St Petersburg полностью

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.