The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  He had written to Repin that "a true artist who should dig deep enough would have cause to dance for joy at the results";13 but fathoming the depths further led him only to "songs and dances of death," his most famous song cycle. The melancholia which overcame him-and which Repin has preserved in the haunting portrait of him painted two weeks before his death -is amplified in Khovanshchina, the chaotic and unfinished first part of a trilogy which occupied much of the last eight years of Musorgsky's life. The ostensible theme is the end of Old Russia in an orgy of wild excess, Khovanshchina, that ends in the self-immolation of the Old Believers in the last act; and the coming victory of "new" Russia that is foreshadowed by the offstage sounds of the coming Preobrazhensky regiment at the end. Yet there is no clear message; people no longer seem capable of affecting or even understanding what is going on. The mob at Kromy was at least able to look for answers and follow leaders, whereas the streltsy can only drink, dance, and give way to another mob which murders their leader, Khovansky. The arias of Boris involve a recognition of sin and a search for expiation; but those of Shaklovity, Marfa, and Dosifei are only lamentations and divinations, obscure in meaning and charged with foreboding. Gradually one senses that Russia is only superficially the subject of the opera, even though Musorgsky spent endless months studying Russian history before writing it. Russia is rather the background against which two deeper forces are contending for the destiny of men: the God-saturated world of nature and pride-saturated world of material force. Khovanshchina stands as a kind of mammoth naturalistic tone poem that begins at sunrise and ends in moonlight, that begins by the river in Moscow and ends with a fire in the forest.

  The Christian substratum of Boris Godunov (and of early populism?) has been eliminated. The two scenes devoted to the streltsy show them as-to cite the phrase of the scribe in the opera-"beasts in human shape." In the carousing scene, they become, in effect, a mob of dancing bears exiled from humanity in the manner of peasant folklore. They are reminiscent of an extreme and debauched revolutionary circle of Musorgsky's time which mystified the police by referring to itself as "the Bear Academy."14 Their leader, Ivan Khovansky, is a "white swan" who is first hailed and then mocked after his assassination with the hushed and beautiful line "Glory and honor to the white swan."

  If the defenders of Old Russia are corrupt, the advocates of innovation are also: the venal Prince Golitsyn and the self-satisfied Emma from the German suburb.

  Meanwhile, with increasing frequency, the dark figures of Old Believers move in and out, singing choruses and muttering semi-intelligible prayers. Hovering over all this strange, disconnected activity like a druid priest watching the senseless struggles of animals in the forest stands Dosifei, the leader of the Old Believers. At the end he beckons his followers to join him in mounting the great funeral pyre which will return them to the elements through fire. The contrast between the long and beautiful aria with which he bids farewell to earth and the shrill, banal chords used to announce the approach of Peter the Great's army suggests that the bleak world of the elements brings man closer to truth than the dazzling world of artificial invention.

  The real conflict in Khovanshchina is between these two primal forces: the real world of nature and the artificial world of human striving. Both old and new Russia have succumbed to the latter, Musorgsky seems to be saying through the figure of Marfa, the leader of the sisterhood of feminine Old Believers. Marfa seeks to expiate her sin of having loved Andrew Khovansky, the symbol of Old Russia, and is thus led to join Dosifei in the final scene of immolation. The venal Khovansky does not understand her and elopes with the German girl, Emma; and the streltsy are spared at the last minute. Thus physical life survives while spiritual life seeks release in death. Both Old and New Russia tried to kill Marfa: Golitsyn by drowning her, Khovansky by seducing her. But Marfa survives so that she may voluntarily free herself of the world and its chains; and music from the divination scene returns in reprise in a particularly beautiful fashion as Golitsyn sets off for exile.

  In the course of successive drafts of Khovanshchina, Marfa became the main character. She was, together with the great contralto Daria Leonova -for whom Musorgsky was a touring accompanist in his last years-the

  "missing madonna" of his lonely life, the "damp mother earth" of his naturalistic cosmology. He gave to Marfa-and to Leonova who sang the part-his most beautiful love music and his most haunting music of foreboding and prophecy. One evening shortly before he died-apparently from epileptic alcoholism-he was accompanying Leonova on the piano as she was singing selections from the still-incomplete Khovanshchina for a small group of friends. When she came to the line "Glory and honor to the white swan," Musorgsky suddenly stopped at the piano. A strange shudder ran through the whole group, and neither Leonova nor Musorgsky could go on. It was the moment of truth-or perhaps a decisive instant in his own final turn to insanity. A shudder was the last stage direction he had written in for the fool after his last lament in Boris Godunov, and now the full impact of the shudder had come back to him.

  Wagner alone in the nineteenth century had a conception as vast as that of Musorgsky. He too sought to transcend the conventions of the operatic stage with a new type of music drama to be constructed out of a new musical idiom and rediscovered pagan folklore. It was largely fear of succumbing to the influence of Wagner (who had come to St. Petersburg in 1862-3) that the "mighty handful" came together in the sixties. If Musorg-sky's rival musical culture was less successful in terms of formal perfection and subsequent influence than that of Wagner, the difference between their two independent and simultaneous careers tells us something about the inner aspirations of the Germanic and Slavic worlds respectively in an age of awakening nationaj self-consciousness. Unlike Wagner, for whom the Downfall of the Gods was seen as the prelude to a new heroic age, there is no hint of redemption as Musorgsky's Brunnehilde mounts her final funeral pyre. Whereas Wagner had sought to uncover the music of the future, Musorgsky had sought to recapture the music of the past-actually writing some of Khovanshchina in the hook note style of the Old Believers. There is no Siegfried in Musorgsky's "popular music drama"; no prize songs in his sunless song cycles; no tinsel of religion or nationalism. Instead, there is a kind of Eastern resignation of willful striving, a strange mixture of clairvoyant insight and realism with no way out.

  Similar to Musorgsky in many respects is the figure of Fedor Dostoev-sky: another epileptic artistic genius who died just a few weeks before the musician early in 1881 and was laid to rest near him in the graveyard of the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Like Musorgsky, Dostoevsky illustrates the agony of art in the populist age: the tension between relentless realism and the search for a positive message in the people. Like Musorgsky's operas, Dostoevsky's novels offer a tragic depth and dramatic power that was not present in the fashionable plays of the time, let alone the newly

  popular operettas of Offenbach and Strauss. Like Musorgsky, Dostoevsky had a special reverence for Gogol and considered himself a child of the sixties. The epilepsy that affected Dostoevsky was more intense but less debilitating than the creeping madness of Gogol and Musorgsky. Dostoevsky was able to bring his work to a greater measure of fruition than either of these two figures.

  His cosmology of characters and ideas belongs, in many ways, more to the twentieth than to the nineteenth century. One Soviet writer at the end of the Russian Civil War was hardly exaggerating when he said that "all contemporary literature is following in Dostoevsky's footsteps … to talk of Dostoevsky still means to talk of the most painful, profound issues of our current life."15 Ilya Ehrenburg, writing during the period of forced industrialization in the thirties, called Dostoevsky's novels "not books, but letters from someone close" which alone tell "the whole truth" about human nature.

  It is a truth which is undeniable and deadly. One cannot live with it. It can be given to the dying as formerly they gave last rites. If one is to sit down at a table and eat, one must forget about it. If one is to raise a child, one mu
st first of all remove [it] from the house. … If one is to build a state, one must forbid even the mention of that name.16

  The Soviet Union came close to such a prohibition during the era of high Stalinism; for truth was to Dostoevsky both Christian and anti-authoritarian. Dostoevsky fused, if he did not altogether harmonize, Gogol's search for religious faith with Belinsky's passionate anti-authoritarian mor-alism to provide a new type of positive answer designed for those who had experienced the iconoclasm of the sixties.

  Dostoevsky's positive answer did not bypass or even transcend the real world but rather penetrated into it. From the time of his first bleak novel of urban life, Poor People in 1845-6, Dostoevsky was unwilling to gloss over unpleasant facts or offer romantic flights to far-off lands or distant history-even Russian history. He is relatively indifferent to scenery or even beauty of language; his subject matter is prosaic and contemporary- much of it taken directly from the newspapers. His focus is on people, and on the most real thing about them: their inner drives, desires, and aspirations. Amidst all the crime and sensualism of his novels the focus is always on psychological development, never on physiological details. He was a "realist in the higher sense of the word." As he wrote at the end of the sixties:

  If one could but tell categorically all that we Russians have gone through during the last ten years in the way of spiritual development, all

  the realists would shriek that it was pure fantasy! And yet it would be pure realism! It is the one true, deep realism; theirs is altogether too superficial.17

  Thus Dostoevsky takes us "from the real to the more real."18 A veteran of the Petrashevsky circle-the first expressly devoted to "social thought"- of arrest, mock execution, and Siberian exile, Dostoevsky resolved in the late sixties to find that which was most real in the confused experience of the intelligentsia. His method is that of "deep penetration," proniknovenie, a term of which he was particularly fond. He was prompted to fathom these depths not only by his own traumatic experience in prison but also by his association upon return with the so-called pochvenniki, or "men of the soil." This group, led by the remarkable Muscovite critic Apollon Grigor'ev, sought to oppose both the romantic idealism of the older generation and the materialism of the younger generation with a kind of Christian naturalism, which they felt could be the basis of an original and independent Russian culture. They sought to penetrate through life's artificial exterior for a "restoration in the soul of a new, or rather a renewed, faith in the foundation [grunt], the soil [pochvd], the people-a restoration in the mind and heart of everything immediate [neposredstvenny]."19 Criticism, Grigor'ev felt, must be "organic"-taking account of the historical, social, and spiritual forces as well as the physiological forms of life and art. Ostrovsky's dramatic portrayal of Muscovite and provincial life was thought to have prepared the way for a new popular literature by moving back into the soil and away from aristocratic convention.

  Dostoevsky moves beneath the surface in the first remarkable literary creation of his period of post-exilic prophecy: Notes from the Underground of 1864. Then, having presented the dark recesses of malice in human nature, he plunges on from the real to the more real: to the deeper reality of human nature as a divided complex of feeling and intellect.

  The problem of division within man had fascinated Dostoevsky since the time he wrote his Double in 1846 and called his divided hero "the greatest and most important type which I was the first to discover and proclaim."20 In Crime and Punishment of 1866, the first of his great novels, he presents us with a hero, Raskolnikov, whose very name has the word for "schism" within it. Already in this work we see the beginning of his more grandiose conception of bringing the divided inner impulses of men into open confrontation and attempting to overcome the sense of separation and division in modern man. In this as in his other great novels he presents ordinary Russians not in any epic, descriptive sense but in a dynamic state of development. His characters become actors in a broader human drama

  where all are involved in the fate of each. The scene is the city, primarily St. Petersburg: "the most abstract and contrived city on the entire earthly sphere."21 There are no happy pastorales to relieve the tension. The stage is filled with the babel of intellectualized chatter and a sense of continued expectation and suspense. The scenario is that of the detective stories and melodramas that were currently popular all over Europe. But all of these ingredients are lifted to the level of a modern passion play, for the drama is, in truth, played out on a stage which has salvation at one end and damnation at the other. Through Dostoevsky, the novel form became invested with the dimensions of religious drama; and the ideas of salon thinkers were developed to their extreme and brought into conflict before the largest single audience available in Russia: the subscribers to Katkov's Russian Herald.

  The unique importance of Dostoevsky for Russian cultural history- as distinct from the world-wide development of psychology, literature, and religious thought-lay in his attempt to uncover some new positive answer for humanity in the depths of Russian popular experience. At about the same time in the late sixties that Musorgsky was beginning the first of his epochal "popular music dramas," Dostoevsky turned his attention toward the composition of a novel that would deal not with underground men, crime and punishment, but with redemption and renewal. Like Gogol, he turned to his Russian "divine comedy" after going abroad; and his first effort, The Idiot, of 1867-8, reveals some of the incipient madness of the late Gogol in its agonizing incapacity to create a credible image of pure goodness. Dostoevsky brought with him the faith of the pochvenniki that ultimately all men were in harmony and that there were no unbridgeable barriers between one man and another, or between the world of men and that of the insects below and the angels above. The division between the actual and the ideal-the real and the more real-is ultimately artificial; but it can be overcome only by penetrating deeply into the entire problem of division.

  Schism had been a deep and abiding theme of Russian history in the Romanov period. The seventeenth century saw the separation of the government from the people; the eighteenth, the aristocracy from the peasantry; the early nineteenth, the intellectual from the non-intellectual aristocracy; and the mid-century, the "sons" from the "fathers" within the thinking elite. In writing The Idiot Dostoevsky proved that the mere injection of a Christ-figure into this situation is not enough. Dostoevsky's would-be redeemer is incomplete in the novel without his alter ego, the sensualist Rogozhin, with whose life and fate that of "the Prince-Christ" Myshkin is completely intertwined. The helpless idiocy of Dostoevsky's holy fool at the end of the novel

  is in many ways reminiscent of the final cries of anguish by the fool at the end of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov.

  To overcome the separation in Russian life, it is necessary to fathom that separation which lies at the base of all others: the separation from God. Thus, while still in the last stages of writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky first conceived of a new novel to be called "The Atheist" or "The Life of a Great Sinner." In it a man was to lose his faith and embark on a search fcr positive answers that would lead him eventually to a Russian monastery and the recovery of faith at a higher level. It was to be "a gigantic novel," after the writing of which "I shall be ready to die, for I shall have uttered therein my whole heart's burden."22

  Thus, whereas Musorgsky in the Kromy scene of Boris ends his search for new answers with a cry of total despair, Dostoevsky's cry at the end of The Idiot is only the beginning of his search. But whereas Musorgsky was closer to the populists of the seventies in looking for sociopolitical leadership in the Kromy Forest, Dostoevsky was closer to the realists of the sixties in looking for metaphysical truth in the real St. Petersburg. Whereas Musorgsky looked to the Russian past, Dostoevsky looked to its present and future. The realism of historical lament in the one gives way to the realism of religious prophecy in the other.

  In his first outline of "The Atheist" late in 1868, Dostoevsky indicated his intention to spend at least two years in preparator
y reading of "a whole library of atheistic works by Catholic and Orthodox writers." From atheism his hero is to move on to become a Slavophile, Westernizer, Catholic, flagellant sectarian, and "finds at last salvation in the Russian soil, the Russian Saviour, and the Russian God."23 He attaches repeated importance to the need he feels to be in Russia to write such a work. The two great novels which he wrote during his fascination with this never fully realized idea both take the problem of separation out of the individual into a broader and more distinctively Russian context. The Possessed of 1870-2 anatomizes the ideological divisions in Russian society as a whole. The Brothers Karamazov of 1878-80, which is the closest Dostoevsky came to giving finished form to "The Atheist," illustrates the separation within individuals, society, and the family itself. The Brothers focuses on the ultimate form of human separation: that which leads man to murder his own progenitor. If The Possessed depicts "Turgenev's heroes in their old age,"24 the social denouement as it were of the philosophic nihilism of Fathers and Sons, The Brothers lifts the conflict of fathers and sons to the metaphysical plane, on which alone it could be overcome.

  The scene of The Possessed is Skvoreshniki, the provincial estate which bears the name of an outdoor house for feeding starlings and migratory

  birds. It is in truth a feeding place for the noisy black birds of revolution, a way station through which the unsettling ideas of the aristocracy are migrating out from St. Petersburg to the Russian countryside. All the characters are interconnected in a hallucinatory forty-eight hours of activity, most of which is a compressed and intensified version of real-life events. In a series of strange and only partially explained scenes we see the movement of Russian thought from the dilettantish aristocratic romanticism of Stepan Trofimovich, with whom the novel begins, to the activity of a host of young extremists. Conversation leads directly to murder and suicide; the "literary quadrille" of intellectuals to a strange fire. "It's all incendiarism," cries out one perplexed local official, adding prophetically that "the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses." But he and others not caught up in the hot stream of ideas are powerless to understand, let alone check, the conflagration of events. This is a novel of ideas in action, and those who are not intelligentnye (whether they be babbling bureaucrats or garrulous liberals) are foreigners to it.