The Magical Chorus

An antiwar critic and cultural historian, he had published as early as 1912 a magazine article signed “The Scythian” which proclaimed a rejection of bourgeois civilization as an “alien culture.” “The order of such a life inevitably will be destroyed.”⁴⁰

That article was the proto-manifesto of an influential Russian cultural movement known as Scythianism, which retains its attraction for many in Russia to this day; from it came the theory of cultural Eurasianism, according to which Russia, as the great state on the border of Europe and Asia, has its own unique path and role in global geopolitics. Herodotus used the term “Scythian” for the semi-mythical nomadic tribes that invaded the Black Sea steppes from Asia in the eighth century BC; in the imagination of the Russian intellectuals they became a symbol of barbarian might and energy. Among adherents of Scythianism, a left-radical ideology with populist roots, were the major Russian poets of the era—Blok, Bely, Esenin, and Klyuev.

The motto chosen by Ivanov-Razumnik and his friends were the words of the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen from his classic work, My Past and Thoughts: “I, like a true Scythian, happily see the old world fall apart and think that our calling is to inform it of its imminent death.”

Stravinsky, who never formally declared himself a Scythianist, clearly was at that period (and later) influenced by its neonationalist ideas. (Interestingly, Ivanov-Razumnik and Stravinsky had a common friend, the musicologist Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, one of the composer’s sons.) Stravinsky’s Scythian outlook can be seen in his conversation with Romain Rolland, who wrote it down in September 1914.

The French writer had come to Stravinsky with a request to join a protest in print against German “barbarism”—a timely topic. But Stravinsky (whom Rolland described as a short man, with a sallow, weary face, and weak-looking—a false impression!), without justifying Germany, did not agree that it was a barbaric country, calling it instead “decrepit and degenerate.”⁴¹

Barbarism, according to Stravinsky, was a feature of a new culture. Stravinsky argued, in the Scythian spirit, that Russia was predestined to play the role of a “beautiful and powerful barbarian country, pregnant with new ideas that will fertilize world thought.”⁴²

Stravinsky also made a political prediction that was fully in line with the ideas of Ivanov-Razumnik and his friends: that the war would be followed by the revolution that would overthrow the Romanov dynasty and create the Slavic United States.

It is tempting to perceive Sacre du printemps as the greatest manifestation of the Scythian spirit in culture. In Russian poetry that spirit was expressed powerfully in Blok’s topical poem, “Scythians”(1918):

Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians,

With slanted and greedy eyes!

The Blok–Stravinsky parallel was never considered, as far as I know, by their contemporaries (even by the Eurasianist Pierre Souvtchinsky, who knew both men and wrote about both). Blok was not friends with Stravinsky, and judging by his diary and notebooks, had never heard a single note of his music. Still, one might imagine that it was Sacre du printemps that the poet had in mind when he called upon the Russian intelligentsia to accept the revolution: “We loved those dissonances, those roars, those ringing sounds, those unexpected transitions…in the orchestra. But if we really loved them instead of merely tickling our nerves in fashionable theater halls after lunch, we must listen and love the same sounds now, when they fly out of the world orchestra.”⁴³

The ideologist of Scythianism, Ivanov-Razumnik, had in 1915 distributed hectograph copies (the samizdat of the time) of his antiwar article, “Trial by Fire,” in which he maintained that only united democratic forces could stop the monstrous slaughter. Blok liked the article; he subsequently wrote about war: “For a moment, it seemed that it would clear the air; it seemed that way to us, people overly impressionable; in fact it turned out to be a worthy crown to the lies, filth, and vileness into which our homeland had sunk.”⁴⁴

Russia suffered one humiliating disaster after another in the war. The economy was falling apart, with long breadlines even in the capital. The three-hundred-year-old autocratic rule of the Romanov dynasty, which had survived the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, was drawing to an end.

On January 1, 1916, Alexander Benois wrote in his diary (which was published only in 2003): “What will the new year bring? If it only brings peace, the rest will fall into place.”⁴⁵ But for Benois (like Blok, a committed opponent of war), it was clear that Nicholas II (whom Benois was calling “the madman” who was “absolutely incapable” of ruling Russia) and his government did not comprehend “the meaninglessness of this deviltry.” It horrified the moderate, cautious Benois: “Human stupidity is limitless, all-powerful, and it is quite possible that we will end up in universal bankruptcy and cataclysm!”

On February 20, 1917, Benois wrote: “Something must happen—there is an awful lot of electricity accumulated. But will it be anything decisive?”⁴⁶ He did not have long to wait for an answer: the autocracy, which had seemed invincible quite recently, collapsed within a few days that month. Gorky hailed this development enthusiastically. Most probably, Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov, had they lived to see it, would have reacted in the same way. The fall of the Romanov dynasty was not a chance occurrence but the culmination of a process.

Nicholas II abdicated from the throne, a Provisional Government was formed, but it too was unable to end the war and stop the economic decline. Only Lenin, the charismatic leader of the extremist party of Bolsheviks, promised workers and soldiers immediate peace and a good life if a dictatorial socialist regime is created.

Blok, in his 1917 diary, pointedly noted an absence of “genius” in the old ruling class. “Revolution presupposes will,”⁴⁷ he wrote. Only Lenin had the focus and iron will at that moment, and following his plan, on October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks burst into the Winter Palace, arrested the meeting ministers of the Provisional Government, and took over the capital.

The Russian cultural elite on the whole considered this an irrational adventure. Almost all of them were certain that the new regime would fall in a week or two. The Bolshevik culture commissar Lunacharsky hoped that if they managed to hold for a month, events would follow by momentum. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks found themselves isolated in the Winter Palace. Only a very few people from the intelligentsia were willing to make contact with them—of course, they included such notables as Benois, Blok, and Meyerhold.

The astonished Benois thought it all resembled a production by his friend Diaghilev, whom he had compared to Lenin in his diary. With Diaghilev “everything first looked ridiculous and sometimes even nasty,” creaking and collapsing until the last moment, and then somehow, he turned it into a beautiful and successful show. Perhaps the Bolsheviks would burn a few things and then calm down and in the end establish sober and reasonable order. “I doubt that they will build anything lasting,” concluded the skeptical Benois.⁴⁸ He was a cultivated man but certainly no prophet.

Chapter Three

In December 1917, the newly minted Bolshevik Commissar of Education (who in fact dealt with all cultural issues), Anatoly Lunacharsky, had two visitors in his small office in the Winter Palace: Nikolai Punin, twenty-nine, formerly the art critic of the trendy magazine Apollo, and experimental