Читать книгу Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today - Simon Morrison - Страница 6

THE TRANSLITERATION SYSTEM used in this book is the one devised, phonetically, by Gerald Abraham for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), with the modifications introduced by Richard Taruskin in Mussorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993). It renders the Russian letter ы as ï and the аи combination in the name Михаил as Mikhaíl. Exceptions to the system concern some commonly accepted spellings of Russian and non-Russian names and places (for example, Alexei rather than Aleksey, Dmitri rather than Dmitriy, Maddox rather than Medoks, St. Petersburg rather than Sankt-Peterburg) and surname suffixes (Verstovsky rather than Verstovskiy). For ease on the eye, I favored Ekaterina over Yekaterina and Elena over Yelena. In the bibliographic citations, however, the transliteration system is heeded without exception (Dmitriy rather than Dmitri, and so on). Surname suffixes are presented intact, and soft signs preserved as diacritical apostrophes.

RUSSIA RETAINED USE of the Julian calendar from antiquity until January 1, 1918, when the Bolsheviks under Lenin mandated the conversion to the Gregorian calendar of western Europe. Before the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), Russians marked the start of the year on September 1 rather than January 1, and numbered years from the date of the creation of the Earth rather than the birth of Christ. Peter the Great reformed the counting of the years but upheld the use of the Julian calendar in deference to the Russian Orthodox Church. So in effect, before the Bolshevik overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian calendar was twelve days behind that of the western European calendar. In this book, dates are specified according to the calendar in use in Russia: Julian before 1918 (abbreviated O.S.), Gregorian afterward.