Russian culture is frequently perceived in terms of its tendency to logocentrism, a feature that has long tended to shape the development and perception of the various non-verbal art forms. Music is no exception to this rule, characterised as it is by the dominance of texted forms, most notably opera and song. Take, for instance, the nineteenth-century fascination with Pushkin, which extends from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Liudmila, via Tchaikovsky’s [Chaikovsky’s] Eugene Onegin, Mazeppa and Queen of Spades, as well as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, to the various attempts to set his Little Tragedies (Cui, Dargomyzhsky, Rakhmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov). Similarly, almost all of Russia’s poetic tradition has been explored in the song repertoire, where intensely debated attitudes to prosody and declamation illustrate an acute respect for the poetic word as such. And...

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Citation: Bullock, Philip Ross. "Shostakovich and Literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 June 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1732, accessed 09 June 2026.]