This paper offers a study of the way Soviet authorities’ discourses on music were received in France. The post-war period is very interesting in many aspects. The political landscape changed following Zhdanov and Stalin’s deaths, and two decrees regarding music production were published in 1948 and 1958. The press bulletins of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the journalistic and intellectual production with scholarly pretensions of the PCF inform us about the reception of Soviet music in the French public space. We understand the evolution of censorship in the USSR thanks to the discourse in France about the professional Soviet musician and about the Soviet opera. Since censorship in the USSR was not always controlled, it is appropriate to question the role of Soviet and French communist intellectuals. As such, we study socialist realism in music, but also the conflicts that the enforcement of such ideological principles produces. Moreover, although French sympathizers covered Soviet musical news extensively, we observe divergences of opinion resulting from the diversity of the editorial frameworks.
The purpose of this article is to develop an approach to integrating a recorded public reading of a novel by its author into literary research. More specifically, the article focuses on the recording of Venedikt Erofeev’s reading of Moscow to the End of the Line in 1980. This public reading raises the problem of literary interpretation and the voice in literature. Indeed, due to Erofeev’s double interference during the writing and the public reading of the text, this recording could possibly restrict the interpretative diversity of the work. However, the context and the nature of this public reading do not necessarily lead to the pitfall of a strictly author-centric interpretation. Rather, Erofeev’s recorded reading is a reminder of the intrinsic vocality of the work—an aspect of the text that can be lost in repeated silent reading.
The buildings that comprise my research corpus encourage me to question my archival approach to architecture in a socialist environment. The study of an architectural project requires looking at the constraints, the reasons for the construction, and the interpretation. Architectural archives are also research objects in themselves. Indeed, there are several components that should be studied in parallel with the buildings: “administrative”, “graphic”, “oral” and “in-situ”. This paper is an opportunity to become familiar with the different sources invoked in architectural analysis.
