244). Such minor lapses notwithstanding, Nicholls and Pushkin adopt a highly systematic approach, which makes explicit the latent Russian etymologies. Highlighting Skriabin's radiance, luchezarnyi, luchistyi appear consistently as “radiant” rather than the established “luminous,” “effulgent” to reveal their relation to the ubiquitous “ray” (luch) and “irradiate” (izluchat΄). In the “Editorial Procedures,” the translators flag other Skriabinian terms: “striving” (stremlenie), “impulse, rush” (poryv). They thus develop a reliable code of correspondences even if a “word-for-word equivalence” (xv) is impossible. Oriented toward the source language, the translation seeks semantic and grammatical accuracy, forgoes meter and rhyme, and does not smooth out the convoluted syntax, yet it is not foreignizing. By taking a Nabokovian approach—supplementing literal accuracy with copious comments—the translated Notebooks are at once readable and rigorous.
Lucid and reliable, this long-awaited translation fills an important gap and should spur further translations of Skriabin documents: above all, Sabaneev's Reminiscences of Skriabin (1925), as well as collections of essays and poems dedicated to the composer. The volume opens new avenues for interdisciplinary research on Russian culture, literature, and music and would be a valuable addition to courses on western civilization, modernism, and intellectual history. A useful and appealing introduction to Skriabin, The Notebooks promise to become an indispensable companion for scholars, students, pianists, and music lovers alike.
