The Magical Chorus

Rimsky-Korsakov was in no danger of such lunacy. Critics often described the open sensuality of the billowing waves of Scriabin’s music, which they felt was exactly what Rimsky-Korsakov’s oeuvre lacked. (Scriabin was very amorous, like Blok. The only known extramarital romance of Rimsky-Korsakov, with the singer Nadezhda Zabela, wife of the artist Vrubel, was apparently platonic.)

Quite telling is the reaction of the critic Yevgeny Petrovsky (who had given Rimsky-Korsakov the idea for his antimonarchist opera Kashchei the Immortal) to the premiere of his idol’s new opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia, in St. Petersburg in 1907. The reviewer noted that Rimsky-Korsakov, who based the opera on the religious legend about the miraculous rescue of Kitezh from the Tatar invasion (according to the story, the city sank underwater and its residents were taken aloft to heaven), expressed in his music not the “elevation of souls upward,” but a “measured procession of the cross around and near the church.” Another observer agreed: “That walking ‘around’ rather than ‘upward’ is characteristic of Kitezh as a whole.”¹⁷

This curious Freudian criticism missed the mark: the restraint of Kitezh is affecting. Anna Akhmatova once said that she held Kitezh higher than Wagner’s Parsifal because of the purity and chastity of its religious feeling, which she considered typically Russian.¹⁸

The young Sergei Diaghilev loved Kitezh for the same reason. There is a perception of Diaghilev, who created the model for art entrepreneur in haute culture in the last century, as being a Westernizer and cosmopolite. That is a misapprehension: Diaghilev throughout his life was an inveterate Russian nationalist, even a “fanatic” one in Benois’s opinion, but he learned in his later years to mask these feelings out of pragmatic considerations.

The personality of Diaghilev, that Rastignac from the Russian provinces (he came to St. Petersburg from remote Perm, pink-cheeked, red-lipped, and blatantly optimistic), managed to combine altruistic adoration of art with charming opportunism, which he was the first to admit. This can be seen in his relations with Rimsky- Korsakov, with whom he claimed to have studied composition (probably just a legend).

But Diaghilev did in fact show his compositions to Rimsky-Korsakov once in 1894, and the master called them “more than foolish.” The infuriated twenty-two-year-old Diaghilev told Rimsky-Korsakov: “The future will show which of us history will consider greater!” And left proudly, slamming the door behind him.¹⁹

This confrontation did not keep Diaghilev, who was gathering a landing party of Russian music to descend upon Paris in 1907 for his now-legendary Russian Historical Concerts, to ask for support and cooperation from Rimsky- Korsakov, whom he now addressed as his “favorite and beloved teacher.” Rimsky-Korsakov did not want to appear before “those feuilleton French” who “understand nothing,” but Diaghilev was a great arm-twister. An eyewitness reported that Diaghilev “flattered, hypnotized with praise, he berated, he grew heated, gesturing furiously and running around the room.”²⁰ In the end, the austere maestro wrote to Diaghilev, “If we have to go, let’s go, said the parrot as the cat pulled him out of the cage,” and traveled to Paris, where he and the other Russian composers and performers dragged there by the persistent impresario—Alexander Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Chaliapin—were met with great success (despite the ominous rumors that “terrorists with bombs” were seen at the concerts).

In 1897, Diaghilev outlined his ambitions in a letter to Benois: “To polish Russian painting, cleanse it, and most importantly, present it to the West, glorify it in the West.”²¹ Diaghilev did not manage to realize this program successfully in painting, but ten years later he began implementing it in music (and after that, in ballet), where things went much better.

The Russian Historical Concerts of 1907 (five performances) cost an enormous sum, 180,000 francs, which came not from the tsar’s treasury, as rumor had it, but from the businessmen of the Russo-American Rubber Company, who got “a cup of tea” with Diaghilev’s patron, Grand Duke Vladimir, in exchange. Diaghilev was an innovator even in the field of finding sponsors; however, the Russian press was quick to dub him a “Gescheftmacher of genius.”²²

But without this dealmaker, it is now clear, one of the cultural milestones of Russia would probably not have existed. This was the journal Mir Iskusstva [World of Art], which appeared from 1899 to 1904, published by the association of young artists and literati of the same name, which tried to rejuvenate national culture (Benois even suggested calling the journal Renaissance). While striving to overcome the utilitarianism of the previous generation of Russian artists (and condemning the radically populist aesthetics of Leo Tolstoy, considered by the younger crowd “a slap in the face of beauty”), Diaghilev still proclaimed that “art and life are inseparable.” This dualism was evident in the Mir Iskusstva attitude toward the West: Diaghilev and Benois professed “love for Europe,” but also insisted that that very love helped Russian classics from Pushkin to Tchaikovsky to Tolstoy “to express our izbas [cottages], and our bogatyrs [mythic heroes], and the unfeigned melancholy of our songs,” that is, to be true nationalists.

The editorial board, authors, and friends of Mir Iskusstva, which was subsidized at the outset by the Moscow merchant Savva Mamontov (who also started the first private opera company in Russia) and Princess Maria Tenisheva, a wealthy patron of national culture and crafts, quickly fell apart into two camps. One consisted of artists—Benois, Bakst, Serov, and Konstantin Somov—and the other, of writers and philosophers who despised “those stupid and ignorant daubers”—Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Hippius, Rozanov, and the proto-existentialist Lev Shestov, who published one of his most important early works, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy,” in Mir Iskusstva.

Diaghilev, as the editor, tried to avoid excessive “decadence” and to play a mediating centrist role. The first issue carried, to the horror of Benois and his snobbish friends, reproductions of the then-popular religious and historical works of the traditionalist painter Vasnetsov. Diaghilev also promoted not only the subtle Impressionist landscape artist Isaak Levitan and the perceptive portraitist Serov, who tended toward stylization (both were close to Mir Iskusstva), but the much more conservative titan of Russian realist painting, Ilya Repin.

To keep the journal afloat, Diaghilev had to perform miracles of political tightrope walking. In 1900, Mamontov, who went broke, and Tenisheva, who was infuriated with showoff Diaghilev, stopped funding the journal, so the quick-witted impresario talked his close friend Serov, who was doing a portrait of Nicholas II, to ask the tsar for help. Nicholas II (according to the artist Kustodiev, who had discussed aesthetic topics with the tsar while doing his own sketch of the sovereign) was not in favor of artistic innovation (“Impressionism and I are two incompatible things”)²³ and was skeptical about the “Decadents.” Still, trusting Serov, the tsar commanded that a subsidy of fifteen thousand rubles be given to Diaghilev, with another thirty thousand later added: a very impressive sum for those years and a salvation for the journal.

Diaghilev had to maneuver through the shoals of religious issues, too. He was probably more superstitious than devout, but he was proud to publish the “God-seeking” Rozanov and he frequented the meetings of the Religious- Philosophical Assembly. He was strongly influenced by the literary lions on the board of the journal, Merezhkovsky, Hippius, and especially, his cousin Dmitri Filosofov, tall, languid, charismatic, and probably Diaghilev’s first lover (who dropped him to spend fifteen years living in a menage a trois with Merezhkovsky and Hippius).

This did not keep Filosofov from being a moral purist in questions of culture and a religious fundamentalist. We can find echoes of Filosofov’s ideas in Diaghilev’s letter to Chekhov of December 23, 1902, where recalling a