The Concert Ticket

HISTORICAL NOTE

IN 1962, the celebrated Russian composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky accepted a Soviet invitation to visit his former country—his first trip to his native land after half a century of absence. He was eighty years old. A historic concert, with Stravinsky himself conducting, was given at the Great Hall of the Philharmonia in Leningrad. The line for tickets began a year before the performance and evolved into a unique and complex social system, with people working together and taking turns standing in line. After a year of waiting, an eighty-four-year-old cousin of Stravinsky was unable to attend, as the tickets had sold out; her number in the line was 5,001.

Although The Concert Ticket is set in a fictionalized version of Soviet Russia, its central premise is inspired by this historical episode. Likewise, while the characters in the book are invented, there are certain parallels with actual persons and events. Most notably, Maya’s ballet world in the Western “city of light” is loosely based on the famous Ballets Russes, a company that was a sensation in Paris in the years before the Revolution and that included the incomparable Vaslav Nijinsky (once described as “the little devil [who] never comes down with the music”) and the beautiful Tamara Karsavina. Among the company’s most groundbreaking productions were ballets written by the then unknown Stravinsky, including The Firebird (L’oiseau de feu, 1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps, 1913).

Finally, a word about chronology. The year in which the novel takes place is identified as the thirty-seventh anniversary of the “Change,” which, of course, mirrors the October Revolution of 1917. This is not, however, intended to imply a temporal setting of 1954. Rather, I have borrowed freely from three different periods of Soviet history: the repression of Stalin’s 1930s, the hopefulness of Khrushchev’s Thaw (late 1950s–early 1960s), and the stagnation of Brezhnev’s 1970s.

The verse about the cuckoo is taken from a 1911 poem by Anna Akhmatova, “I live like a cuckoo in a clock”; the translation is my own.