Vsevolod Zaderatsky’s “24 Preludes and Fugues”: Return from oblivion

Statement of the problem. The 20th century is a complex uneasy period, especially for Ukraine, where the living and cultural space was being actively cleaned from “enemies of the people”. Almost all Ukrainian intellectuals, especially scientists and composers, get this stigma. Vsevolod Zaderatsky, a genius of Ukrainian musical culture, a composer who, in terrible, inhumane conditions being a prisoner of Gulag, managed to create the masterpiece “24 Preludes and Fugues”, without an instrument and the necessary pencils and erasers, writing without drafts, fair copy, For the first time in 400 he revives a polyphonic cycle similar to J. S. Bach’s one, putting into it all the depth and tragedy of human life in the 20th century. Objectives, methods and novelty of the research. The purpose of the study is to analyze the historical, cultural and psychological aspects of the work by Vsevolod Zaderatsky to show the specifics of the composer’s thinking and writing of the monumental polyphonic cycle “24 Preludes and Fugues” and to reveal the peculiarities of performing difficulties and tasks to give advice on studying the cycle. The scientific novelty is the context approach to the analysis of performance tasks in V. Zaderatsky’s “24 Preludes and Fugues”. The following research methods were used: the context analysis of cultural, historical, psychological and musicological conditions of writing the cycle; the genre-style one to show the specifics of the composer’s musical language in the cycle; phenomenological approach to identify the facts of the composer’s creative biography and the social preconditions influenced on his artistic worldview; valuable and meaningful one to understand the composer’s philosophical vision embodied in the “codes” of polyphonic texture; music textual analysis of the cycle to create a performing interpretation. Conclusion. Vsevolod Zaderatsky – a genius of Ukrainian musical art, a wonderful pianist, a talented teacher was deliberately erased from history by the Soviet authorities. The cycle “24 Preludes and Fugues” is a kind of diary, created during the years of exile in horror circumstances, without proper conditions for creativity. Thanks to this work, the composer managed to preserve his psyche and leave a masterpiece for posterity that we should be proud of and that we should perform. A comprehensive analysis of the cycle in musical-historical and genre-stylistic contexts proves that the little-studied, in fact not performed in its entirety (it was performed only once in Ukraine!) masterpiece of V. P. Zaderatsky “24 Preludes and Fugues” should occupy its niche in the history of piano of art and needs to be popularized as a memory of the dark times of erasure of Ukrainian history, culture and art, often without the possibility of rehabilitation.