Musicologist, Critic. He did much to promote modern music in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. Today he is best remembered for his friendship with composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he influenced. Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky was born in Vitebsk, Russia, and raised in St. Petersburg, graduating from Leningrad University in 1924. An acknowledged genius, he was fluent in over 20 languages and wrote extensively about theatre and history before settling on a career in music. He was instrumental in introducing jazz, the work of the Schoenberg School, and especially that of Mahler to his country. As lector of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra from 1929, and its artistic director from 1940, his pre-concert talks were noted for their eccentric wit and were as popular as the concerts themselves; many were reprinted in newspapers. Sollertinsky met the 20 year-old Shostakovich in 1927 and exposed him to a vast musical repertoire that had a decisive impact on his style, and he was one of the few who came to his defense when Shostakovich was branded "an enemy of the people" by the Stalinist government in 1936. He himself was denounced as "a troubador of formalism" on the pages of Pravda in 1937, but managed to avoid arrest. At the beginning of the Nazi siege of Leningrad in September 1941, Sollertinsky was evacuated with the LPO to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and continued his activities with that orchestra. His 1943 speech on the 50th anniversary of Tchaikovsky's death was broadcast throughout the USSR as an assurance that Russian culture was still thriving in wartime. That November he was offered a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory, but died of a heart attack in Novosibirsk before he could assume the post. He was 41. Shostakovich wrote to his widow: "Ivan Ivanovich was my closest friend. I owe all my education to him. It will be unbelievably hard for me to live without him". His Piano Trio No. 2 (1944), with its famous "dance of death" finale, was dedicated to Sollertinsky's memory.