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In the aftermath of the Great War the Ottoman and imperial Russian empires came to an end, and new geopolitical formations, what became the Soviet Union and Republican Turkey, emerged. In both countries a search ensued for new cultural identity and new cultural forms. At the same time, there lingered the possibility of creating new transnational formations and alliances. Clark’s article attempts to place the momentous shift from Ottoman to Republican Turkey and the almost simultaneous shift from Russia to the Soviet Union, and the subsequent attempts at cultural rapprochement between the two, within a broader context of cultural interactions with Europe as rival cosmopolitanisms competed for defining the “new Turkey” and also the “new Russia.”

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As Katerina Clark argues here, Dmitrii Shostakovich's turn to the quartet form in 1938 and his account of his First Quartet should be seen in the context of ongoing debates from that time about how the mandate for socialist realism might apply in music, a problematical question since music is the least representational of the arts. In making this point, Clark does not analyze the quartets themselves, but instead probes Shostakovich's statements about them, moving out from that narrow focus to place his remarks in the context of overall developments and controversies in Soviet culture of that decade—more specifically in the context of efforts aimed at liberalizing socialist realist practice.