Natasha's Dance полностью

* It is telling, in this context, that the word he used for 'people' was 'liudi' - a word which has the meaning of individuals - although it has usually been translated to mean a collective mass (the sense of the other word for people - the 'narod'). J. Leyda and S. Bertensson (eds.), The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947), pp. 84-5.

assailed on every side by the loud hand-clapping of traders all over the market-place. A cart collapses, the clang of metal rings in the air, wooden planks come crashing to the ground and the observer grows dizzy, as he turns his head this way and that.³⁸

In Musorgsky's final years tensions with his mentor became more acute. He withdrew from Stasov's circle, pouring scorn on civic artists such as Nekrasov, and spending all his time in the alcoholic company of fellow aristocrats such as the salon poet Count Golenishchev-Kutuzov and the arch-reactionary T. I. Filipov. It was not that he became politically right-wing - now, as before, Musorgsky paid little attention to politics. Rather, he saw in their 'art for art's sake' views a creative liberation from Stasov's rigid dogma of politically engaged and idea-driven art. There was something in Musorgsky - his lack of formal schooling or his wayward, almost childlike character - that made him both depend on yet strive to break away from mentors like Stasov. We can feel this tension in the letter to Repin:

So, that's it, glorious lead horse! The troika, if in disarray, bears what it has to bear. It doesn't stop pulling… What a picture of the Master [Stasov] you have made! He seems to crawl out of the canvas and into the room. What will happen when it has been varnished? Life, power - pull, lead horse! Don't get tired! I am just the side horse and I pull only now and then to escape disgrace. I am afraid of the whip!³⁹

Antokolsky felt the same artistic impulse pulling him away from Stasov's direction. He gave up working on the Inquisition, saying he was tired of civic art, and travelled throughout Europe in the 1870s, when he turned increasingly to pure artistic themes in sculptures like The Death of Socrates (1875-7) and Jesus Christ (1878). Stasov was irate. 'You have ceased to be an artist of the dark masses, the unknown figure in the crowd', he wrote to Antokolsky in 1883. 'Your subjects have become the "aristocracy of man" - Moses, Christ, Spinoza, Socrates.'⁴⁰

Even Repin, the 'lead horse', began to pull away from Stasov's harnesses: he would no longer haul his Volga barge. He travelled to the West, fell in love with the Impressionists, and turned out French-styled

portraits and pretty cafe scenes which could not have been farther from the Russian national school of utilitarian and thought-provoking art. 'I have forgotten how to reflect and pass judgement on a work of art', Repin wrote to Kramskoi from Paris, 'and I don't regret the loss of this faculty which used to eat me up; on the contrary, I would rather it never return, though I feel that back in my native land it will reclaim its right over me - that is the way things are there.'⁴¹ Stasov condemned Repin for his defection, charging him with the neglect of his artistic duty to the Russian people and his native land. Relations became strained to breaking point in the early 1890s, when Repin rejoined the Academy and reassessed his views of the classical tradition - effectively denying the whole national school. 'Stasov loved his barbarian art, his small, fat, ugly, half-baked artists who screamed their profound human truths', Repin wrote in 1892…⁴² For a while the artist even flirted with the World of Art - Benois and Diaghilev, or the 'decadents' as Stasov liked to call them - and their ideal of pure art. But the pull of 'Russia' was too strong - and in the end he patched up his relations with Stasov. However much he loved the light of France, Repin knew that he could not be an artist who was disengaged from the old accursed questions of his native land.