A superb original photograph of the great French/Swiss composer together with the Russian-American writer and composer. 13 x 18 cm. Stamped "Centre Culturel Américain" on the verso, mounting traces, overall fine condition.
Nicolas Nabokov was born in 1903 to a distinguished family of landed gentry (Vladimir Nabokov was his first cousin). With the eruption of revolution, the Nabokovs fled to the Crimea and Nabokov later lived in Germany and France before relocating to the United States in 1933. Writing for Partisan Review and for Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, he consolidated a reputation as an authority on Soviet culture within the anticommunist left. In 1951, he was named General Secretary of the new Congress for Cultural Freedom. All of this submerged his continued vocation as a composer. Two big operas — Rasputin’s End (1958) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1971) — led nowhere. More noticed were his ballet-oratorio Ode (1928), premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes; Union Pacific (1934), an “American ballet” for Colonel W. de Basil’s Ballet Russes; and Don Quixote (1966), for which George Balanchine famously returned to the stage to dance the title role opposite his muse Suzanne Farrell.
A superb original photograph of the great French/Swiss composer together with the Russian-American writer and composer. 13 x 18 cm. Stamped "Centre Culturel Américain" on the verso, mounting traces, overall fine condition.
Nicolas Nabokov was born in 1903 to a distinguished family of landed gentry (Vladimir Nabokov was his first cousin). With the eruption of revolution, the Nabokovs fled to the Crimea and Nabokov later lived in Germany and France before relocating to the United States in 1933. Writing for Partisan Review and for Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, he consolidated a reputation as an authority on Soviet culture within the anticommunist left. In 1951, he was named General Secretary of the new Congress for Cultural Freedom. All of this submerged his continued vocation as a composer. Two big operas — Rasputin’s End (1958) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1971) — led nowhere. More noticed were his ballet-oratorio Ode (1928), premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes; Union Pacific (1934), an “American ballet” for Colonel W. de Basil’s Ballet Russes; and Don Quixote (1966), for which George Balanchine famously returned to the stage to dance the title role opposite his muse Suzanne Farrell.