The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  By the narrow standards of physiological realism painting was bound to be the most successful art medium, and the painters of the populist era felt generally less deeply perplexed than writers or composers. Yet the history of painting and, even more, of its impact during this period illustrates the same movement from realism to moral agony and madness that was characteristic of much populist art. The story is told succinctly in one of Garshin's short stories, "The Artists," in which an innocuous painter of idealized landscapes is contrasted with another artist, Riabinin, who seeks to render realistically the expressions of suffering on the face of workmen and finally abandons painting to become a village schoolmaster.2

  The real-life counterpart of Garshin's hero was the new school of painters known as the "wanderers" (peredvizhniki). They were a kind of artistic by-product of the iconoclastic revolution. Rebelling in 1862 at the proposed subject for the painting competition in the St. Petersburg academy,

  "The Entrance of Odin into Valhalla," they resolved to paint henceforth only live Russian subjects and to use a remorselessly realistic style. They accepted ostracism from the academies with populist eagerness and proved true "wanderers" in their search both for subject matter and places of exhibition.

  The leader of this new school of painting was Ilya Repin, whose famous canvas of 1870-3, "Haulers on the Volga," may be regarded as the icon of populism. It presented a realistic portrayal of popular suffering in such a way as to arouse in the sensitive viewer's mind the hint of a better alternative. For behind the dark and beaten-down figures of the haulers there looms the distant, brightly colored boat itself; and, in the middle of the picture, a good-looking young boy has lifted up his head and is staring off out of the picture. To the young students who saw this picture, its meaning was clear: the boy was raising his head up in a first, subconscious act of defiance and was looking inarticulately to them, the student generation of Russia, to come and lead the suffering people to deliverance.

  Recognizing the popularity of the new realistic style, the government enlisted the talents of one of Russia's best painters, Vasily Vereshchagin, to serve as official artistic chronicler of the Russo-Turkish War. But some of Vereshchagin's paintings were awesomely realistic in portraying the horrors of war and inspired emotions other than the intended one of patriotic exultation. His three-part study, "All Quiet on the Shipka," which showed a soldier gradually freezing to death, inspired Garshin to write a poem, "The Exhibition of Vereshchagin," contrasting the horror of the scene in the painting with the blase, well-dressed viewers walking past it.3

  Another creative genius of the populist era, Modest Musorgsky, also tried to describe people at an art exhibition with a total realism that described the viewers as well as the paintings in his "Pictures at an Exhibition." Like Garshin's poem, Musorgsky's tone poem was part of a strange artistic quest for both realism and redemption which led to brilliant and original results.

  Musorgsky was the most distinguished member of a group of musical iconoclasts known as the "mighty handful" (moguchaia kuchka), or "The Five," whose rebellion from established musical conventions almost exactly parallels that of the "wanderers" in art. This group sought to lead Russian music on a special path that would avoid sterile imitation of the West and also sought to "wander" in search of new forms of musical construction. The organizer of the group and founder of the Free Music School, which became the populist rival to the conservatory, was Mily Balakirev, a native of Nizhny Novgorod, who gathered about him a group of talented musicians influenced by the new materialism and realism of the sixties: a

  chemist, Borodin; a military engineer, Cui; a naval officer, Rimsky-Korsa-kov; and Musorgsky, a young military officer who had been devouring the works of Darwin and living in a typical student commune of the sixties. The mighty handful sought a new popular style of music; and Musorgsky went far toward creating one.

  Musorgsky was the consummate "man of the sixties" in his passion for realism and novelty, his rejection of sentimentality, melodrama, and classical art forms. He was convinced that "nothing that is natural can be either wrong or inartistic,"4 and that art must "plow up the black earth . . . the virgin soil . . . that no man has touched" rather than "reclaim tracts already fertilized"; it must "penetrate unexplored regions and conquer them … past all the shadows, to unknown shores . . ."5

  His means of plunging on into the deep were those of the populist age carried to new extremes. He sought to derive all his music from the hidden sounds and cadences of human speech. Beginning with the texts of Gogol, whom he felt to be the closest of all writers to Russian popular culture, he moved on to try to reproduce in music the themes and hypnotic repetitions of Russian oral folklore, the babble in the market place at Nizhny Novgorod, and the mysterious murmurs of nature itself. In a manner reminiscent of Ivanov's quest in painting, Musorgsky insisted that he sought "not beauty for its own sake, but truth wherever it be."6 But unlike Ivanov, Musorgsky was a true populist, priding himself on his lack of formal musical training and insisting that "art is a means of conversation with the people, and not a goal." He sought "not merely to get to know the people but to be admitted to their brotherhood," and stated his populist credo in a letter to Repin, whose "Haulers on the Volga" had been a major source of inspiration for his music:

  It is the people I want to depict; sleeping or waking, eating or drinking, I have them constantly in my mind's eye-again and again they rise before me, in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, with no tinsel trappings! How rich a treasure awaits the composer in the speech of the people-so long that is, as any corner of the land remains to which the railway has not penetrated. . . .7

  In his effort to reproduce and bring forth the true national music that he felt lay within the Russian people, he moved slowly toward the musical stage. Since Gogol ceased writing for the theater there had been little of true value written for the stage, which was dominated in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by Ostrovsky's colorful but ideologically insipid theatre de moeurs* On the musical stage, however, there had been a steady development since Glinka of a body of native Russian operas rich in choral

  music and based on thematic material from Russian history and folklore. More impressive than any plays produced before Chekhov's great successes in the 1890's was the rich body of operatic literature that appeared during that period and included not only comfortably lyrical works, such as Sadko and Eugene Onegin, but certain important, idiosyncratic operas that are less familiar outside, such as Rubinstein's Demon, Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Maid oj Pskov.

  Music, the universal language, was a means of communicating with the new, more polyglot audiences of the late imperial period; and the serious musical drama was a way of effectively conducting that "conversation with the people" which was Musorgsky's conception of art. The subjects which he chose to talk about with his audience in his later years were drawn entirely from Russian history. The various scenes of his operas were viewed not as constituent parts.of a drama so much as "illustrations to a chronicle," which dealt with the destiny of the Russian people. A simultaneous drift toward historical subject matter was also noticeable in the paintings of the "wanderers."

  One of the peculiar traits of Russian realism was that the boldest and most resolute followers of an art based on the study of the surrounding world very willingly abandoned this reality and turned to history, that is, to a domain where the immediate connection with actuality is, naturally, lost.9

  The domain of history held out the promise of prophetic insight. Moscow, the great repository of Russian tradition, was specially revered by Musorgsky's circle, who gave it the name of Jericho, the city which had brought the Jews into the promised land of Canaan. The heartland of Russia was the new Canaan for the restless artists of the populist age. They wandered through it like holy fools of old, and turned to the ever-expanding volume of writing about its history rather in the way monastic artists had previously studied sacred chronicles in search both of worthy subject
matter and of personal reassurance and inspiration. Their attention gravitated toward the late Muscovite period: a time similar to their own in spiritual crisis and social upheaval. The same fascination that produced Repin's image of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son and Surikov's picture of Morozova dragged into exile (as well as some of the most popular plays of Ostrovsky and A. K. Tolstoy) also led Musorgsky to devote most of his last thirteen years to two great historical operas dealing with the late Muscovite period. The first of these operas, Boris Godunov, deals with the beginnings of the century of schism; the second, Khovanshchina, with the end. Taken together, they begin on the eve of the Time of Troubles and end with the

  self-immolation of the Old Believers and the coming of Peter the Great. They are permeated with the desire for artistic fidelity to the musical laws of speech and emotion; historical fidelity to the known desires and habits of the leading characters; and theatrical fidelity to such traditions as there were in Russian opera since Glinka. But the real triumph of these operas-that which gives them a unique place even in this century of rich operatic accomplishment-is that they tell with artistic integrity much about the aspirations of the populist age itself. A key to understanding his music-and perhaps the populist movement itself-lies in the confession that he made to Bala-kirev just a year after resigning his army commission:

  I was oppressed by a terrible disease which came on very badly while I was in the country. It was mysticism, mixed up with cynical thoughts about God. It developed terribly when I returned to Petersburg. I succeeded in concealing it from you, but you must have noticed traces of it in my music. . . .10

  This is as close as we are ever brought to the origins of the strange nervous disorder which framed his career and led him to drink himself into derangement and death. It is probably not accidental that he was occupied at the beginning of his career with translating Lavater, the spiritualist and physiognomist who had fascinated Russian mystics of the aristocratic century with his claim to be able to read the nature of men from the shape and expression of their faces; or that the greatest aria in Khovanshchina should be Marfa's strange aria of prophecy and divination. Musorgsky himself was endowed with a strange genius for penetrating through the outer veil of speech and action to the inner desires of his fellow men. There are traces of prophecy in Boris, though they are often concealed from view by the distracting addition of the Polish scene (demanded by Musorgsky's original theatrical producers); by the melodic and melodramatic additions of the Rimsky-Korsakov and other revisions used in present-day productions; and above all by the dramatic and critical overemphasis on the role of Boris, which has become conventional since Chaliapin.

  If Boris is the sole-or even the main-focus of interest, the opera becomes little more than another of the many historical melodramas on themes that were characteristic of national theaters in the late nineteenth century. It is, indeed, rather lacking in subtlety and moral sensitivity when compared with the accounts of Karamzin and Pushkin, from which Musorgsky derived his story. Only when the opera is placed in the context of populism does the uniqueness and power of Musorgsky's version become fully apparent. For, just as his friend the populist historian Kostomarov insisted that the simple people rather than tsars were the proper subject of

  the true historian, so does Musorgsky make the Russian people rather than the figure of Boris the hero of his opera.

  The Russian people frame the entire drama. It begins and ends with them. Boris is guilty before them from his first words, "My soul is heavy," to his last cry, "Forgive"; and the only alibi he ever offers comes at the height of his maddened clock monologue, when he claims that it was not he who killed the infant Dmitry but "the will of the people." It is the people's plight that is the focus of Musorgsky's attention; the climax of the opera comes in the last scene, which shows the people in the Kromy Forest after Boris is dead. This is a pure addition to the Pushkin version and to Musorgsky's own first version. But unlike the addition of the Polish scene, the forest scene was Musorgsky's own idea-one that drew from a variety of impressions he had gathered throughout the 1868-72 period. He discussed its contents with numerous historians and critics and wrote it in a state of enthusiasm at his "novelty and novelty-novelty out of novelty!"11

  The "revolutionary scene," as Stasov called it, reflects with astonishing insight the revolutionary longings of the age in which Musorgsky lived, whatever it may or may not tell us about the original Time of Troubles. The scene was banned from public performances during the Revolution of 1905. The activities of the mob in the forest reflect in microcosm the search for a new basis for authority in late Imperial Russia. The people in the forest- like the populists who were headed there-have lost confidence in the Tsar and have a new and heady belief in the elemental strength and wisdom of the people. As the curtain opens, they are rejecting and deriding the first of five figures that come before the people as a possible alternative to the authority of the dead Tsar. They are mocking and torturing the boyars, the hereditary aristocracy that has gained its authority through an unholy alliance with the Tsar: "Boris stole a throne and he stole from Boris," they chant as they give the Boyar Khrushchev (sic) a whip for a scepter and a 100-year-old peasant woman for a "queen." The scene of mockery swells to a crescendo, with the magnificent chorus based on an old popular rhythm: "Slava boyarinu, Slava Borisovu," which becomes a kind of leitmotiv for the entire scene. Enthusiastic students left the theater singing this anarchistic chorus through the streets of St. Petersburg as Boris made its spectacular entry into the repertoire early in 1874 on the eve of the mad summer that took them off into Kromy forests of their own.

  The second alternative to appear before the mob is the prophetic holy fool, or yurodivy, who had told Boris in a preceding confrontation before St. Basil's Cathedral that the "Tsar-Herod" had lost the right to pray for intercession from the Mother of God. He represented the quixotic longing to follow Christ, the half-heretical voice of Christian prophecy which was

  so deeply enmeshed in the populist mystique. But his fate in Kromy Forest, like that of the fools who "went to the people," is to be robbed and humiliated by an ungrateful mob. His last coin is taken from him; and he retreats to the back of the stage to make room for the next suitors for the affections of the uprooted masses.

  They are the vagabond, pseudo-holy men, Varlaam and Missail, who come out of the depths with bass voices and baser motives to fan the flame of revolution. It is these forest monsters who advise the mob that the Tsar is "a monster eating human flesh"; and they trigger a swelling chorus singing the praises of "power, beautiful power," "terrible and capricious power." The orgiastic climax comes with the women's cry of smert'l ("death"), and then the music swirls and degenerates into a kind of chaotic anticlimax. It is all a kind of uncanny picture of the populist revolutionary movement that was to come: inspired by vagabond conspirators from outside, finding climactic release only in a tsaricide in which women played a prominent part, and dissolving shortly thereafter.

  Just at this moment of revolutionary excitement a fourth alternative leadership for the mob is heard offstage: the sound of two Polish Jesuits from the entourage of the False Dmitry chanting a Latin prayer in measured tenor notes. Varlaam and Missail's booming bass voices incite the mob to haul off these "ravens and vampires," even though they themselves are committed to the support of Dmitry. The Jesuits are hauled off to be lynched. They represent Latinstvo, the oldest and most enduring symbol of Western ideology, which is rejected with particular violence by proponents of a special path for the Russian people, whether presented in an old Catholic or in a new liberal form. It was the unfortunate fate of the two Jesuits to arrive on the scene-like the constitutional proposals of Alexander H's last years-at the precise moment when revolutionary passions were aroused and their fate foredoomed. These two Jesuits are disciples of the sinister and diabolic Rangoni, who is not present in Pushkin's play but dominates the Polish act in Musorgsky's final version of the opera: a kind of reminder that Musorgs
ky's age was more profoundly anti-Western than Pushkin's. Finally, the fifth and last external force to come before "the people" appears: the False Dmitry himself, who is hailed as the new Tsar by the gullible mob. The masses in Kromy Forest, like those of Alexander's time, thus end up no better off than they were to begin with. They have a new tsar, who-we have been repeatedly led to believe-will probably be worse than the one he replaced, which was indeed the case with Alexander III. This is the final message that comes at the end as the mob leaves the stage, trailing blindly behind the False Dmitry. Bells ring; a red glow from a distant fire lights the background; and the humiliated fool steps forth. He,

  like Boris before him, can no longer pray; and as the orchestra clears away the echoes of praise for God and Dmitry with a few lacerating chords of grief, the fool brings the opera to an end:

  bitter tears

  tears of blood

  weep, weep, Orthodox soul soon the enemy will come

  and the darkness fall

  the dark darkness

  impenetrable …

  weep, weep, Russian people,

  hungry people.12

  Musorgsky had plunged out into the deep but had not found "the other shore." The bark is lost at sea, a helpless prey for alien currents. We are left only with the cry of the man in the boat, in all its honest, agonizing simplicity.