Anatoly Lunacharsky’s In the World of Music (V mire muzyki) is a collection of essays and articles on classical music. In the introduction, Lunacharsky frames the pieces not as musicology but as an attempt at a cultural history of music written from a Marxist perspective. The volume is therefore less a technical study of harmony, form, or performance than a series of critical and cultural reflections on composers, works, and musical life.
The essays address a range of European and Russian subjects. They include a piece connected with the Chopin centenary; a discussion of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust; assessments of Modest Mussorgsky, Aleksandr Glazunov, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Beethoven; and a treatment of the nineteenth-century critic and tastemaker Vladimir Stasov, among other topics. The collection is occasional and evaluative rather than a systematic survey, combining appreciation of individual composers with broader commentary on music’s cultural and public significance.
The book’s recurring concern is the social character of musical experience: Lunacharsky asks what a work reveals about the era and milieu that produced it, how a composer’s world-view enters the music, and how music becomes a public fact through performance, criticism, and education. His Marxist perspective is visible less in formulaic class labels than in a broad historical materialism that treats art as both conditioned by society and capable of shaping consciousness.
The essays on individual composers combine attention to expressive character with judgments about artistic truth and social resonance. Russian subjects are approached through questions of national tradition, realism, and the composer’s relation to the people; Western works are considered through tensions between romantic individualism and revolutionary or collective aspiration. The collection also reflects on the critic’s task—Stasov appears as a figure who shaped public taste—and on the need for an accessible musical culture.
Its significance lies in its model of Marxist criticism that is appreciative rather than reductive, treating the classical heritage as usable rather than merely ideological. It presents music as a site of cultural struggle and education, and criticism as a bridge between composer, work, and audience.
