Christ on occasion as the source of their moral ideas; and most 'men of the seventies' believed that moral ideals- not political or economic forces-would ultimately determine the course of history.
The assassins of Alexander II seemed to believe that this act was a kind of spiritual duty which would in itself bring about the new age of brotherhood. The moral fervor and selflessness of the conspirators appealed to the intellectuals, many of whom (in the manner of the Karamazov brothers) felt responsible in some way for the assassination and involved in the trial and punishment. Prominent intellectuals like Tolstoy and Solov'ev appealed to the new Tsar for clemency-often precipitating emotional demonstrations of student support. Though few outside of the leadership of the People's Will organization favored terroristic assassination, many believed that the Tsar now had a unique opportunity to perform an act of Christian forgiveness that could resolve the disharmonies in society. It seemed as if the thirty thousand who had flocked to Dostoevsky's grave in January of 1881 were looking to Alexander III to be the 'true Tsar,' the long-lost Ivan the Tsarevich who would realize the hopes of his suffering people.
Alexander, however, followed the path that Nicholas I had taken after the Decembrist uprising, hanging the killers and initiating a reign of reaction. In a series of manifestoes and decrees he attempted to suppress once and for all both the activity of the revolutionaries and the intellectual ferment that lay behind it. The steady expansion of the educational system (and the unusually liberal range of higher educational opportunities for women) under Alexander II was curtailed by a return to Uvarov's idea of education as a form of civic discipline. By the end of 1884 all ministers even faintly interested in constitutional or federal rights had been dismissed, all publications of the People's Will curtailed, and the leading journal of legal populism, The Annals of the Fatherland, outlawed forever. This determined dash of cold water produced a stunned silence among those who had shared in the great expectations of the populist period. From a cultural
point of view the reign of Alexander III (1881-94) was a period of profound depression. The populist mythos continued to dominate Russian social thought, but gone were the old Utopian expectations and excitement. The period was referred to as one of 'small deeds' and 'cultural populism' as distinct from the great deeds and socially revolutionary populism of the seventies.
Two long-labored masterpieces of populist art were completed during this period: Repin's painting 'The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan' and Borodin's opera Prince Igor. They stand as final monuments of the new national art promised by the 'wanderers' and the 'mighty handful' respectively. Repin's canvas, which occupied him from 1878 to 1891, depicts the idealized exuberance of the rough-hewn 'people,' spontaneously and communally defying a would-be alien oppressor. Borodin's opera, on which he worked from 1869 till his death in 1887, elaborates the epic tale of Igor's ill-fated battle with the Polovtsy into a colorful stage pageant that harmoniously combined equal measures of earthy comedy, exotic dancing, and vocal lyricism.
Igor was Borodin's only mature opera, and came close to being a collective enterprise of the Russian national school even before Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov were called on to finish the work after his death. Borodin often composed in the company of his friends. He used his knowledge as one of the outstanding chemists of his age to devise a special gelatin for preserving his crudely penciled scores and also to help develop Russian medical education. Despite his cosmopolitan education and mastery of many languages and disciplines, Borodin looked to Russian popular culture for his dramatic subject matter. He died in Russian national costume at a benefit ball, and was laid to rest near Musorgsky and Dostoevsky in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery. If subsequent generations were to remember Borodin's opera primarily for the famed dances in the camp of the Polovtsy, those who first saw the opera in the melancholy Russia of the early 1890's must have felt a special sense of identification with an earlier scene in the same act. The lonely figure of Igor, defeated in his great campaign and frustrated by his captivity, seeks private consolation by summoning up-in some of the most ecstatic music ever written for the bass voice-the image of his faithful wife; and by stepping forward to sing a line that is echoed by the surging orchestra and might well stand as the unanswered lyric prayer of the populist age: 'O, give, give me freedom.'2 Left with 'small deeds' and unfulfilled hopes, idealists in the age of Alexander III fled from the broad arena of history to private worlds of lyric lament. The failure of the populist age and its prophetic artists to find any new redemptive message for Russia was accepted as final. The only
consolation was to find beauty in the very sadness of life. The fairy-tale beauty of Chaikovsky's ballets, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty, began during this period their long service to Russia of providing childlike interludes of graceful fancy for a harassed people. The talent that was to produce in 1890 the powerful, at times hallucinatory operatic masterpiece, The Queen of Spades, had already fashioned from another famous text of Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, the most popular opera of the 1880's (thanks partly to Alexander Ill's special passion for it). The preoccupation of this opera with unideological problems of personal relations and its mood of lush musical melancholy corresponded in many ways to the spirit of the times. Lensky's tenor lament for his wasted youth and Onegin's own farewell to his lost love amidst falling leaves in the last act seemed to drown sadness in a gush of melody. The composer who had entered the Russian musical scene with a buoyant cantata of 1865 based on Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' died in 1893, just nine days after conducting the first performance of his grief-laden Sixth Symphony, appropriately known as the 'Pathetique.'
The leading painter of this period, Isaac Levitan, retreated altogether from the world of people to become perhaps the greatest of all Russian landscape painters. Not a single human figure appears in the paintings of the last twenty-one years of his life.3 Yet Levitan, like Chaikovsky, projects a deeply human sense of sadness into the beauty of his work. Many of his best compositions-'Evening on the Volga,' 'Evening Bells,' and 'The Golden Autumn'-depict the afterglow of nature rather than daylight or the promise of springtime.
An even sadder mood is set in the work of Levitan's lifelong friend, Anton Chekhov. Nowhere more than in Chekhov's plays does one find the pathos-in-comedy of human futility portrayed with more beauty and feeling. Although his greatest plays were written early in the reign of Nicholas II, they reflect the mood that had developed under Alexander III, the period of Chekhov's development as a writer. 'I am in mourning for my life,' explains the leading character at the beginning of Chekhov's first great play, The Sea Gull. The idea of a dead sea gull as a symbol of pathos had been suggested to him by Levitan; but through Chekhov's plays the symbol became equated with the slow and graceful gliding out to sea of old aristocratic Russia.
Characters wander across the stage unable to communicate with one another, let alone with the world about them. 'There is nothing for it,' says Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya. 'We shall live through a long chain of days and weary evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials which fate sends us . . . and when our time comes we shall die without a murmur.' Consis-
tently, Chekhov glorifies those who suffer and succumb, still believing in the ideals of populism, but no longer expecting to see them realized on earth. Sonya suggests that 'beyond the grave we shall see all our sufferings drowned in mercy that will fill the world.' But this is only a lovely lyric moment like the melody from the 'Pathetique Symphony.' Progressively in his dramas, Chekhov moves away from all hope and consolation-even those found in the familiar conventions of melodrama, such as the escape-through-suicide which he invoked in The Sea Gull and Three Sisters. Seeking perhaps the tranquil twilight of Levitan's landscapes, Chekhov fled to a cherry orchard for his last play and went to the Black Forest to die. But he knew that the forces of material change were prevailing, and the offstage sound of the axe in the orchard brings down the final curtain in his last play.
Lyric lament was replacing the harsh but inclusive realism of the populist age. Short stories and sketches replaced the great works of the populist age. There is nothing in the late nineteenth century to compare in scope and realistic intensity with Nekrasov's poem 'Who Then Is Happy in Russia?' (1863-76) or Saltykov's Golovlev Family (1872-6), let alone with Khovanshchina or The Brothers Karamazov. The golden age of the realistic novel came to an end in the eighties just as the golden age of Russian poetry had ended in the forties. Turgenev wrote his last
