KATE TRANSCHEL
(1844-1908), prominent Russian composer who contributed to the formation of a Russian national music in the nineteenth century.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer by training, came to study professionally as a member of Mily Balakirev’s amateur circle of composers (“Mighty Handful”). An active composer under Balakirev’s guidance since 1861, he became a professor of composition and instrumentation at the St. Petersburg conservatory ten years later. Rimsky-Korsakov is regarded as one of the most significant composers and musicians of Russia in the nineteenth century.
Together with Balakirev and Alexander Borodin, who numbered among his closest creative partners in the 1860s, Rimsky-Korsakov developed a specific Russian idiom in orchestral music. As an opera composer, although he wrote a few historical operas, Rimsky-Korsakov especially stands for the Russian fairy and magic opera, the genre of which he brought to a culmination. Of high though not undisputed merit were the completions, revisions, and instrumentations of opera torsos of Borodin and Musorgsky, even if Rimsky-Korsakov partly neglected the composers’ original intentions. Finally, he made significant contributions to musical education. Not only did his textbook of harmony become the widely acknowledged standard in Russia, but he also acted as a teacher and example for outstanding Russian composers. His support of students in the Revolution of 1905 (leading
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Seaman, Gerald R. (1988). Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland.
(1859-1924), an anti-Bolshevik who led the conservative faction of the Octobrist Party in the pre- revolutionary legislative Duma and served as president of that body from 1911 to 1917, then emigrated in 1920 to Yugoslavia, where he completed a memoir, The Reign of Rasputin.
Devoutly Orthodox, conservative, nationalist, and loyal to the tsar, Mikhail Rodzianko also believed in the semiconstitutional system established in 1906 and strove to make it work. He never grasped that Nicholas II at heart rejected the new order. The Duma leader was therefore always puzzled when the tsar ignored Rodzianko’s pleas to rid the court of Rasputin’s pernicious influence and to form a competent ministry.
An archetype of the old order, he came from a prosperous landed family, received an elite education, served in the army, and then became a district marshal of nobility and zemstvo executive. Chosen for the State Council in 1906 and elected to the Third Duma in 1907, Rodzianko became Duma president in 1911. He actively promoted the war effort after 1914, and in 1916 warned the tsar that incompetent ministers were undermining the struggle against the Central Powers and endangering the survival of the monarchy itself.
During the Revolution of 1917, Rodzianko urged the tsar to appoint a government in which
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the people would have confidence and which he hoped to head. As the revolution deepened he reluctantly agreed to help persuade Nicholas to abdicate. Because of his political conservatism, he was not asked, however, to serve in the new Provisional Government.
As a believer in both the tsardom and constitutionalism, he could only watch in dismay as Russia sank into radical revolution and civil war. In emigration he found himself reviled by monarchists as having betrayed the tsar, and rejected by liberals as having failed to be reformist enough. See also: DUMA; NICHOLAS II; OCTOBRIST PARTY; REVOLUTION OF 1905
Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. (1981). The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (1973). The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-14. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rodzianko, Mikhail V. (1973). The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire’s Collapse. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
JOHN M. THOMPSON
(1874-1947), artist, explorer, and mystic.
Born in St. Petersburg and educated at the Academy of Arts, Roerich established himself as a painter of scenes from Slavic prehistory. Works such as The Messenger (1897), Visitors from Overseas (1901-1902), and Slavs on the Dnieper (1905) combined a bold use of color with Roerich’s expertise as a semi-professional archaeologist. Roerich joined the World of Art Group and designed sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His greatest fame resulted from his designs for Prince Igor (1909) and The Rite of Spring (1913), the libretto of which he cowrote with Igor Stravinsky.
In 1918, Roerich and his family left Soviet Russia for Scandinavia, England, then the United States. In New York, Roerich and his wife, Helena, founded a spiritual movement: Agni Yoga, an offshoot of Theosophy. Roerich’s followers included Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture (and later vice-president). His backers built a museum for him in Manhattan and sponsored him on two expeditions to Asia. From 1920 onward, Roerich’s painting took on an Asiatic, mystical character, featuring gods, gurus, and Himalayan mountainscapes.
Roerich visited India in 1923. From 1925 to 1928, he and his family completed a mammoth trek through Ladakh, Chinese Turkestan, the Altai Mountains, the Gobi Desert, and Tibet. Ostensibly leading an American archaeological, ethnographic, and artistic expedition, the Roerichs also secretly visited Moscow, and the true purpose of their journey remains a matter of debate. Roerich established a research facility in the Himalayan village of Nag-gar, India, and lobbied for the passage of an international treaty to protect art in times of war. This effort gained him two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1934-1935, Roerich, bankrolled by Wallace and the U.S. government, traveled to Manchuria and Mongolia. The expedition stirred up great scandal, leading Wallace and most of Roerich’s supporters to break with him by 1936. Roerich’s U.S. assets were seized. The Roerichs remained in India, supporting the freedom movement there and befriending its leaders, such as poet Ra-bindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru. Roerich died in 1947. Nehru, the new leader of independent India, gave his eulogy.
Roerich’s occultism and the mysteries surrounding his expeditions have shaped both popular and academic understanding of his life. Western scholars acknowledge the importance of his early art, but have criticized his later works; they have tended to be suspicious about the political and mystical motives underlying his expeditions. After the late 1950s, Soviet scholars reinstated Roerich as an important figure in the Russian artistic canon, but downplayed his occultism and controversial actions. Non-academic writing on Roerich is either hagiographic-Agni Yoga has a worldwide following, and the Russian movement has enjoyed tremendous popularity since 1987-or lurid and sensationalistic, accusing Roerich of espionage and collaboration with the Soviet secret police. Since the early 1990s, emerging evidence indicates that the Roerichs believed a new age was imminent and that one of its necessary preconditions was the establishment of a pan-Buddhist state linking Siberia, Mongolia, Central Asia, and Tibet. The Roerichs also sought to involve themselves in the struggle between Tibet’s key political figures, the Panchen (Tashi) Lama and Dalai Lama. Rather than
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straightforward espionage, the purpose of Roerich’s expeditions seems to have been the fulfillment of these grandiose, but ultimately quixotic, ambitions. See also: BALLET; OCCULTISM
Decter, Jacqueline. (1997). Messenger of Beauty: The Life and Visionary Art of Nicholas Roerich. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. McCannon, John. (2001). “Searching for Shambhala: The Mystical Art and Epic Journeys of Nikolai Roerich.” Russian Life 44(1):48-56. Meyer, Karl, and Brysac, Shareen Blair. (1999). Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Williams, Robert C.
