Natasha's Dance полностью

f z. Vladimir Shervud: Russian Museum, Red Square, Moscow (the Kremlin to the left). Early 1900s

fancy yellow brickwork and ornate folk designs. Moscow entered the twentieth century with its skyline in the form of the seventeenth.

Musorgsky fell in love with Moscow's 'Russianness'. He had spent nearly all his life in Petersburg. But as an artist he was drawn to the 'realm of fairy tales' which he discovered in the ancient capital. 'You

know', he wrote to Balakirev on his first trip to Moscow in 1859, 'I had been a cosmopolitan, but now there's been a sort of rebirth; everything Russian has become close to me and I would be offended if Russia were treated crudely, without ceremony; it's as if at the present time I've really begun to love her."³³ As a mentor to the young composer, Balakirev was not pleased. For all his pioneering of the nationalist school, Balakirev was a Westernist and a thumping patriot of Petersburg who looked down on Moscow as parochial and archaic; he called it 'Jericho'.⁶⁴ Musorgsky's love affair with Moscow, then, seemed almost a desertion from the Balakirev school. It was certainly a sign of the young artist finding his own style and theme. He began to spend his summers on the fabulous estate of the Shilovskys at Glebovo, near Moscow, renewing contact with his own gentry background in that area.* He made new friends in circles outside music where he found a stimulus to his own art: the poet Kutuzov (a descendant of the famous general), the sculptor Antokolsky, the painter Repin, as well as Gartman, who were all receptive to his unschooled style of music, and more tolerant of his alcoholic ways, than the rather staid composers of St Petersburg. Breaking free from the domination of the Balakirev school (which took Liszt and Schumann as the starting point for the development of a Russian style), Musorgsky began to explore a more native musical idiom in his 'village scene' for voice and piano, Savishna (1867), in Boris Godunov (1868-74) and then in his Pictures, which, like Gartman's drawings, reworked Russian folklore in imaginative ways. Moscow thus delivered him from the 'German' orthodoxy of the Balakirev school. It allowed Musorgsky, who had always been perceived as something of an outcast in St Petersburg, to experiment with music from the Russian soil. Gartman's fantastic folk forms were the equivalent of Musorgsky's explorations in music: both were attempts to break free from the formal conventions of European art. Among the pictures at the exhibition there was a design for a clock in the form of Baba Yaga's hut on chicken's legs.+ Images like this demanded a new mode of

* The Musorgsky family owned 110,000 hectares - eighteen villages - with a total population of 400 serfs prior to the emancipation of 1861 (C. Emerson, The Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge, 1999), p. 37).

+ In Russian fairy rales the witch Baba Yagfl lives deep in the woods in a hut whose legs allow it to rotate to face each unfortunate new visitor.

musical expression, one entirely free from the sonata form of European music, if they were to be redrawn in sound; and this is what Musorg-sky's Pictures did. They created a new Russian language in music.

'To you, Generalissimo, sponsor of the Gartman Exhibition, in remembrance of our dear Viktor, 27 June, '74.' Thus Musorgsky dedicated Pictures to Vladimir Stasov, the critic, scholar and self-appointed champion of the national school in all the Russian arts. Stasov was a huge figure, one might say a tyrant, in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian cultural milieu. He discovered a large number of its greatest talents (Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Repin, Kramskoi, Vasnetsov and Antokolsky); he inspired many of their works (Borodin's Prince Igor, Musorgsky's Khovansh-cbina, Balakirev's King Lear and Rimsky's Sadko and Scheherazade); and he fought their battles in countless thunderous articles and letters to the press. Stasov had a reputation as a brilliant dogmatist. Turgenev carried on a lifelong argument with 'our great all-Russian critic', whom he caricatured in the figure Skoropikhin in his 1877 novel Virgin Soil ('He is always foaming and frothing over like a bottle of sour kvas'). He also wrote a famous ditty about him:

Argue with someone more intelligent than you:

He will defeat you.

But from your defeat you will learn something useful.

Argue with someone of equal intelligence:

Neither will be victorious.

And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.

Argue with someone less intelligent:

Not from a desire for victory

But because you may be of use to him.

Argue even with a fool: You will not gain glory But sometimes it is fun.

Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.6⁵