A skilled and imaginative, though conservative, Russian composer of the first half of the twentieth century, Alexander Gedike remains much more widely known in Eastern Europe than in the world at large, where he is nearly unknown. He was a contemporary of Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Unlike Stravinsky, he did not embrace modernism of the early twentieth-century movement of futurism, and unlike Rachmaninov, he remained in Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik coup. His avoidance of futurism somewhat marginalized him in the 1920s, when it appeared that the new Revolutionary state would embrace that movement as a revolutionary and anti-bourgeois force in art. He returned to favor, and stayed there, after Stalin's adoption of a Soviet Realism, an unproblematic and conservative style such as the one Gedike had been pursuing all along. Alexander Fyodorovich Gedike's name is often rendered in different ways. The more precise English rendering (most often to be found in library listings) is Aleksandr Fjodorovich Gedike. However, due to the German derivation of the family name, German and other European sources often spell it "Goedicke." The "G" in the name is hard, as in "get." Alexander's father was a piano instructor at the Moscow Conservatory and the organist of the French Church of Moscow. Fyodor Gedike taught his son piano, organ, and the rudiments of music. Alexander entered Moscow Conservatory in 1891 as a student of piano and theory. His teachers were Galli, Pabst, and Safonov. He did not take any composition courses, but his skills in this field attracted the attention of the respected composer Sergei Taneyev, who gave the young man informal lessons and advice. Gedike graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1898. He began a career as a pianist and composer. The later career was boosted in 1900 when he won the Anton G. Rubinstein Prize in Vienna for composition. The prize cited his Piano Concerto, his First Violin Sonata, and other works. At the same time Gedike received an honorary diploma for his accomplishments as a pianist. In 1909, he became a professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1920 he also took on the subjects of chamber music and organ. After the 1917 Revolution, the new Soviet Union appeared likely to take a Revolutionary position in arts. Many artists in several fields embraced the Italian-originated school of "futurism," stressing tough, militant modernism, an anti-bourgeois (hence, anti-Romantic) viewpoint, and a fondness for machine rhythms. Gedike remained apart from this trend. As a serious student of Bach, he preferred to preserve Classical virtues and strong counterpoint, and became known as a champion of classical traditions. By 1930, with the solidification of Josef Stalin's rule over the U.S.S.R., came signs that futurism was becoming disfavored, omens that came true in the following decade. Gedike's solidly conservative style gave Stalin's arts commissars no trouble. He was granted a Doctorate in Arts in 1940 and won several state prizes, though mostly as a concert pianist and organist. He was especially known for his penetrating performances of the organ music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his early concern with determining stylistic authenticity in that music. He rarely visited the West, but became known as an important performer and composer in Eastern Europe and throughout the Soviet Union. He survived the 1948 Zhdanovschina (composers' purge) with no serious threat to his position, and still occupied his professor's seat at the Conservatory at the time of his death on July 9, 1957.