Philip Ross Bullock, M.St., D.Phil. (B.A. Durham)
Professor of Russian Literature and Music
Fellow of Wadham College, Lecturer at Worcester College
Research
My most recent monograph is a short critical life of Tchaikovsky that explores the composer's life within the context of nineteenth-century Russia's evolving musical institutions (conservatoires, publishing, performance, and patronage). I have also edited Rachmaninoff and His World for the University of Chicago Press, part of my role as scholar-in-residence at the Bard Music Festival in summer 2022. I am currently working on an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between words and music in Russian culture from the late eighteenth century to the present day, with a specific focus on the literary, musical and cultural history of the art-song repertoire, as well as on aspects of opera too. In 2022-23, I held a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellowship (Rachmaninov Song at Wigmore Hall), co-curating a series of four recitals with pianist Iain Burnside in 2023-24. A video introducing this series can be found here. I also continue to be interested in the modernist prose writers of the early-Soviet period, particularly Andrei Platonov (on whom I wrote my doctorate) and Isaak Babel'.
My main areas of methodological expertise include theories of gender and sexuality, interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between literature and the other arts, and the study of translation, reception and cultural exchange (with a particular interest in Russia, Britain, Scandinavia and Finland). I am a member of several international networks, including Writing 1900 (a research project jointly hosted by the University of Oxford and the Humboldt University in Berlin), and since 2015, I have served as an elected member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Tschaikowsky-Gesellschaft. Together with Alexandra Lloyd and Laura Tunbridge, I co-convened the Oxford Song Network: Poetry and Performance at TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), and between 2009 and 2024, I was one of the convenors of Study Group for Slavonic and East European Music (supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies).
Before coming to Oxford, I taught at the University of Wales, Bangor, and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. I have held British Academy Postdoctoral and Mid-Career Fellowships, and in 2007, I was Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I spent the academic year 2016/17 as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris, supported by a EURIAS Senior Fellowship. In 2009, I received both the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern Languages. Along with Julie Curtis and Rajinder Dudrah, I was a member of Oxford's AHRC-funded Creative Multilingualism, as part of which I worked closely with the Oxford Lieder Festival. Between 2017 and 2020, I was Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
I particularly enjoy communicating academic ideas to a broader public, and have written and presented a number of talks and features on Russian literature and music that have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, as well as contributing to an award-winning film documentary about Tchaikovsky. I have written programme notes, produced translations and given public talks for various organisations, including Garsington Opera, Welsh National Opera, the Royal Opera House, Stuttgart Opera, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Oxford International Song Festival and Wigmore Hall (recordings of talks I gave in association with Garsington Opera can be found here and here, and a list of my collaborations can be found here).
Teaching
In addition to teaching translation from and into Russian at various levels, I give lectures and tutorials on the full range of nineteenth and twentieth-century authors covered on the undergraduate course. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to Russian literature, and have offered lecture series on 'Russian literary classics on the opera stage' and 'Russian literature and the visual arts'.
Graduate Teaching
Over the years, I have supervised a large number of graduate theses and dissertations, including studies of both Russian music and literature in interwar Paris, literary and political representation in late Imperial Russia, Vyacheslav Ivanov's reception of Nietzsche and Dionysus, Bronislava Nijinska's Polish ballets, the Soviet reception of Benjamin Britten, the representation and detection of crime in the novels of Dostoevsky and Zola, the role played by guitar poetry in Soviet film, the politics of empire in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Dead House, mathematics and Russian modernism, Soviet translations of Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century Russian opera libretto, and the operas of Rodion Shchedrin. I also teach graduate courses on Russian modernism and on theories of gender and sexuality in modern Russian culture.
Publications
Books and edited volumes
- Čajkovskij-Analysen: Neue Strategien, Methoden und Perspektiven, Čajkovskij-Studien 18, co-edited with Lucinde Brauen, Christoph Flamm and Stefan Keym (Mainz: Schott, 2022)
- Rachmaninoff and His World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
- The First World War and its Aftermath: Literary Networks and Cultural Encounters, co-edited with Sofia Permiakova and Gesa Stedman, special issue of Journal of European Studies, 51/3-4 (2021)
- Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, Performance, co-edited with Laura Tunbridge, Proceedings of the British Academy, 236 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
- Music's Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930, co-edited with Daniel M. Grimley (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021)
- 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music, co-edited with Pauline Fairclough, special issue of Slavonic and East European Review, 97/1 (2019)
- Literary Communities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Space, Place, and Identity, co-edited with Stefano Evangelista and Gesa Stedman, special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53/2 (2017)
- Pyotr Tchaikovsky (London: Reaktion, 2016), translated into Romanian (2022) and Turkish (2023)
- Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, co-edited with Rebecca Beasley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
- Loyalties, Solidarities and Identities in Russian Society, History and Culture, co-edited with Andy Byford, Claudio Nun-Ingerflom, Isabelle Ohayon, Maria Rubins and Anna Winestein (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies UCL, 2013)
- Translating Russia, 1890-1935 (special issue of Translation and Literature, 20/3 (2011), co-edited with Rebecca Beasley)
- The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906-1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011)
- Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England, Royal Musical Association Monographs, 18 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)
- The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov (London: Legenda, 2005)
Journal articles and book chapters
- '"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is": Music, Nostalgia, and Affect in Gaito Gazdanov's An Evening with Claire', in Jennifer Rusthworth, Hannah Scott and Barry Ife (eds), Song in the Novel, Proceedings of the British Academy, 265 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 154-170
- 'Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage' in Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt and Laura Scuriaatti (eds), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces Beyond the Centres (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 145-63
- 'The Name-Day Scene in Tchaikovsky's Evgenij Onegin: Symphonic Dramaturgy on the Operatic Stage', in Lucinde Brauen, Christoph Flamm, Stefan Keym and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), Čajkovskij-Analysen: Neue Strategien, Methoden und Perspektiven, Čajkovskij-Studien 18, co-edited with (Mainz: Schott, 2022), 136-48
- 'Dialogues with Pushkin: From Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky and The Rake's Progress', in Rachael Durkin, Peter Dayan, Axel Englund and Katharine Clausius (eds), The Routledge Comparion to Literature and Modern Music (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 141-50, trans. Kay Baburina as ‘V dialoge s Pushkinym: Ot Chaikovskogo k Stravinskomu i “Pokhozhdeniem povesy”’, Versus, 2/6 (2022), 41-60
- 'Rachmaninoff and the "Vocalise": Word and Music in the Russian Silver Age', in Philip Ross Bullock (ed.), Rachmaninoff and His World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 82-97
- 'Rachmaninoff and the Celebrity Interview: A Selection of Documents from the American Press', in Philip Ross Bullock (ed.), Rachmaninoff and His World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 180-215
- 'Shekspirshchina: Nineteenth-Century Russian Musical Responses to Shakespeare', in Mervyn Cooke and Christopher Wilson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 624-41
- 'By the Waters of the Tiber: Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Grechaninov and Russian Culture in Interwar Europe', Journal of European Studies, 51/3-4 (2021), 377-54
- 'The German Roots of Russian Orientalism: Hafiz's Poetry in Early-20th-Century Russian Song', in Philip Ross Bullock and Laura Tunbridge (eds), Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 47-63
- 'Sibelius Reception in Britain, 1901-1939: Centre and Periphery in the Musical Construction of the North', in Philip Ross Bullock and Daniel M. Grimley (eds), Music's Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), pp. 233-49
- 'Tchaikovsky and Song: Music as Poetry', in Delia da Sousa Correa (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 477-82
- 'Beginnings, Endings, and Eternal Returns: Vladimir Sharov's Rehearsals and the Legacy of the Soviet Avant-garde', Slavic and East European Journal, 64/1 (2020), 62-74
- 'A Breath of Fresh Air... Ivan Vyrypaev's Oxygen (2002) from Moscow to Birmingham via Oxford' (with Rajinder Dudrah, Julie Curtis and Noah Birksted-Breen), in Katrin Kohl (et al.), Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), pp. 87-108
- 'A la russe, mais à l'étranger: Russian Opera Abroad', in Andy Byford, Connor Doak and Steven Hutchings, Transnational Russian Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 184-96
- '"That More Liberal Mode of Life": Rosa Newmarch, Aestheticism and Queer Listening in Victorian and Edwardian Britain', in Sarah Collins (ed.), Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 109-26
- 'Chaikovsky and the Economics of Art Music in Late Ninteenth-Century Russia', Journal of Musicology, 36/2 (2019), 195-227
- 'The Birth of the Soviet Romance from the Spirit of Russian Modernism', Slavonic and East European Review, 97/1 (2019), 110-35
- 'Song in a Strange Land: The Russian Musical Lyric Beyond the Nation', in Kevin M. F. Platt (ed.), Global Russian Cultures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 290-311
- 'Are You Musical? Sexuality and Social Utopianism in the Reception of Russian Music in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain', in Inga Mai Groote and Stefan Keym (eds), Russische Musik in Westeuropa bis 1917: Ideen - Funktionen - Transfers (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2018), 229-46
- 'From Text to Act: Tchaikovsky's Songs as Embodied Emotion', in Julie A. Buckler, Julie A. Cassiday and Boris Wolfson (eds), Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), 123-30
- ‘Russia and Eastern Europe’, in Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton (eds) British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850- 1950 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), 174-93
- 'Choice and Inevitability: The Moral Economy of Peter Grimes', in Kate Kennedy (ed.), Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), 223-42
- ‘“That’s Not the Only Reason We Love Him”: Tchaikovskii Reception in Post-Soviet Russia’, Slavic Review, 77/1 (2018), 53-78, republished in Richard C. M. Mole (ed.), Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 109-28
- 'Čaikovskij and the Language of Same-Sex Desire', in Kadja Grönke and Michael Zywietz (eds), Musik und Homosexualität - Homosexualität und Musik, Jahrbuch Musik und Gender 10 (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms, 2017), 49-59
- ‘An Antidote to Ibsen? British Responses to Chekhov and the Legacy of Naturalism’, in Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole (eds), Adapting Translation for the Stage (Abington and New York: Routledge, 2017), 56-68
- ‘Ibsen on the London Stage around the Turn of the Century: Independent Theatre as Transnational Space’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies, 53/2 (2017), 360-70
- 'Lyric and Landscape in Rimsky-Korsakov's Songs', 19th-Century Music, 40/3 (2017), 223-38
- ‘“An Era of Eros”: Hellenic Lyricism in the Early Twentieth-Century Russian Art-Song’, in Katerina Levidou, Katy Romanou and George Vlastov (eds), Musical Receptions of Greek Antiquity: From the Romantic Era to Modernism (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2016), pp. 260-95
- '"A Cool Transparency": Platonov and the Affordance of Vision', in Ben Dhooge and Michel de Dobbeleer (eds), Uslyshat' os' zemnuiu: Festschrift for Thomas Langerak on his Retirement (Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2016), 43-57
- 'The Mountain of the Mind: The Politics of the Gaze in Andrei Platonov's "Dzhan"', Slavic Review, 73/4 (2014), 751-71
- 'Intimacy and Distance: Valentin Sil'vestrov's Tikhie pesni', Slavonic and East European Review, 92/3 (2014), 401-29
- '"Nemorgaiushchii glaz chelovechestva": Illiustratsii Kirilla Sokolova k "Kotlovanu" Andreia Platonova', in B. V. Dooge [Dhooge], T. Langerak and E. A. Iablokova (eds), Vozvrashchaius' k Platonovu: voprosy retseptsii (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2013), 496-537
- 'Introduction: Against Influence: On Writing about Russian Culture in Britain' (co-authored with Rebecca Beasley), in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-18
- 'Tsar's Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895-1926', in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 113-28
- 'Not One of Us? The Paradoxes of Translating Oscar Wilde in the Soviet Union', in Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo (eds), The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), 235-64
- 'Babel', Pater i ekfrasis po-angliiski', in D. V. Tokarev (ed), 'Nevyrazimo vyrazimoe': ekfrasis i problemy reprezentatsii vizual'nogo v khudozhestvennom tekske (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2013), 269-80
- 'Platonov and Theories of Modernism', Russian Literature, 1/2 (2013), 301-22
- '"Wilful Melancholy" or "A Vigorous and Manly Optimism"?: Rosa Newmarch and the Struggle against Decadence in the British Reception of Russian Music, 1897-1919', in Anthony Cross (ed.), 'A Peole Passing Rude': British Responses to Russian Culture (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 125-32
- 'Faith or Forgery? Walter Benjamin and Nikolai Leskov's The Sealed Angel', in Carolin Duttlinger, Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan (eds), Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Freiburg: Rombach, 2012), 325-41
- 'Platonov and the Open Text', in Katharine Holt (ed.), Andrei Platonov: Style, Context, Meaning (= Ulbandus, 14 (2012)), 302-17
- 'Women and Music', in Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (eds), Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), pp.119-36
- ‘The Illusion of Transparency’, Translation and Literature, 20/3 (2011), 282-300 (co-authored with Rebecca Beasley)
- ‘Untranslated and Untranslatable? Pushkin’s Poetry in English, 1892-1931’, Translation and Literature, 20/3 (2011), 348-72
- ‘Sibelius and the Russian Traditions’, in Daniel Grimley (ed.), Sibelius and His World (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp.3-57
- 'Utopia and the Novel after the Revolution', in Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.79-96
- 'The Composer’s Voice, the Post’s Echo: Monologic Verse or Dialogic Song?', in Pauline Fairclough (ed.), Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.207-227
- '"Lessons in Sensibility": Rosa Newmarch, Music Appreciation and the Aesthetic Cultivation of the Self', in Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell (eds), The Arts in Victorian Literature (= Yearbook of English Studies, 40 (2010)), 295-318
- 'The Cruel Art of Beauty: Walter Pater and the Uncanny Aestheticism of Isaak Babel''s Red Cavalry', Modern Language Review, 104 (2009), 499-529
- 'Andrei Platonov’s Happy Moscow: Tolstoi, Stalin and the Soviet Self', in Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (eds), Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London: Anthem Press, 2009), pp.201-15
- 'Padenie v upadnichestvo: Schastlivaia Moskva i literaturnyi stil' mezhdu etikoi i estetikoi', in E. I. Kolesnikova (ed.), Tvorchestvo A. Platonov. Kniga 4 (St Petersburg: Nauka, 2009), pp.107-19
- 'Ambiguous Speech and Eloquent Silence: The Queerness of Tchaikovsky’s Songs', 19th-Century Music, 32 (2008), 94-128
- 'The Pushkin Anniversary of 1937 and Russian Art Song in the Soviet Union', Slavonica, 13 (2007), 39-56
- 'Andrei Platonov’s Happy Moscow: Stalinist Kitsch and Ethical Decadence', Modern Language Review, 101 (2006), 201-11
- 'Staging Stalinism: The Search for Soviet Opera in the 1930s', Cambridge Opera Journal, 18 (2006), 83-108
- 'The Musical Imagination of Andrei Platonov', Slavonica, 10 (2004), 41-60
- 'A Modern Ahasuerus: Jewish Themes in the Works of Andrei Platonov', Essays in Poetics, 27 (2002), 139-61
- 'Materinstvo kak metafora sploshnoi kollektivizatsii (po tvorchestvi Andreia Platonova', in Z. A. Khotkina, N. L. Pushkareva and E. I. Trofimova (eds), Zhenshchina, Gender, Kul'tura (Moscow: MTsGI, 1999), pp.312-20
Other publications
- 'Kobyz: Hearing Space, Seeing Silence', in Alim Sabitov and Nariman Skakov (eds), 14 Essays Inspired by the Sculptures of Erkin Mergenov (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2010), pp.41-8, published in Russian as ‘Kobyz (1977)’, in Nariman Skakov (ed.), 14 esse o skul’pturakh Erkina Mergenova (Almaty: Interprint, 2010), pp.67-76
- 'Prologo', in Alexander Pushkin, Historias de Belkin, trans. James and Marion Womack (Madrid: Nevsky Prospects, 2009), pp.7-19
- '"How it Strikes a Contemporary": Literature and Culture in Contemporary Russia', in Peter J. S. Duncan (ed.), Convergence and Divergence: Russia and Eastern Europe into the Twenty-First Century (London: UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2007), pp.163-8, previously published in Russian in Antopologicheskii forum, 5 (2006), 431-9
- 'The Songs of Sergei Prokofiev: Texts and Contexts, Imitations and Interrogations', Three Oranges, 11 (2006), 17-22
- Twenty entries (including ‘Romans’, ‘Soviet Opera’, ‘Post-Soviet Opera’)', in Karen Evans-Romaine, Helena Goscilo and Tatiana Smorodinskaya (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture (London: Routledge, 2006)
- ‘Shostakovich and Literature’; ‘Isaak Babel′’ and ‘Konarmiia’; ‘Andrei Platonov’, ‘Kotlovan’, ‘Vozvrashchenie’, ‘Schastlivaia Moskva’ and ‘Chevengur’, in Robert Clark, Emory Elliott and Janet Todd (eds), The Literary Encyclopedia and Literary Dictionary