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.38 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.
