In J. D. Salinger's collection of short stories, For Esme with Love and Squalour, there is one that I especially like called 'De Daumier Smith's Blue Period'.
Comic and deadly, it is a portrait of youthful self-absorption, obsession and innocent ignorance, and I think it appeals to me because it reminds me unerringly of what I might call my 'Russian Period'.
In September 1952, I was working on a plan, at that stage unrevealed, to convince my parents to buy a radiogram. Radiograms and the emerging Long Playing microgroove records were just beginning what would be their relatively brief dominance of the music-listening world before Compact Discs and the replacement of valves by transistors supplanted them.
For a nearly sixteen-year-old, hormone-besieged young bloke plotting to ambush loving parents who, in his opinion, needed some re-education, the radiogram was heaven-sent. It was a music player which looked like a piece of furniture. Substantial, polished, pretending to be fashioned by hand from this or that kind of wood, radiograms cleverly concealed their essential artiness, their capacity to resound with symphonies and choirs or riff and rage with traditional jazz behind or beneath a façade entirely acceptable to any respectable, middle-class suburban lounge room.
I reasoned, however, that to make the case for a radiogram convincingly, I would have to show how and why it was necessary for the proper completion of my life and well-being, and how a lack of it would be desolating and possibly cause me to fall into dangerous decline. In short, I needed to know something about the music which only the radiogram could dispense. This task suited me very well because I was embarking with genuine enthusiasm and a degree of dogged determination on a self-tutoring course in classical music, aided by a program on ABC Radio, the name of which I forget, but which I turned to each Saturday once the counter attraction of football had either waned or ended.
I don't know how it was that I became so engrossed with and especially appreciative of Russian composers. Whatever the explanation, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Khachaturian, Ippolitov — all one way or another goose-bumpingly romantic — became my special favourites, though Ippolitov perhaps partly because I loved sounding the drum roll of his full name: Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov.
It was difficult for me in those intense days to choose a favourite from among these melodic Slavs whose tortured lives and gloomy sensibilities appealed