Long-awaited biography of the mysterious Russian composer Arthur Vincent Lourié, this volume explores Lourié's formative years in Russia and in interwar France before his final years in the USA.

Described by Richard Taruskin as "the most interesting forgotten composer of the twentieth century," Arthur Vincent Lourié (1891-1966) was an artists' musician who was inspired more by painters, poets, and philosophers than by his musician colleagues. His life and work provide a wide-ranging critical lens for the artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Through Lourié, readers are introduced to the artistic bohemia of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, the turbulent, artistically fertile years of early Soviet Russia, and the ups and downs of Russian émigré life in Paris, with its constantly shifting artistic trends (before his eventual/final move to the United States at age 48). Central to Lourié's Paris years were his connections to Igor Stravinsky and to Jacques Maritain, whose movement of Catholic revival both embraced and rejected modernism and provided a spiritual home for the ethnically Jewish Lourié.

Since his life and work do not fit easily into established narratives of twentieth-century music, Lourié has remained on the margins. Engaging with his multi-layered life and idiosyncratic work helps us unlearn clichés of taken-for-granted artistic paths and learn to think on the sidelines-that is, to place ourselves in the midst of the reality of creators who exist largely outside preconceived narratives.

Based on the author's two decades of research, this volume follows Lourié's turn from a radical modernist composer in pre-revolutionary Russia into the advocate for, and later a critic of, Stravinsky's neoclassical style in Paris.