In March 2021, about a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Timofey Kazantsev, a classical pianist, ended a concert in Novosibirsk, Siberia in an unusual manner. He dedicated his performance to Vera Lotar-Shevchenko, a pianist who was imprisoned in a labor camp during Stalin’s purges, and he told the audience of a “large-scale political repression machine currently operating in Russia.” He called for them to sign a petition for the release of a local activist arrested for attending protests. 

My colleague at the Calvert Journal, a website that covered contemporary art and culture in the post-Soviet world which I edited until its closure in February 2022, had written a short article about Kazantsev’s protest. In it, Kazantsev compared the risk of speaking out in Russia to Beethoven’s last piano sonata — the strange, existential Op. 111 sonata with which he ended that concert. 

“You will either get a response from the audience, or it will end badly,” he told me on a call from his home in Germany, where he moved with his wife and two children last summer. “There is a similar feeling” in Beethoven’s Op. 111, one of the few sonatas which has a very special ending. 

Kazantsev’s post-concert remarks were brave and risky. There had been widespread crackdowns on protests across Russia two months prior. But it was his choice of metaphor that moved me most.