1994
Recently, my father, a music collector, bought some CDs of noted modern Soviet composer Boris Tischenko, the once-student of Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote his Symphony No. 8 during WWII. Expectedly, Shostakovich had a marked influence upon Tischenko's music, which, after listening to the CDs, my father described as “difficult” in an impressed way. He sent a photo of these CDs to Tischenko's son, Vsevelod, who had come to the East Coast in the wave of 90s immigration and whom my father has known for many years. Seva said once that he tried listening to his father's music when he was young and it traumatized him for life. In said life, meanwhile, he hadn't seen his father from a young age, and Tischenko senior had altogether three children and then retired to Italy, where he was friends with and hung out with fellow renowned father of three children, Nobel Prize in Literature winner Joseph Brodsky. Seva once ran into Brodsky's son, Andrey, when Andrey first arriv...