The Magical Chorus

prophet of chaos and death—all that for us was the unfolding of a single tragedy, and Blok was its hero.”¹¹

Blok, earlier than others, was pinpointed by Russian literary scholarship (especially by the “formalists” Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynyanov) as the creator of his own biographical mythos. Tynyanov explained the “Blok phenomenon” thus: “When people speak of his poetry, almost always they unwittingly replace the poetry with the human face—and everyone has come to love the face and not the art.”¹²

True, the image Blok created, not only in his poems, but also in his letters, diaries, and notebooks, of a martyr sacrificing himself for art and truth, was an inspiring one. It does not matter that the real Blok in the reminiscences of his contemporaries appeared as an alcoholic, debaucher, misogynist who ruined his wife’s life, and anti-Semite (Zinaida Hippius, who shared Blok’s Judophobic views, called him an “exceptionally fierce anti-Semite” and noted in her diaries his desire “to hang all the kikes”).¹³ Yet none of the evidence managed to shake Blok’s legend, such was the power of his image: the severity and significance of Blok’s looks, ideally confirming the idea of how a “poet” should appear and act; the unfeigned tragic tone and music of his poetry; and his symbolically untimely death. Nor was Blok’s image undermined by the attacks of his literary enemies—in particular, the envious parody of Blok in Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Road to Calvary, where he is depicted as the famous poet Alexei Bessonov, gulping down wine, seducing women right and left, and writing about the fate of Russia, although he knows the country “only from books and pictures.”

Tynyanov was the first to place Blok’s “literary personality” in a historical, mythos-forming tradition that can be traced to Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy and was continued by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, for whom the “Blok mythos” served as an example. (We can now add later writers to the list: Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky.) Blok modeled himself also on Vrubel (the legend of artist as “sacred madman”).

The wing of Vrubel’s Demon touched the work and posthumous legend of another famous Nietzschean and occultist of the period, the composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), whose music was met with incomprehension, irritation, and anger, but also with elation and adoration similar to the cult of Blok. Scriabin was a particular favorite of the Russian Symbolists Andrei Bely and Vyacheslav Ivanov and then the younger poets Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, who in typically grandiloquent fashion proclaimed: “In the fateful hours of cleansing and storm we raised aloft Scriabin, whose heart is a sun burning above us.”¹⁴

Many leading Russian Symbolists followed the German Romantics (Friedrich Schiller) and Dostoevsky in the belief in the great transformative power of art. “From art,” said the visionary and mystic Bely, author of the novel Petersburg, considered by the finicky Vladimir Nabokov to be on the level of the works of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka as a masterpiece of twentieth-century world literature, “will come a new life and the salvation of humanity.”¹⁵

But Scriabin did not simply talk about the possibility of combining art with ethics and religion: he tried to turn his utopian romantic-symbolist ideas into reality. A small, quick-moving dandy with a neat beard and upward pointing mustache, Scriabin, an extreme solipsist, came to believe that he was a religious prophet (“theurge,” in Symbolist jargon). From his adolescent “grumbling at fate and God”(as he admitted), he came to self-divinity and the connected ideas of self-sacrifice, without ceasing to play with Nietzsche’s demonism (“Satan is the yeast of the Universe”). Hence, the demonic motifs in some of his best piano works, such as “Poeme satanique”(1903) and the Ninth Sonata (1913), which the composer called a Black Mass.

Scriabin’s music is exalted, seductive, comparable to Vrubel’s infernal canvases and Blok’s intoxicating poetry. The peak of the flirtation with the occult came with Scriabin’s Promethee—Poem of Fire (1910), a stunning work for a large symphony orchestra and piano, organ, chorus, and special light keyboard. The musical symbolism of this innovative opus was influenced by The Secret Doctrine (1888), the fundamental work of Theosophy leader Helene Blavatsky, who interpreted the mythological Prometheus as a theosophist hero, a titan rebelling against God.

Blavatsky’s concept of Lucifer as the “bearer of light” (lux and fero) apparently prompted Scriabin to introduce the part of Luce (light) in the score of Promethee: during the performance, the composer called for multicolored “fiery columns” in the hall. The score was published in 1911 by a fan of the composer, the conductor Sergei Koussevitzky, with a fiery orange cover, as specified by Scriabin, and an androgynous depiction of the demon Lucifer (cf. the androgynous nature of Vrubel’s Demon).

Scriabin contemplated a great Mysterium, an apocalyptic musical action that, once realized, would lead to the “end of the world,” when matter would begin to perish and the spirit would triumph: a Second Coming brought on by the power of art as transformed by Scriabin. Bely and Ivanov could only watch in envy as the rather abstract idea for a mysterium that they had propagated suddenly moved closer to reality: Scriabin was already discussing how he would build a special temple on a lake in India to be the center of this unheard-of ritual, which would in some way involve all of humanity; the composer started raising funds for the temple; he was picking the right spot for it….

It all ended abruptly in the spring of 1915, when Scriabin died from blood poisoning at the age of forty-three. There were only forty pages of sketches for the Acte prealable of the Mysterium, an introduction of sorts. Others tried to turn those sketches into a completed work; it has even been performed and recorded, but, alas, without the anticipated mystical effect.

The Scriabin case was unique in the speed of his trajectory, which stunned contemporaries compared to a rising line, and composer’s exalted image, unheard-of previously in Russia. But it was also a typical part of the new spiritual strivings in Russian culture. The notable musical premieres of 1915, just before the death of Scriabin, included Sergei Taneyev’s cantata Upon Reading the Psalms, Alexander Gretchaninoff’s cantata Praise God, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. The next year, 1916, saw the performance of the stylish requiem Fraternal Prayer for the Dead by Alexander Kastalsky, director of the Synod School and of the Synod Choir, a connoisseur of ancient Russian chorale music and leader of the “new wave” in Russian spiritual music, which sought to purify but also to democratize it.

Compared to Scriabin’s works (and bearing in mind that Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps had already exploded on the scene), these compositions appear quite conservative, although their archaism is varied. It is curious to note that while Gretchaninoff was undoubtedly a religious man (but a political radical, who wrote “Funeral March” in revolutionary 1905 for the Bolshevik Bauman), church was never central to Rachmaninoff’s world view, and Taneyev was openly agnostic and anticlerical. (Kastalsky presents a special case: he started out with a loyal submission of his church music to Nicholas II in 1902 and ended up in 1926 as a member of the Red Professors group at the Moscow Conservatory, writing works about Lenin and the Red Army to the doggerel of the Communist court poets Demyan Bedny and Alexander Bezymensky and creating the officially approved arrangement of the “Internationale,” which served as the Soviet Union anthem until 1944.) But all these quite different composers were active in the Russian religious renaissance.

Like Taneyev (head of the Moscow composers), the patriarch of the St. Petersburg school of composition, Rimsky-Korsakov, was openly atheistic, but that did not hinder him, as one of the directors of the Court Capella, from taking part in Orthodox arrangements of the traditional Easter service. Rimsky-Korsakov’s reaction to Scriabin’s mystical plans was sarcastic: “Could he be losing his mind because of religious-erotic lunacy?”¹⁶