Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

by Stephen Walsh

  None of these works would be seriously worth discussing if it were not for the light they shed on Musorgsky’s early development out of practically nothing, and for what they tell us (or at least imply) about Balakirev’s teaching. The whole process has an extremely creaky look to anyone who has studied music at all systematically. But it worked for Musorgsky. Balakirev could not remedy the defects in his pupil’s character, but he could confront him with works of genius, and Musorgsky was quick to understand what he needed, and to reject what he did not. In his teacher’s absence, but no doubt at his behest, he studied Gluck’s reform operas, Mozart’s Requiem, and various Beethoven sonatas that were new to him (including one or both of the op. 27 sonatas “Quasi una fantasia”). Balakirev’s precepts did not stop with music. It was probably at his suggestion that they read Byron’s Manfred together, and perhaps also Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame? (Kto vinovat?). “How I would like to be Manfred!” Musorgsky had blurted out one day as they walked together down Sadovaya Ulitsa. “I was a complete child at the time,” he later confessed, “and it seems that fate was kind enough to fulfil my wish—I was literally ‘manfredized,’ my soul slew my body. Now I have to take every kind of antidote.”19 Since “manfredization”—self-identification with Byron’s guilt-wracked but unrepentant Romantic hero—was more or less epidemic among Russian writers and artists of the period, it is as easy to understand why the nineteen-year-old Musorgsky would be infected as it is to understand why his (almost) twenty-one-year-old self would see the need of an antidote. But one still cannot tell from his music what form he thought it would take.

  CHAPTER 5

  On Aesthetics and Being Russian

  The year before Musorgsky’s meeting with Borodin, a twenty-seven-year-old postgraduate student at St. Petersburg University had published his master’s dissertation under the title The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality.

  Nikolay Chernïshevsky was the son of an Orthodox priest in Saratov, on the lower Volga five hundred miles southeast of Moscow. His father, however, must have been exceptionally broadminded, not to say well educated, by the usual standards of the provincial Russian priesthood, for by the time Nikolay reached St. Petersburg in 1846, after four years in the seminary at Saratov, he not only was well enough taught to enroll as a student in the university’s Faculty of History and Philology but was able to abandon his religious studies with his parents’ consent.

  Whether they would have agreed so readily had they foreseen the precise direction his studies would take is an open question. Before long he was immersed in the literature of the French utopian socialists, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and company; had worked his way through the German idealist philosophers, from Hegel to Schelling and eventually Feuerbach; at which point he abandoned his Christian faith altogether and became a confirmed believer in the anthropological theory of man as the arbiter of his own destiny and the proper focus of his own spiritual aspirations. At the same time he was moving more and more toward a radical, even revolutionary, politics. In the late forties he had flirted with the (by modern standards) moderately leftist Petrashevsky group, but not so much as to be involved in the mock execution and Siberian exile to which the group’s members, including the young Dostoyevsky, were subjected in 1849. Nevertheless, by the time his Aesthetic Relations was published in 1855, he was already well to the left politically. That year he became literary editor of Belinsky’s old journal, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and began to contribute articles that shifted Belinsky’s emphasis on socially and psychologically directed interpretation toward a more specifically political radicalism. The idea that it was the essential task of literature—and by extension, art in general—to prepare and promote the demise of Russian autocracy emerges clearly for the first time in these writings: Belinsky, for all his radicalism, had never argued for the subjection of literature to any such political program. In 1857, when Chernïshevsky handed over the editorship to his twenty-one-year-old colleague Nikolay Dobrolyubov, he was passing the torch to an extreme advocate of this point of view, and at the same time associating it unequivocally with the politics of revolution and nihilism.

  There is as yet hardly anything political in the Aesthetic Relations. What the book does suggest is a certain hard-nosed materialism that goes perfectly well with the political activist’s determination to get things done. It spends a good deal of time refuting Hegel’s view of art as the perfection of a beauty that in the physical world is invariably tainted or ephemeral. It argues that, on the contrary, reality is always more beautiful than art, which can never be more than a pale copy. How, Chernïshevsky asks, can a copy be more beautiful than the original? How can the artist imagine more beautiful faces and bodies than the ones he himself has seen? How can the imagined rose match the perfection of the real flower? Art is transient, whereas nature is constantly self-renewing. Beauty in art is lifeless and monotonous, while beauty in the real world is alive and forever changing. Beauty in art demands an effort of the imagination, whereas beauty in life is instantly, spontaneously recognizable and comprehensible. Even literature (poetry and prose), which Chernïshevsky considers the least problematical art form, tends to be “feeble, incomplete and indefinite” in its imagery, compared with the corresponding images in reality. It’s true that the written word is more informative than the other arts; it can describe character and ideas and can tell a complex story. But all these things are present in reality as well. The writer can, certainly, use rhetorical effects to enhance this or that detail. But this leads to exaggeration and a corresponding tendency to oversimplify. Novels in general, he grumbles, are stilted in dialogue and artificial in motivation; they also pander to certain weaknesses in man that deny reality: the need for characters to be good or bad, the need for happy endings or for the tragic hero to come to a sticky end, the love of tear-jerking sentimentality.

  Chernïshevsky is no musician, and like most thinkers who apply their ideas arbitrarily to music he soon runs into difficulties on this terrain. Obviously music is not, except in special cases, imitative of reality; so it can hardly be reckoned as inferior on that count. But if music is not a product of the search for beauty such as is found in the world around us, what is it? Chernïshevsky, writer that he is, finds his answer in the art of singing—that is, music explained by words. Singing, he suggests, is not about beauty but about the expression of feeling. A singer sings as a dog howls or a child cries. This may seem evasive, since the singer, of course, is not on the face of it the same person as the composer: not, that is, the creator, but the middleman. But Chernïshevsky gets round this problem by designating folk song as the most authentic kind of vocal music, far superior, in his book, to what he calls the “artificial” singing of opera or the art song; and folk music, as everyone knows, is not, strictly speaking, composed at all, but just grows, like a plant or a tree. In this sense, he concludes, singing (or if one insists, vocal music) is not really a fine art like painting or poetry at all, but a useful art, like plowing or carpentry. This is clearly very convenient for his general argument, because it allows him to regard a certain type of music as a phenomenon of nature—an aspect of reality—while art music is implicitly denounced as a feeble (and useless) copy of this phenomenon. Instrumental music began as accompaniment to singing; later it achieved independence, partly because of the limitations of the human voice. But it remains a poor imitation of singing, just as art singing remains a poor substitute for singing “as a work of Nature.”

  It hardly seems necessary to dwell on the fallacies in this argument. Chernïshevsky knows perfectly well that art is not solely, or even mainly, concerned with beauty in the conventional sense, but deals with man’s consciousness of the world around him, something that, by definition, the world cannot know. What he seems to be feeling his way toward is a theory of art that, so to speak, keeps its feet firmly planted on the ground, and rejects the abstract Hegelian concepts of beauty and universals in favor of individualism, particularism, and a sense of the wor
ld in which it is objects and people that determine our emotional and aesthetic responses.1 His mistake, perhaps, is to oversimplify. Here and there he seems genuinely to be arguing that art as such is an irrelevancy. Turgenev famously read the book in this sense: “In his eyes,” he remarked, “art is only what he calls a surrogate for reality, for life, and is essentially only fit for the immature. Whichever way you look at it, this idea is the basis of everything for him. And in my view it’s rubbish.”2 At times one can find oneself wondering whether Chernïshevsky has ever looked closely at a Rembrandt portrait or listened attentively to a Bach suite or a Beethoven string quartet. He seems impervious to the idea that art might itself represent a reality transfigured by the imaginative powers of genius, just as, on a more commonplace level, dreams and fantasy transform but in no way ignore our experience of day-to-day existence. In particular, his ideas about music may seem hardly worth more than a passing glance. Yet at other times it seems perfectly clear that when he talks about life, he means something other than base matter. “True life,” he says, “is the life of the heart and mind.” “Beauty is life: beautiful is that being in which we see life as it should be according to our conceptions; beautiful is the object which expresses life, or reminds us of life.”3

  Chernïshevsky’s monograph, though only a master’s thesis, seems to have been studied with some attention at least by the artistic community of the mid-fifties. Whether Vladimir Stasov read it at the time is less certain. In an autobiographical note written in old age, he names Belinsky, Chernïshevsky, and the nihilist Dmitry Pisarev as his guides.4 But leaving aside the question of memory, it remains unclear at what stage the guidance took effect, and through which works. All three wrote about literature and aesthetics, Stasov’s field of interest. Chernïshevsky later also published an influential novel. But both he and Pisarev were more notable as political radicals, and both spent a significant part of their adult life (Pisarev’s was short) in either prison or exile. Both were hugely admired by Lenin, and came to be seen as prophets of revolution. Accordingly, Stasov’s self-association with these two was seized on by his Soviet biographers and treated as confirmation of his “correct” proto-Marxist views. He was said, for instance, to have “perceived in Chernïshevsky the authentic leader of the revolutionary democratic movement of the sixties and to have valued his teaching as the most forward-looking of his time.” “Stasov,” the same biography goes on, “particularly valued Chernïshevsky’s demand that art make a judgment about life, stamping everything with those social appearances and forms which stifled and crippled the people, at the same time asserting progressive democratic ideals.” And he called for “the active participation of art in the struggle for the emancipation of the people and for historical progress, [and] placed art at the service of the emancipation movement.”5

  Stasov’s émigré Russian biographer, the Washington-based Sovietologist Yuri Olkhovsky, is understandably dismissive of such claims. “In the USSR,” he points out, “Chernïshevsky’s views are considered the apex of Russian pre-Marxist materialist socio-philosophical and aesthetic thought. When one also considers that Vladimir Lenin based many of his ideas on the writings of Chernïshevsky one begins to realize that Belinsky carries much less significance with Soviet ideologists than does Chernïshevsky.”6 Olkhovsky goes so far as to doubt whether Stasov actually ever read anything by Chernïshevsky, while accepting that he was familiar with his ideas. This might seem to be carrying skepticism to unnecessary lengths. That Stasov read Chernïshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (Shto delat’?) when it came out in 1863 is practically certain, since Balakirev praises it in a letter to him of April that year without naming it. But Stasov was in any case a voracious reader of books and articles about art, and would no more have ignored an important writer on aesthetics in the fifties than, as a teenager, he would have overlooked the latest major essay by Belinsky in Sovremennik. Even Olkhovsky concedes that he probably read Chernïshevsky’s series of “Sketches of the Gogol Period in Russian Literature” in Sovremennik in 1856, since Stasov himself had an article in one of the relevant issues. Perhaps one can assume that Stasov was well acquainted with Chernïshevsky’s work at this time without any need to impose on him its author’s subsequent political tendencies one way or the other.

  The point is that Stasov was not, at bottom, a political thinker at all. He was uninterested in revolution or “the emancipation of the people” as political goals, though he was in favor of any kind of social reform that he thought would benefit art. So, like many intelligent people who spend little time worrying about political issues as such, he could be profoundly inconsistent in his views. Like most of his generation, he loathed the restrictions placed on art and literature by the whole apparatus of autocracy. He liked the idea of Russia’s ancient democratic institutions, from the village commune (obshchina) up to the supposed elective democracy of medieval Novgorod. But he was much less enthusiastic about the apparatus of modern democracy, which ultimately gave power to committees of the ignorant and the uncultivated. In modern terms he was what might, clumsily, be called an elitist. He was essentially interested only in the first-rate, was generally contemptuous of the second-rate, and had no discernible interest in popular or demotic art, such as may have existed in nineteenth-century Russia. His great aesthetic awakening had been through the masterpieces of Western music and literature and Western—especially Italian and French—painting. Except in some recent literature and architecture and perhaps the operas of Glinka, Russian art had little to offer that was even remotely comparable, and this was something Stasov regretted and began in the fifties to hope to alter. Under the influence of Belinsky and Chernïshevsky, it seemed natural to pursue this goal in terms of the content of art rather than its style or method. If significant art was to be understood as a direct reflection of the society by and for which it was made, then Russianness was best achieved through Russian subject matter; and if the significance of Russian art was to be gauged according to its contribution to an awareness of that society and its problems, then the best subject matter would be, as Belinsky had written in 1834, the “faithful portrayal of scenes of Russian life.”7 Not that there was anything particularly new about that idea. Literate Russians knew and admired the work of Dickens and Balzac. Gogol’s Dead Souls had brilliantly caricatured the absurdity and corruptness of the serf economy. Alexander Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame? had used the rigid structure of Russian society to frame a love story that presented misery and confusion as what seemed the inevitable outcome of emotional emancipation. But on the whole the Russian novel as social critique was still in its infancy in 1859, the year of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Turgenev’s Nest of Gentlefolk, and the year after Alexey Pisemsky’s Thousand Souls. As for painting—Stasov’s home ground—it had barely ventured beyond the idealized peasantry of Alexey Venetsianov’s Threshing Floor (1822) and the vivid theatricality of Bryullov’s Last Day of Pompeii (1833), painted in any case in Italy.

  The question of realism in painting and storytelling only had to be posed for its solution to be self-evident, at least in theory. But with music, as Chernïshevsky had already discovered, it was another matter. Singing as a natural phenomenon like the wind and the rain was one thing. But how could you talk about realism in a Beethoven symphony or string quartet? You could argue for historical subject matter or social realism in opera, within certain obvious limitations imposed by the conventions of the medium. You could talk about pictorialism in songs or choruses: the turning mill wheel and babbling brook in Schubert’s Schöne Müllerin, the Resurrection in Bach’s B-minor Mass. But such imagery was only comprehensible through the words, conventionalized into music. Music on its own could only paint pictures by trivializing itself, through onomatopoeia or that curious process of mental substitution whereby we understand the movement from left to right on the piano as “rising,” or repeated musical figures as “machines.” None of this added up to music in any but the most peripheral sense.

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bsp; For Stasov, one solution to the problem lay in the concept of program music. Again there was nothing very new about this idea. Obvious orchestral examples like Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique were either known or known about (though Berlioz’s hybrid, part-vocal Roméo et Juliette symphony was better known than the Fantastique in St. Petersburg). But Stasov, no doubt with Belinsky’s criticism in mind, wanted to go beyond the overt intentions of such works and decipher programs in instrumental works that were to all outward appearances purely abstract. “What are the majority of Beethoven’s overtures,” he wrote much later, “what are certain parts of his last quartets, what are many of his sonatas, what are all Beethoven’s symphonies starting with the Third, if not ‘program music’?”8 He read A. B. Marx’s book on Beethoven the minute it appeared in late 1858 and was delighted, he told Balakirev, to find that Marx shared his opinion that “the finale of the Third Symphony depicts a crowd of people, a popular festival, in which diverse groups succeed one another: now ordinary people, now soldiers, now women, now children—and all against the background of some rural landscape.”9 Yet even before reading Marx he had detected at least the essence of a narrative in Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a work to which—unlike the “Eroica” Symphony—the composer himself attached no hint of a program. “Have you noticed,” he asked Balakirev, “how one musical detail governs nearly everything in it? It’s the scale—explicit or implicit.” He gives several music examples, and then: “It seems to me that this procession of scales, this constant upward motion is not accidental, but must serve as the expression of some kind of ‘striving,’ some spiritual or mental impulse. From the first time I heard this quintet (or almost-symphony), it struck me that there is some program here. The main role in this program is played by ‘striving.’ ”10