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music until his early twenties. He graduated from
St. Petersburg University in 1905 with a degree
in law and philosophy. In 1907 he began to study
with Nikolai
RIMSKY
-
KORSAKOV
, who recognized
his brilliance and sought to shelter him from con-
ventional academic training by offering individ-
ual lessons. Rimsky-Korsakov arranged for the
performance of some of Stravinsky's early com-
positions in 1908. Later that year, Stravinsky
began to work with Sergei
DIAGHILEV
, who com-
missioned him to arrange the 1909 summer sea-
son of his Ballets Russes in Paris. In 1910, again
working for Diaghilev, Stravinsky, wrote a full-
length ballet,
The Firebird,
which premiered in
Paris and turned Stravinsky into an overnight
sensation. The next few years witnessed an espe-
cially creative period of collaborations between
Stravinsky and Diaghilev that revolutionized the
world of ballet. Another acclaimed Stravinsky
ballet,
Petrushka
(1911), featured Vaslav
NIJINSKY
in the title role. Stravinsky spent the next two
years writing what turned out to be one of the
most controversial and influential landmarks of
modernist ballet and music,
The Rite of Spring.
First performed on May 29, 1913, it sparked an
opening night riot among a sharply divided audi-
ence. World War I interfered with Stravinsky's
successful work with the Ballets Russes. He spent
most of the war in Switzerland with his wife and
two children. Beginning with the pagan themes
of
The Rite of Spring,
Stravinsky turned to more
obvious Russian folk themes and text, which
influenced his work over the next decade, as evi-
denced by
Renard
(1916) and
The Wedding
(1923).
Cut off from Russia by the Russian Revolution,
Stravinsky gradually abandoned the Russian
themes and entered a neoclassical phase that
would inform most of his work for the next three
decades. The Stravinsky family left Switzerland
in 1920 and settled in Paris, where they lived
until 1939. Two important works from this
period, the oratorio
Oedipus Rex
(1927) and the
cantata
Symphony of the Psalms
(1930) reveal the
influence of a religious conversion that Stravin-
sky had experienced in 1926. The deaths of his
eldest daughter, wife, and mother and the onset
of World War II compelled Stravinsky to move to
the United States. He remarried in early 1940
and first settled in Hollywood, California. After
working on symphonies during the war years,
Stravinsky produced his first full-length opera,
The Rake's Progress,
written between 1948 and
1951. Stravinsky's health declined after 1956,
when he suffered a stroke, but he continued to
work actively until 1966, when he completed his
last major work,
Requiem Canticles.
Stravinsky
died in New York City on April 6, 1971.
Suslov, Mikhail Andreevich
(1902-1982)
Soviet official
Content to work away from the center stage of
the ruling circles as the colorless guardian of ide-
ological orthodoxy, Suslov was one of the most
powerful men in the Soviet establishment from
the mid-1960s until his death. Suslov was born
to a Russian peasant family in the Saratov region
of the lower Volga River valley. A teenager at the
time of the 1917 Revolution, he joined the Com-
munist Party's youth league (
KOMSOMOL
) during
the civil war, becoming a full party member in
1921. The following year he was sent to Mos-
cow, where he attended classes at the Institute
for Red Professors as well as the Plekhanov Insti-
tute for Economics, from which he graduated in
1928. As a skilled propagandist he advanced
within the party ranks and in the early 1930s
played a role in removing alleged opponents of
STALIN
in the Urals and the Ukraine. Benefiting
as others of his generation from the decimation
of
COMMUNIST PARTY
ranks during the purges of
the mid-1930s, in 1937 Suslov was appointed a
party secretary of the Rostov region in southern
Russia. Two years later he became first secretary
of the Communist Party in the nearby Stavropol
region, a position he held until 1944. From 1944
to 1946, he supervised the incorporation of
Lithuania, occupied since 1940, into the Soviet
Union. From 1947, when he became a secretary
of the party's Central Committee until his death,
Suslov worked in various capacities of increasing
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