He discussed its contents with numerous historians and critics and wrote it in a state of enthusiasm at his 'novelty and novelty-novelty out of novelty!'11
The 'revolutionary scene,' as Stasov called it, reflects with astonishing insight the revolutionary longings of the age in which Musorgsky lived, whatever it may or may not tell us about the original Time of Troubles. The scene was banned from public performances during the Revolution of 1905. The activities of the mob in the forest reflect in microcosm the search for a new basis for authority in late Imperial Russia. The people in the forest- like the populists who were headed there-have lost confidence in the Tsar and have a new and heady belief in the elemental strength and wisdom of the people. As the curtain opens, they are rejecting and deriding the first of five figures that come before the people as a possible alternative to the authority of the dead Tsar. They are mocking and torturing the boyars, the hereditary aristocracy that has gained its authority through an unholy alliance with the Tsar: 'Boris stole a throne and he stole from Boris,' they chant as they give the Boyar Khrushchev (sic) a whip for a scepter and a 100-year-old peasant woman for a 'queen.' The scene of mockery swells to a crescendo, with the magnificent chorus based on an old popular rhythm: 'Slava boyarinu, Slava Borisovu,' which becomes a kind of leitmotiv for the entire scene. Enthusiastic students left the theater singing this anarchistic chorus through the streets of St. Petersburg as Boris made its spectacular entry into the repertoire early in 1874 on the eve of the mad summer that took them off into Kromy forests of their own.
The second alternative to appear before the mob is the prophetic holy fool, or yurodivy, who had told Boris in a preceding confrontation before St. Basil's Cathedral that the 'Tsar-Herod' had lost the right to pray for intercession from the Mother of God. He represented the quixotic longing to follow Christ, the half-heretical voice of Christian prophecy which was
so deeply enmeshed in the populist mystique. But his fate in Kromy Forest, like that of the fools who 'went to the people,' is to be robbed and humiliated by an ungrateful mob. His last coin is taken from him; and he retreats to the back of the stage to make room for the next suitors for the affections of the uprooted masses.
They are the vagabond, pseudo-holy men, Varlaam and Missail, who come out of the depths with bass voices and baser motives to fan the flame of revolution. It is these forest monsters who advise the mob that the Tsar is 'a monster eating human flesh'; and they trigger a swelling chorus singing the praises of 'power, beautiful power,' 'terrible and capricious power.' The orgiastic climax comes with the women's cry of smert'l ('death'), and then the music swirls and degenerates into a kind of chaotic anticlimax. It is all a kind of uncanny picture of the populist revolutionary movement that was to come: inspired by vagabond conspirators from outside, finding climactic release only in a tsaricide in which women played a prominent part, and dissolving shortly thereafter.
Just at this moment of revolutionary excitement a fourth alternative leadership for the mob is heard offstage: the sound of two Polish Jesuits from the entourage of the False Dmitry chanting a Latin prayer in measured tenor notes. Varlaam and Missail's booming bass voices incite the mob to haul off these 'ravens and vampires,' even though they themselves are committed to the support of Dmitry. The Jesuits are hauled off to be lynched. They represent Latinstvo, the oldest and most enduring symbol of Western ideology, which is rejected with particular violence by proponents of a special path for the Russian people, whether presented in an old Catholic or in a new liberal form. It was the unfortunate fate of the two Jesuits to arrive on the scene-like the constitutional proposals of Alexander H's last years-at the precise moment when revolutionary passions were aroused and their fate foredoomed. These two Jesuits are disciples of the sinister and diabolic Rangoni, who is not present in Pushkin's play but dominates the Polish act in Musorgsky's final version of the opera: a kind of reminder that Musorgsky's age was more profoundly anti-Western than Pushkin's. Finally, the fifth and last external force to come before 'the people' appears: the False Dmitry himself, who is hailed as the new Tsar by the gullible mob. The masses in Kromy Forest, like those of Alexander's time, thus end up no better off than they were to begin with. They have a new tsar, who-we have been repeatedly led to believe-will probably be worse than the one he replaced, which was indeed the case with Alexander III. This is the final message that comes at the end as the mob leaves the stage, trailing blindly behind the False Dmitry. Bells ring; a red glow from a distant fire lights the background; and the humiliated fool steps forth. He,
like Boris before him, can no longer pray; and as the orchestra clears away the echoes of praise for God and Dmitry with a few lacerating chords of grief, the fool brings the opera to an end:
bitter tears
tears of blood
weep, weep, Orthodox soul soon the enemy will come
and the darkness fall
the dark darkness
impenetrable …
weep, weep, Russian people,
hungry people.12
Musorgsky had plunged out into the deep but had not found 'the other shore.' The bark is lost at sea, a helpless prey for alien currents. We are left only with the cry of the man in the boat, in all its honest, agonizing simplicity.
He had written to Repin that 'a true artist who should dig deep enough would have cause to dance for joy at the results';13 but fathoming the depths further led him only to 'songs and dances of death,' his most famous song cycle. The melancholia which overcame him-and which Repin has preserved in the haunting portrait of him painted two weeks before his death -is amplified in Khovanshchina, the chaotic and unfinished first part of a trilogy which occupied much of the last eight years of Musorgsky's life. The ostensible theme is the end of Old Russia in an orgy of wild excess, Khovanshchina, that ends in the self-immolation of the Old Believers in the last act; and the coming victory of 'new' Russia that is foreshadowed by the offstage sounds of the coming Preobrazhensky regiment at the end. Yet there is no clear message; people no longer seem capable of affecting or even understanding what is going on. The mob at Kromy was at least able to look for answers and follow leaders, whereas the streltsy can only drink, dance, and give way to another mob which murders their leader, Khovansky. The arias of Boris involve a recognition of sin and a search for expiation; but those of Shaklovity, Marfa, and Dosifei are only lamentations and divinations, obscure in meaning and charged with foreboding. Gradually one senses that Russia is only superficially the subject of the opera, even though Musorgsky spent endless months studying Russian history before writing it. Russia is rather the background against which two deeper forces are contending for the destiny of men: the God-saturated world of nature and pride-saturated world of material force. Khovanshchina stands as a kind of mammoth naturalistic tone poem that begins at sunrise and ends in moonlight, that begins by the river in Moscow and ends with a fire in the forest.
The Christian substratum of Boris Godunov (and of early populism?) has been eliminated. The two scenes devoted to the streltsy show them as-to cite the phrase of the scribe in the opera-'beasts in human shape.' In the carousing scene, they become, in effect, a mob of dancing bears exiled from humanity in the manner of peasant folklore. They are reminiscent of an extreme and debauched revolutionary circle of Musorgsky's time which mystified the police by referring to itself as 'the Bear Academy.'14 Their leader, Ivan Khovansky, is a 'white swan' who is first hailed and then mocked after his assassination with the hushed and beautiful line 'Glory and honor to the white swan.'
