Our Notes & References

Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance in the Soviet Union: a foxtrot composed by “the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer” (McLaughlin).

Rare: no copy traced at auction outside Russia; OCLC locates only two holdings (Princeton (2 copies), Amherst).

The title “Chocolate Kiddies” likely originates from the eponymous Broadway-style revue act of exemplary jazz performances, which was founded in 1924 for European tours. In the spring of 1926, “The Chocolate Kiddies”, featuring Sam Wooding and his orchestra and billed as a “Negro operetta”, toured the Soviet Union, performing in Moscow and Leningrad for three months. The tour was met with great success, and the Soviet magazine Tsirk [Circus] dedicated a special issue to the event. The poet and author Mikhail Zoshchenko remembered the revue in his short story “Dushevnaia prostota” [“Soulful Simplicity”] (1927), and local ‘true connoisseurs’ of the genre praised the performers as “brilliant artists, whose equal in the genre of rhythmic songs and dances we had never seen before” (Poliakov, our translation).

The composer of this score, Valentin Kruchinin (1892–1970), was influenced by American jazz and other ‘Western’ music in the 1920s. He created several foxtrots and wrote the music for Iakov Protazanov’s film Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), which also “resembles a slow foxtrot” (McLaughlin). The foxtrot genre held a “particularly colourful history within Soviet culture” (McLaughlin): while popular among urban Russians, especially following the tour of “The Chocolate Kiddies”, it was also viewed by Soviet authorities as a symbol of ‘Western decay’ and ‘petit-bourgeois individualism’. This tension is reflected in the publication of this edition, which bears a note indicating it was published by the author himself—perhaps a sign of the increasing scrutiny and impending prohibition of such foreign influences in the years that followed.

The cover was created by the graphic artist Evgenii Mikhailovich Golshtein (ca. 1900-later 1940).

Bibliography

McLaughlin, Hannah C. J. Valentin Kruchinin and the Queen of Mars: Early Musical Traces of Soviet Sci-Fi. Twentieth-Century Music. 2024, #21(2), pp. 238-262; Poliakov V. S. “Tovarishch smekh”, quoted by Aleksandr Zholkovskii, “Ideinaia struktura Dushevnoi Prostoty M. M. Zoshchenko” // Slavica tergestina 4 (1996).