ABSTRACT
Vyacheslav Petrovich Artyomov (born 1940) belongs to that generation of Russian composers who embarked upon their creative careers during the period of the Thaw initiated by Khrushchev. His earliest compositions appearing in the sixties were soon to reveal that his road to the artistic truth was alien not only to those who served faithfully to the official ideology cultivated by the communist regime, but also to the tenets and aesthetic views of their implacable opponents. However, at first the opposition of Artyomov's style to the currently fashionable avant-garde and later to the post-avant-garde was not so obvious. He was regarded as one of the numerous adherents of the sonoristic trend which came to be pronounced so prominently in the early sixties by such Polish masters as Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, et al. Artyomov's early compositions were looked upon as conscientious reproduction of the previous findings in 20th-century modern music while he was treated as one of the many.
