The Magical Chorus

discussion with the writer on “whether a serious religious movement is possible in Russia now,” the impresario insists: “It is, in other words, the question: to be or not to be? for all contemporary culture.”²⁴

Chekhov, who viewed Diaghilev sympathetically, was much more skeptical. When Diaghilev, who worshipped him, asked him to become a coeditor of Mir Iskusstva, Chekhov refused: “How could I live under one roof with D. S. Merezhkovsky, who believes definitely, believes like a teacher, while I have long lost my faith and can only look incredulously at any intelligent believer?”²⁵

Both Merezhkovsky and Filosofov saw Chekhov as an aesthete, remote from real life, and a social relativist. (Interestingly, Leo Tolstoy was convinced that Merezhkovsky and company used religion “for fun, for a game.”) They promoted these views in their own magazine, Novy Put [The New Path], which they started with Filosofov as editor in 1904. Zinaida Hippius wrote sarcastically in Novy Put that Chekhov was not a teacher of life, as a true writer must be, but “merely a slave who was blessed with ten talents, high trust—and squandered that trust.”²⁶

A mighty circle of influential religious philosophers (mostly former Marxists) appeared on the pages of Novy Put—Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Semyon Frank. In 1909 they published the anthology Vekhi [Landmarks], accusing the Russian intelligentsia of atheism, nihilism, and sectarianism, which led, in their opinion, to the defeat of the revolution of 1905. Vekhi proclaimed philosophical idealism to be the most reliable foundation for all future reforms.

Vekhi turned out to be enormously influential and went through five editions in a single year. Leo Tolstoy found the main idea in the anthology—the priority of self-perfection—to his taste, but the literary style repulsed him as vague and artificial. Gorky called Vekhi “the vilest little book in the entire history of Russian literature,” and Lenin branded the anthology “the encyclopedia of liberal renegades.” (This became the required answer about Vekhi on future exams in Soviet colleges.)

By 1909, when Vekhi appeared, Diaghilev was not very interested in religious and philosophical disputes. He had begun his celebrated Russian Seasons the previous year, bringing Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, with Fedor Chaliapin in the starring role, to Paris. Rimsky-Korsakov did the instrumentation for the opera, and at Diaghilev’s persistent requests, wrote several additions. He died a few days after the final Paris performance of Boris Godunov, at the age of sixty-four.

Diaghilev’s goal was to astonish Parisians by the opulence of the production. With Benois, he found and bought ancient brocade and expensive silks for the costumes, designed by Ivan Bilibin, an artist of the Mir Iskusstva group. The coronation scene of Boris Godunov was produced with maximum lavishness. Parisians were overwhelmed by the spectacle of the tsar accepting the scepter and orb from the patriarch, Boris being showered with gold and silver coins and having an embroidered belt wrapped around him. There was also a solemn procession with icons and gonfalons, impressive boyars in sparkling raiments, grim archers in red caftans bearing aloft enormous banners, and exotic-looking priests with censers regally entering to the deafening ringing of church bells.

But the center of the performance, amid all its color and lushness, was the gigantic figure of Chaliapin in the role of Tsar Boris. The great bass, famous not only for his thunderous voice but his incomparable dramatic interpretations, played the hero of Mussorgsky’s proto-Expressionist opera with the full range of emotions. At first his Boris was imperious, but with a sense of foreboding; at the end, he was desperate and exhausted and half- crazed by the knowledge of his doom. The French saw more than a mighty singer on the stage of the Grand Opera; Chaliapin appeared as the hero of some work by Dostoevsky.

This was a turning point in Diaghilev’s enterprise and in the Western reputation of Russian music. The picky Parisian critics were amazed by the innovations of Mussorgsky, whom they compared to Shakespeare and Tolstoy (the composer had a strong influence on Debussy, Ravel, and other leading French musicians of the time), and they raved over the production and the performers, Chaliapin in particular, whom they called “actor number one of our age.” Chaliapin wrote with justifiable pride to Gorky, “We shook up the flabby souls of contemporary Frenchmen…. They’ll see where the power is.”

The fascination of the French with Chaliapin had a political element. While he was at the Grand Opera he published in the newspaper Le Matin a passionate open letter in which he complained that the Russian land, so rich in talent, was constantly oppressed “by someone’s heavy boot, trampling everything alive into the snow”—first the Tatars, then the ancient princes, now the police. Chaliapin promised the French audience: “I will give my heart to the citizens of this birthplace of freedom. It will be the heart of Boris Godunov: it will beat beneath the raiments of brocade and pearl, the heart of the criminal Russian tsar, who died tormented by his conscience.”²⁷

This was a clever and bold move on the part of the singer, a smart mix of political gesture and artistic emotion. (Subsequently, other famous Russian musicians, like Mstislav Rostropovich, tried to emulate Chaliapin.) In the revolutionary year of 1905, Chaliapin sang a protest song, “Dubinushka” [The Club], from the stage of the Imperial Bolshoi Theater, for which the irritated tsar demanded he be punished. Wisely, the management demurred. Then, in 1911, during a performance of Boris Godunov at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg with Nicholas II in the audience, Chaliapin got on his knees with the chorus and sang the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” Both episodes were widely publicized. The first riled the right, the second, the left, because both sides wanted to have the great singer in their camp.

This continued after the revolution of 1917. In 1918, eight years after Chaliapin was granted the highest title of “His Majesty’s Soloist,” the Bolsheviks made Chaliapin the first recipient of a new honorific, “People’s Artist.” But that did not help the Bolsheviks keep Chaliapin. Although he had hailed the overthrow of the monarchy, Chaliapin saw that “‘liberty’ had been turned into tyranny, ‘fraternity’ into civil war, and ‘equality’ meant stomping down anyone who dared raise his head above the level of the swamp,”²⁸ as he put it, and he left Russia in 1922, never to return. Later Stalin, who was a big fan of Chaliapin, made a few attempts (through Maxim Gorky, a close friend of the singer) to get him to return to his homeland. The cautious Chaliapin did not fall into Stalin’s trap.

The political zigzags continued even after Chaliapin’s death in 1938 in Paris. (He lived to be sixty-four, like Rimsky-Korsakov.) Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had stripped the singer of his People’s Artist title in 1927 because he donated a large sum to help the poor children of Russian emigres in France, the cult of Chaliapin continued to flourish in his former homeland.

The Chaliapin mythos promoted by the press before the revolution was of the poor boy who made it to the top by virtue of his talent (the Gorky model). This legend persisted in the Soviet Union, even after his departure for the West, because Chaliapin was one of the first Russian musicians to make recordings, and they became hugely popular. He sang both the classical repertoire and popular folk songs. The old, hissing records were played for many years at parties all over Russia, where people consumed vodka and pickles and sobbed listening to the magnificent bass singing the heartrending ballad “The sun rises and falls, but it is dark in my prison.”

Chaliapin’s ambivalent status as emigre also bolstered his reputation. By remaining in the West, like his friend and musical mentor Rachmaninoff, the singer avoided the total appropriation of his image by the Soviet regime. He remained the personification of Russian strength, valor, and flair, unfettered by party discipline or Communist ideology. So the emigre Chaliapin made an unexpected posthumous journey: in 1984, after coming to terms with the singer’s heirs, the Soviet government flew his remains from Paris to the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery in