Natasha's Dance

authentically than we’.32

    Musorgsky was roughly the same age as Repin and Antokolsky but he had joined Stasov’s stable a decade earlier, in 1858, when he was aged just nineteen. As the most historically minded and musically original of Balakirev’s students, the young composer was patronized by Stasov and pushed in the direction of national themes. Stasov never let up in his efforts to direct his protege’s interests and musical approach. He cast himself in loco parentis, visiting the ‘youngster’ Musorgsky (then thirty-two) when he shared a room with Rimsky-

    Korsakov (then twenty-seven) in St Petersburg. Stasov would arrive early in the morning, help the men get out of bed and wash, fetch their clothes, prepare tea and sandwiches for them, and then, as he put it, when ‘we [got] down to our business [my emphasis - O. F.]’, he would listen to the music they had just composed or give them new historical materials and ideas for their works.33 The Populist conception of Boris Godunov (in its revised version with the Kromy scene) is certainly in line with Stasov’s influence. In a general sense all Musorgsky’s operas are ‘about the people’ - if one understands that as the nation as a whole. Even Kbovanshchina - which drove Stasov mad with all its ‘princely spawn’34 - carried the subtitle ‘A national [people’s] music history’ (‘narodnaya muzikal’naya drama’). Musorgsky explained his Populist approach in a letter to Repin, written in August 1873, congratulating him on his Barge Haulers:

    It is the people I want to depict: when I sleep I see them, when I eat I think of them, when I drink I can see them rise before me in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, and without tinsel trappings! And what an awful (in the true sense of that word) richness there is for the composer in the people’s speech -as long as there’s a corner of our land that hasn’t been ripped open by the railway.35

    And yet there were tensions between Musorgsky and the Populist agenda set out for him by Stasov - tensions which have been lost in the cultural politics that have always been attached to the composer’s name.36 Stasov was crucially important in Musorgsky’s life: he dis-

    covered him; he gave him the material for much of his greatest work; and he championed his music, which had been unknown in Europe in his lifetime and would surely have been forgotten after his death, had

    it not been for Stasov. But the critic’s politics were not entirely shared by the composer, whose feeling for ‘the people’, as he had explained to Repin, was primarily a musical response. Musorgsky’s populism

    was not political or philosophical - it was artistic. He loved folk songs

    and incorporated many of them in his works. The distinctive aspects

    of the Russian peasant song - its choral heterophony, its tonal shifts,

    drawn out melismatic passages which make it sound like a chant

    or a lament - became part of his own musical language. Above all, the

    folk song was the model for a new technique of choral writing which Musorgsky first developed in Boris Godunov. building up the different voices one by one, or in discordant groups, to create the sort of choral heterophony which he achieved, with such brilliant success, in the Kromy scene.

    Musorgsky was obsessed with the craft of rendering human speech in musical sound. That is what he meant when he said that music should be a way of ‘talking with the people’ - it was not a declaration of political intent.* Following the mimetic theories of the German literary historian Georg Gervinus, Musorgsky believed that human speech was governed by musical laws - that a speaker conveys emotions and meaning by musical components such as rhythm, cadence, intonation, timbre, volume, tone, etc. ‘The aim of musical art’, he wrote in 1880, ‘is the reproduction in social sounds not only of modes of feeling but of modes of human speech.’37 Many of his most important compositions, such as the song cycle Savishna or the unfinished opera based on Gogol’s ‘Sorochintsy Fair’, represent an attempt to transpose into sound the distinctive qualities of Russian peasant speech. Listen to the music in Gogol’s tale:

    I expect you will have heard at some time the noise of a distant waterfall, when the agitated environs are filled with tumult and a chaotic whirl of weird, indistinct sounds swirls before you. Do you not agree that the very same effect is produced the instant you enter the whirlpool of a village fair? All the assembled populace merges into a single monstrous creature, whose massive body stirs about the market-place and snakes down the narrow side-streets, shrieking, bellowing, blaring. The clamour, the cursing, mooing, bleating, roaring - all this blends into a single cacophonous din. Oxen, sacks, hay, gypsies, pots, wives, gingerbread, caps - everything is ablaze with clashing colours, and dances before your eyes. The voices drown one another and it is impossible to distinguish one word, to rescue any meaning from this babble; not a single exclamation can be understood with any clarity. The ears are

    * It is telling, in this context, that the word he used for ‘people’ was ‘liudi’ - a word which has the meaning of individuals - although it has usually been translated to mean a collective mass (the sense of the other word for people - the ‘narod’). J. Leyda and S. Bertensson (eds.), The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947), pp. 84-5.

    assailed on every side by the loud hand-clapping of traders all over the market-place. A cart collapses, the clang of metal rings in the air, wooden planks come crashing to the ground and the observer grows dizzy, as he turns his head this way and that.38

    In Musorgsky’s final years tensions with his mentor became more acute. He withdrew from Stasov’s circle, pouring scorn on civic artists such as Nekrasov, and spending all his time in the alcoholic company of fellow aristocrats such as the salon poet Count Golenishchev-Kutuzov and the arch-reactionary T. I. Filipov. It was not that he became politically right-wing - now, as before, Musorgsky paid little attention to politics. Rather, he saw in their ‘art for art’s sake’ views a creative liberation from Stasov’s rigid dogma of politically engaged and idea-driven art. There was something in Musorgsky - his lack of formal schooling or his wayward, almost childlike character - that made him both depend on yet strive to break away from mentors like Stasov. We can feel this tension in the letter to Repin:

    So, that’s it, glorious lead horse! The troika, if in disarray, bears what it has to bear. It doesn’t stop pulling… What a picture of the Master [Stasov] you have made! He seems to crawl out of the canvas and into the room. What will happen when it has been varnished? Life, power - pull, lead horse! Don’t get tired! I am just the side horse and I pull only now and then to escape disgrace. I am afraid of the whip!39

    Antokolsky felt the same artistic impulse pulling him away from Stasov’s direction. He gave up working on the Inquisition, saying he was tired of civic art, and travelled throughout Europe in the 1870s, when he turned increasingly to pure artistic themes in sculptures like The Death of Socrates (1875-7) and Jesus Christ (1878). Stasov was irate. ‘You have ceased to be an artist of the dark masses, the unknown figure in the crowd’, he wrote to Antokolsky in 1883. ‘Your subjects have become the “aristocracy of man” - Moses, Christ, Spinoza, Socrates.’40

    Even Repin, the ‘lead horse’, began to pull away from Stasov’s harnesses: he would no longer haul his Volga barge. He travelled to the West, fell in love with the Impressionists, and turned out French-styled

    portraits and pretty cafe scenes which could not have been farther from the Russian national school of utilitarian and thought-provoking art. ‘I have forgotten how to reflect and pass judgement on a work of art’, Repin wrote to Kramskoi from Paris, ‘and I don’t regret the loss of this faculty which used to eat me up; on the contrary, I would rather it never return, though I feel that back in my native land it will reclaim its right over me - that is the way things are there.’41 Stasov condemned Repin for his defection, charging him with the neglect of his artistic duty to the Russian people and his native land. Relations became strained to breaking point in the early 1890s, when Repin rejoined the Academy and reassessed his views of the classical tradition - effectively denying the whole national school. ‘Stasov loved his barbarian art, his small, fat, ugly, half-baked artists who screamed their profound human truths’, Repin wrote in 1892…42 For a while the artist even flirted with the World of Art - Benois and Diaghilev, or the ‘decadents’ as Stasov liked to call them - and their ideal of pure art. But the pull of ‘Russia’ was too strong - and in the end he patched up his relations with Stasov. However much he loved the light of France, Repin knew that he could not be an artist who was disengaged from the old accursed questions of his native land.

3

    In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary ‘the loss of everything - the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there’s no point writing - I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence.’43 Much of Tolstoy’s life can be explained by that