NATASHA

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 game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him. Not that the old Volkonsky house was particularly impressive when Tolstoy, aged just nineteen, inherited the estate, with its 2,000 acres and 200 serfs, on his father's death in 1847. The paint on the house had begun to flake, there was a leaky roof and a rotten verandah,

the paths were full of weeds and the English garden had long gone to seed. But all the same it was precious to Tolstoy. 'I wouldn't sell the house for anything', he had written to his brother in 1852. 'It's the last thing I'd be prepared to part with.'⁴⁴ And yet now, to pay his gambling debts, Tolstoy was obliged to sell the house he was born in. He had tried to avoid the inevitable by selling all eleven of his other villages, together with their serfs, their timber stocks and horses, but the sum these had raised was still not quite enough to get him into the black. The house was purchased by a local merchant and dismantled, to be sold in lots.

Tolstoy moved into a smaller house, an annexe of the old Volkonsky manor, and, as if to atone for his sordid game of cards, he set about the task of restoring the estate to a model farm. There had been earlier projects of this kind. In 1847, when he had first arrived as the young landlord, he had set out to become a model farmer, a painter, a musician, a scholar and a writer, with the interests of his peasants close to heart. This was the subject of ALandowner's Morning (1852) - the unfinished draft of what was intended to become a grand novel about a landowner (for which read: Tolstoy) who seeks a life of happiness and justice in the country and learns that it cannot be found in an ideal but in constant labour for the good of others less happy than himself. In that first period Tolstoy had proposed to reduce the dues of the serfs on his estate - but the serfs mistrusted his intentions and had turned his offer down. Tolstoy was annoyed - he had underestimated the gap between nobleman and serf - and he left the country-side for the high life of Moscow, then joined the army in the Caucasus. But by the time of his return in 1856, there was a new spirit of reform in the air. The Tsar had told the gentry to prepare for the liberation of their serfs. With new determination Tolstoy threw himself into the task of living with the peasants in a 'life of truth'. He was disgusted with his former life - the gambling, the whoring, the excessive feasting and drinking, the embarrassment of riches, and the lack of any real work or purpose in his life. Like the Populists with their 'going to the people', he vowed to live a new life, a life of moral truth that was based on peasant labour and the brotherhood of man.

In 1859 Tolstoy set up his first school for the village children in Yasnaya Polyana; by 1862 there were thirteen schools in the locality,