Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (; in Surazh, Chernigov Governorate, Russian Empire – 23 August 1944 in Moscow) was a significant Ukrainian modernist composer of Belorussian and Ukrainian origin. Roslavets was a convinced modernist and cosmopolitan thinker; his music was officially suppressed from 1930 onwards. Among his works are five symphonic poems (three of them are lost), two violin concertos, five string quartets, two viola sonatas, two cello sonatas, six violin sonatas, and five piano trios. Life There are three autobiographies by Roslavets that differ considerably from one another. In one of them, published 1924, the composer deliberately misrepresented his biography in order to prevent the attacks by the "Proletarian Musician" faction. There are differing accounts of Roslavets' birthplace, some indicating that he was born in Dushatyn to a peasant family, while he actually was born in 1881 into the family of a railway clerk (of Ukrainian origin, according to Detlef Gojowy) posted in Konotop and Kursk, where Roslavets began to study violin, piano, theory of music and harmony in Arkady Abaza's musical classes. In 1902 Roslavets was accepted as a student at the Moscow Conservatory where he studied violin under Jan Hřímalý, free composition under Sergei Vasilenko, counterpoint, fugue and musical form under Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Alexander Ilyinsky. He graduated in 1912, with a silver medal for his cantata Heaven and Earth after Byron's verse drama. Futurism In the 1910s Roslavets' compositions were published in Russian Futurist journals, and futurist artists designed some covers for his music. After 1917 the composer became one of the most prominent public figures of "leftist art" in Russia, together with Arthur Lourié, Kazimir Malevich, Vsevolod Meyerhold and others. Roslavets taught violin and composition in Elets, Kharkiv (then known as Kharkov, where he was director of the Musical Institute) and Moscow. He had a position in the State Publishing House, edited the journal Muzykalnaya Kultura and was one of the leaders of the Association for Contemporary Music. Musicology As a musicologist, Roslavets fought for professionalism, the best in Russian, Western classical and New Music; criticizing vulgar identifications of music with ideology (exemplified in his article ‘On pseudo-proletarian music’). He wrote the first Russian article about Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. This led to him being harshly attacked in the 1920s by the "proletarian musician" movement, especially by the representatives of the "RAPM" Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and "Prokoll" (Production Collective of the Students at the Moscow