St Petersburg полностью

Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky once met at a mutual friend’s house in the fall of 1864; neither left any reminiscences about the meeting. But we know that Tchaikovsky read Dostoyevsky eagerly all his life, sometimes taking delight, sometimes rejecting his writings. The Brothers Karamazov captivated the composer at first, but as he continued to read, he felt depressed. “This is becoming intolerable. Every single character is crazy.”73 Tchaikovsky’s final conclusion was, “Dostoyevsky is a genius, but an antipathetic writer.”74

Yet the congeniality of Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky, as we have seen, was acutely felt by the composer’s younger contemporaries. They equated Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, with psychological novels in the center of which—for the first time in Russian music—was an ambivalent, suffering personality. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, Tchaikovsky’s hero persisted in exploring the meaning of life while trapped in the fatal love-death-faith triangle in the best Dostoyevskian fashion.

Tchaikovsky conveyed in music this Dostoyevskian confusion about life’s mysteries and contradictions using techniques characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels, including the writer’s favorite piling up of events and emotions leading to a catastrophic, climactic explosion.

The frenzied longing for love, which saturates many pages of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, also fills Dostoyevsky’s novels, while the other pole of the same passion, typical of both, is the fascination with and fear of death, combined with the need to confront it.

Compare Tchaikovsky’s attitude toward death with Mussorgsky’s. Mussorgsky was close to Dostoyevsky in describing the tragedy of a lonely soul in the social desert of the city. But the theme of death as interpreted by Mussorgsky clearly belongs to another era. For all its expressiveness and drama, Mussorgsky’s vocal cycle Songs and Dances of Death is still a series of grand romantic pictures in music. Mussorgsky observes death from offstage, as if from the sidelines.

For Mussorgsky the most perplexing mystery is life, not death. For Tchaikovsky the opposite is true, and this brings him so much closer to Dostoyevsky. For Tchaikovsky as for Dostoyevsky, fate is synonymous with death. Tchaikovsky’s notes explaining the hidden “program” of the Fifth Symphony are very significant: “The fullest submission before fate, or, which is the same thing, before the inexplicable predestination of Providence.” Reading this, one can almost feel the pain that fatalism and pessimism bring down upon Tchaikovsky. And he instantly adds (this note relating to the second movement of the Fifth): “Should one throw oneself into the arms of faith???”75

But such a move, so profound and natural for Dostoyevsky, and so tempting for Tchaikovsky, did not become the lever of the composer’s late output. He never really threw himself into the arms of faith, and so the theme of St. Petersburg became a kind of creative anchor for the mature Tchaikovsky. Being one of the builders of the Petersburg mythos took on special significance for Tchaikovsky: in creating that mythos, he pushed aside the horrible images of triumphant death from his creative consciousness.

Depicting Petersburg and its themes in his symphonies, Tchaikovsky covered a path in a quarter of a century that took the rest of Russian culture one hundred and fifty years to traverse. In his first three symphonies the composer’s delight in the brilliant atmosphere of the imperial capital with its colorful parades and opulent balls is evident. This attitude is similar to that of the early bards of Petersburg. But even in those first three symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s pleasure is already complicated by the intrusion of new images. They are, first of all, genre pictures, scenes of festivities on the streets and squares of the city; these impressions are close in spirit to the young Gogol.

Tchaikovsky also introduces here a clearly melancholy note, which does not permit the listener to forget that the author lives in the second half of the nineteenth century. This melancholy is sharply on the rise in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, where the sentimental pity for a solitary soul, lost in the metropolis, makes us recall Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. In his late symphonies, Tchaikovsky noticeably universalizes this conflict between the individual and society. On the one hand, it seems to shoot upward, into the vistas of the universe, presenting the individual arguing with fate. On the other hand, the individual poses tragic questions to himself and himself alone, in the style of Dostoyevsky.