Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  Belinsky’s particular impact took various forms. His conviction that art should above all reflect the reality of life as it was experienced by the ordinary individual—the Truth, however unpalatable—emerged comparatively late in his bumpy intellectual career. It is expressed with typically violent clarity and energy for the first time in a series of letters he wrote to his friend the writer Vasily Botkin in 1841, and more temperately in an essay written that same year but published posthumously: “Art,” he wrote there, “is the immediate contemplation of truth, or a thinking in images.”5 For a time before that he had been in the grip of a barely less violent pro-Hegelian idealism which had seduced him into an objective—that is, passive—acceptance of reality; Hegel, he confesses to Botkin, “has turned the realities of life into ghosts clasping bony hands and dancing in the air above the cemetery.”6 But even before his brief Hegelian digression, he was writing criticism that penetrated with extraordinary originality and imaginative force into the psychological texture of the works under review. His long articles on Pushkin, for instance, the first of which date from before the poet’s death in 1837, not only helped set up Pushkin’s reputation as the founding father of modern Russian literature, but set a standard for the close reading of texts that has rarely been surpassed since.

  To some extent one has to separate Belinsky’s philosophy from his day-to-day critical activities. It was characteristic of the Russian situation in the thirties that thinking people looked to Western ideas and either accepted or rejected them (often with equal violence) in the quest for a social or political theory able to resolve the confusions of life under their own massively inert autocracy. They took what they thought they needed from German idealism, from French utopian socialism, and from English utilitarianism, not to mention Western political and economic systems. Not surprisingly the path through this jungle of ideas was sometimes tortuous and unclear; in the undergrowth, you could never be sure whom you would meet—friend or foe, even supposing you would know which was which. By temperament, Belinsky was always a Westernizer: that is, a progressive who argued for the remodernization of Russian society along the Western European lines initiated in the early eighteenth century by Peter the Great. He was an admirer of Tsar Peter. He opposed the mystical leanings of the Slavophiles, with their faith in the spiritual values of old Russia, the Orthodox Church, and the Russian peasant in his muddy baste shoes; yet he remained an ardent patriot, a strong believer in the concept of nationality (natsional’nost’—the quality of this rather than that ethnic group) as against the misty, hard-to-define narodnost’, with its undertones of popularism, nationalism, and the black earth. Then in the forties he moved toward socialism, or at least a social consciousness too individualistic to align itself readily with the new communism (though not so much as to prevent his coming, through selective reading, to be regarded as a father figure by all subsequent fellow travellers, up to and including the Soviets).

  Through all these twists and turns, he remained at heart a believer in art as truth and in criticism as the revelation and elucidation of that truth. Interpretation naturally brought into play the preferences and biases of the critic. But Belinsky was not essentially a propagandist; he never argued for the appropriation of art as a vehicle for ideology. The truth of a book or a poem was innate. For Stasov, this was perhaps the most striking lesson Belinsky taught. “Up to now all criticism in the arts has consisted of saying: this is good, this is bad, this is not appropriate, here are such-and-such mistakes of costume, here such-and-such of proportion, etc. For this kind of criticism no talent is needed, only a certain measure of training and study, so anyone … could produce this kind of criticism. But what should we demand of artistic creation, what are the arts for? They don’t exist for their parts but in order to create a whole, united in one point, and the product of all its parts, all its elements.… Every genuine work of art consequently bears within itself its meaning and intention; to reveal the one and the other for humanity is the purpose of criticism.”7 No doubt Stasov was also attracted by other aspects of Belinsky’s thought and personality. His individualism must have appealed to the young student trying to balance intense artistic enthusiasms with the dry study of the imperial system of law and administration. Stasov was equally receptive to Belinsky’s social consciousness post-1840. This is not to say that he was or ever had been politically minded in any strong sense. In Nicholas I’s Russia almost any social thinking, even that of the deeply traditionalist Slavophiles, lay in the direction of emancipation and liberalization; it was hardly possible to think about politics without desiring the end of serfdom, a system as economically debilitating as it was humanly degrading, or the purging of the country’s rigid, inefficient, and corrupt state bureaucracy. For the young Stasov, widely read in German, French, and English as well as Russian literature, it was natural in any case to look outward, which in the nature of things meant to think progressively, even if your reading was Fichte and Schelling. The breadth of Belinsky’s thought chimed with the breadth of Stasov’s literacy. Above all, the self-assured, quick-tongued, strong-willed law student was surely impressed by Belinsky’s eloquence, his polemical brilliance, his boldness in the assertion of heterodox opinions, and, not least, his fierce combativeness.

  Stasov emerged from the School of Jurisprudence in 1843 an educated, cultivated nineteen-year-old, well read, with highly developed, if perhaps unduly emphatic, musical and artistic tastes and a broad knowledge of European (including Russian) literature and thought. At school he had certainly spent more time on music and art and reading than on jurisprudence. His closest friend there (until he left the school in 1840) had been another, somewhat older musician, Alexander Serov, and most of their musical experiences—though by no means all their likes and dislikes—had been shared. Serov was an enthusiast for German music, including Weber and Meyerbeer, while Stasov’s tastes in that direction still stopped generally with Bach and late Beethoven, though he had, and retained, a passion for Schumann. Perhaps influenced by his attachment to Italian painting, he leaned also in the direction of the music of that country—but less, at first, that of the Renaissance than that of the recent operatic composers, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini. For both of them, Chopin was a genius, Liszt a mere showman, an empty purveyor of spectacular but vapid roulades and arpeggios, artistically of no serious account. They had not, of course, heard him play. When they did hear him, at his first St. Petersburg concert in 1842, they were instantly smitten, not so much by his virtuosity as by his sheer artistic presence and power, even though he played only transcriptions and operatic fantasies, presented in the manner of a prizefighter from a stage erected in the middle of the Hall of the Assembly of the Nobles. “After the concert,” Stasov noted, “Serov and I were like madmen. We exchanged only a few words and then rushed home to write each other as quickly as possible of our impressions, our dreams, our ecstasy … We were delirious, like lovers! And no wonder. We had never in our lives heard anything like this; we had never been in the presence of such a brilliant, passionate, demonic temperament … Liszt’s playing was absolutely overwhelming.”8

  Stasov wrote a review of the concert but was unable to get it accepted for publication. He was desperate, he wrote later, to make people understand Liszt’s artistic importance, just as, a year or two before, he had written an article on Karl Bryullov’s large-scale pencil sketch for the Apostles mosaic in St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose lack of popular recognition infuriated him (the expression is his own, and characteristic). This too remained in his drawer. Not till 1847 was he able to get a substantial article accepted by a public print: a lengthy, opinionated, but compulsively readable survey of the musical events of the year, published in Belinsky’s old paper, Notes of the Fatherland.9 But one could hardly survive on occasional journalism, and like many writers and artists in nineteenth-century Russia Stasov was forced on leaving the School of Jurisprudence to take precisely the kind of government post for which the school was supposed to be a preparation.
From 1843 to 1851 he worked successively in the Senate Boundary Department, the Department of Heraldry, and the Ministry of Justice. Needless to say, these were routine jobs within a bureaucratic system that neither encouraged nor rewarded personal initiative. But they left Stasov time to pursue his artistic enthusiasms more or less as he liked. He haunted the Hermitage Museum, with its vast collection of paintings, prints, and sculpture; he wheedled his way into the office of the curator of engravings, Nikolay Utkin, who was at that very moment cataloguing the Warsaw collection, confiscated at the time of the 1830 Polish rising, and may well have been astonished at the expertise of this nineteen-year-old boy (who had pored over the Parisian Annales du musée since childhood). He also began to frequent the Imperial Public Library, an institution that, then as now, was very much more than its name might suggest to an Anglo-Saxon bookworm. The library was not only a major repository for books, including the Voltaire and Diderot collections acquired by Catherine the Great and nearly half a million volumes appropriated from Poland’s Zaluski Library. It also held quantities of manuscripts, paintings, and artworks, all more or less chaotically organized, largely uncatalogued, and in an appalling state of repair. From Stasov’s point of view there was little question of serious study in such conditions; but here too he was energetic in making contacts that were to prove important later on, both for his ideas about art and for his eventual job prospects.

  In 1851 he was taken on as a travelling secretary by the hugely rich Russian expatriate industrialist Prince Anatoly Demidov, whose estate at San Donato, near Florence, housed an outstanding library and a magnificent art collection. The three years Stasov spent abroad with Demidov, mainly in Italy, were crucial in rounding out his knowledge of Renaissance painting and architecture in particular. They also cemented his confidence in his own taste and judgment in artistic matters, however unorthodox or, at times, doctrinaire. An extraordinary letter survives which he wrote to his aunt Anna Suchkova, his mother’s sister, in 1852, describing in exhaustive detail, and with unconcealed pride, his project of refitting the Catholic chapel at San Donato in Russian Orthodox style, “not,” he hastens to assure her, “because it makes any difference to me—to me it’s really all one, as you know—but because I’m in the habit of getting everything (even very small things) as right as possible and as they ought in fact to be, if I can only get my hands on them.”10

  On their way to Italy, they had passed through London at the time of the Great Exhibition; and they were in Paris for part of the summer or autumn of 1851. Here, according to Stasov’s Soviet biographers, he was in touch with (unspecified) revolutionary activists and attended socialist meetings.11 Whether or not he did so might be doubted. For Soviet critics it was always of course important to assert the political credentials of those of whom, on general grounds, they approved, and Stasov would plainly qualify in this respect, if only in view of his debt to Belinsky and, later, Nikolay Chernïshevsky, left-wing thinkers whose views on art influenced him. On political questions, however, his position was less clear-cut. As a free-thinking agnostic, he had little sympathy with the hyper-Orthodox Slavophiles, but nevertheless shared some of their ideas about history and was attracted by the imagery they inspired. He approved of Herzen’s friend Vadim Kel’siyev’s later attempt to draw a connection between revolutionary socialism and the Old Believers. “Both in pagan and Christian times,” he enthused to Balakirev in a long letter about Kel’siyev, “the real Russia was in its soul and its nature democratic.”12 But this was probably as much an aesthetic as a political response, and one that to some extent reflected the confusion of radical thinking among the intelligentsia in the fifties and sixties. If Stasov had actually attended revolutionary meetings in early-fifties Paris, he would certainly have been watched and probably apprehended as soon as he returned to Russia. Nothing of the kind seems to have happened to him, at least on this occasion.

  Demidov and Stasov left Italy for Russia in the spring of 1854, on the way taking in Vienna, where Stasov saw Wagner’s Lohengrin for the first time. This was another of those formative experiences the effects of which remained with him for the rest of his life, largely unmoderated by the passage of time. Like many of his antipathies, his loathing of Wagner seems to have been prompted as much by circumstantial factors as by a direct response to the music. He evidently took against what he later called “Wagner’s incoherent, mystical and moralizing plots,”13 and possibly also against his writings, with their interminable, self-important theorizing that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with such works (and there were as yet not many of them) as had actually reached the stage. Still basking in the glow of Italian art, he may well have been repelled by the slow Germanic heaviness and ponderous symbolism of Lohengrin, with its “knights [Stasov is generalizing] who appear from somewhere out of the sky and go back there just because here on earth they are asked who exactly they are.”14 In Italy he had met Rossini, and found in him “an artistic soul of beautiful simplicity”; he had had access to the huge collection of Italian polyphonic motets and madrigals in the collection of Abbé Francesco Santini, “pure veins of gold, silver and whole cliffs of diamonds and emeralds.”15 Now reading an article by Liszt in praise of Wagner (we don’t know which one), he turned momentarily against his great hero of the previous decade and planned a riposte which he intended to submit to Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Perhaps fortunately for future relations with Liszt, the article was never written. But Stasov’s anti-Wagnerism survived as one of several important negative elements in the dogmas that were to have such a powerful influence on Russian music of the next decade and a half.

  At the time of his return to St. Petersburg, Stasov was thirty years old and badly in need of paid work. For reasons that are not wholly clear, the association with Demidov came to an end. He was still technically single, though before Italy his life had been complicated by a series of love affairs and at least two illegitimate daughters. In another sense, it’s true, his life was secure. The Stasovs were an extremely close-knit family, lived under the same roof (or, to be exact, roofs, since they also shared a dacha at Pargolovo, ten miles to the north of St. Petersburg), and even half-resented the occasional marriage of one of their number. When his brother Dmitry married in 1861, Vladimir wrote in a fury to Balakirev:

  In half a year or a year he’ll be a completely different person, and we simply won’t recognize him. He’ll acquire a totally new circle, be surrounded by other people, and he’ll take on their smell, their tastes and coloring. But what must be must be. I’m just a bit annoyed that he doesn’t mind enough being separated from our family; I know that he’s deeply in love with his wife now, and I also know that it’s impossible for us all to go on living together forever in some kind of Noah’s Ark—yet a break is a break, and arguments don’t help … This wedding of Mitya’s I regard as much the same as a death in the family.16

  This was to have future resonances, also, for a family of a different kind. But for all the Stasovs, money was in short supply. Vladimir pulled strings as best he could with ministry contacts. Nothing was forthcoming. He went back to the public library, now gradually being transformed under the hands of its hyper-efficient but liberal-minded new director, Baron Modest Korff; and there, sure enough, he soon established a contact that led to a series of tasks that, in turn, led in due course to a post. Stasov’s work began in 1855 with an unpaid commission to catalogue the library’s huge Rossica section. With typical thoroughness he not only did this, but in the process evolved an appropriate cataloguing system while reading many of the books as he went along. Korff quite soon realized, as Utkin and Demidov had done, that he had an extraordinary talent on his hands, and by the end of 1856 had arranged for Stasov to be appointed his full-time personal assistant. Thus this young man whose enthusiasm for art in the broadest sense outstripped all considerations of personal advancement, official rank, or any of the normal status symbols on the career ladder of the imperial civil service, had for t
he third time in his life struck lucky. Just as hardly any school in tsarist Russia would have vouchsafed the intellectual freedoms of the School of Jurisprudence, just as his service with Demidov had brought him into contact at exactly the right time with a range of artistic experience scarcely available at home, so now he found in Korff a rare superior of a liberal turn of mind, indulgent of his broad and sometimes wayward interests, and responsive to his astounding intellectual energy.

  While he was thus simultaneously setting up his library career and broadening his artistic knowledge, Stasov was by no means neglecting his musical interests. He had eventually met Glinka, through Serov, in 1849, and had begun to attend his musical soirées that spring. But these had come to an end in the autumn when Glinka went abroad, and by the time he returned to St. Petersburg in 1851 Stasov was in Italy. Now, in 1854, Stasov again became a Glinka “brother,” as the great composer liked to call his musical intimates, in the manner of a secret society plotting against the neglect of his music in the capital at large. The circle was small and somewhat dilettante in flavor. Apart from Vladimir Stasov and his lawyer brother, Dmitry, it included Serov, by this time an active and influential music critic; Dargomïzhsky; another composer, Nikolay Borozdin; the music publisher Constant Villebois; and assorted amateur-musician friends of Glinka’s. Vasily Sobol’shchikov, the director of the public library’s art department and a decent pianist, would sometimes appear; and even Korff himself would turn up with his entire family. There would be string quartets and two-piano arrangements of orchestral pieces and operatic excerpts, including from Glinka, sometimes played eight-handed, more often four-. It was the kind of music making that reflected the very low density of professional music in St. Petersburg in the 1850s. There being no established series of orchestral concerts, the best way to get to know orchestral music was in salon transcriptions. Chamber music remained an almost exclusively amateur pastime, in spite of the decidedly unamateur character of recent repertoire such as the late Beethoven quartets, which were nevertheless attempted at Glinka’s soirées (the master himself on viola). As for Glinka’s operas, almost the only way to hear them properly performed in the mid-fifties was in piano or ensemble arrangements and occasional recital excerpts. There was talk of Glinka and Vladimir Stasov starting a concert society with the composer as chairman. But the idea, if it was ever more than a conversation topic, was interrupted by Glinka’s departure for Berlin in April 1856, and terminated by his death nine months later.