Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

So it comes as no surprise that Alexander III, who had pushed through Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin into the repertoire of the imperial theaters, would have personally crossed off a new production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov from the planned season in 1888 of the Maryinsky Theater.

That fact led the Soviet critics to proclaim that the highest authorities had been implacably hostile to Mussorgsky. In fact, Mussorgsky had a patron at the very top: Terty Filippov, who had served more than twenty years in the State Comptroller’s Office (he was its director; in fact, Filippov reported personally to the monarch between 1889 and his death in 1899). Controlling the revenues and expenses of all state and public funds, Filippov was one of the most powerful officials in the land.

Filippov was a curious and even extravagant character. The illegitimate son (according to gossip) of a provincial postmaster, he made his fantastic state career thanks to his reputation as an effective manager, honest and incorruptible—very rare in Russia, both then and now.

Filippov’s friends, impressed by his erudition in cultural and religious matters, saw him as a potential minister of education or high procurator of the Holy Synod. But Pobedonostsev was high procurator and very wary of Filippov as a possible rival.

The views of both men were similar: they were staunch conservative defenders of the autocracy and the Orthodox Church. Yet there had been a time when Filippov was an ardent reader of Belinsky’s articles and George Sand’s novels, a “ruthless atheist” and almost socialist. His outlook changed, but traces of his Bohemian youth remained.

Filippov was a music lover, with a pleasant tenor, who enjoyed singing folk songs and organized a pretty good choir at the Comptroller’s Office. He became a leading expert on Russian antiquity, studying old manuscripts, icon painting, and church music. This led to a close friendship with the composer Balakirev, the guru of the Mighty Bunch, who introduced Filippov to Mussorgsky.

Mussorgsky was undoubtedly the most talented member of the Mighty Bunch, but no one in the group understood it. They treated him the way a family might a gifted but wayward child, despairing of his eccentric behavior, intemperate drinking, excessive (in the opinion of others) self-regard, and inability to work in an organized and concentrated manner (attention-deficit disorder, perhaps). In their correspondence and conversations about Mussorgsky, words like “complete idiot,” “almost an idiot,” and “clouded brain” came up frequently.

When Mussorgsky was composing, people tugged at him from all sides with endless advice and criticism, friendly and otherwise. The press hated him. When his opera Boris Godunov (based on Pushkin) was shown for the first time in 1874 at the Maryinsky Theater, the critics were like attack dogs: “ugly monotony,” “cacophony in five acts and seven scenes,” and “stinking object.” They were particularly exercised over the “blasphemous” tampering with the text of Pushkin’s tragedy.

Even Cui, a fellow member of the Mighty Bunch, smacked Mussorgsky in print: “There are two main flaws in ‘Boris’: chopped-up recitative and scattered musical thoughts, making the opera potpourri-like in places.” These flaws, in Cui’s opinion, were the result of “careless, self-satisfied, and hasty composing.”¹³

His friend’s hostile attitude bewildered Mussorgsky. “Behind this mad attack, this flagrant lie, I see nothing, as if soapy water had spread in the air.”¹⁴

Not surprisingly, Mussorgsky started his next opera, Khovanshchina (or “Khovansky Affair”), about the war the young Peter the Great and his cohort fought against the rebel streltsy (musketeers) and Old Believers, in 1682, feeling totally isolated. One of the few who came to his aid then was Filippov.

First Filippov created a sinecure for him in the State Comptroller’s Office, and when the composer turned out to be incapable of performing even nominal office duties and fled his job, Filippov (with a few friends) took on paying Mussorgsky a private pension so that he could concentrate on Khovanshchina.

Filippov was eager for Mussorgsky to complete the opera also because he was particularly interested in the schism, considering it the epochal event in Russian life. Pobedonostsev viewed the Old Believers as enemies undermining Russian Orthodoxy. His deputy commented, “No one has caused as much harm to the Church in her struggle with the schism as Filippov.”¹⁵

Filippov and Mussorgsky had lively discussions about the schism. The state comptroller provided Mussorgsky with books on its history, including his own writings. The composer read them avidly and used them to write his own original libretto for Khovanshchina, but he did not complete the opera, dying in 1881 at the age of forty-two. The funeral took place at the prestigious cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, arranged by Filippov and Pobedonostsev working together for once. Rimsky-Korsakov completed and orchestrated Khovanshchina.

Khovanshchina is perhaps the greatest political opera of all time. It does have a love subplot, but it is clearly secondary. The main thing is the clash of different political forces, expressed in music of such power and passion that the opera comes across as an expressionist thriller.

Mussorgsky conjured up idealists, opportunists, traitors, political pragmatists, and religious martyrs, who lived on the stage like real people. The self-immolation of the schismatics in the finale invariably moves one to tears. This opera will always be timely for Russia, since it probes the secrets of the Russian soul perhaps even more deeply than Mussorgsky’s more famous work, Boris Godunov.

A comparison of Khovanshchina with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, composed in 1834–1836, seems inevitable. Both operas deal with the Romanov struggle for power, but the approach of the two composers is strikingly different. Glinka portrayed the unity of monarch and people; his opera, created under the aegis and with the direct involvement of Nicholas I, instantly became the musical emblem of Russian autocracy. Khovanshchina was largely ignored by the Romanovs.

Glinka’s enemies of the Russian monarch are foreigners—the Poles; the center of Mussorgsky’s opera is the civil war inside Russia. For Glinka, the divine prerogatives of Mikhail Romanov were a given. Mussorgsky’s sympathies are with the rebels, even though intellectually he understands the inevitability of Peter’s victory.

Glinka’s opera is heroic and static, while Mussorgsky’s opera is fluid, contradictory, and profoundly tragic. The composer of Khovanshchina feels deeply for Russia and mourns its fate. Filippov may have had an idea of how to use it for patriotic propaganda, but it remained a puzzle for Alexander III.

When the Wanderer artist Surikov tackled the schism theme powerfully in his 1887 painting Lady Morozova, depicting an Old Believer being driven off into exile while the crowd of onlookers cheer and jeer her, the emperor and his entourage were also ambivalent. Surikov described Alexander’s visit to the show. “He came up to the painting. ‘Ah, that’s the yurodivy [holy fool]!’ he said. He figured out all the faces. My throat dried up from nervousness: I couldn’t talk. The rest, they were like gundogs all over the place.”¹⁶

Most of the Mighty Bunch, unlike many of the Wanderers, came from quite respectable families. But their aesthetic was revolutionary, in the artistic, not political, sense. The