Posted on 09/06/2015 1:23:51 PM PDT by Borges
VALHALLA, N.Y. — It was quiet beneath the mountain laurel shrubs shielding the grave of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff from the late-summer sun. The furor is 4,500 miles away, in Russia, its indelible voice in every melodic line he wrote — a different Russia, a different sensibility, a different life, different time.
Resolutely nationalistic Russians want his body back. His great-great-granddaughter, Susan Sophia Rachmaninoff Volkonskaya Wanamaker, says “nyet.” Or she might, if she spoke Russian, but probably not. In a conversation about where his remains belong, she repeatedly used words like “dignity” and “respect.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Kick Lenin out and put it in his mausoleum.
Moving dead people around is tacky, unless it was a temporary battlefield interment or something.
Funny.
He lies by Ayn Rand, another great Russian.
They don’t seem to want her back though.
May he rest in peace and freedom.
He became an American citizen a few weeks before he died. He clearly wanted to be remembered as a Russian American.
They better not. Keep Rachmaninoff in Vahalla, where he is buried. Vahalla is for heroes anyway and Rachmaninoff mine.
The way he was treated by “Mother Russia” no sane family member would allow this to happen.
He wrote some beautiful piano. Concerto’s. Let him rest in peace.
Russia didn’t treat him kindly. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia:
The 1917 Russian Revolution meant the end of Russia as the composer had known it. Rachmaninoff was a member of the Russian bourgeoisie, and the Revolution led to the loss of his estate, his way of life, and his livelihood. On 22 December 1917, he left Petrograd for Helsinki with his wife and two daughters on an open sled, having only a few notebooks with sketches of his own compositions and two orchestral scores, his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel. He was 44 years old.
If he had wanted his remains repatriated to Russia, he would have left instructions.
Depends, it depends on the families wishes not a country of birth. After my Mom passes I fully intend to have her and my Dad along with my Grandmother's ashes which are far away from living family to a place in one cemetery local to living family members, some may find that tacky but I like to visit my family that has passed, there are not to many of us above or below the earth.
That flaming psychopath Vlad Putin should stick to annexing the territory of weaker neighbors.If he thinks he can forcibly move Rachmaninoff to the USSR let him try.
Obama will return him in exchange for keeping Hilary’s emails secret.
I see your point. Moving ashes around doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me, but digging up people ...
Still, it is in the purview of the people with the legal authority.
A Post-Soviet Russia is still reeling, and searching for it’s own soul and identity, having lived through the years of the Czars, and then the Communists, neither of which really survive well, when a free nation prospers and beckons for those subjugated.
Mssr. Rachmaninoff’s choice to become an American citizen, in the time of upheaval and overthrow of Czarist Russia, speaks volumes, for those who care to take notice.
Let the Russkies eat borscht!
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