Rachmaninov's Works and Dostoevsky's Speech about Pushkin

The author examines Fyodor Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow as a significant event in the history of Russian culture. He emphasizes that the ideas about Russian culture expressed in it remain relevant today, making the interest in the speech in the cultural milieu of that time all the more understandable. The author considers Dostoevsky's attention to the theme of Pushkin's speech a special «symptom» of the Russian diaspora, since Pushkin and Dostoevsky primarily constituted the literary interests of its famous representatives, and not only writers (Remizov, Shmelev, and others). The author believes that many of Dostoevsky's pronouncements on Pushkin are applicable to Rachmaninoff's work, both in specific and general terms. The article shows how Rachmaninov's work reflects the historicism of Pushkin's themes, noted in Dostoevsky's speech, and recreates the intonational world of Russia in its historical movements and striving for global responsiveness in works of European programmatic music and in works of Russian programmatic music, representing the world of Russia.