But there are even more typically Petersburgian features in Tchaikovsky’s work. Music lovers look primarily for emotional agitation in it, enjoying what Laroche, who understood the composer as no one else did, called its “refined torment.” But that leaves out the important part of Tchaikovsky’s work so popular with the masses, which could be called “imperial,” that is, the glorification of the Russian empire and the victories of Russian arms.
The imperial theme is traditional in Russian culture. The first proud note of it was sounded in Petersburg by none other than Pushkin (if we discount the rather formulaic exercises of his ode-writing predecessors).
In Pushkin’s era Petersburg was already the capital of an empire that had defeated the military might of Poland and Sweden, had annexed Finland and the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—in the West and the Tatar lands in the south, and had embarked on the conquest of Transcaucasia. All this—including the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the vast Siberian expanses, sparsely settled by pagan tribes—constituted an enormous territory, swiftly approaching in size one-sixth of the world’s land area. The victory over Napoleon and the conquering march of Russian troops across Europe into Paris increased the imperial ambitions of the Petersburg elite.
The cult of the Russian soldier and his bayonet flourished. When the Poles rebelled against their Russian conquerors in 1830 and Nicholas I replied with cannons, calls for aid to the rebels resounded in France. In that moment Pushkin responded with a scintillating poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia,” a blistering manifesto of imperial pride and Petersburg’s ambitions, formulated as a series of poetic rhetorical questions:
Or is the Russian tsar’s word now powerless?
Or is it new to us to argue with Europe?
Or has the Russian grown unaccustomed to victories?
Or are there not enough of us? or from Perm to Tauris,
From the cold rocks of Finland to the flaming Colchis,
From the stunned Kremlin
To the walls of stagnant China,
Flashing its steel bristles,
Will not the Russian land rise?
These proud, iron-hard lines were very effectively used by Soviet propaganda during the war with Nazi Germany—naturally, omitting mention of the tsar.
With the new lands, newly conquered peoples entered the Russian Empire. Some did this without particular resistance; others, for instance, the Muslim nationalities of the Caucasus, fought ferociously for many decades for their independence. The attitude of the Russian cultural elite to these new imperial subjects was ambivalent.
That ambivalence was already apparent in Pushkin’s narrative poem
As was the case with most of the continuing themes of Russian culture, it was also Pushkin who set the tone in this instance. Attracted by the exotic mores of the multinational subjects of the Russian Empire, Petersburg writers, artists, and composers still treated those peoples with suspicion and sometimes even outright hostility. The Tatar and Muslim tribes of the Caucasus were depicted as barbarians to whom the Russian sword brought civilization and the true religion, Russian Orthodoxy. The Swedes and Germans were often described as primitive, simpleminded, and cruel; the Poles as conceited braggarts; the Jews as dirty and greedy ignoramuses.
The rapid expansion of the empire, the ethnic variety of its peoples, and Petersburg’s growing appetite for conquests found particular reflection in Russian music. The list of works related to the imperial theme in one way or another is enormous. In music the Pushkin role of founder of new paths was played, of course, by Glinka with his opera
