sentimentality, melodrama, and classical art forms. He was convinced that 'nothing that is natural can be either wrong or inartistic,'4 and that art must 'plow up the black earth . . . the virgin soil . . . that no man has touched' rather than 'reclaim tracts already fertilized'; it must 'penetrate unexplored regions and conquer them … past all the shadows, to unknown shores . . .'5
His means of plunging on into the deep were those of the populist age carried to new extremes. He sought to derive all his music from the hidden sounds and cadences of human speech. Beginning with the texts of Gogol, whom he felt to be the closest of all writers to Russian popular culture, he moved on to try to reproduce in music the themes and hypnotic repetitions of Russian oral folklore, the babble in the market place at Nizhny Novgorod, and the mysterious murmurs of nature itself. In a manner reminiscent of Ivanov's quest in painting, Musorgsky insisted that he sought 'not beauty for its own sake, but truth wherever it be.'6 But unlike Ivanov, Musorgsky was a true populist, priding himself on his lack of formal musical training and insisting that 'art is a means of conversation with the people, and not a goal.' He sought 'not merely to get to know the people but to be admitted to their brotherhood,' and stated his populist credo in a letter to Repin, whose 'Haulers on the Volga' had been a major source of inspiration for his music:
It is the people I want to depict; sleeping or waking, eating or drinking, I have them constantly in my mind's eye-again and again they rise before me, in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, with no tinsel trappings! How rich a treasure awaits the composer in the speech of the people-so long that is, as any corner of the land remains to which the railway has not penetrated. . . .7
In his effort to reproduce and bring forth the true national music that he felt lay within the Russian people, he moved slowly toward the musical stage. Since Gogol ceased writing for the theater there had been little of true value written for the stage, which was dominated in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by Ostrovsky's colorful but ideologically insipid theatre de moeurs* On the musical stage, however, there had been a steady development since Glinka of a body of native Russian operas rich in choral
music and based on thematic material from Russian history and folklore. More impressive than any plays produced before Chekhov's great successes in the 1890's was the rich body of operatic literature that appeared during that period and included not only comfortably lyrical works, such as Sadko and Eugene Onegin, but certain important, idiosyncratic operas that are less familiar outside, such as Rubinstein's Demon, Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Maid oj Pskov.
Music, the universal language, was a means of communicating with the new, more polyglot audiences of the late imperial period; and the serious musical drama was a way of effectively conducting that 'conversation with the people' which was Musorgsky's conception of art. The subjects which he chose to talk about with his audience in his later years were drawn entirely from Russian history. The various scenes of his operas were viewed not as constituent parts.of a drama so much as 'illustrations to a chronicle,' which dealt with the destiny of the Russian people. A simultaneous drift toward historical subject matter was also noticeable in the paintings of the 'wanderers.'
One of the peculiar traits of Russian realism was that the boldest and most resolute followers of an art based on the study of the surrounding world very willingly abandoned this reality and turned to history, that is, to a domain where the immediate connection with actuality is, naturally, lost.9
The domain of history held out the promise of prophetic insight. Moscow, the great repository of Russian tradition, was specially revered by Musorgsky's circle, who gave it the name of Jericho, the city which had brought the Jews into the promised land of Canaan. The heartland of Russia was the new Canaan for the restless artists of the populist age. They wandered through it like holy fools of old, and turned to the ever-expanding volume of writing about its history rather in the way monastic artists had previously studied sacred chronicles in search both of worthy subject matter and of personal reassurance and inspiration. Their attention gravitated toward the late Muscovite period: a time similar to their own in spiritual crisis and social upheaval. The same fascination that produced Repin's image of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son and Surikov's picture of Morozova dragged into exile (as well as some of the most popular plays of Ostrovsky and A. K. Tolstoy) also led Musorgsky to devote most of his last thirteen years to two great historical operas dealing with the late Muscovite period. The first of these operas, Boris Godunov, deals with the beginnings of the century of schism; the second, Khovanshchina, with the end. Taken together, they begin on the eve of the Time of Troubles and end with the
self-immolation of the Old Believers and the coming of Peter the Great. They are permeated with the desire for artistic fidelity to the musical laws of speech and emotion; historical fidelity to the known desires and habits of the leading characters; and theatrical fidelity to such traditions as there were in Russian opera since Glinka. But the real triumph of these operas-that which gives them a unique place even in this century of rich operatic accomplishment-is that they tell with artistic integrity much about the aspirations of the populist age itself. A key to understanding his music-and perhaps the populist movement itself-lies in the confession that he made to Bala-kirev just a year after resigning his army commission:
I was oppressed by a terrible disease which came on very badly while I was in the country. It was mysticism, mixed up with cynical thoughts about God. It developed terribly when I returned to Petersburg. I succeeded in concealing it from you, but you must have noticed traces of it in my music. . . .10
This is as close as we are ever brought to the origins of the strange nervous disorder which framed his career and led him to drink himself into derangement and death. It is probably not accidental that he was occupied at the beginning of his career with translating Lavater, the spiritualist and physiognomist who had fascinated Russian mystics of the aristocratic century with his claim to be able to read the nature of men from the shape and expression of their faces; or that the greatest aria in Khovanshchina should be Marfa's strange aria of prophecy and divination. Musorgsky himself was endowed with a strange genius for penetrating through the outer veil of speech and action to the inner desires of his fellow men. There are traces of prophecy in Boris, though they are often concealed from view by the distracting addition of the Polish scene (demanded by Musorgsky's original theatrical producers); by the melodic and melodramatic additions of the Rimsky-Korsakov and other revisions used in present-day productions; and above all by the dramatic and critical overemphasis on the role of Boris, which has become conventional since Chaliapin.
If Boris is the sole-or even the main-focus of interest, the opera becomes little more than another of the many historical melodramas on themes that were characteristic of national theaters in the late nineteenth century. It is, indeed, rather lacking in subtlety and moral sensitivity when compared with the accounts of Karamzin and Pushkin, from which Musorgsky derived his story. Only when the opera is placed in the context of populism does the uniqueness and power of Musorgsky's version become fully apparent. For, just as his friend the populist historian Kostomarov insisted that the simple people rather than tsars were the proper subject of
the true historian, so does Musorgsky make the Russian people rather than the figure of Boris the hero of his opera.
The Russian people frame the entire drama. It begins and ends with them. Boris is guilty before them from his first words, 'My soul is heavy,' to his last cry, 'Forgive'; and the only alibi he ever offers comes at the height of his maddened clock monologue, when he claims that it was not he who killed the infant Dmitry but 'the will of the people.' It is the people's plight that is the focus of Musorgsky's attention; the climax of the opera comes in the last scene, which shows the people in the Kromy Forest after Boris is dead. This is a pure addition to the Pushkin version and to Musorgsky's own first version. But unlike the addition of the Polish scene, the forest scene was Musorgsky's own idea-one that drew from a variety of impressions he had gathered throughout the 1868-72 period.
