St Petersburg полностью

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.”39 Stasov readily agreed: “I think he is a total idiot.”40 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.”41

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.”42

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.”43

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.