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Footnotes 1 Nethanel E. Pollak, “The Viola Behind the Iron Curtain: A Survey of Original Viola Works from the Soviet Era.” (DMA diss., University of Miami, 2024), 85-149. 2 See: Marina Frolova-Walker, “The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny: An Aesthetic of Socialist Realism,” in Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America, ed. Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 403–23; and Frolova-Walker, Marina, Jonathan Powell, Rosamund Bartlett, Izaly Zemtsovsky, Mark Slobin, Jarkko Niemi, and Yuri Sheikin. “Russian Federation.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 12 Nov. 2025. 3 Frolova-Walker, “The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny,” 403. 4 Frolova-Walker, “The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny,” 408. 5 Powell. 21. 6 Alexandr Ivashkin, “Who’s Afraid of Socialist Realism?” The Slavonic and East European Review 92, no. 3 (July 2014): 430-31. As mentioned, socialist realism can simultaneously be seen as a concept, a movement, a method, or a style. The rest of this article will mainly refer to the stylistic aspects of socialist realism, as they are most relevant to the music addressed below. 7 Ivashkin, 430-31. 12 See Powell’s description of the early Soviet wave of avant-garde, and how it degraded in favor of Socialist Realism in the 1930’s. Powell, 18-20. 13 Consider Ivashkin (432-34) for an Figure of a discussion on the quality of socialist realist works. 14 Pollak diss., 85-149. While many sources date the end of Soviet social-realist music in 1960 and the beginning of the Thaw, it is apparent that composers kept writing in this style far beyond 1960. In the case of the viola literature corpus research, although avant garde music was gradually growing since the late 1950’s, the tendency to write under the social-realist influence seems to fully end around 1970. Since the definitive borders of social-realism in music are fluid, one can spot social-realist features in music before 1930 or after 1970 as well. 15 Pollak diss., 152-56. 8 Ivashkin, 431. 9 Ivashkin, 431. 10 Powell, 21-22. 11 Ivashkin, 431.

16 Consider Frolova-Walker’s “The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny” for instance, that only regards symphonies. 17 Pollak diss., 75-76, 85-149. 18 Data is gathered from Pollak diss., 85-149, where a more detailed information and annotation can be found for each of the works. (*) In many cases the exact year of composition is unknown, and the year of the first known publication is provided instead. Marked with (**) are entries in which no data was available about the time in which the piece was written or published. In either case, the composer’s year of death and/or opus number served as an indicator for the latest possible date for a composition to be written, and along with other notable features of socialist realism the works without a year of composition could still be considered as socialist realist. 19 For a detailed review of the data collection see the section “On the Collection Process of Primary and Secondary Sources” in chapter 1 of the author’s dissertation (Pollak, 16-19). 20 Nethanel E. Pollak, “Red Ties, Trumpets, and Balalaikas. Part II: An Analysis of R. Bunins’ Viola Concerto,” Journal of the American Viola Society 38, 22 As with most other composers to be addressed in this article, the most reliable biographic information was taken from the Big Biographical Encyclopedia, an online Russian project released in 2009, with its data drawn from previous editions of Soviet encyclopedias and fact-proof by scholars. See “Bol’shaya biograficheskaya entsiklopediya [Big Biographical Encyclopedia]”, https://rus-big-biography-enc. slovaronline.com/. Future references will use the abbreviation BBE. 23 Frolova-Walker, “The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny,” 406-407. 27 More on the viola as representative of the human voice in the Soviet musical literature in Pollak, diss., 59,79. 28 Both Stepanova’s Sonata and Poem are catalogued in Pollak diss., and at the Primrose Archive. 29 Dr. Rupp’s research is now documented in her blog “The Scholarly Dilettante,” https://rupphistory0. wordpress.com/2025/10/16/vera-stepanova-an unknown-soviet-viola-composer/#5c3f0a8e-1ce5-4500 a5d5-9888b92c3813-link no.2 (Summer 2022): 7-16. 21 Pollak, “Red Ties”, 10-14. 24 BBE 25 BBE 26 Pollak diss., 81.

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