Boris Gusman

Boris Gusman with his son Israel Borisovich Gusman, c.1918-1920. Boris Yevseyevich Gusman (16 December 1892 – 3 May 1944) was a Soviet author, screenwriter, theater director, and columnist for Pravda. As deputy director for the Bolshoi Theatre and later director of the Soviet Radio Committee Arts Division, Gusman played an important role in promoting Sergei Prokofiev's music in the USSR and internationally. Gusman was arrested during the Great Purges of the late 1930s, and died in a labor camp in 1944. His son Israel Borisovich Gusman would later become a prominent musical conductor.

Life

Pravda and art criticism As a young man Gusman was a violinist and played for the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra of the Sheremetev family. Prior to the Russian Revolution and during the First World War, Gusman associated with intellectuals and critics around the Enchanted Wanderer magazine, including Dimitri Kruchkov and Victor Khovin, both members of the Ego-Futurist movement. In 1917 he moved to Nizhny Novgorod to marry the daughter of a merchant, who soon gave birth to their son, Israel Gusman.

It was in 1921 that Gusman and his family moved to Moscow, where he began writing for Pravda. Gusman responded favorably to candid films pioneered by Dziga Vertov called Kino-Pravda. He described them as "lively… striking… and interesting," but criticized the lack of connection between scenes and the absence of unifying themes. Gusman remained with the Bolshoi Theatre through 1930, and in 1933 became head of the arts division of the Soviet Central Radio Administration. Following the success of the film, in 1934 Gusman organized a broadcast concert of the music with Moscow Radio Orchestra. Gusman also commissioned Prokofiev to write a Collective Farm Suite, a Dance Suite, and a suite from the music for Egyptian Nights. and was assigned a smaller post at a Tchaikovsky museum in Klin.

Arrested in one of a series of purges targeting Soviet artists and cultural leaders in 1937–38, Gusman was accused of having written ideologically unsound scripts in the past. While initial purges targeted those linked (or accused of links) to Trotskyism, Gusman's arrest came alongside later, wider purges.

Gusman's son Israel survived the purges, and would go on to head the Gorky Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra from 1957 until 1987.

1928: The Living Corpse, adapted from a story by Leo Tolstoy. 1929: Merry Canary, a story about intelligence and espionage. 1935: On the Strangeness of Love, a Vaudeville comedy set in Crimea.

Books 1923: Literary portraits: one hundred poets (Tver)