Natasha's Dance

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    Nicholas II was a major patron of Vashkov and the Moscow workshop of Faberge.98 Vashkov designed the silver objects for the mock medieval church in the Fedorov village at Tsarskoe Selo, a sort of Muscovite theme park constructed for the Romanov tercentenary in 1913. This was the high point of the cult of Muscovy. It was engineered by the last Tsar in a desperate effort to invest the monarchy with a mythical historical legitimacy at a time when its right to rule was being challenged by the institutions of democracy. The Romanovs were retreating to the past, hoping it would save them from the future. Nicholas, in particular, idealized the Tsardom of Alexei in the seventeenth century. He saw in it a golden age of paternal rule, when the Tsar had ruled in a mystical union with the Orthodox people, undisturbed by the complications of a modern state. He loathed St Petersburg, with its secular ideas and bureaucracy, its Western culture and intelligentsia, so alien to the ‘simple Russian folk’, and he tried to Muscovitize it by adding onion domes and kokoshnik pediments to the classical facades of its buildings. It was in his reign that the Church of the Spilt Blood was completed on the Catherine Canal. With its onion domes and colourful mosaics, its ornate decorations that contrasted so bizarrely with the classical ensemble in which it was placed, the church was a piece of Moscow kitsch. Yet today tourists flock to it, thinking they are getting something of the ‘real’ (exotic) Russia so evidently missing in St Petersburg.

    Like the church, the Muscovite renaissance in the arts conjured up a land of fairy tales. The retreat to Russian wonderland was a general

    trend in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when the increased censorship of Alexander III’s reign and the early years of Nicholas II’s made it hard for the realist school to use art for social or political commentary. And so painters such as Vasnetsov, Vrubel and Bilibin turned to Russian legends as a new way to approach the national theme. Viktor Vasnetsov was the first major artist to make the transition from realist genre painting to fantastic history scenes. He graduated from the Petersburg Academy, but it was his move to Moscow which, by his own admission, accounted for the switch. ‘When I came to Moscow, I felt I had come home’, he wrote to Stasov. ‘The first time I saw the Kremlin and St Basil’s, tears welled in my eyes: so forceful was the feeling that they are a part of me.’99 Vasnetsov depicted monumental figures from the epic folk legends like Ilia Muromets, presenting them as studies of the national character. Nobody in Petersburg would countenance his art. Stasov condemned it for departing from the principles of realism. The Academy denounced it for rejecting classical mythology. Only Moscow welcomed Vasnetsov. The leading Moscow critics had long called on artists to take inspiration from legendary themes, and the Moscow Society of Lovers of Art proved an important outlet for Vasnetsov’s epic canvases.100 Mikhail Vrubel followed Vasnetsov from Petersburg, moving first to Moscow and then Abramtsevo, where he too painted scenes from Russian legends. Like Vasnetsov, Vrubel was inspired by the Moscow atmosphere. ‘I am back in Abramtsevo’, he wrote to his sister in 1891, ‘and again I am enveloped. I can hear that intimate national tone which I so long to capture in my work.’101

    Vasnetsov and Vrubel brought this land of fairy tales to their colourful designs for Mamontov’s Private Opera, which had its origins at Abramtsevo. There was a strong collective spirit within the Abramtsevo circle which expressed itself in the amateur productions at the colony and at the Mamontovs’ house in Moscow. Stanislavsky, who was a cousin of Elizaveta Mamontov, recalled that during these productions ‘the house would become a tremendous workshop’, with actors, artists, carpenters, musicians hurriedly preparing everywhere.102 At the heart of this collaboration was the ideal of artistic synthesis. Vasnetsov and Vrubel joined with composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov in a conscious effort to unify the arts on the basis

    of the folk-inspired ‘Russian style’. Wagner’s idea of the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, was a major influence. Rimsky even planned a Russian version of the Ring cycle based on the epic Russian folk legends - with Ilia Muromets as a sort of Slav Siegfried.103 But Mamontov had also come quite independently to the idea of a total work of art. As he saw it, the opera could not succeed on the basis of good singing and musicianship alone; it had to unite these with its visual and dramatic elements in an organic synthesis. Mamontov established his Private Opera in 1885, three years after the state monopoly of the Imperial Theatre (already an anachronism when private theatres were outlawed in 1803) had finally been lifted by the Tsar. It immediately became the focal point of Moscow’s opera world, eclipsing the Bolshoi with its innovative productions of mainly Russian operas. Vasnetsov brought the vibrant primary colours of the folk tradition to the stage for Rimsky’s Snow Maiden, the big success of the first season. The bulky bulbous form of Tsar Berendei’s palace, with its lavishly ornate folk-style decorations and fantastic columns shaped and painted like Russian Easter eggs, was inspired by the wooden palace of Kolomenskoe just outside Moscow. The whole scene conjured up a magic Russian realm, and it left the public, which had never seen such folk art on the stage before, enraptured and amazed. The height of the company’s success came after 1896, when the great bass Shaliapin, still only a young man of twenty-four, signed with Mamontov. Shaliapin’s rise had been blocked at the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg by senior singers such as Fedor Stravinsky (the composer’s father), but Mamontov believed in him and put him in the role of Ivan the Terrible in Rimsky’s Maid of Pskov, the Private Opera’s main production of the 1896-7 season at its new home in the Solodovnikov Theatre in Moscow. It was a sensation. Rimsky was delighted and, having just had Sadko turned down by the Marinsky at the express command of Nicholas II (who wanted something ‘a bit merrier’),104 he had no hesitation in throwing in his lot with Mamontov. Rimsky, the young kuchkist of the 1860s, had risen to become a pillar of the Russian musical establishment and a professor of the Petersburg Conservatory after 1871; now he too became a convert to Moscow’s neo-nationalist school. All his last six major operas were performed by the Private Opera in its distinctive neo-Russian style, including

Sadko and May Night (with the 24-year-old Rachmaninov conducting) in 1897, The Tsar’s Bride in 1899, and Kashchei the Immortal in 1902. These were tremendously important productions - their great strength being their visual elements, with colourfully stylized folk-like sets and costumes by Korovin, Maliutin and Vrubel in perfect keeping with the music of these folk-based opera fantasies. They were a major influence on the synthetic ideals of the World of Art movement and the Ballets Russes. Such, indeed, was Mamontov’s success that in 1898 he agreed to co-finance the costs of Diaghilev’s review the World of Art. But then disaster struck. Mamontov was accused of appropriating funds from his railway empire to support the Opera. There was a scandal and a noisy trial in 1900. Mamontov was acquitted of corruption on a wave of public sympathy for a man whose love of art, it was generally concluded, had carried him away. But financially he was ruined. His company collapsed and the Private Opera closed. Mamontov himself was declared bankrupt, and the effects of his Moscow house were sold off by auction in 1903. One of the sale items was a peasant’s wooden model of a railway station crafted at Abramtsevo.105

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    Private theatrical undertakings were something of a Moscow fashion following the lifting of the state monopoly in 1882. The actress Maria Abramova, for example, set up her own theatre, with the help of merchant patrons, where Chekhov’s Wood Demon (1889) had its premiere; and in the 1900s another well-known actress, Vera Komis-sarzhevskaya, owned a private theatre in St Petersburg. By far the most important of these private ventures was the Moscow Arts Theatre, founded by Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1898. Here Chekhov’s last great plays were first performed. Stanislavsky was born in Moscow to a merchant family which ‘had already crossed the threshold of culture’, as he would later write. ‘They made money in order to spend it on social and artistic institutions.’ His maternal grandmother was the French actress Marie Varley, who had made herself a star in Petersburg. But while his parents were rich enough to put on lavish balls, they basically inhabited the old Moscow

    mercantile world. Stanislavsky’s father slept (with his grandfather) in the same bed.106 As a student Stanislavsky took part in the Mamontov amateur productions. These convinced him that, while huge efforts had been put into the music, the costumes and the sets, very little had been done about the acting, which remained extremely amateurish, not just in the operas but in the theatre, too. He trained himself as an actor by standing for hours before a mirror every day and developing his gestures over several years to make them appear more natural. His famous ‘method’ (from which ‘method acting’ was to come) boiled down to a sort of naturalism. It was acting without ‘acting’ - which fitted in so well with the modern dialogue (where the pauses are as important as the words) and the everyday realities of Chekhov’s plays.107 Later his method was made more systematic through a series of techniques to help the actor convey the inner thoughts and emotions of a part. They were all about recalling moments of intense experience in the actor’s own life, supposedly to help him produce the emotion on demand. Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote a blistering satire of the Moscow Arts in his farcical, unfinished Black Snow (1939- ), ridiculed these methods in a scene in which the director