St. Petersburg : A Cultural History

Chapter 2

Throughout Petersburg reigns an astonishingly profound and wonderful musicality,”^{46} marveled Alexander Benois, an artist who in the early twentieth century played a unique role in restoring the Petersburg mythos to its glory. His younger contemporary, the musicologist Boris Asafyev, affirmed the presence of music in the St. Petersburg legend even more resolutely.

The Petersburg culture now cannot be crossed out of the history of Russia and humanity. And music plays perhaps the dominant role in that culture. Especially the work of Tchaikovsky, inspired by the illusions of the Petersburg white nights and the stark contrasts of winter: black tree trunks, the snow cover, the oppressive weight of granite, and the precision of cast-iron fences.^{47}

That passage, written by Asafyev in 1921 in a hungry, dying Petrograd, is remarkable, since it describes Tchaikovsky’s music as if it were a masterly drawing by Alexander Benois, and it makes clear the collision of music and art in the creation of a new image of Petersburg. Taking the lead, in this respect nineteenth-century Petersburg music also had a powerful influence on European and world culture; the Russian visual arts of that period could not even dream of such a role.

How did it happen that music, the least descriptive of the arts, turned out to be a far more truthful, albeit troubling, mirror of life in Petersburg than poetry, painting, or the other arts? The answer lies in the uniqueness of Petersburg’s existence—there, the external image and the inner content often do not coincide.

Externally Petersburg of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be seen as a triumph of rationalism. Formed by the baroque and neoclassicism, the Russian capital was considered both by its inhabitants and by foreign observers the epitome of architectural harmony. Innumerable paintings, watercolors, drawings, engravings, and lithographs by such skilled artisans as Fyodor Alexeyev (1755-1824), Andrei Martynov (1768-1826), Stepan Galaktionov (1779-1854), and Vassily Sadovnikov (1800-1879) depicted it that way. Sadovnikov’s fame was based upon his popular lithographic panorama of the Nevsky Prospect, advertised this way: “The buildings are copied from nature with astonishing fidelity, with not a single sign omitted.”^{48}

All these pictures, often notable for their mastery and accuracy, nowadays impart a sense of too many things left unsaid: meticulously drawn, solitary, somehow lost little human figures are merely props against a background of Petersburg’s fabulous but emotionally neutral classicist buildings and huge squares. These works convey neither the real face of Petersburg nor its soul; neither its majesty and propriety nor its spirituality. Artists, accurately depicting the city’s various sites, did not convey or explain its magical attraction or repugnant cruelty. Compared to the later Nevsky Prospect by Gogol, Sadovnikov’s hugely successful lithographs, which were sold in two long rolls, are a mere curiosity.

Much more interesting is the Magic Lantern; the full title is “Magic Lantern, or A Spectacle of St. Petersburg’s Traveling Sellers, Masters, and Other Folk Craftsmen, Depicted with a True Brush in Their Real Clothes and Presented Conversing with One Another, Commensurate With Each Person and Title,” a monthly anthology of hand-colored lithographs with extended dialogue captions that appeared at the same time as Sadovnikov’s panorama.

Leafing now through the pages of Magic Lantern, one is struck by the variety of wares and services offered to customers on the streets of early-nineteenth-century Petersburg. The colorfully dressed characters depicted with understanding and sympathy in the touchingly angular lithographs—besides Russians, there are Germans, Frenchmen, a Finn, a Jew, and even a man from Central Asian Bukhara—sell Dutch honey cakes, French bread, rolls, buns and blini, oranges, apples, nuts, prunes, baked pears, candy, hot sbiten (a spiced tea and honey drink), kvass (a fermented soft drink), milk, veal, beef, hot dogs, pike, perch, game, flowers, dishes, watches, combs, needles, pins, brooms, wax, shawls and scarves, magazines and newspapers, and even plaster busts of Homer, Democritus, and … Charlotte from Goethe’s Young Werther.

The simplicity of both the drawings and the dialogues in Magic Lantern is equally appealing. But the gap between the best pages of Physiology of Petersburg, which came out under Nekrasov’s editorship three decades later, and the engravings that accompany them is obvious and sometimes depressing. The text depicts real emotion, while the illustrations are still clumsily conventional, albeit more naturalistic than in the Magic Lantern. The artists were clearly lagging behind the writers, both in the discovery of the “new” Petersburg and in the radical literary change in attitude toward the “old” one.

Perhaps only one painting of that period conveys the true majesty and horror of the Petersburg mythos, and it is not overtly related to the Petersburg theme. Entitled Last Day of Pompeii, it is a huge canvas depicting the destruction of the ancient city by lava from Mount Vesuvius, as described by Pliny the Younger. It was begun in Rome by Karl Briullov, a Russian painter of the Petersburg-Italian school, in 1827 (that is, seven years before the publication of Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s famous novel on that theme) and completed by him in 1833.

Briullov’s painting, which created quite a stir in Europe, was delivered on the ship Tsar Peter to Petersburg, where it was “imperially approved” by Nicholas I and exhibited at the Academy of Arts. Its colossal triumph was greater than that for any other previous Russian painting. “Men of power and artists, socialites and scholars, simple folk and craftsmen—all are imbued with the desire to see Briullov’s painting,” records the supplement to Severnaya pchela for October 21, 1834. “This desire is raging throughout the capital, in all estates and classes, in the suites on the English Embankment, in the workshops and stores on Nevsky Prospect, in the shops in Gostiny and Apraksin Dvor, in the poor quarters of clerks on the Peski and in the offices on Vasilyevsky Island.”^{49}

In Petersburg they called Briullov the “divine Karl.” Pushkin was so excited and charmed by the Last Day of Pompeii that he began a poem dedicated to it (it was left unfinished):

Gogol produced an ecstatic article that began, “Briullov’s painting is one of the brightest phenomena of the nineteenth century. It is the resurrection of painting.” The emperor granted the artist an audience and made him a cavalier of the Order of St. Anna. Nicholas liked the mastery of Briullov’s work; they say he also liked the artist’s young wife. The temperamental and proud Briullov, who was very short, became extremely jealous of the gigantic Nicholas. One morning his wife, standing by the window, saw the emperor in a sled pulled by a raven steed drive up to the Academy of Arts, where the Briullovs lived. She cried out, “Oh, it’s the sovereign!” The furious Briullov rushed over and screamed, “So, you recognized him!” and tore an earring from her pierced ear.

The Petersburgers who flocked to see Briullov’s Last Day of Pompeii were transfixed by his unabashedly romantic depiction of a natural disaster, which ruined a beautiful city and its inhabitants: a reminder of the precarious position of their own metropolis exposed to the merciless forces of nature. There was something operatic in the drama of Briullov’s painting (Gogol was the first to note it, but he approved—such were the tastes of the period), but Petersburgers squirmed anyway. The artist had touched a deep-seated, unconscious fear.

The dissident Alexander Herzen came up with the words to describe that vague feeling in an article on the traditional “confrontational” theme about the opposites, “Moscow and Petersburg,” which circulated throughout Russia in samizdat some twenty-five years later (and which had been read aloud at meetings of the socialistic Petrashevsky circle): “Briullov, who developed in Petersburg, selected for his brush the terrible image of a wild, irrational force, destroying people in Pompeii—that is the inspiration of Petersburg!”

Briullov’s painting shone and vanished in the pale Petersburg sky like an ephemeral comet. The artist could never repeat his unparalleled success, even though he was surrounded by loyal students, a new generation of artists that, under the influence of Briullov, “a man with wild and uncontrollable passions,” as a contemporary noted disapprovingly, “became enamored of effects and phrases: it shouted about the grandeur of the artist, the sacredness of art, grew beards large and small and shoulder-length hair, and dressed in eccentric costumes to distinguish itself from ordinary mortals—and to top it off, following its teacher’s example, unbridled its passions and drank itself into a stupor.”^{50}

Briullov, who was used to the Italian atmosphere, spent the dreary Petersburg evenings and nights in the company of bohemian bachelors at the house of his friend Nestor Kukolnik, the romantic poet and debauchee. Kukolnik, a braggart and adventurer, was celebrated for his superpatriotic dramatic play (which also had received Nicholas’s approval) The Hand of the Almighty Saved the Fatherland, which described in mystical tones the tumultuous path to the throne of the first Russian ruler from the Romanov dynasty, young Mikhail, who became tsar in 1613.

A regular member of Kukolnik’s rowdy gatherings, with music and champagne, was the composer Mikhail Glinka. Thirty-two-year-old Glinka became popular after the premiere of his first opera in 1836, in which the peasant Ivan Susanin surrenders his life to save Mikhail Romanov from the invading Poles. It was a legendary subject, from the same historical period represented in Kukolnik’s play. The composer called his opera Death for the Tsar. Nicholas I renamed it A Life for the Tsar, demonstrating that he was as deft an editor as his grandmother, Catherine the Great.

Russians justly consider Glinka to be the father of their national music, as Pushkin is the father of their national literature. Glinka’s talent and oeuvre have much in common with Pushkin’s—the same lightness and precision, naturalness and expressiveness, simplicity and harmony. Both Glinka and Pushkin possessed innate mastery, an ability to assimilate different Western influences but also an instinctive understanding and original interpretation of the Russian national psyche.

As in the case of Pushkin, the respectful attitude of the West toward Glinka is based on his reputation as a national cultural hero. His music is not understood here, or liked, or regularly performed. Mountings of Glinka’s operas, which are always present on Russian stages, are rare in the West. It is even more astonishing because in music there is no real language barrier to impede comprehension, as in the case of literature.

Unconditional delight in Glinka, however, has never crossed beyond the borders of the Slavic countries, even though confident assurances that his music was just about to be accepted in Europe began to be heard in Russia during the composer’s lifetime. In the West Glinka is still viewed merely as a talented imitator of European musical formulas of the time, not as an original genius.

The Russian cult of Glinka, like the cult of Pushkin, is universal, reaching its apogee in prerevolutionary years; Igor Stravinsky noted later, “poor Glinka, who was only a kind of Russian Rossini, had been Beethovenized and nationally-monumented.”^{51} It’s curious that in the 1971 Soviet edition of the conversations between Robert Craft and Stravinsky, in which I first encountered this rather complimentary quotation (that is, in terms of Stravinsky’s tastes, for at the time he much preferred Rossini to Beethoven), the word “only” was omitted by the editor because it was thought to be apparently “derogatory” toward Glinka.

Glinka’s music became an intrinsic part of the childhood of most of the figures of early Russian modernism, and therefore was always wrapped for them in special memories. The family of Alexander Benois was particularly proud of an Italian great-grandfather who was “director of music” in Petersburg and Glinka’s predecessor. Benois’s ancestor even wrote an opera on the same legendary subject of Ivan Susanin, but twenty years earlier, and subsequently, without envy, diligently conducted the premiere of his rival’s work.

Benois recalled that the young Sergei Diaghilev “idolized Glinka”:^{52} Glinka’s operas were sung by heart at Diaghilev’s house. Nikolai Roerich, later coauthor of the libretto and first designer for Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps, basked in his childhood impressions of listening to Glinka’s “golden” operas at the Imperial Maryinsky Theater:

It seemed as if the musicians were playing from golden scores. There was anxiety that everybody in the box take their seats promptly. The gentleman with the baton had come!—this important information would be delivered from the front, in fear that there would be latecomers moving their chairs and talking, while down there the musicians would already be playing magically from the golden pages.^{53}

After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Glinka became an inconvenience because of his monarchist opera. In those years Igor Stravinsky cultivated appreciation of Glinka in the West, but it did not take here, and the pragmatic Stravinsky gradually moderated his praise. In the Soviet Union Stalin turned out to be an unexpected admirer, and Glinka was force-fed to the public aggressively and almost violently, as potatoes had been in the reign of Catherine the Great.

In the years after World War II, Soviets proclaimed Glinka the “measure of all things,” the official cultural icon, and his harmonic and optimistic music was used by the authorities as an antidote (in numbing doses) to the works of “pessimists and decadents” from Wagner to Shostakovich.

I remember a venerated Soviet musicologist’s heartrending tale about the persecution and attacks on his book, published in 1948, which mentioned—rather cursorily—the influence of Mozart on Glinka’s compositions. The howl of outrage was unanimous, asserting Glinka to be absolutely original and free of all possible Western influences. The poor musicologist was punished for his heresy; his work was not published (nor was he paid) for many years.

Instead countless publications asserted that Glinka’s operas “laid the foundation for the period of primacy of Russian music in the development of the musical culture of the entire world.” One such book, published in 1951, contained quite a surrealistic image: “Glinka amongst us sings the glory of the indestructible might of our Soviet Fatherland.”^{54}

A result of such co-optation, using Glinka as propaganda for the Stalinist regime, was the alienation of Russia’s intellectual youth from his music. In the Leningrad of the 1960s, we virtually rediscovered for ourselves Glinka’s indisputably “Petersburgian” works (in terms of their beauty and purity of line and the nobility of their emotions), thanks to our “underground” idol, Stravinsky. I remember the impression the passages from the Russian edition of Stravinsky’s Chroniques de ma vie made on us. Published in 1963, Stravinsky raved about Glinka’s artistry as “a perfect monument of musical art” and his orchestration, “so intelligent… so distinguished and delicate.”^{55}

Soviet hagiographies presented Glinka as a knight without fear or reproach, antimonarchist, a virtual Decembrist who worked from morning till night creating what was peculiarly called “Russian national realistic music.” The real Glinka, who appeared on the pages of his contemporaries’ memoirs—small, pale, unkempt, a famous Petersburg drunkard with a glass of champagne always in his hand—seemed a curious, unorthodox creature.

In his posthumously published Notes, Glinka described in greatest detail the real and imaginary ills that beset him—headaches, toothaches, neck aches, bad nerves, stomachaches, liver aches, and so on, with the names and characteristics of all the doctors who attended him and the effectiveness of all the medications they prescribed, including the decoction (“rob antisyphilitique”) called “eau de M-r Pollin,” which Glinka had to stop taking because it caused “unbearable migraines.”^{56} With the same thoroughness he listed his numerous paramours: Russian, Polish, German, French, Italian, and Spanish women, usually “pretty and slender” but sometimes “pretty and plump.”

Glinka mentions music in his Notes mostly in passing, as befits a spoiled Russian nobleman and dilettante composer. Where did this hypochondriac, this babied and capricious, egotistical and indolent nobleman who always felt ill find the strength to produce his great work? After A Life for the Tsar, Glinka composed another grand opera—Ruslan and Lyudmila—based on the Pushkin tale, charming in its abundance of bel canto melody and lush orchestration. He also wrote a succession of popular symphonic works, numerous compositions for the piano and other instruments, and eighty marvelous art songs; Glinka particularly valued this genre for its spontaneity and accessibility.

Glinka loved performing his own songs, among which there are numerous masterpieces, playing the piano around two in the morning at parties in Kukolnik’s unruly house, where the composer spent all his time. The other guests were all talented people but they were far from Glinka’s stature. They understood this and surrounded the composer with sincere adoration. Glinka found refuge here from his failing marriage to a woman who berated him for wasting too much money on music paper.

In the 1970s, Leo Arnshtam, a friend of Shostakovich’s youth and a filmmaker commissioned by Stalin personally in 1946 to make a biographical film on Glinka, told me the spicy details of Glinka’s closed divorce documents, giggling over the fact that his wife was accused not only of adultery but also of bigamy.

Completely frazzled, Glinka decided in 1840 to escape from Petersburg to Paris, where he composed a special work for his last fling at Kukolnik’s, his only vocal cycle, of twelve songs, called Farewell to Petersburg. The faithful Kukolnik produced words to accompany Glinka’s luscious melodies.

One of Glinka’s most impressive works, Farewell to Petersburg is a kaleidoscope of pictures and emotions, united by a noble and expressive manner of vocal writing; it includes a passionate confession of love, sorrowful meditations, a lullaby, an attempt to capture the beauty of the Russian landscape (“The Lark,” popular in Russia), and a musical depiction of a Petersburg spree among a circle of delighted and loyal friends. With typically Russian “universal responsiveness” (Dostoyevsky’s expression) and Petersburgian sensibility, it uses an Italian barcarole, a Spanish bolero, and a Jewish song; the song, as well as some references to Palestine in the text, kept the cycle from being performed in full in the Soviet Union after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, when Brezhnev broke diplomatic ties with Israel.

One of the pieces in Farewell to Petersburg, “Travel Song,” is of particular interest. It is probably the world’s first truly artistic vocal depiction of a railroad trip. The first railroad in Russia, connecting Petersburg with suburban Tsarskoe Selo, was still considered an innovation since it had opened only a few years earlier, in October 1837.

Contemporaries perceived the introduction of railroad transport not simply as a current sensation but as a symbolic event confirming the wisdom and correctness of the historical path chosen by Peter the Great: “Fire breathes from the nostrils! And twenty carriages attached to one another roll down cast-iron tracks, like a single arrow shot from a bow! What would Peter I say and feel if by some miracle he was here among us and could fly the twenty-five versts from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo in twenty-five minutes! What joy would reign in his heart!”^{57}

After writing Farewell to Petersburg, Glinka suddenly changed his mind about leaving. Instead, he published his cycle, with “extraordinary success,” as the press noted: it went into three editions. The popular Petersburg journal Library for Reading particularly singled out “Travel Song,” “in which movement defines a special life, hustle and bustle—the necessary qualities of a trip on the railroad. The external sense of the trip and inner excitement, passionate and imbued with hope and expectation, are presented with exquisite refinement. In terms of artistry, this is probably the best number in Farewell to Petersburg”^{58}

Still, subsequent works by Glinka, especially major ones, had at best succès d’estime. Nicholas I left the theater before the end of the long-awaited and highly publicized premiere of Ruslan and Lyudmila. Taking that as a signal, the aristocratic audience applauded Glinka’s opera mildly; some even hissed. Discouraged, Glinka sat nervously in the director’s box with his friend, the chief of the gendarmes corps. Seeing Glinka hesitate over whether to come out for bows, the sympathetic but cynical gendarme pushed the composer onto the stage with the words, “Go on, Christ suffered more than you.”^{59}

A contemporary recalled that after the premiere of Ruslan and Lyudmila, “everyone went home subdued, as if after a nightmare.”^{60} The public rushed to the conclusion that Glinka has written himself out in his first opera, A Life for the Tsar. The composer, no Christ at all (his acquaintances compared Glinka to the delicate blossom Mimosa sensitiva), fell into a deep depression.

Glinka couldn’t live without the high of adulation for his creative gifts. He blossomed only when supported and applauded. Then, in the appropriate atmosphere and after a few glasses of champagne, he would gladly perform his marvelous songs as he had in the past. He had a tenor voice, not very high but resonant and unusually flexible, and so he interpreted his works for friends to an explosion of sincere delight.

In 1849 the young Dostoyevsky heard Glinka when the composer sang before some members of the dissident Petrashevsky circle. Ruslan and Lyudmila was always one of Dostoyevsky’s favorite operas. And hearing Glinka sing, the writer was greatly moved; that evening remained in his memory as one of the most powerful impressions of his life. Many years later Dostoyevsky described Glinka performing his art song in the novella The Eternal Husband, judging the performance in terms of his “realistic aesthetic” of that period: “No adept musician or some sort of salon singer could ever have achieved that effect…. In order to sing that small but extraordinary piece, what was needed was the truth, real, total inspiration, real passion.”

In the end Glinka fled the city, which he called “vile,” “hateful Petersburg.” “The local climate is definitely harmful to me, or perhaps, my health is even more affected by the local gossips, each of whom has at least one drop of poison on the tip of his tongue,”^{61} he complained to his beloved sister. Count Sollogub recalled visiting Glinka in those days at his Petersburg apartment, when the composer frightened him with his “martyred look and gloomy cynicism.”^{62}

But before leaving for Berlin (where Glinka died in 1857 at the age of fifty-two of the aftereffects of the flu, which led to paralysis of the heart), the composer left behind a work that, despite its seeming lack of pretension and its modest length, became the true model and powerful source of Petersburg music. It was the orchestral version of Glinka’s old piano piece, “Valse-Fantaisie,” a remembrance of “the days of love and youth,” as the composer elegiacally informed the paralyzed friend to whom the score was dedicated.

This astonishing waltz, pure Pushkin in its mood and mastery, is the real inspiration behind the magical waltzes of Tchaikovsky, which later conquered the world. (There are echoes of the “Valse-Fantaisie” even in the famous “Blue Danube” waltz by Johann Strauss, Jr., who held Glinka in esteem.) Tchaikovsky said of another piece by Glinka, “Kamarinskaya,” that it contained, as an acorn contains an oak, the entire Russian symphonic school. “Valse-Fantaisie,” that incomparable Petersburg musical poem of love, longing, and suffering, already contains the emotional intensity, smooth melodic curves and swings, and the virtuoso “silver” orchestration of the waltz revelations of Tchaikovsky (and later of Glazunov), but in a classically pure and balanced form.

In composing this sentimental music without sentimentality, Glinka could have repeated Pushkin’s line “My sorrow is radiant.” “Valse-Fantaisie” is pure Petersburg erotica—passionate but controlled. In Petersburg (as in Europe) a young woman from an aristocratic home could not dance the waltz without special permission from an adult chaperone. Petersburg adapted the European waltz by “hiding” its sexual daring, and so Glinka gave the erotic longing an almost spiritual tone, as if foreshadowing by half a century the basic motif of Anna Akhmatova’s early poetry.

It was probably exactly this quality that made “Valse-Fantaisie” one of the favorite musical works of George Balanchine, who had danced in Ruslan and Lyudmila as a child on the stage of the Maryinsky Theater. In the West, Diaghilev and Stravinsky approved and further fueled the young choreographer’s cult of Glinka, urging him to ignore the coolness toward the Russian classic among European musicians.

Balanchine told me how Diaghilev, laughing at and mocking the ignorance of Western critics, showed him a clipping from a French newspaper that asserted Glinka would have been all right if he had not stolen his melodies from Tchaikovsky!^{63} Becoming one of Stravinsky’s closest friends and collaborators, Balanchine understood the importance for the composer, unknown to many Western observers, of Glinka’s oeuvre. Stravinsky’s biographer, Robert Craft, recalled that as he listened with Balanchine to a recording of Stravinsky’s Persephone in 1982, he was astonished to hear the choreographer exclaim, “Glinka!” (and also “Tchaikovsky!”) during melodies that to Craft seemed “purely French.”^{64}

Balanchine staged “Valse-Fantaisie” three times for the New York City Ballet, in 1953, 1967, and 1969, revealing a spectacle of nostalgic elegance. His friend and collaborator, the artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, always associated that work of Glinka’s with the magic and poetry of the Petersburg white nights. Balanchine’s ideas on the “Valse-Fantaisie” were so explicit and powerful that even John Martin, the influential ballet critic of the New York Times, usually not one to take note of some obscure Russian connection, turned out to be more penetrating in his review of this piece than usual: “The music, winning and melodious, with no break, no change of tempo, passes from persuasiveness to virtual hypnosis, and it is easy to realize why once the genteel waltz was considered an instrument of the devil.”^{65}

When he left Petersburg forever in 1856, Glinka got out of his carriage at the city limits and spat on the ground that, in his opinion, did not give his genius its due. He returned to the capital only in his coffin; fewer than thirty people attended his interment. Among them was Count Sollogub, who recorded in his memoirs that when the coffin was lowered into the grave, the composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky, standing next to him, remarked bitterly, “Look at that, please, it’s as if they were burying some titular councillor.”^{66} On the hierarchical ladder of tsarist Russia, titular councillor was one of the lowest ranks. Perhaps Dargomyzhsky recalled those words a few years later, when he composed his famous art song, “Titular Councillor,” a musical satire imbued with bitterness about the fate of “the little man” in St. Petersburg.

Sollogub felt that Glinka, who was “ambitious and proud to the extreme,” had been destroyed by the lack of official recognition and status commensurate with the composer’s great aspirations: “Sensing his extraordinary gift, he quite naturally dreamed of an extraordinary position, which, incidentally, in those circumstances, was impossible. Had there been a conservatory, he would have been made director, of course. But there was no conservatory.”^{67}

In the Petersburg of Nicholas I, the social position of music and musicians was uncertain and ambiguous. The other arts—painting, sculpture, architecture—were supervised by the Academy of Arts, founded in 1757 by Empress Elizabeth. This gave their practitioners some status and rights—great help in the severely codified and over-bureacratized state that was Russia. In particular, graduates of the Academy of Arts were given the official title “free artist,” which gave them certain privileges.

The artists of the opera and ballet belonged to the system of imperial theaters and were thus considered to be in government service; the same was true of the members of the Court Singing Capella. But the profession of musician per se did not exist from the legal point of view in Russia, and for musicians this created countless unpleasant incidents.

The first Russian performer to become world famous, the pianist Anton Rubinstein, recalled encountering one such absurd situation. Rubinstein was the son of a Jew who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and once the pianist went to the Kazan Cathedral in Petersburg to sign up for confession. The deacon asked him, “Your name? Who are you?”

“Rubinstein, artist.”

“Artist, does that mean you work in a theater? No? Perhaps, you’re a teacher at some institute? Or you are in service somewhere?”

Rubinstein tried to explain to the deacon that he was a concert pianist. Finally, the deacon had the sense to ask Rubinstein about his father. Satisfied, he listed the great artist in the confession book as “son of a merchant of the second guild.”^{68}

Petersburg’s musical life in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century was concentrated in several aristocratic salons, because until 1859 public concerts were allowed only during Lent, when the theaters were closed, that is, six weeks a year. The most famous of these salons was in the home of the wealthy Counts Vielgorsky—the brothers Mikhail and Matvei, eccentric and refined music lovers, but also clever courtiers.

The counts had, weekly, sometimes quite impressive concerts: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first heard in Russia at the Vielgorskys’. Three hundred or more guests would come to listen to Franz Liszt playing piano or to see Robert Schumann conduct one of his symphonies. It was there that people enjoyed the art of the Italian prima donnas visiting Petersburg and stared with curiosity at the famous European avant-garde composers of the day—Berlioz and Wagner.

Berlioz called the Vielgorsky house “a small ministry of fine arts,” and for good reason: there one could regularly hear the metallic voice of Russia’s main patron of the arts—His Majesty Nicholas I; frequently it was after a concert at the Vielgorskys’ that the fate of a visiting European musician would be decided—whether he would leave Russia rich or without a penny. Among the accepted, Clara Schumann enthusiastically reported to her father, “Those Vielgorskys are marvelous people for artists; they live only for art and do not spare any expense.”

Another concert series with a solid reputation (and a European fame) was held at the house of General Alexei Lvov, the ambitious and imperious director of the Court Singing Capella and composer of the Russian national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” Glinka had hoped passionately that the unofficial contest in 1833 would result in his monumental, joyful chorus “Glory” from A Life for the Tsar becoming the state anthem. Alas, Nicholas chose the much more formulaic work of his close friend Lvov, in whose company he liked to make music; as Sollogub explained, “the sovereign did not want to be glorified, he wanted people to pray for him.”^{69}

A similar situation occurred in 1943 when Stalin selected the music of his toady—also a general, but a Soviet one—Alexander Alexandrov, rejecting the entries by Shostakovich and Khachaturian. Lvov’s melody is often heard in our day, whenever Tchaikovsky’s popular 1812 Overture or his Slavonic March is performed, because they include the anthem. Another melody by Glinka, “Patriotic Song,” was finally chosen as its anthem by the post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.

An habitué of Lvov’s aristocratic musical salon recalled, “Every educated member of Petersburg society knew that temple of musical art, attended in its time by members of the imperial family and the high society of Petersburg; a temple in which for many years (1835-1855) mingled the authorities, the artists, wealth, taste, and beauty of the capital.”^{70}

Lvov was a virtuoso violinist himself, but he always insisted that he was only a musical dilettante and not a professional, for a general and important bureaucrat being “merely a musician” seemed humiliating. Schumann, who heard Lvov play in Leipzig, called him a “marvelous and rare performer” and wrote, “If there are other such dilettantes in the Russian capital then many a European artist could learn there rather than teach.” Still, Rubinstein was absolutely right in suggesting that music in Petersburg would not flourish without musical training being sponsored by the state.

Rubinstein was the ideal figure to accomplish this grand design. Short and stocky with a mane of hair and strongly resembling Beethoven (Rubinstein did not deny rumors that he was Beethoven’s illegitimate son), the Russian pianist had, besides his talent as performer and composer, boundless energy and self-confidence. It helped that he had developed ties to the royal family necessary for the success of his endeavor. As a boy he had played in the Winter Palace, where Emperor Nicholas greeted him with, “Ah, your excellency.” “I was told,” Rubinstein recalled later, “that the tsar’s word was law, and that had I mentioned it I would have been an ‘excellency.’”^{71}

Nicholas made the little boy imitate Liszt’s playing (with all of Liszt’s mannerisms) and laughed heartily; the amusing wunderkind was showered with precious gifts. And as Rubinstein insisted later, he had never seen anything more generous than the tsar’s gifts, particularly if they were handed to him right on the spot in the Winter Palace: “the gifts that were sent the following day were not as valuable.”^{72}

Rubinstein became a kind of musical secretary to the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, wife of Emperor Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. The grand duke was a boor, while Elena Pavlovna, a beautiful and smart German princess from Württemberg, strove to create a European-oriented intellectual and artistic climate for herself in Petersburg. Gradually that German lady, described even by her enemies as “highly amusing, serious, and lovely,” became the main patroness of the arts in Russia. During long evening talks with Elena Pavlovna in her palace on Kamenny Island, where Rubinstein had moved, they finalized plans for a conservatory in Petersburg. The impressions of those conversations, life in the palace, and the landscapes around it were captured by Rubinstein in his charming piano pieces, collected in the cycles Kamenny Island ( 1853-1854), The Ball ( 1854), and Soirées àSt. Petersburg (1860).

But nothing came of the plans to “Europeanize” Russian music in Nicholas’s lifetime. Rubinstein wrote that when he returned from revolutionary Berlin to Petersburg in 1849, the trunk with his musical compositions was confiscated by customs agents who suspected the notes concealed some sort of seditious writings. In Petersburg the capital’s governor stamped his feet at Rubinstein and shouted, “I’ll have you in chains! I’ll send you to Siberia!” And the Petersburg police chief sent the artist, by then a European star, to one of his clerks with the instructions, “Play something for him, so we’ll know that you really are a musician.”^{73}

In that atmosphere it would seem hopeless to talk about respect for musicians, but Rubinstein did not give up: in 1859, with the help of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, he organized the Russian Musical Society, which subsequently added “Imperial” to its name. Elena Pavlovna became the “most august chairwoman” of the society, which inaugurated regular symphonic and chamber concerts with frequently adventurous programming. Music classes began under the society’s auspices, and in 1861 they became the Petersburg Conservatory, the first in Russia.

This was an enormously significant step. The Petersburg Conservatory bred the performing and composing schools that would conquer the entire world in the twentieth century. The names Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist, Milstein, Mravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich speak for themselves. George Balanchine also attended that conservatory, and he always recalled his musical mentors with affection and gratitude.

The flood of candidates for study at the first Russian conservatory was overwhelming, and naturally it included some oddballs; one noble lady brought her retarded son to Rubinstein “because everyone chases him away, so let him study music at least.” The first students (there were 179 of them) were a motley crowd that had gathered from all corners of the empire; among them was a shy, unassuming senior clerk of a department in the Ministry of Justice, the twenty-two-year-old Peter Tchaikovsky.

The accusations, complaints, and arguments, so typically Russian, overheated and often unfair, filled the air almost immediately; the strife was about both the idea of the conservatory and about Rubinstein personally. Vladimir Stasov, the temperamental and quite influential critic, insisted that higher education could be useful in science but not in art, and so conservatories would interfere “with creativity in the most harmful way” and “serve only as a hotbed for mediocrities.”^{74}

Stasov, who was playfully called “Bach” by his friends and ridiculed as an ignoramus by his enemies, asserted that small-scale schools were better for the development of original Russian music. He was defending the vital tradition of intimate Petersburg musical circles, which by that time had produced remarkable artistic results. Among them, the most curious group gathered in the late 1850s around the composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky.

The wealthy landowner Dargomyzhsky had long attracted admirers of his art, primarily young and pretty amateur female singers. Small and bewhiskered like a cat, the composer, in imitation of Glinka, spent hours at his piano illuminated by two candelabra, while accompanying his lovely students as they sang his unconventional, expressive art songs. He sang along in his strange, almost contralto voice. This is how Dargomyzhsky’s Petersburg Serenades premiered. That cycle of refined vocal ensembles soon gained popularity among the capital’s dilettantes.

After the success of his opera Rusalka (based on a Pushkin tale and produced in Petersburg in 1856), Dargomyzhsky started to be visited by beginning composers as well. Among them were the nineteen-year-old nobleman from Nizhni Novgorod, Mily Balakirev, and the young military engineer who graduated from the same academy as Dostoyevsky, César Cui, born in Vilno, the son of a Frenchman and a Lithuanian woman. Both were uncommonly gifted musicians whose talents Dargomyzhsky appreciated. Soon they were joined by the son of a Pskov landowner, the guardsman Modest Mussorgsky, a “very elegant little officer, as if from a picture,”^{75} with aristocratic manners, who could play excerpts from Trovatore and Traviata sweetly and gracefully on the piano, and proud of the fact that at the age of thirteen he “had been granted the particularly courteous attention of the late Emperor Nicholas,” according to Mussorgsky’s “Autobiographical Notes” from 1880.

Dargomyzhsky blossomed in the company of these young geniuses, and his art songs became sharper and bolder. If Glinka’s music can be considered congenial to the works of Pushkin, Dargomyzhsky’s works were beginning to echo the Petersburg of Gogol’s tales and the world of The Physiology of Petersburg, the collection edited by Nekrasov.

In those years the satirical chansons of the French poet Pierre-Jean Béranger, translated into Russian, were very popular. Dargomyzhsky wrote his two masterful art songs, very Petersburgian in mood and outlook, to texts by Béranger. He presented them in the form of an originally conceived ballad, almost a stage monologue, in which the Frenchman’s themes, transplanted to Petersburg’s soil, sounded daringly freethinking and challenging. “The Old Corporal” was a frontal attack on one of the two main institutions of Nicholas’s empire, the army, and “The Worm” on the other, the bureaucracy.

From a purely artistic point of view, these are two marvelous, melodramatic musical tales, with an expressive vocal part and laconic accompaniment. The great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin recalled singing “The Old Corporal” for Leo Tolstoy at his home (with twenty-six-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff at the piano): “When I tearfully spoke the last words of the soldier about to be shot: ‘God grant you get home,’ Tolstoy took his hand from under his belt and wiped two tears that fell from his eyes.”^{76}

Audiences were just as touched when Chaliapin performed with Russian passion “The Worm” and Dargomyzhsky’s other song about a miserable, intimidated clerk, “The Titular Councillor.” Their striking, almost caricatured depiction of these men who were so close to the heroes of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and The Overcoat provoked one hostile critic to describe the characters as “this scum of Petersburg’s corners.”

While he was creating these sarcastic and at the same time deeply felt sketches in the late 1850s, Dargomyzhsky practically preordained the manner of performance, inserting numerous author’s remarks as if in a dramatic scene by Gogol: “with a sigh,” “squinting,” “smiling shyly.” This attention to close detail combined with his general satirical but compassionate attitude put Dargomyzhsky next to Gogol’s followers in the “natural school” and brought him together with radical writers grouped around Iskra (The Spark), the popular, ultraleftist Petersburg satirical journal.

It seemed that Dargomyzhsky, who was respected paradoxically by both the establishment (he had become a board member of the Imperial Russian Musical Society in 1859) and the young intellectual rebels, had positioned himself comfortably at last and could rest safely on his laurels. This hard-won security makes his last artistic leap even more amazing—a kind of swan song, the opera The Stone Guest, which would have far-reaching influence on the subsequent avant-garde strivings of Petersburg music. Dargomyzhsky wrote it to the almost unchanged text of one of Pushkin’s Small Tragedies, a variation of the Don Juan theme.

Just as Pushkin had, in his day, competed with no less than the mighty shadow of Molière, Dargomyzhsky challenged Mozart. Naturally, the Russian’s chamber opera was in an altogether different “weight class” from Mozart’s monumental and all-encompassing Don Giovanni. But no less incisive a music critic than Shostakovich told me that of the two musical interpretations of the Don Juan legend, he definitely preferred Dargomyzhsky’s.^{77}

We may appreciate Shostakovich’s point of view better if we understand that Dargomyzhsky’s opera is, from start to finish, an experimental—to the point of being polemical—work, a quality which probably endeared it so to Shostakovich. It was created in accordance with his profession de foi: “I want sound to express the word directly. I want the truth.”

Dargomyzhsky’s intention was nothing more or less than a radical reform of the operatic genre. In The Stone Guest he rejected most traditional operatic techniques. There are no developed arias, no ensembles, no choruses in his work; instead there is only a flexible recitative that follows closely Pushkin’s text. The music flows whimsically, sensitively re-creating the subtlest change in mood, but it is subordinated to the logic of speech; and it is exactly this quality, conveying to the Russian listener of Dargomyzhsky’s opera an acute and almost physical pleasure, that gets in the way of the work’s appreciation in the West. To Russians this work sounds astonishingly daring and bold to this day.

In writing The Stone Guest, the already severely ill composer relied as never before on the moral support of his talented young friends. Balakirev, Cui, and Mussorgsky were joined by the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, the rosy-cheeked and handsome Alexander Borodin, and a young naval officer, the tall and bespectacled Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. This group, eventually led by the fanatical and despotic Balakirev, met almost weekly at Dargomyzhsky’s to follow the progress of The Stone Guest. Dargomyzhsky sang Don Juan with inspiration while Mussorgsky helped with the part of Leporello. And every time the master would muse, “I’m not writing it, it’s some force I do not understand.”

Stasov, an eyewitness of these unforgettable Petersburg evenings, later said,

It was delight, awe, it was an almost prayerful bowing before a mighty creative force, which had transformed that weak, bilious, sometimes petty and envious man into a powerful giant of will, energy, and inspiration. The Balakirev group’ was overjoyed and delighted. It surrounded Dargomyzhsky with its sincere adoration, and with its profound intellectual sympathy rewarded the poor old man in the final days of his life for all the long years of his moral loneliness.^{78}

After each new presentation, Dargomyzhsky usually mused that, if he died without finishing The Stone Guest, he wanted Cui to finish writing it and Korsakov to orchestrate it. And that’s what happened. On January 17, 1869, Dargomyzhsky was found dead in his bed, the manuscript of The Stone Guest open on his lap. Only the last few pages of the piano score were left unfinished. Completed and arranged lovingly by his young friends in 1870, the opera was staged at the Maryinsky Theater two years later.

There was a reason for the delay. Nicholas I’s decree of 1827, which had remained in force even after the emperor’s death, stated that a Russian composer could receive no more than 1,143 rubles for an opera, while Dargomyzhsky’s executor demanded a fee of 3,000 silver rubles. The court minister who supervised the Maryinsky Theater refused to pay that sum. (For the sake of comparison, Verdi’s honorarium for an opera specially commissioned by Alexander II, La Forza del Destino, which the composer premiered in Petersburg in 1862, came to 22,000 rubles.) At Stasov’s urging, the needed sum was collected—not by musicians but by Petersburg artists, who then offered the rights to Dargomyzhsky’s opera “to the Russian theater and the Russian people” for free.

Presented to the Petersburg audience, The Stone Guest was met by the predictable raptures from Stasov and confusion, even hostility, among the uninitiated, who charged that Dargomyzhsky in his last years had fallen “completely under the sway of our home-grown musicoclasts.”^{79}

But this wonderfully “musicoclastic” opera, inspired and completely original, gave a powerful impulse to the radical strivings of the Petersburg group of composers. This group, whose members are listed here in birth order (Borodin, 1833; Cui, 1835; Balakirev, 1836; Mussorgsky, 1839; and Rimsky-Korsakov, 1844), entered music history under the “tactless” (according to Rimsky-Korsakov) name Moguchaya Kuchka (Mighty Handful), in the West, the Mighty Five, invented by the group’s ideologue, Stasov.

The Mighty Five may be the most outstanding artistic group that ever existed in Petersburg or elsewhere in Russia. It assured the domination of Russian artistic development for years to come by a similar kind of friendly alliance: both the realistic painters known as Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) and later the members of the modernist Mir iskusstva started out as participants in circles that were connected not only by aesthetics but also by close personal ties. The members of the Mighty Five, musical amateurs who basically taught one another under the stern leadership and supervision of Balakirev, decisively changed the style and substance of Russian music and, in the person of their most famous representative, Mussorgsky, noticeably influenced Western culture as well.

The connection between Dargomyzhsky and Mussorgsky is unquestionable. Mussorgsky dedicated the first song of his cycle, The Nursery, to Dargomyzhsky, “the great teacher of musical truth.” Under the influence of The Stone Guest and the (at first) joking suggestion of Dargomyzhsky, Mussorgsky began composing an opera to the unchanged prose text of Gogol’s play The Marriage, that satirical, “completely unbelievable event in two acts” from the life of a bachelor Petersburg clerk. Mussorgsky explained, “This is what I would like. For my characters to speak on stage the way living people speak … in The Marriage I am crossing the Rubicon.”^{80} It sounded like a manifesto of musical realism, but the result was just as “unbelievable” as Gogol’s Petersburgian grotesque play.

Mussorgsky’s Marriage today is perceived as a prescient forerunner of expressionism; in its day even Dargomyzhsky, the young innovator’s mentor, thought that Mussorgsky “had gone a little too far.” The other circle members, delighted by early fragments of the opera, viewed The Marriage, presented to them in the form of the completed first act, as just a curiosity.

Mussorgsky himself was almost frightened by the audacity of his experiment and announced, “The Marriage is a cage in which I am kept until I become tame and then I can come out.”^{81} He broke off the composition and left the opera unfinished. Appreciation of The Marriage’s real value came only a half-century later.

Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest and Mussorgsky’s Marriage speeded the future development of Russian opera, setting off a chain reaction of experimental works created by Petersburg musicians. They are Rimsky-Korsakov’s chamber opera Mozart and Salieri (1897, after Pushkin); Prokofiev’s The Gambler (1916), based on the Dostoyevsky novel; and Shostakovich’s The Nose (1928) and The Gamblers (1942), after Gogol.

All these works have in common the composer’s persistent, almost fanatical desire to conquer new musical territory and revolutionize musical language. By “cross-breeding” music with prose, not poetic texts as had been the custom, these works produced sometimes shocking, though ultimately deeply satisfying, results. More important, the composers’ very approach to their themes was refreshingly unorthodox, without reliance on traditional postromantic effects. In these respects, all these operas could count The Stone Guest and The Marriage as their forerunners.

At the same time, The Stone Guest’s music served as a model for Russian lyrical dramatic recitative, construed as closely as possible to cantilena (usually not the case with Italian recitative). Dargomyzhsky’s opera was built as an unbroken line of miniature ariosos and monologues. This device gave a powerful impetus to structural experiments in Russian opera. As for The Marriage, it was the first extended work to develop satirical, grotesque musical language, with all its jolting contrasts and exaggerations, when the composer, in the best Russian-Petersburg tradition, mocks his characters but at the same time “weeps” over them. Taking into account all these aspects, we see how Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich are all deeply indebted to Dargomyzhsky and Mussorgsky.

The rich musical life of Petersburg in the 1860s and 1870s, attracting ever more participants and larger audiences, was defined by a strident conflict between two seemingly unequal forces. The camp of the Imperial Russian Musical Society and the Petersburg Conservatory was headed by the capricious Anton Rubinstein. To counterbalance their Western-oriented and, in the opinion of the young nationalists of the Five, decidedly anti-Russian direction, the other dictator, Balakirev, founded his own educational organization, called “Free Music School.”

At Balakirev’s school not only were the basics of music taught free of charge to poor students, clerks, and craftsmen, but regular concerts were given with programs consisting primarily of works by the Five. However, Balakirev and his friends had trouble competing with the Russian Musical Society, because the participation of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (“the muse Euterpe,” as she was called by admirers and foes alike, owing to her role as august patroness) gave Rubinstein access to a constant and generous imperial subsidy.

Trapped in the vise of an exhausting financial deficit, Balakirev and his circle found release in cursing Rubinstein along the lines of “Stupinstein.” They did not eschew anti-Semitic cracks, either. The wounded Rubinstein complained, “Sad is my lot, no one considers me his own. In my homeland I am ‘kike,’ in Germany I am a Russian, in England, I’m Herr Rubinstein, everywhere a stranger.”^{82}

In his battle with the hated Russian Musical Society, Balakirev even used the advice of a Petersburg fortune-teller who was in love with him, “a real witch,” according to Rimsky-Korsakov. Cui attacked the “conservatives” in his music column in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, an influential newspaper. The most radical member of the “Balakirev party,” Mussorgsky, was mobilized to help by composing a rather mean musical parody called Rayok (The Peepshow), in which he mocked the enemies of the Mighty Five, including “Euterpe” Elena Pavlovna.[6]

The life and work of Mussorgsky is woven from paradoxes. The composer resembled one of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Many of his confused views and tastes were formed by the idealism of the radical youth of the 1860s in Petersburg.

It was in Petersburg, in May 1855, right after the death of Nicholas I, that the twenty-six-year-old Nikolai Chernyshevsky published his influential booklet, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” with its basic thesis, “the beautiful is life.” This became the guiding motto of the sixties generation. According to Chernyshevsky, true art re-creates reality in the forms of life itself and at the same time is a “textbook of life.” In other words, art must be “realistic” and “progressive,” actively participating in the political struggle, the final goal of which is revolution and a specifically Russian socialism that somehow does not resemble the Western models.

An even more radical critic, Dmitri Pisarev, also an idol of Petersburg youth, rejected the very meaning of art. In his opinion the only thing that art might be good for was to depict “the suffering of the starving majority, to dwell on the causes of that suffering, constantly to draw society’s attention to economic and social issues.”

Pisarev, a confirmed nihilist, saw little use in classical art, which, in his opinion, was far removed from life. He insisted that Pushkin’s work was “somniferous,” hopelessly out of date. Pisarev wrote that Pushkin was merely a “frivolous versifier, shackled by petty prejudices,” a useless and even harmful “parasite,” a definition that would be applied a hundred years later, first by the Soviet press, then by the courts to another poet, at the time a Leningrader and future Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky.

The views of the energetic young literary nihilist, which found broad support among the Petersburg students of the sixties, were shared by many aspiring artists of the capital as well. Journals with articles by Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and other radicals were greeted in the Petersburg art world with avid interest, circulated, and read until the pages wore out. Many took delight in Pisarev’s anarchistic call, “What can be broken should be broken, what can take a blow is useful, what smashes to smithereens is garbage.”

And so the privileged Academy of Arts, for a long time the dominant factor in the artistic life of Petersburg and all of Russia, received its first unexpected blow from within in 1863. Fourteen of the most talented students of the academy quit, refusing to obey what they considered old-fashioned and meaningless rules.

“The rebellion of the fourteen” provoked a clash between the official, ossified art of Petersburg and the young nationalist talents, who were feeling their strength. This was an unheard-of collective—and therefore, for the cultural establishment, an especially dangerous—protest against the bureaucratization of Russian art, which had been turned by Nicholas I into an office department, where the rewards were generous and the demands severe.

The young rebels formed the Petersburg Artists’ Cooperative, headed by the charismatic twenty-six-year-old Ivan Kramskoy. In imitation of the heroes of Chernyshevsky’s popular novel, What Is to Be Done?, they organized a “commune,” renting a large house in Petersburg where they lived, worked, and ate; the household expenses and income were shared. There would be up to fifty guests at the inexpensive but lively dinners held at the cooperative; articles about art were read aloud and discussed, someone would sing or play the piano, and sometimes they even held dances. The Artists’ Cooperative quickly turned into a flourishing enterprise: word of the rebels, despite the official ban on mentioning their departure from the academy in the press, spread far and wide, and there were enough people in Petersburg who wanted to have a fresh Russian landscape, or a busy genre scene, or a realistic portrait done by one of these young talents, to sustain them.

After conquering Petersburg, the young rebels’ next big step was taking over the inert Russian provinces. In 1870 the cooperative was transformed into the Brotherhood of Wandering Art Exhibits. The idea was to move paintings all over the country that would otherwise be available only to residents of the capital. The general public would see and have an opportunity to buy original art. The painters, besides expanding their audience and potential market for their works, also collected the modest entrance fees to the exhibits.

The exhibits of the Wanderers, as they were called, were held annually, and each became an event that was discussed for the rest of the year. Astonished viewers crowded in front of the pictures, expressing outrage or delight that instead of the mythological, conventional heroes and idealized still lifes and landscapes they were being shown genre scenes involving clerks, merchants, or—horrors!—drunken peasants.

If the Wanderers did exhibit a historical painting, it would be from the Russian past. They rejected the tradition of Briullov, whose once-famous Last Day of Pompeii was now mocked by the outspoken ideologue of the Wanderers (and of the Mighty Five), Stasov, for its “superficial beauty,” “melodrama,” and “Italian fake declamation instead of honest feeling.” Briullov’s oeuvre had to wait until 1898 for its “rehabilitation,” when the hundredth anniversary of his birthday was marked by opulent banquets (with some of the leading Wanderers present) and rapturous speeches.

The paintings of the most important Petersburg Wanderers—Ivan Kramskoy, Nikolai Ge, Ilya Repin, Arkhip Kuindzhi—sold like hot cakes. A rich merchant wanted to buy a landscape by Kuindzhi, and the artist told him an amusing story. When that landscape was just finished, the paint still not dry, an unassuming naval officer looked into the artist’s studio: could they sell him that painting?

“It’s beyond your means,” the artist replied.

“How much do you want?”

“Nothing less than five thousand,” the painter said, naming an incredible sum just to get rid of his uninvited guest.

The officer responded calmly, “Fine, I’ll take it.” It was Grand Duke Konstantin.

Rumors of such incidents spread rapidly through Petersburg, and as a result prices for the Wanderers’ works rose even higher. The emerging Russian bourgeoisie had money to spend. Growing public opinion demanded art that was engaged and “realistic.” The idea of collectivism in culture, of cooperatives, associations, and circles was in the air.

Mussorgsky, as befitted a man of the sixties, also considered himself a collectivist, a political radical, and a “realist.” He was genuinely upset when the Balakirev circle began to come apart over personal conflicts and artistic disagreements. But for all this, Mussorgsky was indisputably the most isolated member of that circle and the hardest to understand. The grandeur, acuity, and uncompromising nature of the composer’s artistry, in conjunction with the morbid intensity of his personality, doomed Mussorgsky to solitude. In this lay the roots of his creative and personal drama.

Mussorgsky’s fervent desire for collective effort, including living in a “commune,” so typical of the Petersburg of the sixties, was often accompanied by outbursts of the most extreme individualism. (Mussorgsky never had a family.) His naive striving for “realism” in music paradoxically led him to the grotesque, the depiction of hallucinations, and pathological characters. An atheist, he created some of the most intensely mystical pages in Russian music. And, finally, Mussorgsky’s political radicalism was almost totally transformed into aesthetic radicalism. The composer’s battle cry became “Forward! To new shores!”

In a list he made not long before his death of people who had especially influenced his development, Mussorgsky first entered and then crossed out Dostoyevsky. Why? One could argue endlessly, but the obvious reason is the similarity between the central personae of Mussorgsky’s operas and the protagonists of Dostoyevsky’s novels. In both artists’ works, the aesthetic ideal was the search for a “new word.”

The unbearable torment of Tsar Boris Godunov in the eponymous opera after the tragedy by Pushkin, which Mussorgsky wrote in 1869-1872, echoes the torment of Raskolnikov, the Petersburg student in Crime and Punishment, published a few years earlier. And Dosifei, the leader of the eighteenth-century schismatics in Khovanshchina (which Mussorgsky called a “national musical drama”), resembles in many ways the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov; each was written in the late 1870s.

The similarities were not, of course, the result of conscious imitation or borrowings by Mussorgsky; rather, they stemmed from the same artistic approach. Each character—Dostoyevsky’s student and monk, Mussorgsky’s tsar—falls under the same artistic microscope mercilessly revealing the deepest, most contradictory, most encoded emotions and spiritual longings. Both Dostoyevsky and Mussorgsky were fascinated by the mystery of the Russian soul and its inexplicable duality. In their works, kindness and cruelty, wisdom and folly, good humor and ill can be easily combined in the same person.

To this day commentators are confounded by the character of Shaklovity, the head of the sysknoi prikaz (the seventeenth-century secret police) in Khovanshchina. Shaklovity is a patriot, a traitor, an informer, a philosopher, a killer—a mass of contradictions. Mussorgsky, who wrote the original libretto of Khovanshchina himself, was accused of shoddy craftsmanship, since it appeared that Shaklovity defied all the operatic clichés. Mussorgsky’s Shaklovity, however, is far from poorly wrought. He is ambitious and cruel, a real political figure. Mussorgsky, like his contemporary Dostoyevsky, had succeeded in creating a complex character. We need look no further than Russia’s later, terrible history to confirm yet again the genius of Mussorgsky’s psychological insight.

Like Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky’s work depicts “the insulted and the injured” with all their passion and pain. Like Dostoyevsky too, he raises these pathetic characters to tragic heights until the grotesque and the majestic coexist. Mussorgsky could accomplish this not only because he had compassion for these poor people, not only because he felt a sense of guilt toward them, but because in his works he almost became them. Like Dostoyevsky’s most inspired pages, Mussorgsky’s music is vivid, confused, feverish, and ultimately hypnotizing.

There are other strikingly similar traits in the creative techniques of the writer and the composer as well. Mussorgsky used many of Dostoyevsky’s methods and devices, among them the confessional monologue, so typical of Dostoyevsky’s novels. It is Dostoyevsky’s trademark, so to speak. The descriptions of hallucinations and nightmares make up some of his most memorable writing. And Boris Godunov employs three such Dostoyevskian monologues by Tsar Boris to hold the opera together. One of the most powerful scenes is Boris’s hallucination, when he sees the ghost of the tsarevich, murdered on his orders.

The same can be said for another characteristic trait of Dostoyevsky’s plots, the sudden outbursts of “scandals,” which sharply delineate the motives and characters of the protagonists. Joseph Brodsky brought to my attention the extraordinary importance of these scandals in the structure of Dostoyevsky’s novels.^{83} Such a scandal is brilliantly drawn by Mussorgsky in the second act of Khovanshchina, when the princes hold a secret council to argue over Russia’s political future. This is the most impressive “political” scene in the history of opera.

Paradoxically, Mussorgsky and Dostoyevsky share the same ambivalence toward open political tendentiousness and “engagement” in a work of art. For this reason both writer and composer, without collusion, criticized the popular political poetry of their contemporary Nekrasov. Of the works of the Wanderers, they preferred the ones where the social theme did not predominate, where, as Mussorgsky put it, there wasn’t a “single civic theme, or a single Nekrasovian misery.”

It is telling that the inspiration for one of Mussorgsky’s most famous works was the visual arts. Pictures at an Exhibition, written for piano and later orchestrated by Ravel, was inspired not by a realistic canvas of the Wanderers but by the symbolic and grotesque drawings of the composer’s friend Viktor Hartman, exhibited posthumously in Petersburg in 1874.

The figure of the yurodivy is typical of both Dostoyevsky and Mussorgsky. The Russian word applies to the holy fool as well as the village idiot. But it also transmits many historical, cultural, and religious notions. The phenomenon of the yurodivy, which dates to the fifteenth century, was a marked presence in Russian history until the eighteenth century, when it moved into Russian literature and art as a national symbol.

In the Russian tradition, the yurodivy is the odd man out, a social critic and prophet of apocalyptic change. Challenging trivial truths, turning them inside out and mocking them, he demonstrates their shallowness, hypocrisy, and absurdity. Using his sometimes feigned madness as a weapon, the yurodivy pits himself against both the rulers and the crowd.

In the opera Boris Godunov, the yurodivy, a minor character in the Pushkin tragedy, was turned into the spokesman for the oppressed and beleaguered Russian people. The confrontation between Boris and the yurodivy, who accuses the tsar of infanticide before the stunned crowd and the boyars, is one of the opera’s climaxes. Boris’s reaction is characteristic and historically accurate. He stops the guards who are about to arrest the yurodivy. “Don’t touch him! … Pray for me, blessed one!” Traditionally, Russian tsars tolerated the yurodivy’s outspoken statements because they considered the men possessed of higher wisdom.

The final, heartbreaking moment of the opera is the yurodivy’s terrifying, hopeless plaint, prophesying the coming of dark times: “Weep, weep, Russian people, hungry people!”—the piercing, ageless wail of long-suffering Russia itself.

In Mussorgsky’s art song to his own text, “Svetik Savishna,” the yurodivy, suffering and gasping, vainly tries to declare his love to a beautiful woman. It is a stunning work. “A horrible scene. Shakespeare in music,” exclaimed one of the first listeners. The tongue-tied laments interspersed with shrieks convey the torment of the humiliated, rejected man with such expressive power that the naturalistic musical scene turns into a symbol with countless interpretations. For me this song has always seemed to be the most perceptive of allegories for the relationship between the illiterate, suffering Russian people and its inaccessible intellectual elite.

“Svetik Savishna” was especially dear to Mussorgsky. He even signed many of his letters “Savishna,” seemingly identifying with the song’s yurodivy. This self-identification was not random: Mussorgsky was a yurodivy composer, whipsawed by the external dynamic of his fate and his own centrifugal psychological impulses.

Interestingly, even his closest friends called him a yurodivy. In their attitude toward Mussorgsky, for all the public praise of his musical gifts, there was always a note of intellectual condescension. Balakirev privately stated that Mussorgsky was “almost an idiot.”^{84} Stasov readily agreed: “I think he is a total idiot.”^{85} For Rimsky-Korsakov, the most circumspect of the group, Mussorgsky’s personality was made up of two components—“on the one hand, a prideful opinion of himself and a conviction that the path he has selected in art is the only correct one; on the other, a complete downfall, alcoholism, and the resultant constantly cloudy head.”^{86}

The word was spoken—alcoholism! Mussorgsky drowned himself in a sea of wine, cognac, and vodka. It turned him before the very eyes of his stunned friends from a refined gentleman into an antisocial bum, a Petersburg yurodivy.

Of course, alcoholism was Mussorgsky’s personal weakness, but at the same time it was a typical phenomenon for that part of Mussorgsky’s generation that wanted to oppose the establishment and express its desperate protest through extreme forms of behavior. “An intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period,” noted a contemporary. “It was a showing off, a ‘pose’ for the best people of the sixties.” Another commentator seconded this opinion: “Talented people in Russia who love the simple folk cannot but drink.”^{87}

Spending day and night in a Petersburg tavern of low repute, the Maly Yaroslavets, in the company of bohemian dropouts like himself, Mussorgsky consciously broke his ties with the “decent” circles of the Petersburg elite. He and his fellow drinkers idealized their alcoholism, raising it to a level of ethical and even aesthetic opposition. Their bravado was little more than a course toward isolation and eventual self-destruction.

On his way to the abyss, Mussorgsky expressed his doubts. Testimony to his ambivalence was his most Petersburg composition, the song cycle with its symbolic title, Sunless (1874, to the poetry of his close friend, Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov). In the six clearly autobiographical song-monologues of Sunless, Mussorgsky portrays himself as one who feels as if the present did not exist for him in the heart of a megalopolis. His failed love, his feeble attempts at contact and communication were all in the past, but even the past might be an illusion. A woman’s brief glance in a crowd turns into a haunting memory—Mussorgsky accents that detail with surreal insistence reminiscent of Dostoyevsky.

Mussorgsky’s protagonist, lacking a present, doubting the past, has no future, either. He suffers during a Petersburg white night, enclosed by the four walls of his small room, just like Raskolnikov, and sums up his lonely, joyless existence. And when the final song of the cycle is complete, lulling and enchanting, it becomes obvious that the hero, in quiet prostration, has no other way out but suicide. The city rejects the crushed individual and so he is prepared to vanish into nothingness.

Sunless is one of Mussorgsky’s creative peaks and his most significant contribution to the Petersburg mythos first sketched by Dostoyevsky. This cycle has an extraordinarily flexible vocal line free of formal constraints, with bold harmonies and the freshness of its piano accompaniment, and an astonishingly laconic manner and restraint that made Mussorgsky a revelation for Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and through them for later musical culture. It is a miniature encyclopedia of the composer’s style and makes clear why Mussorgsky’s influence, enormous in Russia, is noticeable in many vocal works of twentieth-century Western composers.

Mussorgsky’s death was in fact if not in intent a suicide. After a stroke brought on by drinking, he was placed by his friends in a military hospital. Under the strict care of a sympathetic doctor, Mussorgsky’s health began to improve. But feeling better, he bribed the guard with twenty-five rubles, a large sum in those days, to bring him a bottle of forbidden alcohol.

That bottle of cognac, consumed in one sitting with an apple for an hors d’oeuvre, brought on a fatal stroke. Mussorgsky had time only to cry, “It’s all over! Ah, I am a wretch!” Learning of Mussorgsky’s death, one of his drinking companions at the Maly Yaroslavets tavern noted philosophically, “Even a copper coffee pot burns out over a spirit flame, and a man is more fragile than a coffee pot.”^{88}

A powerful testimony to Mussorgsky’s end is a portrait by Ilya Repin in March 1881, painted in just four days of an incredible improvisational surge, only ten days before the composer’s death. Repin, a leading Wanderer, friend, and admirer of Mussorgsky (the feeling was mutual), rushed to the military hospital where the composer was a patient.

Barely known in the West, Repin is familiar to virtually every Russian through his large historical and genre canvases in a realistic style. Energetic, animated, a somewhat eccentric man and a productive painter (he left over a thousand works), Repin was always attracted to topical subjects. The art critic Abram Efros called him the greatest “political commentator” of Russian art.

Repin was also probably its greatest portraitist at a time that, in Stasov’s worried words, was “not at all conducive to the development of portraiture: photography has almost killed the portrait and all Russian talent for it has quieted down, suddenly leaving the stage.” Not Repin: rich and famous, he was welcome everywhere—in the Winter Palace and in a nihilist commune. Repin’s portraits were psychologically penetrating and artistically masterful. In them he immortalized the tsar’s family, high government officials, and the leading writers, actors and actresses, scholars, professors, jurists, and clergy of the day, as well as Russian peasants. Repin was genuinely interested in and attracted to people of all classes and convictions—the elite of Petersburg, its bureaucrats and technocrats, its conservatives, liberals, revolutionaries, and simple folk.

Repin’s portrait gallery of Petersburg intellectuals and cultural figures remains the most interesting and significant of any Russian. The deathbed portrait of Mussorgsky holds a special place here. It is a unique document, capturing the artistic personality on the verge of collapse, the moment when the great composer and the yurodivy, the alcoholic and the lumpen coexist in one body and soul.

Mussorgsky is depicted carelessly wrapped in a green hospital gown with raspberry lapels. Sitting in the light, his figure looks particularly pathetic; the sun ruthlessly reveals his crumbling, puffy face of a bluish tint with “a red potato nose,”^{89} in Repin’s words, unkempt reddish-brown hair, and tangled beard. But the same light draws the viewer’s attention to the composer’s huge, bottomless gray-blue eyes, the magnetic center of the portrait. Those eyes, expressing hidden torment, are nevertheless pure and quiet. Mussorgsky seems to be obediently awaiting death while listening to the sounds fading in his head. It is the humility of the yurodivy who knows that by accepting his torment in this life and thus fulfilling his duty, he goes to meet a higher power.

Mussorgsky’s corpse was still warm when Stasov brought Repin’s portrait to an exhibit of the Wanderers in Petersburg, where it was attacked furiously by the reactionary press for its “cruel realism.” It also elicited praise. The head of the Wanderers, the golden-tongued Kramskoy, sat down before the portrait, as if glued to his chair, and, bringing his face almost even with Mussorgsky’s, devoured it with his eyes, exclaiming, “It’s incredible, it’s simply incredible!” And in fact, the only nineteenth-century depiction of a composer that rivals Repin’s is Delacroix’s portrait of Chopin.

The year 1881 began unhappily for Russian culture. In February fifty-nine-year-old Dostoyevsky died in Petersburg. After that the death of forty-two-year-old Mussorgsky deprived the country of another of its greatest creative geniuses. Petersburgers were well aware of the significance and tragedy of those irreplaceable losses. But even those deaths were overshadowed by an event perceived by most Russians as a national catastrophe. On March 1, 1881, revolutionary terrorists killed “Tsar Liberator” Alexander II.

Alexander II’s basically liberal rule was distinguished by several important reforms, including the historic emancipation of the serfs in 1861, two years before the slaves were freed in the United States. Russia acquired a jury system, limited self-rule for cities and provinces, a more or less independent press (including publications of a fairly radical bent), and universities open to the lower classes. The rights of women and minorities were expanded and certain kinds of corporal punishment, such as flogging, were abolished.

But as had happened before in Russian history and would happen again, liberal reforms did not bring their initiator the deserved popularity. The country was convulsed by change. In Petersburg the attitude of many intellectuals toward Alexander II was rather condescending. Nihilist students thirsted for radical reforms. Officers and bureaucrats openly gossiped about the emperor’s liaison with Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukova, his junior by twenty-eight years. Still, when the nihilist Dmitri Karakozov tried to shoot the emperor in the Summer Gardens on April 4, 1866, the news of the unsuccessful attempt rocked Russia. The newspapers reported that a peasant accidently had bumped into Karakozov, spoiling the shot; they also indicated, incorrectly, that the terrorist was Polish.

This led to numerous performances of Glinka’s patriotic opera, A Life for the Tsar, in which a peasant also saved the first Romanov tsar from the Poles. One such performance was described by twenty-six-year-old Peter Tchaikovsky, then a budding composer:

As soon as the Poles appeared on the stage, shouts began: ‘Down with the Poles!’ The choristers were confused and stopped singing, and the audience demanded the anthem, which was sung about twenty times. At the end the Sovereign’s portrait was brought out, and the ensuing madness cannot be described.^{90}

Karakozov was hanged and terrorist acts stopped for a while. But in January 1878 the revolutionary Vera Zasulich shot and wounded severely the Petersburg city chief, Fyodor Trepov. This began a series of successful terrorist attacks. The revolutionaries did not merely take down the highest tsarist officials, but also explained their attacks to the public and even dared to announce them beforehand. Special warnings from the revolutionaries were delivered to the chief of the gendarmes, Mezentsov (as one of the terrorists recalled, “practically in person” ) and to the Petersburg city prefect, Zurov. After each ensuing attack, leaflets rationalizing and defending it would appear throughout the city.

Even though the underground revolutionary cells were small, their members were dedicated to the highest degree, energetic, and intelligent; each attempt was planned carefully. When they decided to kill Mezentsov, they made up a timetable of his walks. Learning that Mezentsov was always accompanied by an adjutant and that the chief wore a protective vest, the attackers ordered an especially heavy dagger, explaining to the sword maker that they needed it for hunting bear. The journalist Sergei Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, who had been chosen to execute the death sentence that had already been pronounced publicly, got the signal from his accomplice and, concealing the dagger inside a newspaper, approached the strolling Mezentsov in front of the tsar’s Mikhailovsky Palace. While another conspirator distracted the adjutant, Kravchinsky struck the gendarme with the dagger in the stomach below the vest, then leaped into a waiting carriage drawn by a prized trotter, which carried the terrorist down a planned escape route and off to safety.

The chief of the gendarmes died of the wound, and Kravchinsky described the assassination in an underground brochure called “A Death for a Death,” widely distributed in Petersburg and all of Russia. Such audacious attacks carried out in broad daylight left the capital in a state of shock as the revolutionaries announced, “those who decided questions of life and death with a single flourish of the pen now see with horror that they are also subject to the death penalty.” One of the leading nihilists explained the terrorist campaign, unprecedented in boldness, scope, and success, this way: “When they gag the mouth of a man who wants to speak they thereby untie his hands.”^{91}

In Russia the gigantic pyramid of power was topped by the tsar. The emperor was not only a symbolic figure but also a real sovereign. Therefore the liberal Alexander II was inevitably held responsible for the actions of his most reactionary bureaucrats. “It was getting strange,” wrote Vera Figner, a leading terrorist, “to beat the servants for doing the bidding of their master and not touching the master.”^{92} The revolutionaries also wanted to shock Petersburg, so they decided at all costs to kill the tsar. Just a few dozen people with limited funds were in charge. But they were young and, most important, fanatically certain of the rightness of their cause. Alexander II could move the country along the path of reform as much as he wanted—he was doomed anyway.

In 1879 they shot once more at Alexander II, who had been told by a fortune teller that there would be seven attempts on his life. The emperor had been walking—alone as usual—on Palace Square. This time again the terrorist, like Karakozov before him, missed and was also hanged. So the revolutionaries decided to use a much more effective weapon than firearms: dynamite. But the sophisticated plan to blow up the tsar’s train did not work either. Then they placed the explosive in the cellar below the Winter Palace. Another failure. The powerful explosion that killed or wounded some seventy Finnish soldiers guarding Alexander II miraculously left the emperor untouched.

Nevertheless, the social and political fallout from that explosion was extensive, leaving the capital in a panic. “All Russia can be said to be under siege,”^{93} the minister of defense Dmitri Milyutin wrote in his diary. In Petersburg during the winter of 1878-1879 alone, over two thousand were arrested on suspicion of subversive activity. But for the unfettered nihilists, the hunt for Alexander, unprecedented in the annals of political terror, had turned into an obsession.

This was understood by the bewildered and frightened sovereign of a huge and powerful empire: “They are hunting me like a wild animal,” he would complain. “What for? I haven’t even done any personal good deed for them that they should hate me so!” Even their implacable foe, Dostoyevsky, had given the terrorist’s stubbornness its due: “We say outright: these are madmen, yet these madmen have their own logic, their teaching, their code, their God even, and it’s as deepset as it could be.”

On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was returning to the Winter Palace from a military parade accompanied by guards in a special armored coach built in Paris. When the carriage reached the deserted embankment of the Catherine Canal, a terrorist jumped out from behind a corner and tossed a bomb at the feet of the galloping horses. Once again the emperor leaped out unharmed from the shattered carriage, although two of the guards were wounded. Alexander went up to them. A crowd gathered. The attacker had been taken away.

“Glory to God, Your Majesty, that you are safe,” muttered one of the guards.

“Thank God,” replied the tsar.

“It’s too soon to thank God!” shouted a man in the crowd and threw a second bomb at Alexander. This time the emperor was mortally wounded, both legs torn off. After seven unsuccessful attempts, the eighth terrorist action had succeeded. Brought to the Winter Palace, the emperor died within a few minutes. Ironically, on his desk was the draft of the long-awaited constitutional reforms, which he had planned to sign that day.

Having won the battle, the revolutionaries lost the war. All the participants in the assassination of Alexander II were eventually arrested, tried, and hanged. Alexander III, Alexander’s thirty-five-year-old son, ascended to the throne. A huge man, decisive and stubborn, he was a confirmed conservative whose father’s death had only strengthened his conviction that Russia was not yet ready for liberal reform. The new emperor’s ideal was the autocratic rule of his grandfather Nicholas I; the Russian ship of state veered sharply to the right.

Public opinion helped Alexander III. Tchaikovsky’s reaction to the murder of the Tsar Liberator, expressed in a letter from Naples to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, was typical:

The news shocked me so that I almost fell ill. In such horrible moments of national catastrophe, during such incidents that shame Russia, it is hard to be abroad. I would like to fly to Russia, learn the details, be among my own people, take part in demonstrations of sympathy for the new Sovereign, and howl for revenge with the others. Will the vile ulcer of our political life not be uprooted completely this time? It is horrible to think that perhaps this recent catastrophe might not be the epilogue of the whole tragedy.^{94}

Tchaikovsky even signed up for the Holy Brotherhood, a secret organization created by the Russian aristocracy to protect the new emperor and fight terrorism.^{95} Interestingly, this fact has never yet been mentioned in any Russian—or, for that matter, Western—biography of the composer. Even without the help of the Holy Brotherhood, however, the police crushed the remnants of the revolutionary cells in Petersburg and the rest of Russia, The ghost of the Martyr Tsar, as the late emperor was now called, rumored to appear at night at the Kazan Cathedral, could be pacified

Instead, the ghosts of the seemingly vanquished revolutionaries flooded Russian culture: prose (the novels and stories of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Vsevolod Garshin); poetry (the poems of Yakov Polonsky and Semyon Nadson); painting (the works of Repin, Vassily Vereshchagin and Vladimir Makovsky). The Wanderer Nikolai Yaroshenko went so far as to show his painting At the Lithuanian Castle, depicting Petersburg’s main prison (called the Russian Bastille) with a revolutionary young woman standing in front of it, at a Wanderers’ exhibition in Petersburg the day the tsar was killed. This naturally caused a sensation. Alexander II’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, was outraged. “What pictures he paints! The man is a socialist!” The painting was immediately removed from the show and Yaroshenko was placed under house arrest.

The Lithuanian Castle was burned down during the February Revolution of 1917. The infamous prison was replaced by an ugly apartment house, which I saw every day for four years when I lived at the dormitory of the music school of the Leningrad Conservatory.

The image of the revolutionary nihilist moved from Russia to the West, where the press gave broad coverage to Russian terrorism, the assassination of Alexander II, and the subsequent government repressions. The nihilists became a modern symbol, much like the Soviet dissidents a century later. Oscar Wilde wrote the drama Vera, or the Nihilists in 1881. Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse starred in Victorienne Sardoux’s drama Fedora, based on the life of nihilists. The image of the Russian revolutionary appeared in popular works of Emile Zola, Alfonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, and Mark Twain. And it was incorporated, at last, in the pages of the popular magazine The Strand in a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” (“reformers—revolutionists—Nihilists, you understand”). This, of course, was real fame.

The murder of Alexander II also served as an impetus, however oblique, for the creation of a specifically Petersburg artifact in jewelry. It occurred as a clever court jeweler, the Russified François Fabergé, puzzled over Alexander III’s commission for a pleasant Easter surprise for his wife, who could not get over the assassination of her father-in-law. Fabergé came up with a charming, quite expensive toy, which fully embodied the Russian tsar’s idea of a nice Easter surprise: a golden chicken egg that could be opened to reveal a miniature golden chick.

The virtuoso work of the court jeweler so charmed the empress that the next Easter the commission was repeated, and Fabergé put a completely different surprise in the new egg. And so the imperial Fabergé Easter eggs became a tradition, interrupted only by the revolution of 1917. Of the 55 or 56 legendary eggs created by Fabergé, presumably only 43 or so survived; for many obsessed collectors they represent, perhaps along with Diaghilev’s ballet productions, the most opulent and refined achievement of imperial Russia. This is, of course, a matter of personal taste. In any case, the Fabergé eggs amply demonstrate the exquisite mastery exhibited by the jewelers of Petersburg, as well as the wealth of Fabergé’s august clients.

In general, however, Alexander III was a rather stingy monarch, perhaps in imitation of Peter the Great. But neither he nor, later, his son, Nicholas II, begrudged their loved ones the enormous sum of fifteen thousand rubles, the cost of each of those Easter eggs. If not for the revolution, this expense might have turned into a prudent investment, since in our day the value of the eggs is incalculable.

Many historians insist that Alexander III was an uneducated, coarse, and brutish man, albeit with a lot of common sense. But these assertions contradict some of the facts of the emperor’s involvement with Russian culture. A passionate patriot, even a chauvinist (he was a pathological anti-Semite), Alexander III became one of the leading patrons of the Wanderer artists. His rich collection of Russian paintings served as the basis for his museum of visual and fine arts, open to the public in 1898 in the Mikhailovsky Palace, renamed the State Russian Museum under the Bolsheviks.

Alexander III greatly increased the subsidy to the imperial theaters. The orchestra of the Russian opera grew to 110 members and the choir to 120. The stagings of both ballet and opera were lavishly produced, with huge sums specifically allocated for costumes and scenery.

Every spring Alexander III personally approved the repertoire for the opera and ballet, often making significant changes; he did not miss a single dress rehearsal in his theaters. The emperor was involved in all the details of new productions—and not just from whim or pleasure; his motivations were also political. He knew that the imperial theaters—opera, ballet, and drama—were the mirror of the monarchy; the brilliance and opulence of their productions reflected the majesty of his reign. Therefore he correctly viewed the attacks in the liberal press, especially after the repeal in 1882 of the imperial monopoly on theater productions in Petersburg, as veiled attacks on his regime, noting once that the newspapers pounded his theaters “because they are forbidden to write about so many other things.”^{96}

On the emperor’s personal orders, the Maryinsky Theater presented Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, Boito’s Mefistofele, Massenet’s Manon, Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. This Italo-Franco preference reflected not only the sovereign’s musical tastes but Russia’s political orientation at the time. The worsening relations with Germany led to the closing of the German Theater in Petersburg in 1890; as a knowledgeable courtier commented, “This was one of the repressive measures in response to the treacherous behavior of Prince Bismarck!”^{97}

Of the Russian composers, Tchaikovsky had long been a favorite of Alexander III. Knowing that, we can understand more easily why the emperor was rather hostile toward the music of the Mighty Five, a seemingly inconsistent position for a Russian nationalist. Alexander personally crossed out Boris Godunov from the proposed repertoire for the 1888-1889 season of the Maryinsky Theater, replacing it with an opera by Massenet. In his prejudice against Mussorgsky and his comrades, the tsar was not alone, and his allies in this matter were not all conservatives. Among the most famous opponents of the Mighty Five were the liberal novelist Ivan Turgenev and the radical satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.

The denunciations of the Mighty Five are among the more curious episodes in the history of Petersburg culture. They prove that purely aesthetic prejudices often make as strange bedfellows as politics. The artist Repin recalled how the staunch foe of the monarchy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, published a satirical attack on Mussorgsky and his mentor, Stasov: “All of Petersburg read that lampoon of a young talent, dying of laughter; it was a funny tale of a noisy aesthete presenting a homegrown talent to a jury of connoisseurs and how the hung-over talent grunted his new aria on a civic theme: about a coachman who had lost his whip.”^{98}

Mocking the “realism” in music proclaimed by Mussorgsky and supported by Stasov, Shchedrin had Stasov deliver the following absurd tirade in his article: “We must depict in sound combinations not only thoughts and sensations, but the very milieu in which they take place, not leaving out the color and shape of the uniforms.”

Turgenev, who couldn’t stand the music of Balakirev or Mussorgsky, scolded Stasov for supporting them: “Of all the ‘young’ Russian musicians there are only two with positive talent: Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The rest—not as people, of course (as people they are charming) but as artists—the rest should be put in a sack and thrown in the water! The Egyptian king Ramses XXIX is not as forgotten today as they will be forgotten in 15 or 20 years.”^{99} Fortunately, this prophecy did not come to pass.

The relations between Tchaikovsky and the Mighty Five were extremely complex and confused. They began fatefully on that March day in 1866 when Tchaikovsky, then twenty-six, sitting in a Petersburg café, opened the influential newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti to read the first-ever review of his graduation composition. A member of the Mighty Five, Cui had an extremely negative reaction to Tchaikovsky’s cantata performed at his examination: “The conservatory composer Mr. Tchaikovsky is totally without merit.”

That “terrible verdict,” in Tchaikovsky’s words, shook the beginning composer. He saw black, his head spun, he threw down the newspaper, and “like a madman” (as he later described it) ran out of the café to wander around the city all day, repeating over and over, “I’m nothing, a mediocrity, I’ll never be anything, I am talentless.”^{100}

Trying to overcome his hurt, Tchaikovsky one day attended a party at Balakirev’s. The attitude of the Mighty Five toward Tchaikovsky becomes clear from the memoirs of Rimsky-Korsakov, who described their meeting this way: “He turned out to be a pleasant conversationalist and a nice man, who knew how to behave simply and to speak seemingly sincerely and frankly.”^{101} Note the sarcastic and suspicious “seemingly.”

Still, Tchaikovsky persisted in befriending Balakirev; he dedicated one of his works to him and at Balakirev’s suggestion wrote one of his masterpieces, the symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet. But in the long run, Tchaikovsky did not turn Balakirev’s circle into the Mighty Six, as the eternal enthusiast Stasov had first predicted: the tastes, views, ties, preferences, goals, and finally characters of the “Mighties” and of Tchaikovsky were too different. This inevitably led to conflicts—often veiled, sometimes open.

The most hostile, almost morbid relations were between Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. How fine it would have been had the two greatest Russian composers of their time liked, or at least understood and respected, each other! Alas, the reality was different, and no attempts by later biographers to smooth over the situation succeeded. The temperamental Mussorgsky, sensing an enemy in Tchaikovsky, mocked him at every opportunity, never calling him anything but by his derisive nickname Sadyk-pasha. In his turn, the usually quite generous Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother after having “thoroughly studied Boris Godunov,” “I send Mussorgsky’s music to hell with all my heart; it is the tritest and basest parody of music.”^{102}

Tchaikovsky’s confidant the critic German Laroche spilled onto the newspaper pages what the composer had reserved for private discussions; calling Boris Godunov a “musical defecation,” he pitied “the conductor, singers and instrumentalists, brought by fate to deal with that stinking substance.”^{103} Besides everything else, an important issue was the struggle for the Maryinsky stage, the most influential in the empire. It is only now that we presume that the operas of Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky could coexist peacefully on that or any other stage. Laroche did not think so, nor did Alexander III.

Laroche wrote,

The Russian musician who leafs through the piano score of Boris some thirty years from now will never believe, just as no contemporary foreigner believes, that those black signs on white paper depict anything that had been actually sung and played publicly, in costumes, before large crowds that had not only gladly paid money for their seats, but had presented the composer with a laurel wreath … that the wild sounds and wild opinions about them were heard not in some barbarous country, but in a brilliant capital…. An abyss must have gaped between Petersburg and the rest of the world; consequently the patriotic feeling of people with healthy tastes was profoundly insulted.^{104}

The paradox is that in his tirade Laroche combined an appeal to Western taste and judgment along with one to Russian “patriotic feeling.” Such ambivalence reflected the duality of Petersburg’s position as the “window on the West” and at the same time the capital of a powerful empire with a chauvinist monarch. Speaking of “healthy tastes,” Tchaikovsky’s close friend was wisely making a deep courtier’s bow. And suddenly the emperor’s cultural policy and particularly the mystery of the Russian tsar’s animosity toward Mussorgsky becomes clearer.

The thirty-year reign (“too short,” in the words of the artist Alexander Benois) of Alexander III solidified the return to the ideals of patriotism and nationality under the aegis of autocracy, first proclaimed by the emperor’s grandfather Nicholas L In Alexander’s eyes loyalty was true patriotism, and any attempt at aesthetic radicalism smacked of subversion. The French-language Journal de St.- Petersbourg called the members of the Mighty Five “les pétroleurs de la république des beaux arts.”

Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, was perceived by Alexander III as a loyal composer. And, in fact, the composer was personally devoted to the emperor and wrote a coronation march and cantata for him, for which he received a ring with a large diamond valued at fifteen hundred rubles from the tsar. The emperor’s generosity to Tchaikovsky continued and in 1888 he granted the composer a lifetime pension of three thousand rubles a year.

Tchaikovsky may be the most popular and beloved Russian cultural figure in the West. In America, for instance, where his fame was fanned by his conducting at the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891, it would be hard to imagine a Christmas not enveloped in the sounds of The Nutcracker or a Fourth of July without the cannon and fireworks accompanying the 1812 Overture.

This unprecedented popularity is based primarily on the obvious emotional accessibility and lushness of Tchaikovsky’s melodies. An intriguing element is added by the romantic and sensational aspects of Tchaikovsky’s biography: his homosexuality and alleged suicide.

How did Tchaikovsky’s homosexual passions affect his life and music? Did he take poison in Petersburg in 1893, in his fifty-fourth year? And did the authorities cover it up by announcing the composer had died in a cholera epidemic? As a schoolboy in Soviet Leningrad, I had heard tales from old Petersburgers about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and his strange death. Later in New York Balanchine had discussed these issues at length with me. It is clear, however, that the full evaluation of all these rumors can be made only after a thorough and objective study by Russian and Western specialists of the materials kept in Russian archives. The participation of the latter is particularly important since the topics of homosexuality and suicide, especially relating to popular and beloved figures, touch on Russian national pride and were still taboo in the Soviet Union even at the end of the 1980s.

Both Stravinsky and particularly Balanchine insisted on calling Tchaikovsky a “Petersburg” composer. This was based not only on the facts of his life—Tchaikovsky studied in Petersburg and died there; many of his works were first performed in the capital, which he often visited and where he had many friends—but on such personality traits as nobility, reserve, and sense of moderation, and of course the effective use of the “European” forms in his compositions, so consonant with Petersburg’s European architecture.

But there are even more typically Petersburgian features in Tchaikovsky’s work. Music lovers look primarily for emotional agitation in it, enjoying what Laroche, who understood the composer as no one else did, called its “refined torment.” But that leaves out the important part of Tchaikovsky’s work so popular with the masses, which could be called “imperial,” that is, the glorification of the Russian empire and the victories of Russian arms.

The imperial theme is traditional in Russian culture. The first proud note of it was sounded in Petersburg by none other than Pushkin (if we discount the rather formulaic exercises of his ode-writing predecessors).

In Pushkin’s era Petersburg was already the capital of an empire that had defeated the military might of Poland and Sweden, had annexed Finland and the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—in the West and the Tatar lands in the south, and had embarked on the conquest of Transcaucasia. All this—including the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the vast Siberian expanses, sparsely settled by pagan tribes—constituted an enormous territory, swiftly approaching in size one-sixth of the world’s land area. The victory over Napoleon and the conquering march of Russian troops across Europe into Paris increased the imperial ambitions of the Petersburg elite.

The cult of the Russian soldier and his bayonet flourished. When the Poles rebelled against their Russian conquerors in 1830 and Nicholas I replied with cannons, calls for aid to the rebels resounded in France. In that moment Pushkin responded with a scintillating poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia,” a blistering manifesto of imperial pride and Petersburg’s ambitions, formulated as a series of poetic rhetorical questions:

These proud, iron-hard lines were very effectively used by Soviet propaganda during the war with Nazi Germany—naturally, omitting mention of the tsar.

With the new lands, newly conquered peoples entered the Russian Empire. Some did this without particular resistance; others, for instance, the Muslim nationalities of the Caucasus, fought ferociously for many decades for their independence. The attitude of the Russian cultural elite to these new imperial subjects was ambivalent.

That ambivalence was already apparent in Pushkin’s narrative poem A Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820-1821). Pushkin, in the spirit of Rousseau, was enraptured by the freedom-loving rebellious Circassians, their hospitality, simplicity, and customs. But he finished the poem with a hymn to the Russian two-headed eagle and the Russian troops who cut through the Caucasus, destroying the freedom-loving Circassians like “the black contagion.”

As was the case with most of the continuing themes of Russian culture, it was also Pushkin who set the tone in this instance. Attracted by the exotic mores of the multinational subjects of the Russian Empire, Petersburg writers, artists, and composers still treated those peoples with suspicion and sometimes even outright hostility. The Tatar and Muslim tribes of the Caucasus were depicted as barbarians to whom the Russian sword brought civilization and the true religion, Russian Orthodoxy. The Swedes and Germans were often described as primitive, simpleminded, and cruel; the Poles as conceited braggarts; the Jews as dirty and greedy ignoramuses.

The rapid expansion of the empire, the ethnic variety of its peoples, and Petersburg’s growing appetite for conquests found particular reflection in Russian music. The list of works related to the imperial theme in one way or another is enormous. In music the Pushkin role of founder of new paths was played, of course, by Glinka with his opera Ruslan and Ludmila. This mythical epic, based on Pushkin, presents the idea of a Slavic nucleus, which like a magnet attracts into its sphere of domination peripheral characters, from the mysterious Finn to the charming Persian girls.

After Glinka came Dargomyzhsky with his Malorossiiskaya (Ukrainian) and Chukhonskaya (Finnish) fantasies for orchestra. But it was the Caucasian motifs that Russian composers found the most attractive. Here the pioneer was the leader of the Mighty Five, Balakirev, who brought back notations of local folk songs and dances from his trips through Georgia. Balakirev was especially enchanted by the Georgian lezghinka: “There is no better dance. Much more passionate and graceful than the tarantella, it reaches the majesty and nobility of the mazurka.”^{105} The result of Balakirev’s Caucasian enthusiasms were his symphonic poem Tamara and the piano fantasy Islamey, which elicited the praise of Franz Liszt, became popular with the public, and is still the touchstone for Russian piano virtuosi.

The extreme importance of Oriental motifs for the Mighty Five was underscored by Rimsky-Korsakov: “These new sounds were a sort of revelation for us then, we all were literally reborn.”^{106} He was the first in the group to write a major work of an Oriental character, the symphony Antar (1868), which was followed by his symphonic suite Scheherazade, still a staple of symphonic orchestras around the world.

A little-known episode in the history of Petersburg music is indicative of the importance for it of imperial themes. In 1880 the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alexander II’s reign was marked with great pomp. Among other festivities tableux vivants were planned, depicting various significant moments of Alexander II’s era, including Russia’s military victories. The music for these “living pictures,” commissioned by the government, was written by leading composers, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky.

Mussorgsky’s chauvinism is well known. It was second only to Balakirev’s, whose religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism were legendary. The Polish characters in Boris Godunov are drawn with extreme antipathy; they are no less caricatures than the Poles in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which is particularly striking in the much more realistic and psychologically sophisticated opera by Mussorgsky.

Paradoxically, Mussorgsky’s “Jewish” music hardly reflects his anti-Semitic feelings at all. The marvelous choruses “The Destruction of Sennacherib” and “Jesus Navin” (the musical theme for which Mussorgsky borrowed from neighborly Jews), “Hebrew Song,” as well as the famous “Two Jews, One Rich, One Poor” from Pictures at an Exhibition are imbued with respect for biblical Jewish figures but also with sympathy for modern Jewish people, who suddenly found themselves on the territory of the Russian Empire with the annexation of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland, where millions of Jews resided.

In just the same way, Mussorgsky’s orchestral march “The Capture of Kars,” intended to accompany one of the living pictures in honor of the conquest of that Turkish fortress by Alexander II’s army, is triumphant but by no means jingoistic. Moreover, Mussorgsky’s vocal ballad “Forgotten,” composed six years earlier, is one of the most powerful antiwar statements in world music. The remarkable story of its creation gives evidence of the existence inside Petersburg culture of a powerful opposition to its prevailing imperial ambitions.

In March 1874 the battle artist Vassily Vereshchagin opened an exhibit in Petersburg of his works, depicting the conquest of Turkestan by Russia. Diligently crafted, almost photographic in technique, his paintings re-created the highlights of the military actions in central Asia. A tireless laborer and flashy self-promoter, Vereshchagin knew how to present his works to best effect. They were dramatically lit, in later years with custom-built electric projectors, a recent innovation. The exhibit enjoyed a sensational success with the Petersburg public.

Astonishing in their naturalistic detail and unsettling in their fearless depiction of the horrors of war, Vereshchagin’s canvases were enormously popular not only in Russia but also in Europe, where the artist was considered the best contemporary Russian painter, and in New York City, where Vereshchagin’s exhibition of 1889 brought him $84,000, a large sum for those days.

To get into the Vereshchagin show in Petersburg, people spent hours in line, shivering in the cold spring wind. The Petersburg intelligentsia attended, including Stasov and Mussorgsky. The high military authorities were also there. And inevitably, a scandal broke out.

The estimable generals, deeply offended by what they saw, accused Vereshchagin of defaming the honor of the Russian military. They were particularly outraged by his painting Forgotten, which depicted the body of a dead Russian soldier abandoned by advancing troops. Next to the corpse lay his rifle, and a cloud of hungry vultures swirled over him. “It is impossible for Russian soldiers to be abandoned on a battlefield, unburied!” one of the generals shouted at the artist. Vereshchagin, who had gone through the entire Turkestan campaign in the front ranks of the fighting, was “half-crazed with anger and indignation,” Stasov reported. The painter removed Forgotten and two other canvases that had provoked particular criticism and burned them.

“Vereshchagin came to me and told me what he had just done,” Stasov recalled. “He was furious, pale and shaking. When I asked ‘Why did you do it?’ he replied that he had ‘slapped those gentlemen with it.’”^{107} With this gesture, unprecedented in Russian art history, the artist created a furor (as well as great publicity for his show). Meanwhile, the conservative press continued to attack with a vengeance Vereshchagin’s “antipatriotic” paintings. They preferred the also extremely illusionistic but pro-imperial and promilitary war panoramas so popular in Russia in the late nineteenth century.

One of these panoramas, exhibited in a specially built round structure on the embankment of the Catherine Canal where Alexander II was soon to be assassinated, was described by Alexander Benois. The panorama depicted the capture of Kars (commemorated by Mussorgsky’s orchestral march), and the boy Benois spent hours on the viewing platform, especially enjoying the “just-like-real” foreground: models of fortifications, bushes, cannons, scattered guns, and corpses of the defeated foe.^{108}

Petersburg’s cultural elite was involved in a fierce debate to resolve several fundamental questions that might arise in any aggressively expanding state that had not only a strong army but an independent intelligentsia. Among them were the following: what is more important, patriotism or humanism? Is the game worth playing? Do military victories only strengthen the oppressive state machine and enrich the top, or do they bring some benefits for the Russian “simple people” as well? And what about the conquered nations, their culture and customs? Should they be preserved, or is Russification inevitable and “progressive”?

The antiwar feelings among the Petersburg intellectuals was strong enough to guarantee Vereshchagin’s show great success. But naturally, the pro-imperial forces were extremely active too, at the imperial court, in the newspapers, and in artistic circles. If the horrors of war must be depicted, they said, let it be the cruelty of the enemy, shown to the public for educational purposes, like, for instance, the popular painting Turkish Atrocities, a work of Konstantin Makovsky, a bon vivant favorite of the Petersburg aristocratic salons. They began talking about Makovsky’s canvas after none other than Alexander II broke into tears upon seeing it. The artist had painted two fearsome Turks attacking a half-dressed Slavic girl. Among the small minority that did not like Makovsky’s canvas was little Benois, who even as a child had rather independent tastes. As Benois later recalled, he thought the poor girl in the painting was simply drunk.^{109}

Vereshchagin’s burning of his antiwar paintings truly shocked the liberal segment of Petersburg society, which had great sympathy for the artist and was outraged by the military’s pressure. Everyone understood that the artist had done something very important, creating a precedent and determining the positions of liberal culture vis-à-vis imperial Petersburg. Among those who reacted strongly to that symbolic act of defiance was Mussorgsky, who immediately decided to “resurrect” in sound Vereshchagin’s lost painting, Forgotten.

That desire actually reflected some important ideals of the Mighty Five. First, they aspired to integrate music, word, and image, making them equal participants in the projected all-powerful union of the arts with literature. Mussorgsky was deeply convinced of the legitimacy of such a union. (And it was typical of the times that Vereshchagin also wrote prose and poetry, and even tried his hand at composing.) Then there was the passionate desire for music’s active involvement in Russia’s political and civic life. The expression of that desire was Mussorgsky’s aphorism: “Art is a medium of conversing with people and not a goal.”

Finally, on the part of Mussorgsky, there was the wish to preserve what a comrade in art had created. Such a brotherly impulse not to leave the work of your friends unfinished or destroyed was typical also for the other members of the Mighty Five; it became a Petersburg tradition. And so Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest, several operas of Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor were completed posthumously by the friends of the original creators.

This Petersburg ritual of preserving any creative spark dear to the heart was important for Shostakovich, too, who completed and orchestrated the opera Rothschild’s Violin, by his student Veniamin Fleishman, fallen in the battle for Leningrad in 1941.

Composed to a specially written text by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, the author of the poems for Mussorgsky’s song cycle Sunless, in the spirit of Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky’s “Forgotten” is striking in its lapidary expressiveness. Depicting in a mere twenty-seven measures not only a soldier’s death in battle, his body devoured by vultures, but also the sorrowful lullaby that appears and vanishes unexpectedly—the song of the peasant woman who waits in vain for her husband—Mussorgsky’s small masterpiece of the ballad far surpasses Vereshchagin’s obvious and rhetorical painting, which we know from reproductions. As in the case of Pictures at an Exhibition, the composer’s tribute to an artist brought the work that served as his creative impulse real fame and the recognition of posterity.

Mussorgsky’s “Forgotten” was immediately banned by the Petersburg censors. This rare instance of a nervous reaction from the authorities to a musical ballad’s political message only confirmed Mussorgsky’s ambitions regarding the civic potential of his beloved art. So he continued to express his antiwar feelings in music by writing, three years later, “The Field Marshal,” a part of his Songs and Dances of Death, with words by Golenishchev-Kutuzov once again. Here Death appears as a military leader riding in the quiet of the night through the field after battle. Victory was Death’s and not the soldiers’, and he sings a wild, triumphant song to the majestic and grim melody of a Polish anthem from the period of the anti-Russian uprising of 1862. (Its choice must have been dictated by Mussorgsky’s anti-Polish feelings.) The musical picture of Death on horseback, delivering a mocking, cynical, howling monologue, is part of a European tradition; Albrecht Dürer’s cycle of engravings or Liszt’s Totentanz, which appeared two decades before Mussorgsky’s song, come to mind. But Mussorgsky’s song is filled with a purely Russian broad emotionalism and theatricality.

The piano accompaniment to “The Field Marshal” and the other songs of that cycle achieves orchestral effects in its intensity and drama, so it was natural for Shostakovich to orchestrate Songs and Dances of Death in 1962. Seven years later, noting that he wanted to continue Mussorgsky’s “too short” cycle on death (only four pieces), Shostakovich wrote his Fourteenth Symphony for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, in which he obsessively added to the musical gallery of death’s appearances.

Mussorgsky is an interesting example of the Petersburg artist: His vivid, nationalistic music not only lacks strong imperial traits, but, because of its antimilitaristic tendencies, it was perceived by the authorities as being directed against the pillars of the state. For this reason Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, then the vice president of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, stopped his son from applauding at the premiere of Boris Godunov and then shouted (according to eyewitnesses), “This is a shame for all of Russia, not an opera!”^{110}

Along with Mussorgsky, the other members of the Mighty Five, even those much more conservative in their political views, were “under suspicion.” From the aesthetic point of view, they were all dangerous extremists as far as the emperor and his court were concerned. In addition, they all behaved independently, constantly coming into conflict with the official system of cultural administration. In disciplined Petersburg, and especially in the strictly regimented sphere of the imperial theaters, this was considered intolerable and could help explain why Alexander III, in reviewing the proposed repertoire for the imperial opera in 1888, not only crossed out Boris Godunov but put a question mark next to the planned premiere of Prince Igor, a most patriotic and perfectly “imperial” opera by Borodin.

Borodin, the oldest member of Balakirev’s circle, was a physically hearty man almost to his last day. To everyone’s surprise, he died unexpectedly in 1887 in his fifty-fourth year while at a costume ball. Fooling around and making everyone laugh, the composer suddenly leaned against a wall and fell dead to the floor. The diagnosis was a heart attack. He did not finish his major work, Prince Igor, on which he had worked with interruptions for eighteen years. A man of phenomenal musical gifts, Borodin had a multitude of other interests. He was an outstanding chemist and, as head of the chemistry department at the Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, quickly moved up the ladder, at thirty-three having a civil rank equivalent to general.

Chemistry constantly kept him from composing, as well as from numerous civic functions; in particular, Borodin, a staunch defender of women’s rights, was one of the founders of the first medical courses for women in Russia. His colleagues at the academy found it strange that a talented scientist could be distracted by musical “trifles”; Petersburg suffragettes considered Borodin’s struggle for equal rights for women to be his paramount activity. He himself seemed unable to decide which was the most important: science, civic duties, or composing.

Friends in the Mighty Five, who held Borodin’s musical ability in high regard, were dismayed by his disregard of composition. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled bitterly his attempts to urge Borodin to work more diligently on Prince Igor:

Sometimes you’d go see him and ask what he had done. And he’d show you a page or two of score or maybe nothing at all. You’d ask, “Alexander Porfiryevich, have you written?” And he’d reply, “I have.” It would turn out he’s written a lot of letters. “Alexander Porfiryevich, have you at least arranged such-and-such a number?” “I have,” he would reply seriously. “Thank God, at last!” “I arranged it to be moved from the piano to the table,” he would continue just as seriously and calmly.^{111}

After Borodin’s untimely death Rimsky-Korsakov and his younger friend, Alexander Glazunov, completed and orchestrated Prince Igor. One of the main reasons for this noble deed was the cult of continuity that reigned in Petersburg, as well as the desire for a certain kind of art school, or at least a revolutionary circle like Balakirev’s that functioned as a school, to remain intact.

In a city that seemed almost perfect in its architectural orderliness and completeness, the very idea of completeness was in the air, influencing creative people; every work, it seemed, had to be finished. This impulsive longing for order clearly affected Rimsky-Korsakov, the most Petersburgian in character and aesthetics of the Mighty Five. As the most professional of the group, Rimsky-Korsakov not only completed (with Cui) Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest, completed and orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, edited and reorchestrated his Boris Godunov, and prepared his Marriage for publication, but edited (with friends) Glinka’s opera scores.

Dedicated to Glinka, Borodin’s Prince Igor continued the patriotic line of A Life for the Tsar. The plot of the opera, based on a Slavic epic text of the twelfth century, is suitably simple. The Russian Prince Igor goes on a campaign against the hostile Asiatic tribe of Polovtsians, is taken prisoner, and escapes. This spare story was developed by Borodin in such a way as to make his work the most imperial opera in the history of Russian music.

Two contrasting worlds are depicted in Prince Igor—the Russian and the Polovtsian. Naturally, Borodin’s sympathies are with the Russians, even though the composer was the illegitimate son of a Georgian (Imeretin) prince. Prince Igor is the ideal hero, first among equals, and he is supported by the boyars, the troops, and the people. He is the personification of Russian statehood as Borodin saw it: strong, just, civilizing. On the other hand, the nomadic barbarian Polovtsians, for whom the idea of the state is alien, live in a world of violence and destruction.

For Borodin the ethical superiority of Russians over Asiatics was obvious. But the composer’s Caucasian roots gave him a subtle, intuitive understanding of Oriental musical material. This penchant for working with non-European motifs was earlier realized brilliantly by Borodin when he took part with other Russian composers in writing music for the tableaux vivants for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alexander II’s reign. Borodin’s In Central Asia was the most successful and durable of the works composed for that official occasion. The symphonic picture with a vividness reminiscent of Vereshchagin’s genre paintings from central Asia beautifully and eloquently re-created the atmosphere of Turkestan—languid but filled with a sense of hidden danger. Explaining his music, Borodin wrote in the program, “Through a vast desert comes a foreign caravan, guarded by Russian troops.” In fact, In Central Asia is written from the point of view of the Russian soldier patrolling a vanquished Asian province; Borodin wholly identified with what he called the “Russian fighting might.”

In contrast to In Central Asia, the music of the Polovtsians in Prince Igor is much more dynamic and imbued with a sensual joy approaching ecstasy. It is also militant and threatening. Borodin is clearly at home emotionally in the Polovtsian camp. He is not just an observer but practically a participant in the frenzied orgy. This is one of the obvious reasons why audiences all over the world are enchanted by the Polovtsian dances. The mind may resist their hypnotism, but they still work on the subconscious. And the impact of the music is even greater when performed out of context, as a separate symphonic or ballet number, thus severing the logical and intellectual bonds provided by the patriotic libretto.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole, Prince Igor is undoubtedly proclaiming the triumph of reason over emotion, and loyalty to a strong sovereign over the free-for-all of anarchy. Still, in 1888 the wary Alexander III, prejudiced against the aesthetically rebellious Mighty Five, had to be persuaded of the opera’s propagandistic values.

Mitrofon Belyaev, the lumber millionaire and Petersburg patron of the arts, took on the difficult task. Following the prescribed Byzantine court procedures, he petitioned Alexander III to allow him to present the tsar with the printed score of Prince Igor, published at Belyaev’s expense. If the sovereign accepted such a present, that would signal the rehabilitation of Prince Igor; the question mark hanging over the production would thus disappear. In the accompanying explanatory note the millionaire patron of the arts duly stressed the patriotic and loyal content of Borodin’s opera. After some thought, Alexander III accepted the present, and the opera was restored in the repertory plans of the imperial theater.

The production of Prince Igor was opulent and extremely realistic; in particular, the costume and set designers studied Vereshchagin’s central Asian paintings. The Polovtsian scenes required over two hundred people onstage. At the premiere the famous bass of the imperial stage, Fyodor Stravinsky, the father of the composer, Igor, stood out. From the opera’s first performance on October 23, 1890, it was a hit with the Petersburg audience; according to contemporary accounts, the public “roared” in a surge of patriotic fervor.

Prince Igor had a profound effect on twenty-year-old Alexander Benois. Calling Borodin “a dilettante prophet of genius,” Benois recalled later how the music of Prince Igor helped him cross the emotional bridge from the legendary world of ancient Russia and its “proud and noble rulers” to modern, imperial Petersburg. “Through it, Russian antiquity became close and familiar to me, a hardbitten Westernizer; this music beckoned me with its freshness, something primordial and healthy—the very things that touched me in Russian nature, in Russian speech, and in the very essence of Russian thought.”^{112}

The contagious patriotism of Prince Igor united such polar opposites as Sergei Diaghilev, the young aesthete and snob who never missed a performance of the new opera, and Alexei Suvorin, the conservative nationalist publisher of Novoe vremya (New Times), the largest newspaper in Petersburg. Suvorin, who never interfered with the music department of his quite glib publication, broke this rule to announce in print that the modern autocratic Russia is the continuation and apotheosis of the opera’s central idea of the unity of people and ruler.

Borodin’s music, including his three powerful symphonies, two string quartets, exquisite in beauty and inspiration, and a few lovely art songs, did not win great popularity in the West. In America, Borodin is best known through the musical Kismet, which was based on his melodies. Prince Igor is staged relatively infrequently, even though the Polovtsian dances, choreographed by Michel Fokine, which created a sensation in Diaghilev’s Paris season of 1909, are familiar to lovers of ballet. But Borodin had a marked influence on Western musical professionals, especially the French impressionists. Both Debussy and Ravel were enchanted with his exotic melodies and unusual harmonic idiom. For the Western ear Borodin’s Orientalism is the most significant and interesting aspect of his legacy.

But for Russian audiences, what is essential in Borodin—his opera and his symphonies, especially the second, the “Bogatyr”—is his patriotic appeal. This was confirmed yet again during World War II, which the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. In those years the most popular opera, overshadowing both Mussorgsky and the eternal favorite, Tchaikovsky, was Prince Igor, along with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, renamed Ivan Susanin, an epiclike and triumphant tale of the exploits of a Russian warrior and his passionate love of his homeland.

If Borodin can be called the leading proponent—in terms of talent and significance—of the imperial idea in Russian music, then Tchaikovsky comes immediately behind him. Such a coupling may seem unlikely only at first glance. After all, Tchaikovsky is a true child of Petersburg, the most imperial of imperial cities.

Boris Asafyev, the most perspicacious Russian specialist on Tchaikovsky, while insisting that only two great Russian cultural figures had felt at home in Petersburg—Pushkin and Dostoyevsky—would immediately add a third name: Tchaikovsky. In Petersburg the young Tchaikovsky graduated from law school with the title titular councillor, then served for over three years in the Ministry of Justice, living the typical life of a young clerk in the capital.

Like his friends, Titular Councillor Tchaikovsky spent his days properly writing draft resolutions on legal cases and his evenings strolling like a dandy along Nevsky Prospect, stopping at fashionable restaurants. He regularly attended dance halls, was an avid theatergoer, and enjoyed bachelor parties. Delighted by Petersburg society, Tchaikovsky announced, “I admit I have a great weakness for the Russian capital. What can I do? I’ve become too much a part of it. Everything that is dear to my heart is in Petersburg, and life without it is positively impossible for me.”^{113}

Tchaikovsky’s career was progressing swiftly at the Ministry of Justice, and he soon became a court councillor. It came as a great surprise for many of his relatives when in 1862 Tchaikovsky’s name was listed among the first students of the capital’s conservatory, founded by Anton Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky’s uncle, a highly proper gentleman, was embarrassed: “What a shame! To trade jurisprudence for a honker!”

His studies at the Petersburg conservatory made Tchaikovsky a real musical professional. But not only that. Introducing him to European principles and forms of organizing musical material, the conservatory training also gave the young composer a sense of belonging to world culture. This feeling became very important for Tchaikovsky’s relations with Petersburg, since it saved the composer from the traditional conflicts with the city’s cosmopolitan spirit, which were almost inescapable at that time in the circles of the artistic elite.

Becoming the bard of St. Petersburg was more natural and easier for the worldly Tchaikovsky than for any other Russian composer after Glinka. Petersburg was a musical melting pot. Italian tunes were whistled on Nevsky Prospect, and a few steps away one could hear an organ grinder playing a Viennese ländler. The emperor liked French operas, but there was also a tradition at the court, dating back to Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, to invite singers from the Ukraine to Petersburg.

Tchaikovsky soaked up the capital’s music like a sponge: Italian arias from the stage of the imperial theater, French ditties and cancans, the solemn marches of military parades, and the sensuous waltzes that had conquered aristocratic Petersburg. The popular, melancholy Petersburg lieder called romansy held a special sway over Tchaikovsky’s imagination. They were beautiful, darkly erotic flowers that grew in fashionable salons after a complex cross-fertilization of Russian folk tunes and Italian arias. Glinka and a group of Russian amateur composers had worked over the creation of this strange and attractive hybrid. Spicy notes of anguish and passion, borrowed from Gypsy songs that filled Petersburg at that time, were added to their refined creations.

The Petersburg romansy, shaded with Gypsy idiom, lost their hothouse tenderness when they boldly crossed the threshold from the fashionable salons to real life. And yet, they became the delight of the broad masses of Russian music lovers, the Russian pop music of its time. The comfortably sentimental and sad or sensually passionate formulas of the romansy appeared more than once—reworked and ennobled—in Tchaikovsky’s music.

Musicians sometimes joke that Tchaikovsky wrote three symphonies—the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. In fact, his first three symphonies are rarely performed in the West or in Russia. But it is in the early symphonies that young Tchaikovsky’s imperial inclinations manifest themselves most vividly.

Elevated by Tchaikovsky’s genius, the whole variety of musical sounds from his St. Petersburg lives on in these first three symphonies: the sorrowful marches, the aristocratic, sultry waltzes, the romansy of its salons and suburbs, the ballet scenes and arias from its imperial stages, music of its folk festivities, fairs, and holidays.

The finales of Tchaikovsky’s early symphonies are without exception anthems, imperial apotheoses. A Russian folk song is heard in the finale of the First Symphony; in the finale of the Second, there is a Ukrainian folk song; and a polonaise is introduced in the last movement of the Third Symphony. At the time, Poland and the Ukraine belonged to the Russian Empire. Tchaikovsky’s integration of those themes into the framework of his symphonies, Petersburgian in form and content, signifies his support of the unification of various nations under the aegis of the Russian tsar, whose titles included Tsar of Kiev, of Poland, of Georgia, Lord of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Karelia, Bulgaria, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Lord of Turkestan, etc. Tchaikovsky also exploited the emotional and symbolic possibilities of the Russian anthem, “God Save the Tsar,” to the fullest extent. It is included, with all its psychological and political overtones, in two of Tchaikovsky’s popular orchestral works: Slavonic March (1876) and the 1812 Overture (1880).

Tchaikovsky wrote Slavonic March in support of one of the most cherished ideas of imperial Russia—Pan-Slavism. Like an overwhelming majority of educated Russians, Tchaikovsky fervently hoped for the unification of all the Slavic people of southeastern Europe under Russia. When in 1876 little Serbia arose against Turkish hegemony, the atmosphere in Russia—where everyone seemed to root for the brave Serbs—became so electric that the performance of Slavonic March with its Serbian folk melodies inevitably elicited outbursts of patriotism and noisy political demonstrations. Tchaikovsky, who liked to conduct this work himself, was enormously pleased. His satisfaction with the propagandistic role of his music was profound and probably the most sincere of all Russian composers; it was certainly more sincere than the later cases of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

The 1812 Overture sang the glory of the greatest military and political victory of the ruling Romanov dynasty, in the Patriotic War against Napoleon. This dramatic and triumphant composition became (like Slavonic March) a warhorse in the West, but in the Soviet Union it was not performed in its original version for over seventy years. Instead, the Soviets provided a doctored version. The Soviet composer Shebalin performed a musical vivisection, removing the imperial anthem. A similar fate befell the Slavonic March.

Also deliberately forgotten were Tchaikovsky’s sacred works for chorus (whose existence is due to Alexander III’s personal commission), as well as his Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom and the Vesper Service. When Balanchine was preparing his Tchaikovsky festival at the New York City Ballet in 1981,1 reminded him about the composer’s sacred music. Balanchine, a deeply devout man and a fanatic admirer of Tchaikovsky, was very interested and asked me to bring him a recording of the liturgy. He returned the record to me with a curt, “It’s no Bach.”

As is known from his letters and diaries, Tchaikovsky’s attitude toward religion was ambivalent. But he considered composing sacred music as an act of loyalty and patriotism, a gift on the altar of the fatherland, so it became one of the important aspects of the imperial theme in Tchaikovsky’s work.

In 1877 Russia, inspired by Pan-Slavic slogans, declared war on Turkey. Tchaikovsky, along with almost the entire Petersburg intelligentsia, followed with avid interest the actions of the Russian troops, headed by Alexander III and his sons. As never before, the composer had the sense of being an organic part, emotionally and creatively, of the great empire. For some time, the usually extremely self-centered Tchaikovsky even forgot his own, sometimes quite dramatic troubles. “It’s shameful to shed tears for oneself,” he confessed in a letter, “when the country is shedding blood in the name of a common cause.”^{114}

But in a strange way, the Fourth Symphony, which Tchaikovsky wrote during the Russo-Turkish War, turned out to be a first step away from his earlier imperial interpretation of that genre. In the Fourth the protagonist steps beyond the limits of the ritual relations of society and state. We know of a letter from Tchaikovsky to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, in which he devotes a long passage to the hidden program of the Fourth, describing it as an attempt of man to avoid his fate. In the composer’s melodramatic explanation, a “fateful force” hangs over the autobiographical hero “which does not allow his desire for happiness to reach its goal.”

In the finale of the Fourth Symphony, Tchaikovsky puts the lone individual in conflict with society for the first time. Here this conflict is still resolved by subordinating the personal to the collective. Tchaikovsky comments, “If you can’t find reason for happiness in yourself, look to other people. Go out among the people…. Feel the joy of others. Life is possible, after all.”^{115} But in the Fifth Symphony, written eleven years later (1888), such a compromise between hero and society is no longer possible. And in the finale the alienated protagonist must observe a pompous triumphal parade from the side. (This musical philosophical idea was used with tremendous effect by Shostakovich in the finale of his Fifth Symphony, in the tragic year 1937.)

The Sixth Symphony (Pathétique), written not long before Tchaikovsky’s death, depicts the tragic confrontation of the individual and fate and mourns his final, total destruction. This most popular of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies is perhaps his most pessimistic work. I find in it a distant conceptual echo with Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.

In the first movement of the Pathétique Tchaikovsky quotes the funeral chorale of the Russian Orthodox service, “Rest among the saints.” In conversations with close friends Tchaikovsky readily admitted that the symphony presents the story of his life, in which the last movement plays the part of De Profundis, a prayer for the dead. But even the very first listeners, who knew nothing about its hidden program, guessed that the Pathétique might be the composer’s artistic farewell to this world. After the last rehearsal of the symphony, conducted by Tchaikovsky, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, a talented poet and fervent admirer of the composer, ran into the green room weeping and exclaiming, “What have you done, it’s a requiem, a requiem!”

On October 16, 1893, the Pathétique was premiered in a charged atmosphere of the white-columned Assembly of the Nobility. Prolonged ovation greeted the appearance of the rather short but slender, elegant Tchaikovsky at the podium. The composer’s handsome face, with still dark eyebrows and mustache framed by silvery hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard, was pale as usual, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement.

Tchaikovsky began conducting with the baton held tightly in his fist, again in his usual way. But when the final sounds of the symphony had died away and Tchaikovsky slowly lowered the baton, there was dead silence in the audience. Instead of applause, stifled sobs came from various parts of the hall. The audience was stunned and Tchaikovsky stood there, silent, motionless, his head bowed.

“The symphony is life for Tchaikovsky,” Asafyev once noted. In Asafyev’s flowery description the Pathétique “captures the very instant of the soul’s parting from the body, the instant of the life force radiating into space, into eternity.”^{116} This is the opinion of Tchaikovsky’s younger contemporary, who knew many of his friends well; so we can be certain that the Petersburg elite read Tchaikovsky’s last work as a tragic novel with a sorrowful epilogue. And inevitably next to Tchaikovsky’s name arose that of Dostoyevsky. In a typical passage, another contemporary wrote of the composer and the writer, “With a hidden passion they both stop at moments of horror, total spiritual collapse, and finding acute sweetness in the cold trepidation of the heart before the abyss, they both force the reader or the listener to experience these feelings, too.”^{117}

Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky once met at a mutual friend’s house in the fall of 1864; neither left any reminiscences about the meeting. But we know that Tchaikovsky read Dostoyevsky eagerly all his life, sometimes taking delight, sometimes rejecting his writings. The Brothers Karamazov captivated the composer at first, but as he continued to read, he felt depressed. “This is becoming intolerable. Every single character is crazy.”^{118} Tchaikovsky’s final conclusion was, “Dostoyevsky is a genius, but an antipathetic writer.”^{119}

Yet the congeniality of Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky, as we have seen, was acutely felt by the composer’s younger contemporaries. They equated Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, with psychological novels in the center of which—for the first time in Russian music—was an ambivalent, suffering personality. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, Tchaikovsky’s hero persisted in exploring the meaning of life while trapped in the fatal love-death-faith triangle in the best Dostoyevskian fashion.

Tchaikovsky conveyed in music this Dostoyevskian confusion about life’s mysteries and contradictions using techniques characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels, including the writer’s favorite piling up of events and emotions leading to a catastrophic, climactic explosion.

The frenzied longing for love, which saturates many pages of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, also fills Dostoyevsky’s novels, while the other pole of the same passion, typical of both, is the fascination with and fear of death, combined with the need to confront it.

Compare Tchaikovsky’s attitude toward death with Mussorgsky’s. Mussorgsky was close to Dostoyevsky in describing the tragedy of a lonely soul in the social desert of the city. But the theme of death as interpreted by Mussorgsky clearly belongs to another era. For all its expressiveness and drama, Mussorgsky’s vocal cycle Songs and Dances of Death is still a series of grand romantic pictures in music. Mussorgsky observes death from offstage, as if from the sidelines.

For Mussorgsky the most perplexing mystery is life, not death. For Tchaikovsky the opposite is true, and this brings him so much closer to Dostoyevsky. For Tchaikovsky as for Dostoyevsky, fate is synonymous with death. Tchaikovsky’s notes explaining the hidden “program” of the Fifth Symphony are very significant: “The fullest submission before fate, or, which is the same thing, before the inexplicable predestination of Providence.” Reading this, one can almost feel the pain that fatalism and pessimism bring down upon Tchaikovsky. And he instantly adds (this note relating to the second movement of the Fifth): “Should one throw oneself into the arms of faith???”^{120}

But such a move, so profound and natural for Dostoyevsky, and so tempting for Tchaikovsky, did not become the lever of the composer’s late output. He never really threw himself into the arms of faith, and so the theme of St. Petersburg became a kind of creative anchor for the mature Tchaikovsky. Being one of the builders of the Petersburg mythos took on special significance for Tchaikovsky: in creating that mythos, he pushed aside the horrible images of triumphant death from his creative consciousness.

Depicting Petersburg and its themes in his symphonies, Tchaikovsky covered a path in a quarter of a century that took the rest of Russian culture one hundred and fifty years to traverse. In his first three symphonies the composer’s delight in the brilliant atmosphere of the imperial capital with its colorful parades and opulent balls is evident. This attitude is similar to that of the early bards of Petersburg. But even in those first three symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s pleasure is already complicated by the intrusion of new images. They are, first of all, genre pictures, scenes of festivities on the streets and squares of the city; these impressions are close in spirit to the young Gogol.

Tchaikovsky also introduces here a clearly melancholy note, which does not permit the listener to forget that the author lives in the second half of the nineteenth century. This melancholy is sharply on the rise in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, where the sentimental pity for a solitary soul, lost in the metropolis, makes us recall Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. In his late symphonies, Tchaikovsky noticeably universalizes this conflict between the individual and society. On the one hand, it seems to shoot upward, into the vistas of the universe, presenting the individual arguing with fate. On the other hand, the individual poses tragic questions to himself and himself alone, in the style of Dostoyevsky.

The sense of doom permeates Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. This feeling, absolutely uncharacteristic of Dostoyevsky, also betrays the composer’s attitude toward Petersburg. In mourning himself, solipsistic Tchaikovsky mourns the demise of the world. That is why the Sixth Symphony can be seen not only as a requiem for the individual but also for the city and its society. Tchaikovsky’s musical soul was among the first to perceive the coming cataclysms of war and revolution. No one understood yet that the culture of Petersburg was doomed. Tchaikovsky did not understand it, either. He just felt the breath of doom’s approach. This breath tinged his music, as it would a mirror, making it foggy and ambiguous. Nonetheless, it did register a recognizable picture of St. Petersburg.

Dostoyevsky, for his part, hated Peter the Great and his creation—this alien colossus, a city hostile to the Russian spirit, a foreign body forcing itself into Russian space and subjugating it to its evil will. Dostoyevsky’s passionate desire was Petersburg’s total obliteration. Mussorgsky, too, shared much of Dostoyevsky’s attitude toward Peter and his reforms; one can find ample evidence in Khovanshchina, in which the anti-Petrine forces are presented with understanding and profound sympathy. Tchaikovsky, by intuitively grasping and emotionally experiencing the imaginary destruction of the empire and of Petersburg as if it were real, went beyond Mussorgsky and Dostoyevsky. Tchaikovsky felt somehow that doom was around the corner, and, being a composer, he shouted it out as loudly and clearly as he could, filling his music with hysterical warning.

In this reaction, Tchaikovsky became the first Russian composer with a profound nostalgia toward Petersburg. The nostalgic motifs of his music, intertwining with delight for Mozart and the eighteenth century, gave us Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra (1876) and the Mozartiana suite (1887), so beloved by Balanchine. But Tchaikovsky’s nostalgia, his intuitive horror before the coming revolutionary catastrophe, and his pity for Petersburg were reflected with particular power in his ballets and his opera The Queen of Spades. It was in these works that the transformation of the Petersburg mythos began to crystallize in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Yet the city still stood and was reflected in the steely Neva River, apparently unperturbed by the tumult surrounding it. Its mythology had begun before its history, developed in time with it, and was transformed from the imperial to the romantic to an evil and fatalistic aura by men of genius. And still it stood, prepared for the next transformation, stately and seemingly impassive.

This new transformation was driven in tandem by music and the visual arts, a pairing which was highly unusual for Russia, where literature had always reigned supreme. Russia was and still is a logocentric country, however strange that idea may seem to Western fans of Russian music, ballet, and the Russian pictorial avant-garde. Therefore, it was only natural that the original mythos of Petersburg emanated from literature: first the Petersburg of Pushkin, then of Gogol, and of Dostoyevsky, each building upon, enriching and ultimately displacing, if not entirely replacing, the preceding. By the early 1880s, the Petersburg of Dostoyevsky, subsuming the imagery of Pushkin and Gogol, reigned unchallenged in Russian culture.

And then Tchaikovsky appeared on the scene. His music gave a new impetus to the Petersburgian theme in art, freeing it of the dictates of literature. Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades is the prime example of this trend.

Pushkin’s prose novella The Queen of Spades (1833) is one of his most Petersburgian works. This is a tale about Ghermann, the obsessed gambler trying to learn the secret of the three winning cards from the old countess; eventually he loses his fortune and his love and goes mad. Pushkin’s story contains many of the motifs found in the predominantly literary mythos of Petersburg. Pushkin’s narrative is restrained, dry, almost ironic; it makes the reader more willing to believe that anything is possible in the city described, including the appearance of a dead countess. Here, in Pushkin’s characteristically laconic form, even the landscape of Petersburg foreshadows the future, much wordier depictions of Gogol and Dostoyevsky: “The weather was awful: the wind howled, wet snow fell in big flakes; the lamps glowed dimly; the streets were empty.”

Fifty-seven years later, in the opera based on the Pushkin story (with the libretto by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modeste), the composer altered the hero’s name minimally, from Ghermann to Gherman, but in his reinterpretation the plot and characters of The Queen of Spades underwent much more serious changes. Some of them are natural because it was a question of creating a grand melodramatic opera from a compressed prose work. But many of the changes were derived from Tchaikovsky’s completely different feelings toward Petersburg. As Asafyev colorfully reports,

The poison of Petersburg nights, the sweet mirage of its ghostly images, the fogs of autumn and the bleak joys of summer, the coziness and acute contradictions of Petersburg life, the meaningless waste of Petersburg sprees and the amorous longing of Petersburg’s romantic rendezvous, delicious meetings and secret promises, cold disdain and indifference of a man of society for superstition and ritual right up to blasphemous laughter about the other-worldly and at the same time the mystical fear of the unknown—all these moods and sensations poisoned Tchaikovsky’s soul. He carried that poison with him always, and his music is imbued with it.^{121}

There was none of that romantic “poison” in Pushkin. For Pushkin, the Petersburg of The Queen of Spades is a place with a glorious past and future and with a delightful and maybe sometimes slightly mysterious present. In this tale he does not even contemplate the possible doom of the city. Pushkin hides his love for Petersburg beneath irony and uses supernatural events as mere props.

In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin is much more serious and full of pathos; there Petersburg is the symbol of Russia, and Pushkin interprets contradictions to the Petersburg existence as contradictions to the Russian historical path. Still the poet is convinced of the “unshakability” of the imperial capital, though he doubts that the horrible human price paid for that unshakability was justified.

When Tchaikovsky wrote works with an historical or heroic theme, the patriotic idea in them always prevailed; therefore, it is useless to seek psychological depth in them. But in his late works, Petersburg’s ambiance is psychologized in the extreme. Here people do not think about the fate of the state but only about love, life, and death. Death triumphs in The Queen of Spades: the countess dies (as in Pushkin), but the main characters—Gherman and his love, Liza—die too. And their death predicts the fall of Petersburg itself. Once it is perceived, this sense of the city’s doom is impossible to ignore, it so suffuses the music.

Tchaikovsky’s psychological identification with Gherman, rare even for the extremely sensitive composer, is well known. The fateful scene—the appearance of the countess’s ghost, who tells Gherman the secret of the three winning cards—so deeply disturbed Tchaikovsky that he feared the ghost would come to him as well. When writing Gherman’s death scene, the composer wept out loud. In the diary of Tchaikovsky’s manservant, there is a notation naively describing the feverish composition of The Queen of Spades (the opera was written in forty-four days) and Tchaikovsky’s hysterical compassion for his hero: “he cried all that night, his eyes were still red, he was very exhausted…. He felt sorry for poor Gherman.”^{122}

In Pushkin, the confrontation between Ghermann and the ghost of the countess is presented rather ironically and skeptically. For Tchaikovsky this scene presented an opportunity to look into the “other world” and perhaps even to establish some kind of occult contact. Asafyev indicated that in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades the scene with the ghost sounded like a musical incantation, and he insisted that for a religious person to write it that way was blasphemous. Asafyev compared that episode with Dostoyevsky’s famous story “Bobok,” in which the writer tries to guess what the buried but not yet decomposed former residents of Petersburg talk about in a cemetery.

In this case, too, the difference with a work of literature is striking. In The Queen of Spades we do not find a trace of the cynicism inherent in “Bobok,” for Tchaikovsky obviously sensed that the times when the Petersburg theme could be handled in such a way were gone. As far as the composer was concerned, the curtain was coming down. Mourning Gherman at the end of the opera with a lofty and gloomy chorale, Tchaikovsky mourned Petersburg and himself, as he would later do in the Pathétique. It was because Tchaikovsky tied Gherman’s fate to the fate of the Russian capital (and of himself as well) that it became such a psychologically vibrant symbol of the new era of Petersburg’s culture.

And as is almost inevitable in Russia, this cultural transformation could not have been achieved without the help of Pushkin’s omnipresent spirit. But while Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman dominated the “literary” stage of Petersburg’s cultural history all by itself, his Queen of Spades could be transformed, or rather, almost completely dissolved in the waves of Tchaikovsky’s music in order to take part in the fading away of the old mystique of Petersburg and the creation of a new one.

Chronicling the creation of The Queen of Spades, the naive but considerate manservant noted, “If, God willing, Peter Ilyich finishes composing just as well as he started, and this opera is seen and heard on the stage, then, probably, following the example of Peter Ilyich, many will shed a tear.”

And in fact, many did shed tears when The Queen of Spades was first performed at the Maryinsky Theater, on December 5,1890. That premiere can be considered a symbolic and, in many ways, pivotal moment. A group of young Petersburgians who tried not to miss a single performance of a Tchaikovsky opera or, for that matter, of his ballet Sleeping Beauty, produced at the Maryinsky earlier that year, used Tchaikovsky’s music as the catalyst in the formation of the new Petersburg mythos.

The leader of the group, who dubbed themselves the Nevsky Pickwickians, was twenty-year-old Alexander Benois, the son of a wealthy and influential Petersburg architect. The Benois family had Italian, French, and German roots. Alexander’s maternal great-grandfather, who came to Russia from Venice in the late eighteenth century, was named “director of music” of Petersburg by Nicholas I in 1832; his grandfather was the architect of the Maryinsky Theater. A curious detail: entering upon marriage, Benois’s Catholic grandfather and Lutheran grandmother agreed, to avoid religious friction in the family, that their male descendants would be Catholic and the females Lutheran. Alexander Benois felt that this decision contributed to his family’s tradition of broad-mindedness and tolerance, both religious and aesthetic.

Interested in both painting and music, Benois was sent to Karl May’s private school, one of the best in Petersburg. There he befriended Dmitri Filosofov, Konstantin Somov, and Walter Nouvel, and in the best Petersburg tradition founded a circle they called the Society for Self-Education. The club members were only sixteen and seventeen years old. They usually met at the Benois apartment and took turns giving diligently prepared lectures on music, art, and philosophy, followed by lively discussions.

Soon the Pickwickians were joined by the young artist Leo Rozenberg, who later became famous under his pseudonym, Leon Bakst; elected “speaker” of the club, he moderated the debates. That they sometimes grew heated is evidenced by the fact that the bronze bell Bakst used for calling his friends to order eventually cracked.

The Nevsky Pickwickians considered themselves Petersburg cosmopolites. As Benois recalled, they “valued the idea of some sort of united humanity.” In their intense dreams the young club members imagined no less a feat than bringing Russian art out of isolation and into Europe. But those dreams would have been nothing more than that if their group had not been joined by Filosofov’s cousin from the provinces—a young, energetic, and self-confident charmer named Sergei Diaghilev.

The country cousin was the startling opposite of the thin, pale, and restrained Petersburger Filosofov. Benois recalled that Diaghilev astounded them with his un-Petersburgian appearance. “He had round rosy cheeks and sparkling white teeth, which showed as two even rows between his bright red lips.”^{123} Diaghilev, who had a resounding baritone, dreamed of becoming a singer; he also took lessons in composition at the Petersburg conservatory. But he was almost completely ignorant about art, and his literary tastes were equally embarrassing to his new friends.

Benois took up the education of Diaghilev, acting for many years as his mentor and, as Benois called himself, his “intellectual protector.” Diaghilev amazed Benois with his uncommon abilities: “with wild leaps he went from total ignorance and indifference to a demanding and even passionate study”^{124} of European and Russian culture. Benois observed in astonishment as his “beloved and most colorful student” became a specialist, almost instantly, in—say—the little-studied, arcane realm of eighteenth-century Russian art. But Benois always considered Diaghilev’s main talent to be his willpower—to which he added energy, stubbornness, and a considerable understanding of human psychology: “He, who was too lazy to read a novel and who yawned while listening even to a most interesting lecture, was capable of spending a long time to study carefully the novel’s author or the lecturer himself. The ensuing verdict was always acutely accurate and insightful.”^{125}

Even before Diaghilev arrived in Petersburg, Tchaikovsky was one of his favorite composers. But his adoration had been naive and provincial, with a preference for the more emotional melodies (“explosions of lyricism,” in Benois’s expression), not respect filtered through intellect and taste, as was the case among St. Petersburg’s elite. Under Benois’s careful tutelage Diaghilev’s delight in Tchaikovsky turned into a focused admiration that was bound to have important consequences for the future of Russian culture in general and the fate of the Petersburg mythos in particular.

For Benois the Tchaikovsky cult began somewhat earlier, with the Maryinsky Theater premiere of one of Tchaikovsky’s most evocative Petersburgian works, the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Rather prejudiced against Russian composers at the time, the Westernizer Benois was unexpectedly struck by “something endlessly close and dear” in Tchaikovsky’s music. It appeared, Benois felt, as if in response to an unconscious expectation and immediately became “his own” for Benois, infinitely and vitally important. So Benois tried not to miss a single performance of Sleeping Beauty; one week he went four times. For Benois and his friends, it was the perfect embodiment of their own inchoate and immature aesthetic.

The Nevsky Pickwickians were attracted to Tchaikovsky’s Western orientation, in this case the special scent of Francophilia—the libretto was based on Charles Perrault’s fairy tale La Belle au bois dormant—but also the traditions of German romanticism. In Beauty’s music Benois heard the echoes of the “world of captivating nightmares” of his beloved writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. Benois was drawn to Tchaikovsky and at the same time frightened by the “mix of strange truth and convincing invention”^{126} not unlike Hoffmann’s.

Another enchanting quality of Tchaikovsky’s music for Benois was what he called its “passé-ism.” By this Benois meant not only adoring the past as such or Tchaikovsky’s particular talent for stylization but the vibrant sense of the past as being the present. This great gift of Tchaikovsky’s, “something like beatitude,” according to Benois, connected to an acute anticipation of death and a “real sense of the otherworldly.” Benois found a brotherly artistic soul in Tchaikovsky, who, he thought, was, like all the Nevsky Pickwickians, also attracted to the “kingdom of shadows,” where “not only separate individuals but entire eras live on.”^{127} And the Sleeping Beauty production itself, in which so many masters came together—the composer, the choreographer Marius Petipa, the designers, and the outstanding dancers—became for Benois an example of the endless possibilities of ballet as a true Gesammtkunstwerk.

In those days, few people had a serious interest in ballet. In educated Petersburg circles ballet was despised, an echo of the nihilist ideas of the 1860s. Benois, who had loved ballet in his youth, was beginning to cool toward it when his fierce passion for The Sleeping Beauty turned him into an ardent balletomane once more.

So Benois, the eternal proselytizer, infected all his friends with his fanatical enthusiasm for The Sleeping Beauty, first among them Diaghilev, who moved to Petersburg a year and half after the ballet’s premiere. Without his newly kindled balletomania, claimed Benois, there would have been none of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons in Paris, nor his famous ballet company, nor the subsequent worldwide triumph of the Russian ballet.

After the cultural awakening caused by The Sleeping Beauty, Benois and his friends awaited impatiently the premiere of The Queen of Spades. Benois’s circle, Diaghilev included, was present in full force that evening at the Maryinsky Theater. The audience’s reaction to the new opera was rather restrained, but Benois was immediately “enthralled by a flame of rapture.” Tchaikovsky’s music, he recalled, “literally drove me mad, turned me into some kind of visionary for a time…. it took on the force of an incantation, through which I could penetrate into the world of shadows that had been beckoning me for such a longtime.”^{128}

The Queen of Spade’s passé-ism took on special significance for the Nevsky Pickwickians because it was directed not at Europe, so dear to their hearts yet remote, but at the city in which they lived. Benois explained:

I instinctively adored Petersburg’s charms, its unique romance, but at the same time there was much that I did not like in it, and there were even some things that offended my taste with their severity and “officiousness.” Now through my delight in The Queen of Spades I saw the light…. Now I found that captivating poetry, whose presence I had only guessed at, everywhere I looked.”^{129}

This was one of the most startling and magical moments in the evolution of the nearly two-hundred-year-old Petersburg mythos. That mystique had begun with paeans to Peter the Great’s imperial ambitions. Then Pushkin in his Bronze Horseman tried to weight the scales. Which would weigh more: a new capital or the fate of the pathetic clerk crushed by Peter’s will? Neither Gogol nor Dostoyevsky after him ever bothered with that question. Gogol’s grotesque city and Dostoyevsky’s supposedly realistic cauldron of hell were both places where “little” people suffered and died. The city as mirage, as giant octopus, great and heartless deceiver, eternal foreigner on Russian soil—that was the image of Petersburg inherited from Gogol and Dostoyevsky. In Russia’s literature-centered culture of the 1880s, that terrible image became almost universally accepted.

Any casual description of Petersburg in those days had to begin with Gogol and Dostoyevsky (and usually end there); crowds of imitators exploited and vulgarized the imagery of their illustrious predecessors, and Petersburg under their pens turned from a mysterious and fateful capital into a prosaic and boring place. The fantastic realism of Dostoyevsky’s urban landscapes turned into dreary naturalism with his followers. The mirage dissipated. The formerly imposing Petersburg houses, no longer concealing mystical or criminal revelations, turned into gray, empty shells. Sometimes it seemed that if Petersburg were to vanish suddenly, in accordance with Dostoyevsky’s feverish wish and stark prophesy, no one would notice. Even the once-commanding mystique of Petersburg was close to disappearing, because there was no longer any mystery about the city.

Benois and his friends not only reinvigorated that mythos, they managed to give it a new content. This transformation, itself miraculous and unique, had its own inner logic.

The first shifts can be seen with a close look at the universe of Dostoyevsky himself, a writer who was obsessive but not at all dogmatic. Dostoyevsky was a passionate nationalist, but he also had a trait that Osip Mandelstam would later term “a longing for world culture.” In his famous speech on Pushkin, given in 1880, Dostoyevsky called for the Russian “to become brother to all men, uniman, if you will.” The result of his musing on the “European” essence of Pushkin’s work, this neologism represented Dostoyevsky’s conclusion that Pushkin’s works held a prophetic call to “universal unity.”

Dostoyevsky’s speech, hailed throughout the land with unprecedented acclaim, was the milestone from which some of his younger contemporaries marked the new period in Russian culture: they saw in it a rejection of the nationalist-isolationist path, which was leading to a dead end, and an appeal for the expansion and therefore the renewal of the Russian artistic tradition.

Dostoyevsky’s ideas were particularly compelling for Tchaikovsky, who reacted morbidly to the Mighty Five’s criticism that he was not “Russian” enough. In his memoirs Benois states that in “progressive” musical circles “it was considered obligatory to treat Tchaikovsky as a renegade, a master overly dependent on the West.” Tchaikovsky, naturally enough, knew this. That is why in his notebook covering 1888-1889, amid addresses and other notations there is a note made by the composer before his trip to Prague, where he would have to appear frequently at various receptions in his honor: “Start speech with Dostoyevsky’s uniman.”

Tchaikovsky was, probably, the first great Russian composer to think seriously about the place of Russian music in European culture. He regularly conducted his compositions in the West, forming close business and friendly ties with many of the leading musicians of Europe and the United States; for Russians this was also new and unusual. Typical is a letter from Paris, in which Tchaikovsky somewhat wistfully tells his patroness, Nadezhda von Meek, “How pleasant it is to be convinced firsthand of the success of our literature in France. Every book étalage displays translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky…. The newspapers are constantly printing rapturous articles about one or another of these writers. Perhaps such a time will come for Russian music as well!”^{130}

This remark clearly shows Tchaikovsky’s impatient anticipation of a person like Diaghilev, whose central idea would be the promotion of Russian culture in the West. Young Diaghilev’s manifesto might have been his memorable words: “I want to nurture Russian painting, clean it up and, most important, present it to the West, elevate it in the West.” Subsequently, Diaghilev did exactly this and, of course, for much more than just painting.

On October 26, 1892, the writer Dmitri Merezhkovsky gave a lecture in Petersburg on “The Reasons for the Decline of Russian Literature.” A reporter for the mass circulation Novoye vremya summarized it this way: “ ‘We are standing on the brink of an abyss,’ announced Merezhkovsky, recommending that we seek salvation from contemporary French decadents.”^{131} After many years of dominance by nationalistic, utilitarian, and nihilistic ideas, the Petersburg artistic elite sensed that Russian culture was in crisis. Once again, it turned to the West, wanting to be in step with the latest European cultural developments. And this is what Merezhkovsky really proclaimed. His lecture, which aroused great interest—among the respondents were Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov—actually signaled the appearance of the first fledgling modernist movement in Russia—symbolism.

Merezhkovsky called for “an expansion of artistic impressionability.” This “new impressionability” ought to be learned, he lectured, from Western masters: besides the French symbolists Merezhkovsky also named the then-popular Edgar Alan Poe and Ibsen; but he also included as allies the revered classics of Russian literature. Benois immediately joined Merezhkovsky’s “decadent” movement, and they were even friends for a time. Later the sober Petersburgian Benois would confess that he joined out of a mistaken desire to appear “avantgarde.” “It was the time of the typical fin de siècle, whose preciousness and modernity were expressed in the cult (at least in words) of everything depraved with an admixture of all kinds of mysticism, often turning into mystification.”^{132}

The “anti-bohemian” Benois was particularly put off by Merezhkovsky’s wife, the “decadent” poetess Zinaida Hippius. Always dressed all in white (“Like the princess of Dreams”), a tall, thin, pretty blonde with a Mona Lisa smile always playing on her lips, and never tiring of striking a pose (in Benois’s opinion), Hippius stood in sharp contrast to her short, scrawny, shy husband. The very first question Hippius asked of Benois and his friends was, “And you, gentlemen students, what are you decadent about?”

Ideas for renewal and change were in the air of Petersburg, but no one knew just how to realize them. A few years later Merezhkovsky and Benois, together with Diaghilev, would found a journal, Mir iskusstva (World of Art) that would become the triumphant mouthpiece and at the same time the label of a new direction in Russian culture. But before a new era could start, the old one had to be put to rest. That was done by two unexpected deaths that were felt most painfully.

The first was the still-mysterious demise of Tchaikovsky in Petersburg on October 25, 1893, at the age of fifty-three. With the special permission of Alexander III the memorial service was held at the overflowing Kazan Cathedral. The emperor, though expected, did not attend but he did send an impressive wreath. There were over three hundred wreaths altogether, and the closed coffin seemed to drown in them. The funeral procession was the longest in Petersburg history: hundreds of thousands of people came out onto the streets.

The Imperial Maryinsky Theater, still the bastion of the aristocracy, had recently started to attract new patrons, particularly for performances of Tchaikovsky’s operas and ballets, especially students and young professionals. Tickets were impossible to obtain, and when they tried distributing them by lottery, up to fifteen thousand people a day were among the hopefuls. A huge young audience was created for Tchaikovsky’s music.

So on the day of Tchaikovsky’s funeral all lectures in the city’s schools were canceled to allow the students to say good-bye to their beloved composer. Crowds of students took part in the procession, since the city had dozens of gymnasiums and other schools, and over twenty colleges: the famous Petersburg University and various academies and institutes. Young professionals, the Russian intelligentsia, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and journalists, educated in Russia and in Europe and as a rule liberals, were also out in force. They mourned their idol. It seemed as if the whole of “thinking” Petersburg paid tribute to one of its greatest representatives, intuiting the role that Tchaikovsky’s works would play in evolving the city’s mythos.

A year after Tchaikovsky’s death, on October 20, 1894, Alexander III expired unexpectedly, not yet fifty years old. The energetic and seemingly healthy tsar was suddenly brought down by an incurable case of nephritis. When Alexander III ascended the throne in 1881, he had a choice according to one of his councilors: “lose everything or oppress everything.” Alexander chose to be “oppressor.” Still, despite his dictatorial mien, he gained the respect of many, including Benois, who had been presented to the emperor; the young aesthete recalled that Alexander III created a “strange and awesome” impression. Benois was particularly astounded by the emperor’s steely, light blue eyes; when Alexander concentrated his cold gaze on someone, it could have the effect of a blow.^{133}

Benois to his final days (he died in Paris in 1960) insisted that Alexander III’s reign had been “in general, extremely significant and beneficial” and had prepared the way for the flowering of Russian culture in the early twentieth century, the so-called Silver Age. In that we can believe him; after all, he was one of the leaders of that Silver Age. He was also convinced that had Alexander III reigned another twenty years, the history of the entire world would have been much more benign.

In contrast, the heir to the throne, the future Nicholas II, with his “unprepossessing and rather folksy” looks left Benois unimpressed. Nicholas reminded him of a “small-time army officer.”^{134} In early 1894, with the first sign of Alexander III’s illness, a court general wrote in his diary, “The sovereign had the flu…. It is terrible to think what would happen if the tsar were to die, leaving us to the hands of the child-heir (despite his twenty-six years), knowing nothing, prepared for nothing.” On the day of the emperor’s death, next to his laconic notation, “The tsar passed away at two fifteen,” the courtier added a prophetic phrase in English: “A leap in the dark!”^{135}

A decidedly conservative ruler, Alexander III realized nevertheless the importance of rapid economic and industrial development for Russia, and he tried to create the most beneficial conditions for that purpose. The changes came in an avalanche. In Petersburg, giant factories were built and powerful new banks appeared on the scene. A reactionary political commentator wrote with horror of “the bulky figure of capital entering our modest country.” The sense of insecurity was widespread, but so was the anticipation of immense riches. Petersburg was in a fever.

Right after Alexander III’s death, the enormous boom prepared by his rule began, with Russian industry growing at 9 percent annually. Even the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin maintained that Russia in that period had “the most advanced industrial and financial capitalism.”

This frantic economic activity, new for Petersburg, created numerous nouveaux riches who wanted to be acknowledged as the true masters of the city. They wanted to feel like generous patrons of the arts and were prepared to spend substantial sums to support national culture. The motivation was simple and logical: an economically strong Russia had to take its rightful place in the family of civilized nations. The flowering of Russian culture would undoubtedly help that process along. Therefore, Russian culture had to be Westernized, and as quickly as possible. In this quest for rapid Westernization the desires of factory owners, market speculators, and bankers coincided with the dreams of the vast majority of the Petersburg intelligentsia. This created a receptive climate in Petersburg for the ideas of Benois, Diaghilev, and other innovators. In Benois’s words, they were calling for a “departure from the backwardness of Russian artistic life, getting rid of our provincialism, and approaching the cultural West,” which was then realized with considerable speed and success.

In 1895, Diaghilev wrote to his stepmother, whom he loved dearly, “I am, first of all, a great charlatan, although brilliant, and secondly, a great charmer, and thirdly, very brazen, and fourthly, a man with a great amount of logic and small amount of principles, and fifthly, I believe, without talent; however, if you like, I believe I have found my true calling—patronage of the arts. For that, I have everything, except money, mais ça viendra.”^{136}

In this remarkable attempt at self-analysis, with a certain coquetry forgivable in a man of twenty-three, there is a prediction that came to pass very quickly. Always behaving as if he had money (he had none), Diaghilev managed to find enough financial support to organize three exhibits a few years later. The last, opened in 1898—with great pomp, as Benois recalled (there was an orchestra) and with unheard of refinement (numerous hothouse plants and flowers in the hall)—served as the first manifesto of the artistic intentions of the Benois-Diaghilev group.

At last in late 1898, Diaghilev brought his and Benois’s longstanding, heretofore Utopian dream to life: they started an art magazine. Modeled on foreign publications of the modern style like the British Studio, the German Pan and Die Jugend, and the French La Plume, Benois and Diaghilev’s brainchild was called Mir iskusstva (World of Art), which represented quite a revolutionary concept for Russia. It was the first artistic publication by a group of like-minded young people who wanted to use it as a beacon for broad cultural change in the country. It was also the first magazine in Russia’s history prepared and designed as a complete artistic concept.

Mir iskusstva immediately caught the attention of the Petersburg elite with its attractive appearance: large format, excellent paper, well-designed headings, and endpapers. Each issue had wonderful reproductions, specially made in Europe, of works by modern Russian and Western painters. Diaghilev dug its delicate typeface out of the printing house of the Academy of Sciences, where it had lain since Empress Elizabeth’s reign. The magazine’s logo, by Bakst, was a solitary eagle on a mountaintop.

For Diaghilev and his friends this logo was a symbol of independent and free art, proudly presiding high above the mundane. But in fact Mir iskusstva was closely tied to the economic and cultural transformations at large in Russian society. It was no accident that the magazine was financed by Princess Maria Tenisheva, whose husband, a Russian self-made man, built the first car factory in Petersburg, or by the Moscow merchant Savva Morozov, who had grown rich by building railroads. At first Diaghilev himself felt that one of the main goals of the magazine should be the promotion of Russian art industries: the growing textile, fabric, ceramic, china, and glass enterprises. Benois earnestly insisted that “in essence so-called industrial art and so-called pure art are sisters, twins of the same mother—beauty—and resemble each other so much that sometimes it is very hard to tell them apart.”^{137}

In an interview in Peterburgskaya gazeta, Leon Bakst happily promised that each issue of the new magazine would present model designs for craftsmen and workers; special attention would be paid to designs for fabric, furniture, and pottery, ceramics, majolica, mosaics, and wrought iron. Stasov, defender of the Wanderers and realistic art, worriedly wrote to a friend about Diaghilev’s feverish activity, “that shameless and brazen piglet is trying to get all kinds of merchants, traders, industrialists and so on to subscribe to his publication.”^{138}

Stasov, who called Diaghilev a “decadent cheerleader” in print and Mir iskusstva “the courtyard of the lepers” (an image borrowed from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris) had ample reason for sounding the alarm. Even though eventually the young modernists’ magazine did not become a catalogue and handbook for the rapidly developing Russian arts industry, and the number of its subscribers never exceeded one thousand, the influence of Mir iskusstva—both the magazine and the artistic circle it represented and later the whole movement that took its name—had a revolutionary effect on all spheres of Russian cultural life, including the applied arts.

Just as in the early 1860s young artists in Petersburg had passed around every issue of the radical journal Sovremennik with the latest article by the nihilistic guru Chernyshevsky, now they heatedly debated the innovative ideas of Mir iskusstva. Passions boiled. The penny press slung mud at Diaghilev, Benois, and company, and just as had happened with the Wanderers, rich buyers attracted by the scandal came to the studios of the Mir iskusstva artists: stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers, and big bureaucrats who wanted to be au courant and fashionable.

On the pages of his magazine, Benois tirelessly touted promising new names and exciting artistic and cultural concepts. He propagandized the artists of Art Nouveau like Beardsley, the Viennese secessionists, and later the French postimpressionists. Benois called on Russian art to free itself from the conventions of genre, from the slavish dependence on literature displayed by the Wanderers, and also from the shallow salon academism that was still influential both in Russia and the West. But he didn’t proclaim the concept of art for art’s sake, either. According to Benois, a broader concept of art that included music and theater should develop. This Western idea, assimilated through the writings of Wagner and Nietzsche, was taken to heart by the Petersburg modernists and was destined to play an enormous role in their future undertakings.

Benois considered the renaissance of the cult of Petersburg one of his most important goals. He always stressed that he was by no means a Russian nationalist (“I never did mature enough to become a real patriot”), but he never missed an opportunity to declare his love for Petersburg. He said he lived with the imperative “Petersburg über Alles.”

In Benois’s inner world the St. Petersburg of the past was always present, the city of Peter the Great and the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, a city of architectural beauty and stirring military parades, colorful carnivals, and folk festivities, but also the city of solitary dreamy walks in the Summer Garden and assignations by the Winter Canal. That is why, the artist had insisted, “I had had a presentiment since childhood of the music of Queen of Spades with its miraculous ‘calling forth of spirits,’ and when it did appear I accepted it as something long awaited.”^{139} Passed through the prism of Tchaikovsky’s music and magical anew, Petersburg’s image and destiny became paramount for Benois, Diaghilev, and their friends at Mir iskusstva. With a burst of proselytizing energy typical of this group, the members of Mir iskusstva tried to win over the Russian artistic, intellectual, and financial elite in their quest for the “rebirth” of Petersburg. The start of this cleverly conceived and effectively executed campaign can be considered the appearance in the pages of Mir iskusstva in 1902 of Benois’s impassioned article “Picturesque Petersburg,” profusely illustrated by beautiful photographs and drawings.

The article was a groundbreaking event in the transformation of the mythos of Petersburg in the twentieth century. As if issuing a manifesto Benois proclaimed, “I don’t think there is a city in the whole world which enjoys less sympathy than Petersburg. What names hasn’t it been called: ‘rotten swamp,’ ‘ridiculous fancy,’ ‘impersonal,’ ‘bureaucratic department,’ ‘regimental office.’ I could never agree with all that.”^{140}

Benois complained bitterly, “the opinion that Petersburg is ugly is so firmly fixed in our society that none of the artists of the last fifty years turned to the city for inspiration, disdaining this ‘unpicturesque,’ ‘stiff,’ and ‘cold’, place…. None of the major poets of the second half of the nineteenth century defended Petersburg.”^{141}

Aspiring to change all that, the immensely erudite Benois wrote a series of elegantly argued articles defending the city, which symbolized for him all that was great, truly spiritual, and promising in Russian culture. In some (“The Architecture of Petersburg,” “The Beauty of Petersburg”) he enthusiastically drew the readers’ attention to the grandeur, balance, and beauty of the capital’s neoclassical buildings. Asserting that “we broke the records in European architecture” in the first third of the nineteenth century, Benois maintained that there wasn’t a building in Western architecture of that period that could rival the Admiralty, for instance, and that next to the monumental Triumphal Gate erected in Petersburg in 1838 to commemorate the victories in the Russo-Turkish War that ended a decade earlier, Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate looked like a pathetic toy. In other articles (“The Agony of Petersburg” and “Vandals”) Benois protested the uninformed renovations of many unique buildings of old Petersburg and called urgently for “a renaissance of an artistic attitude toward neglected Petersburg.”

As usual, Benois’s writings were supported by indefatigable Diaghilev’s energetic actions. Through Diaghilev’s efforts, art shows were mounted one after another, all cleverly propagandizing the old Petersburg. In 1903, for the two hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding, the capital’s residents beheld an important collection of lithographs of Petersburg, artfully exhibited. As one enchanted viewer recalled, “one could see how much of Petersburg’s street life still remained from the old days.”^{142}

In the following years the number of exhibits emphasizing the beauty of the city and its art increased steadily. Many books about Petersburg appeared, and magazines also were devoted to it, such as Artistic Treasures of Russia and Olden Years. Contemporary architects started imitating Petersburg’s neoclassical models, because the bureaucrats, bankers, and factory owners began commissioning houses in the only recently despised classical style. “The interest in art of that period is becoming widespread,” a historian noted with genuine surprise. “Everyone is studying, collecting, drawing, and praising it.”^{143}

The resourceful artists of Mir iskusstva were of course leading the way. Their paintings, watercolors, drawings, engravings, once again revealing the unparalleled charm and poetry of old Petersburg, became quite popular with the public. An even more important step was taken when Benois created a series of marvelous watercolors depicting Petersburg of the eighteenth century: The Summer Gardens under Peter the Great; The Empress Elizabeth Deigns to Stroll Through the Streets of Petersburg; The Fontanka under Catherine II; The Changing of the Guard in Front of the Winter Palace under Paul I. These watercolors had been commissioned by the publishing house that belonged to the Society of Saint Eugenia, a Petersburg charity that supported retired nurses. The publishing house printed thousands of postcards of the highest quality. The ones with views of old Petersburg by Benois and his Mir iskusstva colleagues became best-sellers and could be seen in every “proper” Petersburg home. At the same time, these popular postcards brought the message of Mir iskusstva to a mass audience.

Carefully reconstructing historic events, costumes, and scenes, Benois’s watercolors do not pretend to be authentic. They illustrate his articles about Petersburg, not the city’s actual history. The artist is always present in them: attentive, loving, with a barely noticeable irony. The composition of Benois’s works is usually rather theatrical; the color stresses the paper’s texture. This is stylization quite typical of early modern European art.

Almost all of his friends recall Benois as a charming person. And of course, they were all enthralled by his enormous erudition and his genius for cultural propaganda. The role of that stooped, bald, and black-bearded man with the attentive brown eyes behind pincenez in the renaissance of Russian artistic taste and the flowering of modern Russian theater and ballet cannot be overestimated. Not many contemporaries considered Benois a truly great artist, and he wasn’t one. But even the most demanding Russian connoisseurs used words like “great,” “astonishing,” and “epochal” when describing two series of Benois’s works—his illustrations for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and The Queen of Spades. (There’s obviously no escape from Pushkin and his visionary works in dealing with the fate of St. Petersburg.)

Mir iskusstva resurrected the art of the book in Russia. The pioneer here, as in much else, was Benois. He persistently propounded the idea of the book as an artistic concept. Everything in a book, Benois would explain again and again—the paper, typeface, illustrations, design elements, and, of course, jacket—had to be integrated. For Petersburg at the turn of the century this was a revolutionary idea. But it quickly gained acceptance, since the tastes of customers were becoming markedly more sophisticated.

That lofty artistic ideas almost instantly penetrated the mass market was—for Russia, at least—astonishing. The energy of Benois and his friends seemed boundless, as they found time for everything and got involved everywhere, trying to push Petersburg’s cultural life to new limits. And they succeeded. Petersburg’s book design and manufacture, like many other crafts that drew the attention of the Mir iskusstva activists—posters, interior design, porcelain, even toys—underwent a true renaissance, thanks to their pioneering efforts.

Benois’s thirty-three drawings for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman appeared in the first issue of Mir iskusstva for 1904 and immediately caused a sensation. The magazine, alas, ceased publication in the same year, the victim of incompatible ideas. Between the mystic, decadent Merezhkovsky and the much more sober and practical Benois and Diaghilev, a schism developed over the literary, “philosophical” bent represented by Merezhkovsky’s camp and the artists’ desire to be free of unwelcome literary intrusions.

It is telling that many contemporary Russian artists considered the publication of Benois’s illustrations of Pushkin—despite the fact that the impetus for them came from a literary work—to be the most significant artistic event in the five years of the magazine’s existence. On the other hand, Benois’s drawings delighted writers as well, especially those of modernist leanings. One of the major poets of that era, the symbolist Valery Bryusov, proclaimed, “At last we have drawings worthy of a great poet. In them the old Petersburg is alive as it is alive in the poem.”^{144}

Everyone was astounded by Benois’s magical ability to recreate the charms of the imperial capital—in the naive words of another poet, “as if the artist had just been there, in the streets of Petersburg of centuries past, and is now telling us what he had seen.”^{145} But, of course, the series of drawings was not a guidebook to old Petersburg. It was also not really illustrative of Pushkin’s work. The best drawings, especially those depicting the statue come to life and pursuing its victim down the empty streets of the city at night, are truly dramatic; as one of the first reviewers noted, “It is profound, it is sometimes as horrible as a dream, with all the naïveté and simplicity of a dream.”^{146} Benois did not attempt to comment in his illustrations on Pushkin’s grand musings on the fate of Russia, its mysterious capital, and its suffering subjects.

Rather, Pushkin and his Bronze Horseman strike the ideal keynote, as always, for testing the new sounds of the song about Petersburg. The music of that song in the Benois interpretation and that of his friends had little in common with the original Bronze Horseman. That is precisely why Benois did not get into the questions that worried Pushkin and his commentators so much, that is, who was right, who was guilty, and was the tragedy of the Horseman’s poor Yevgeny accidental or preordained. Benois’s desire was to elicit pity and love for Petersburg, not for Yevgeny. The literary tradition of the “little man” was of no use for this purpose.

As we know, Pushkin was not quite sure about Petersburg’s role in Russia’s destiny. For Gogol and Dostoyevsky, the verdict in the “Petersburg case” was clear: “Guilty!” The force that initially moved Benois to try to overthrow this unjust verdict was Tchaikovsky’s music. Alas, the members of Mir iskusstva could not find another ally in contemporary Russian culture. The disciples of the Imperial Academy of Arts continued dutifully to glorify the capital, but for them it was a matter of sheer routine, not conviction. The Wanderers, taking literature’s lead, attacked Petersburg ferociously out of ideological and social hatred. The aesthetics of the city were pushed to the background and became completely irrelevant.

By forging an alliance with music unique in Russian culture, Mir iskusstva achieved the impossible—it turned the tide. Its members led the counterattack on a wide front, in all areas of culture. Russian culture, and in particular art, almost suffocating from the weight of strident ideology, started to reclaim its own language once again. At the same time the perception of aesthetic grandeur and the deep emotional and psychological significance of Petersburg was gradually resurrected. The mythos of the capital gained new luster, and once again one could faintly hear the clanging of hoofs under The Bronze Horseman.

The members of the Benois circle were called “retrospective dreamers.” They looked into the future, but their hearts, as befitted real romantics, belonged to the past. And as for all romantics, music was their guiding light. In Benois’s travels to the era of imperial Petersburg his constant companion became Tchaikovsky.

A great deal united the two men, who never met. Tchaikovsky and Benois both idealized the role of superman (or, rather, the super-person) in history, particularly in Russian history. For them Petersburg was not simply an incomparably beautiful city but a magical place inhabited by “living shadows”: Peter the Great, the amazing Russian empresses (and for Benois, there was also mad Paul I, whose image so intrigued him). Thus the imperial longings of both Tchaikovsky and Benois had an aesthetic and personal character. They personalized their monarchist feelings, so that, for example, Alexander III, who patronized Tchaikovsky and maintained a kindly relationship with the Benois family, embodied the Russian monarchy for both of them. Imperial Petersburg of the present and the past blurred into one for composer and artist.

So both Tchaikovsky’s and Benois’s extraordinary interest in ballet comes as no surprise—after all, it was the most imperial of all the arts. Nicholas I, who perceived a resemblance between the order and symmetry of ballet exercises with that of the military parades he so loved, particularly enjoyed ballet. And we find echoes of the cult of parades and military music in both Tchaikovsky and Benois. Tchaikovsky and Benois were also intrigued by ballet’s obsession with dolls and the dancers’ doll-like aspect, the automatic and predictable movements. This was a frequent theme in E. T. A. Hoffmann, beloved by both. One of Tchaikovsky’s most whimsical creations, the Nutcracker ballet, plays with a favorite Hoffmannesque idea of the fine line between human and doll, between a seemingly free individual and a windup mechanism. The idea of an animated doll both attracted and repelled Tchaikovsky. It was, of course, a purely balletic image that was realized brilliantly once again in a joint production of Benois and Stravinsky, the ballet Petrouchka.

The enchantment with ballet took on special significance in Petersburg. Besides the longing for a synthesis of the arts found in both Tchaikovsky and Benois, there was also the foreboding of an avalanche of anarchy and a subconscious wish to escape the coming destructive forces. Before Tchaikovsky’s very eyes, nihilism ceased being merely a philosophy, and the composer learned along with other residents of the capital what Petersburg political terror could be. Later, Benois was fated to be present when, under the Communist regime, that terror changed from an individual to a mass basis. Ballet dolls—they were the final refuge, a haven in a windswept sea.

Tchaikovsky was the first genius of Russian culture to express the horror of coming destruction for Petersburg and the disappearance of its festive, romantic universe. Tchaikovsky exhibited immeasurably more creative power than Benois or any other member of Mir iskusstva could ever aspire to do. Still, Tchaikovsky was heard but not understood. The decoding and popularization of Tchaikovsky’s prophetic vision was realized by Benois, who made up in energy and verve what he lacked in creative powers. Thus, on the threshold of the twentieth century the mythos of Petersburg was driven, contrary to Russian tradition, not by literature but by art.

When the capital of the empire seemed unshakable, while its very existence was perceived as a threat to the unfettered spirit, the mythos of Petersburg—in its literature-dominated, revolutionary interpretation—predicted the fall of the city. But as soon as the signs started to appear—however vague and inexplicable—of coming winds and ruinous floods, the more aesthetically and emotionally sensitive of the artistic circles sharply decreased their maledictions.

The image of the city, cleared of its nihilistic ideological associations, started to change noticeably. From sinister it was gradually transformed to benign, from dour to luminous. The artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a member of Mir iskusstva and a friend of Benois, felt in those days that he was rediscovering Petersburg as a city “with languorous and bitter poetry.” For aesthetes, Petersburg at the start of the century was once again becoming a temple. They cherished “the sensation of mystery.”^{147} They imagined it was the mystery of the past; actually, it was the future that was mysterious and unpredictable.

The Petersburg mythos of the early twentieth century was about to enter a completely different, terrible era. On the way the capital, its image, and its mythos had to endure unprecedented catastrophes. Petersburg’s fate would change radically and with it, or rather, despite it, the symbolism of Petersburg would change, too, as would its place in the context of Russian and world culture and history.

Subsequently a number of great writers, poets, composers, artists, and choreographers would participate in the creation of a startlingly new concept of Petersburg. They would do so while surviving the destruction of many of the old city’s material and spiritual values, the disappearance of its name, as well as the death of multitudes of its inhabitants.

This poem by Anna Akhmatova, which she liked the most of her early poetry, was prophetic, as was so much of her writing. When it first appeared in 1915, no one fully guessed to what degree all of Petersburg’s “wealth” would soon become “former.”