2025 Recipient

Simon Morrison

Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer

The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Simon Morrison, Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer (Yale University Press, 2024)  

Simon Morrison’s Tchaikovsky’s Empire delivers on its subtitle’s promise: Russia’s greatest composer comes alive in its pages. Morrison’s biography immerses the reader in the cosmopolitan vibrancy of Tchaikovsky’s world and the emotional richness of his inner life. We get to know the hyperfocused, disciplined, sometimes cranky, and often snippy composer who wrestled with his own fame and with the way he was viewed by his fellow artists. What makes Tchaikovsky’s Empire truly stand out is how Morrison places his protagonist within the cultural, historical, and political contexts of his time. Morrison’s Tchaikovsky is very much a subject of the Russian Empire as well as a composer for the Russian Empire: he took on commissions for imperial enterprises, worked as a professor at an imperial conservatory, and very much drew from the Europe and Russia of his time in his compositions. Yet his music, which Morrison describes in beautiful detail, was distinct: we know a Tchaikovsky piece when we hear it, a testament to Tchaikovsky’s timeless genius. Tchaikovsky’s Empire reminds us what a good biography can achieve just as it reminds us that music can be transcendent.  

Winner: Benjamin Nathans

Honorable Mention: Jeffrey S. Hardy

Prize Committee: Stephen Norris (chair), Małgorzata Fidelis, and Eren Tasar