‘I loathed being at home’: Glinka, Kukolnik, and the brotherhood behind Farewell to Saint Petersburg

This study attempts to systematise memoirs, archival data, and academic publications concerning the creative partnership between the composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857) and the writer Nestor Kukolnik (1809–1868). The article draws on materials from the Glinka collection in the Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library, memoirs, and a number of pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and contemporary publications on the lives and work of figures in Russian culture during the period under consideration, with the aim of shedding light on aspects of the subject that have not previously been the subject of scholarly examination: the private lives of the two artists and examples of their mutual influence on each other’s artistic lives. The aim of the study is to identify the resources and mechanisms through which autobiographical elements are reflected in Glinka’s song cycle Farewell to Saint Petersburg (1840). Based on the assertion that musical texts, like literary ones, possess a collective memory in a semiotic interpretation, the author of this article identifies in Mikhail Glinka’s song cycle the specific characteristics of the composer’s worldview, as well as the traditions and way of life of his era. The author concludes that the city’s culture, in its personified form, can be represented in a text as a system that is holistic in terms of semantics, imagery, and meaning; a system that reflects the cultural identity of the people and captures the characteristics of the national and cultural mentality. Through historical, comparative, source-critical, literary, and musicological analysis, the study reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the cycle’s creation and situates the Bratiya circle within Glinka’s personal and professional crises of the late 1830s. It argues that the twelve contrasting songs form a unified autobiographical narrative in which friendship, departure, urban memory, and national musical idioms converge, while the piano assumes an increasingly independent expressive role.