‘I Have Never Loved Anyone as Much as I Love You’Pyotr Souvtchinsky and Igor Stravinsky: Pages of Friendship

The article is a part of the forthcoming collaborative monograph The Space of Stravinsky, in which the events of the last ten years of Stravinsky’s life will be examined, including the details of his visit to the USSR in 1962. A number of documents from the ‘F. I. Stravinsky & Sons’ foundation will be published for the first time. The contents of the correspondence between Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky and Pyotr Petrovich Souvtchinsky, published in 2024 in the collection I. F. Stravinsky. Correspondence with Russians. Vol. IV, are just starting to enter the scholarly turnover. The present article provides detailed comments to a number of these letters. Upon moving to the USA, I. F. Stravinsky was avidly interested in the latest news of Paris’s musical life. In turn, P. P. Souvtchinsky not just informed his old friend about the events, but also functioned as the ‘guardian’ of his creative interests. Besides, he was an active mediator between Stravinsky and Soviet musicians that sought to promote the composer’s works in his native land. Another subject matter of the present article is the fate of Stravinsky’s archive. Th e attitude of P. P. Souvtchinsky, considered by the composer as the keeper of his archive, radically diverged from that of Stravinsky’s widow Vera Stravinskaya, as indicated by the correspondence between P. P. Souvtchinsky and the composer’s niece K. Yu. Stravinskaya, some excerpts of which are published here for the first time.