How This Research Works

How this research works

Why show the method

TL;DR: one person, working alone, with two tools that make the work possible. The method is part of what I’m sharing.

The project

A thesis I wrote as an undergraduate, on Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, reopened.
What makes it possible now: the theory it needs, in Russian and German and mostly untranslated, can be found, read and checked from a desk at home.

Working alone

No university post, no department, no research budget.
Only limited access to the subscription databases scholarship assumes.
This page shows what one person can do without that apparatus, and where the limits are.

What makes it possible

Tool	What it does
Digital humanities	Scanned texts, open catalogues and publication databases, text recognition, reference software. Sources that once needed a research trip, read from home. A new paradigm: it widens who can do humanities research.
An AI research assistant (Claude)	In one day, searched eight kinds of sources in three languages. Since then, checked more than four hundred bibliographic records against open databases, caught the errors, and made a scanned German volume searchable. The work of a research staff. Without it, I would not have reopened the topic.

Who does what

The assistant	Me
Finds, checks, drafts, proposes	Reads the sources, makes every ruling and every claim, writes the argument

One ordered path

TL;DR: all the work is one list, done in order. The order changes as I learn.

The list

Everything is on it: the reading, the analysis of the score, the work on the poems, the practical tasks (loans, library visits, scans), and the writing.
The next thing to do is always the first item not yet done.
The two largest translations run alongside as projects of their own, in their own sessions, and never hold up the rest.

The order

Step	What
1	Setting up the tools
2	The event of 1961 to 1963: the poems, the premiere and the documents, read before any theory
3	The theory
4	The Soviet reading of the symphony
5	Its contexts
6	The other people who have written on it
7	The score and recordings, last, when I know what to listen for

Reading the event first means every theory text is read against a known event.

Where each text goes

Primary sources before the maps. I read Bekker, Asafyev and Sollertinsky themselves before anyone’s account of them, so the accounts can’t do my thinking for me.
A text, then the studies of it. Commentary comes straight after the thing it comments on, while that thing is fresh.
The map in English comes last. Russian and German studies come before English ones, because recovering the literature that English readers never had is the point of the project.
The case against sits next to the case for. A sceptic comes straight after the argument it doubts, not at the end of the phase.
Whole texts, front to back, one at a time.

Numbering

Items keep their numbers once given.
A later addition gets a letter or a sub-number that says where it hangs: 4a after 4; 23a1 after 23a.
So a number cited in a note never changes meaning.

Reading in the original

TL;DR: I read Russian, with effort, and German with help. Every non-English source gets one of five kinds of handling, and every finished translation is mine.

Five kinds of handling

Handling	Used for
Full translation	The texts that are themselves the object of study: Yevtushenko’s five poems, Asafyev’s theory of musical form, Asafyev’s 1926 preface, and Sollertinsky’s 1941 lecture on the symphony
Read in Russian, translated only where quoted	The default: Soviet musicology, documents and memoirs
The translation as evidence	Paul Bekker’s 1918 lecture on the symphony reached Soviet readers in a 1926 Russian translation, edited by Asafyev. I read that Russian text, because the translation is part of the story, and check its key terms against the German
German with an English companion	Where a good translation exists. I go to the German for anything quoted
German with a phrase-by-phrase gloss	From the research assistant, where no translation exists

Two rules

Translations are made in their own sessions, a passage at a time. The research assistant supplies a literal version in the Russian word order; the finished translation, and every choice in it, is mine. Published translations are read afterwards, as a check against mine rather than a guide.
One glossary holds every ruling on a term, so a word reads the same way in every note.

The music and the texts

TL;DR: a symphony of 1962 on five poems by Yevtushenko, its words changed under pressure in 1963, and the bodies of thought I bring to it.

The work


Work	Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, op. 113 (1962)
Forces	Bass soloist, a chorus of basses, and orchestra
Texts	Five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, one to a movement
Premiere	Moscow, 18 December 1962: Kirill Kondrashin, the Moscow Philharmonic, and the bass Vitaly Gromadsky
Western premiere	Philadelphia, January 1970

The five movements

«Бабий Яр» (“Babi Yar”)
«Юмор» (“Humor”): humor that outlives every tyrant
«В магазине» (“In the Store”): women queuing in a shop
«Страхи» (“Fears”): the fears of the Stalin years
«Карьера» (“A Career”): a career of conscience (Galileo’s) set against a career of conformity

Babi Yar

A ravine on the edge of Kyiv.
On 29 and 30 September 1941, German units shot 33,771 Jews there, by their own count.
Over the next two years tens of thousands more, Jews and others, were killed at the site.
Soviet memory counted these dead as “peaceful Soviet citizens”. In 1961 the ravine had no memorial.

The poem

Printed on 19 September 1961.
It opens with that fact: «Над Бабьим Яром памятников нет» (“Over Babi Yar there are no monuments”).
Its speaker takes on a Jewish identity and names antisemitism at home as well as abroad.
The press attacked it within days.

From premiere to ban

Date	What happened
18 December 1962	The premiere, in Moscow. The same month, Khrushchev turned on the arts, and the press all but ignored the premiere
20 December 1962	Kondrashin’s live performance is recorded, with the original words
Early 1963	Under official pressure, Yevtushenko replaces two passages of «Бабий Яр». The lines in which the speaker becomes a Jew give way to lines laying Russian and Ukrainian dead beside the Jews. A later passage gives way to praise of Russia’s stand against fascism
From February 1963	The symphony is sung with the new lines
May 1963	A Central Committee memo judges its wide performance “inadvisable”. It is rarely heard in the Soviet Union for years
1967	Kondrashin’s studio recording, with the same orchestra and the revised words
January 1970	The Western premiere, in Philadelphia

So two recordings keep both texts: Kondrashin live in 1962 with the original words, and in the studio in 1967 with the revised ones.

The critical apparatus

I come to the symphony with several bodies of thought, each chosen because it asks the work a different question. The list is provisional, and it will change as my own framing becomes clearer.

Lens	What it is	The question it asks
The Soviet theory of the symphony	Paul Bekker argued in 1918 that a symphony’s power is to form a community of its listeners. Boris Asafyev’s “symphonism” treats musical form as a process heard in time, carried by intonation. Ivan Sollertinsky sorted symphonies into historical types of musical drama. This is the theory Shostakovich’s own critics used	Why is a work like this a symphony at all, and not a cantata or a song cycle?
Identity and self-fashioning	Soviet citizens were asked to make themselves into new, Soviet selves, and many worked at it: in diaries, in how they spoke, in what and how they read. Soviet audiences also took in socially critical work, in the thick journals, at the poetry readings, in the concert hall	How might an audience have heard such a work as being about itself, carried its story over into their own lives, and identified with it?
Many voices	Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyphony and dialogue	How does a work hold voices without absorbing them: a single bass against a male chorus, a poet’s words against a composer’s music?
Memory and monument	How societies remember through shared forms: collective memory, commemorative genres that carry the meaning of their earlier uses, and music as monument	What does it mean for music to act as a memorial, when the poem begins by naming the monument that isn’t there?
The Jewish idiom	A long argument over what the “Jewish” sounds in Shostakovich’s music mean	What might their absence from this symphony’s first movement mean?
Soviet sincerity and irony	The Thaw prized sincerity, and a more ironic culture came after it	Does a symphony of 1962 sit on the line between them?

Claims, evidence, and doubt

TL;DR: the argument is built in parts, each held at one of three levels. Deciding how much weight a part can bear is the core scholarly judgment in this project, and it is mine.

Three levels

Level	What it is	What it obliges
Working reading	A way of hearing or reading the work that I find productive but haven’t tested	Judged by how far it carries the argument: what it lets me notice, what it connects, where it runs out. It isn’t right or wrong yet. It earns its keep or it doesn’t
Hypothesis	A reading stated precisely enough that evidence could count against it	Committing to what would show it false (a passage in the score, a document, a contemporary’s account) and looking for that evidence, not only for support
Claim	A hypothesis that has met the evidence against it, and I stand on it	It goes into the finished writing as an argument, with its objections answered in the open

Example: two parts of the argument, at their levels My undergraduate reading of the symphony as a monument is a hypothesis: I argued it once, and it can be tested. My newer sense that the symphony forms a community among its listeners is still a working reading.

Who decides

Only I move a part from one level to the next.
The research assistant can point out that a reading seems ready to be tested, or that the evidence has turned. The decision is mine.
Whether a passage supports a reading, tells against it, or complicates it is a judgment about the text on its own terms, and I make it.

Recording evidence

Every finding is recorded with an exact reference: page, bar, line, or timestamp.
Each is marked for, against, or complicating.
Evidence against is filed as carefully as evidence for.
Open questions are written down with the date they were raised, and kept until something answers them.

Example: evidence against A 1963 letter from the Minsk performances describes the audience dividing along the very line my reading says the symphony erased. It goes into the path as the first thing to answer when its phase closes.

Citation

Standard scholarly practice: general knowledge in the field goes uncited. Quotations, specific facts that aren’t common knowledge, other scholars’ interpretations, and anything contested are cited.
One habit goes further: every private note carries an exact reference, even where the finished writing won’t need one, so any point can be cited later if it turns out to matter.

Finding and choosing sources

TL;DR: the sources were found in one sweep before any reading began, about 540 distinct items. The research assistant searched and checked; I ruled on every item.

What was searched

#	Where	What
1	A citation graph, in two rounds	Starting from sources already in hand, a citation-graph tool found work that cites them and work that resembles them. Round one started from studies of Asafyev’s theory, of the Jewish idiom in Shostakovich, of Sollertinsky and the Soviet symphony, of Holocaust memory in Soviet music, and of the Thaw. Round two started from what the first turned up, among them studies of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, of Russian musicology up to Asafyev, of the musical Thaw, and of Mahler and genre
2	A Russian open-access journal archive	Searched about eighty ways, in Russian and in English: the symphony and the poem; Yevtushenko; Asafyev, Sollertinsky and Bekker; symphonism; the mass song; the Thaw’s culture of sincerity; Holocaust memory; the tradition of the poetic “monument”
3	The bibliographies of the closest studies of the Thirteenth	A master’s thesis and two undergraduate theses on the symphony, the newest Russian article on its history, and the editor’s essay for the facsimile edition of the score
4	Dissertations in English	Open thesis repositories and a publication database
5	Russian dissertations and monographs	The Russian dissertation databases, the Russian State Library, and the Library of Congress
6	German scholarship	Studies of Paul Bekker, and German writing on Shostakovich, through the German National Library’s catalogue and its scanned tables of contents
7	The press and documents of 1961 to 1970	The Soviet papers that printed the poem and attacked it, the official record of the Party’s meetings with the intelligentsia, and the Western press and wire reports
8	The literature on audiences	Reception theory, identification with characters and personas, the psychology and history of emotion, and Soviet audience research, searched in open publication databases, Russian library catalogues and journal archives, and on the web in English and Russian
9	Everything cross-checked	Each record checked against open databases of publication records; doubtful details confirmed in library catalogues or inside the books themselves

From sweep to path

The research assistant did the searching, checked every record, and proposed a ruling for each item.
I made the rulings, strongest items first.
Each item was read in, kept as a citable record, set aside as a personal interest, or passed over.
Then I set the order: where each accepted source falls in the path, and next to what.

Every source that made it into the path is listed, in reading order, on the sources page. The research log’s entry for 27 September 2026 tells how the sweep went.

Tools

TL;DR: everything here is free except the assistant, the domain, and a library card.

Tool	What it does here	Cost
Obsidian	The notes: the ordered path, the working journal, the claims and their evidence	Free
git	Every change to the notes recorded, with a message	Free
Zotero, with Better BibTeX	The bibliography of record: one checked record and one permanent citation key per source	Free
Crossref, OpenAlex, DataCite, Open Library	Open databases used to check that every cited item, and its DOI, author, title and year, is real	Free
Library catalogues (Library of Congress, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Russian State Library, a university library)	Holdings, imprints, and tables of contents	Free to search; borrowing on a paid community card
Google Books search-inside	Page-level checks inside books not at hand	Free
Research Rabbit	A citation-graph explorer: from sources in hand, the work that cites them or resembles them	Free
CyberLeninka; dissercat	The Russian open-access journal archive; the Russian dissertation database	Free (dissercat’s full texts are paid; none bought)
Apple’s Vision text recognition	Reads scanned pages (Russian, German) into searchable text	Free (built into macOS)
This website (Astro, hosted on Cloudflare)	The notes publish straight to the site	Domain about $8.50 a year; hosting free
Claude (Anthropic)	An AI research assistant. It searches, checks records, drafts, and proposes. It never rules: every ruling and every claim is mine	Subscription

Voice, credit, and rights

TL;DR: my words are my own, the assistant’s substantial contributions are marked, and only public-domain texts are reprinted in full.

Voice

My observations are in my own words.
Where the research assistant’s contribution is substantial, it is marked as a “research assistant’s note”.
The site’s footer credits the assistant too.
Nothing goes up here without my approval of the exact text.

What can be reprinted

Material	What appears here
Texts in the public domain: Bekker’s German writings, and Asafyev’s writings of the 1920s and 1930s where their copyright has lapsed	Quoted and translated in full
Everything else	Brief quotation, with attribution
The score (I own a legal copy)	Analyzed freely; only brief excerpts reprinted
Recordings	Cited by timestamp and description, never hosted here

Each quoted source is checked for its rights before it appears.

Glossary

TL;DR: the terms this project uses, in plain words.

The research toolkit

Digital humanities — humanities research done with, and about, digital methods: digitized sources, text processing, databases, and networked publication. Here it means the whole workflow is shown, not only the findings.
Zotero — a free, open-source reference manager: it stores bibliographic records (and links to their files) and formats citations in any style.
Citation key — a short, permanent label for one source (e.g. haasBorisAsafyev1992), used in notes and drafts instead of a full citation. Software turns keys into formatted notes and a bibliography.
BibTeX / BibLaTeX — long-standing plain-text formats for bibliographies, from the LaTeX typesetting world; BibLaTeX is the newer, richer one.
Better BibTeX — a free Zotero plugin that assigns stable citation keys and keeps exports of the library automatically up to date.
CSL (Citation Style Language) — an open standard that describes a citation style (Chicago, MLA, APA …) as a machine-readable file, so one set of records can be printed in any style.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) — a simple plain-text format for structured data: named fields and values, readable by people and by almost any program.
CSL JSON — the JSON format for bibliographic records that CSL-based software reads: each source is one record with fields like author, title, issued, original-title.
Better CSL JSON — Better BibTeX’s version of CSL JSON: it writes each record’s citation key as its id (so [@key] in a draft finds the right source) and turns labeled lines in Zotero’s Extra field (like original-title:) into real fields. With “Keep updated” on, the file rewrites itself whenever the library changes.
Pandoc — a free document converter; with a CSL style it turns a draft that cites [@key, page] into formatted footnotes and a bibliography.
Chicago notes and bibliography — the citation style used across musicology: footnotes in the text, a full bibliography at the end.
ALA-LC romanization — the Library of Congress / American Library Association system for writing Cyrillic in Latin letters (Асафьев → Asaf’ev); the standard in library catalogs.
OCR (optical character recognition) — software that reads the letters in a page image and turns them into text; needed for scans that have no text layer.
Text layer — the hidden, searchable text inside a PDF. A scan without one is just pictures of pages.
Linked vs. stored attachment — a linked file stays where it is on the researcher’s disk and the record points to it; a stored copy is moved into the reference manager’s own folder (and its sync quota).
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) — a permanent identifier for a published item (e.g. 10.1017/slr.2020.49) that resolves to it online.
ISBN (International Standard Book Number) — the identifier printed on a book, one per edition and format.
Crossref / OpenAlex — open databases of scholarly publication records; used to check that every cited DOI and its author, title, and year are real and correct.
DataCite — the other main registry of DOIs, used by many data repositories, university repositories and Russian journals. A DOI missing from Crossref may be at DataCite.
Citation graph — the network of which works cite which. Tools like Research Rabbit walk it outward from a few known sources.
Autoreferat (автореферат) — the short printed summary of a Russian dissertation, circulated before the defence. Often the only part of an old dissertation that can be read from abroad.
Running head — the line at the top of a printed page giving the author or chapter title. On a scanned book, running heads show where each chapter starts and ends.
Source criticism — the historian’s questions about a document before trusting it: who made it, when, for whom, and how it reached us.
Finding aid — an archive’s guide to one collection: what boxes and folders it holds, and what is in them.

The field

Symphonism (симфонизм) — Asafyev’s word for music conceived as a continuous, developing process, where every element depends on the rest. It became the yardstick of Soviet criticism of the symphony.
Intonation (интонация) — in Asafyev’s theory, the smallest unit of musical meaning as a society hears it: a turn of melody, rhythm or harmony that carries sense the way a spoken phrase does.
Mass song — the Soviet genre of simple, unison, singable songs for collective singing, the official popular music from the 1930s on.
The Thaw — the period after Stalin’s death in 1953, and especially after 1956, when censorship loosened and the Stalinist past could be partly discussed, before the tightening of the mid-1960s.
Thick journals — the Russian literary monthlies (Новый мир, Юность and others) that published new fiction, poetry and criticism, and were where much of the Thaw’s public argument happened.