NATASHA

Stravinsky had hit upon a form of music that expressed the vital energy and spirit of the people - a truly national music in the Stasovian sense. Stravinsky had drafted the first part of The Peasant Wedding by the end of 1914. When he played it to Diaghilev, the impresario broke down in tears and said it was 'the most beautiful and the most purely Russian creation of our Ballet'.¹⁴⁹

The Peasant Wedding was a work of musical ethnography. In later years Stravinsky tried to deny this. Immersed in the cosmopolitan culture of interwar Paris, and driven by his hatred of the Soviet regime, he made a public show of distancing himself from his Russian heritage. But he was not convincing. The ballet was precisely what Stravinsky claimed that it was not: a direct expression of the music and the culture of the peasantry. Based on a close reading of the folklore sources, and drawing all its music from the peasants' wedding songs, the ballet's whole conception was to re-create the peasant wedding ritual as a work of art on stage.

Life and art were intimately linked. The Russian peasant wedding was itself performed as a series of communal rituals, each accompanied by ceremonial songs, and at certain junctures there were ceremonial dances like the khorovod. In the south of Russia, from where Stravinsky's folklore sources were derived, the wedding rite had four main parts. First there was the matchmaking, when two appointed elders, one male and one female, made the first approach to the household of the bride, followed by the inspection of the bride, when by custom she sang her lament for her family and her home. Next came the betrothal, the complex negotiations over the dowry and exchange of property and the sealing of the contract with a vodka toast, which was witnessed by the whole community and marked symbolically by the singing of the song of 'Cosmas and Demian', the patron saints of blacksmiths

(for, as the peasants said, all marriages were 'forged'). Then came the prenuptial rituals like the washing of the bride and the devicbnik (the unplaiting of the maiden's braid), accompanied by more laments, which were followed on the morning of the wedding by the blessing of the bride with the family icon and then, amid the wailing of the village girls, her departure for the church. Finally there was the wedding ceremony itself, followed by the marriage feast. Stravinsky rearranged these rituals into four tableaux in a way that emphasized the coming together of the bride and groom as 'two rivers into one':1) 'At the Bride's'; 2) 'At the Groom's'; 3) 'Seeing off the Bride'; and 4) 'The Wedding Feast'. The peasant wedding was taken as a symbol of the family's communion in the village culture of these ancient rituals. It was portrayed as a collective rite - the binding of the bridal couple to the patriarchal culture of the peasant community - rather than as a romantic union between two individuals.

It was a commonplace in the Eurasian circles in which Stravinsky moved in Paris that the greatest strength of the Russian people, and the thing that set them apart from the people of the West, was their voluntary surrender of the individual will to collective rituals and forms of life. This sublimation of the individual was precisely what had attracted Stravinsky to the subject of the ballet in the first place -it was a perfect vehicle for the sort of peasant music he had been composing since The Rite of Spring. In The Peasant Wedding there was no room for emotion in the singing parts. The voices were supposed to merge as one, as they did in church chants and peasant singing, to create a sound Stravinsky once described as 'perfectly homogeneous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical'. The same effect was produced by the choice of instruments (the result of a ten-year search for an essential 'Russian' sound): four pianos (on the stage), cimbalom and bells and percussion instruments - all of which were scored to play 'mechanically'. The reduced size and palette of the orchestra (it was meant to sound like a peasant wedding band) were reflected in the muted colours of Goncharova's sets. The great colourist abandoned the vivid reds and bold peasant patterns of her original designs for the minimalist pale blue of the sky and the deep browns of the earth which were used in the production. The choreography (by Bronislava Nijinska) was equally impersonal - the corps de ballet moving all as

one, like some vast machine made of human beings, and carrying the whole of the storyline. 'There were no leading parts', Nijinska explained; 'each member would blend through the movement into the whole… [and] the action of the separate characters would be expressed, not by each one individually, but rather by the action of the whole ensemble.'¹⁵⁰ It was the perfect ideal of the Russian peasantry.

5

overleaf:

Natalia Goncharova: backdrop design

for The Firebird (1926)

1

The monastery of Optina Pustyn nestles peacefully between the pine forests and the meadows of the Zhizdra river near the town of Kozelsk in Kaluga province, 200 kilometres or so south of Moscow. The whitewashed walls of the monastery and the intense blue of its cupolas, with their golden crosses sparkling in the sun, can be seen for miles against the dark green background of the trees. The monastery was cut off from the modern world, inaccessible by railway or by road in the nineteenth century, and pilgrims who approached the holy shrine, by river boat or foot, or by crawling on their knees, were often overcome by the sensation of travelling back in time. Optina Pustyn was the last great refuge of the hermitic tradition that connected Russia with Byzantium, and it came to be regarded as the spiritual centre of the national consciousness. All the greatest writers of the nineteenth century - Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy among them - came here in their search for the 'Russian soul'.

The monastery was founded in the fourteenth century. But it did not become well known until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was at the forefront of a revival in the medieval hermitic tradition and a hermitage, or skete, was built within its walls. The building of the skete was a radical departure from the Spiritual Regulations of the Holy Synod, which had banned such hermitages since 1721. The Spiritual Regulations were a sort of constitution of the Church. They were anything but spiritual. It was the Regulations which established the subordination of the Church to the Imperial state. The Church was governed by the Holy Synod, a body of laymen and clergy appointed by the Tsar to replace the Patriarchate, which was abolished in 1721. The duty of the clergy, as set out in the Regulations, was to uphold and enforce the Tsar's authority, to read out state decrees from the pulpit, to carry out administrative duties for the state, and inform the police about all dissent and criminality, even if such information had been obtained through the confessional. The Church, for the most part, was a faithful tool in the hands of the Tsar. It was not in its interests to rock the boat. During the eighteenth century a large proportion of its lands had been taken from it by the

state, so the Church was dependent on the state's finances to support the parish clergy and their families.* Impoverished and venal, badly educated and proverbially fat, the parish priest was no advertisement for the established Church. As its spiritual life declined, people broke away from the official Church to join the Old Believers or the diverse sects which flourished from the eighteenth century by offering a more obviously religious way of life.

Within the Church, meanwhile, there was a growing movement of revivalists who looked to the traditions of the ancient monasteries like Optina for a spiritual rebirth. Church and state authorities alike were wary of this revivalist movement in the monasteries. If the monastic clergy were allowed to set up their own communities of Christian brotherhood, with their own pilgrim followings and sources of income, they could become a source of spiritual dissent from the established doctrines of Church and state. There would be no control on the social influence or moral teaching of the monasteries. At Optina, for example, there was a strong commitment to give alms and spiritual comfort to the poor which attracted a mass following. None the less, certain sections of the senior clergy displayed a growing interest in the mystical ideas of Russia's ancient hermits. The ascetic principles of Father Paissy, who led this Church revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, were in essence a return to the hesychastic path of Russia's most revered medieval monks.

Hesychasm has its roots in the Orthodox conception of divine grace. In contrast to the Western view that grace is conferred on the virtuous or on those whom God has so ordained, the Orthodox religion regards grace as a