by Ray Russell
But if it was not a prank, how can we explain the way Cholodenko has been ripped from history, his music not even a fading echo but a silence, a vacuum, completely forgotten, as totally unknown as the song the Sirens sang?
I don’t presume to solve the mystery. I merely present the three letters “for what they’re worth,” and invite other bloodhounds to make what they will of them. Such bloodhounds will sniff out, as I did, a glaring discrepancy, for the very survival of these letters seems to discredit Lord Henry’s colorful insinuations—but he would probably counter our incredulity, if he were here, by urbanely pointing out that if God proverbially moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, might not His Adversary do the same? For reasons of scholarship and accuracy, I haven’t condensed or edited the letters in any way (except to eliminate the redundant addresses in all but the first), preferring to let even irrelevant or trivial observations stand, in the hope that they may contain clues which eluded me. I’ve also kept Stanton’s not always standard, though phonetically accurate, transliterations. In a few places, I’ve inserted short bracketed notes of my own, in italics. The letters bear month and dates, but no year. Stanton being English, I assume these dates conform to the Gregorian calendar familiar to us, rather than to the old Julian calendar which was still in use in Russia at the time. On the basis of internal evidence, such as the first performance of Eugene Onegin, I believe the letters to have been written in 1879.
5 April
Sir Robert Cargrave
Harley Street
London, England
My dear Bobbie,
No, do not scold me! I know full well that I have been a renegade and most delinquent comrade. If I seem to have avoided your home these many months; if I have neglected you, your dear Maude, and your brood of cherubim—one of whom, young Jamey, must be quite ripe for Oxford by now!—then ascribe it, I pray you, not to a cooling of our friendship’s fires nor to a crusty bachelor’s disdain for the familial hearthstone, but, rather, to my persistent vice, travel.
I have set foot on divers shores since last I sipped your sherry, old friend, and greatly fear the proper Maude would frown prettily and tap her tiny foot with disapproval to hear some of my adventures—such as a certain scandal attendant upon my holiday in Greece, whither I journeyed to steep myself in the air Orestes breathed and tan my pallid English hide under the sun of Sophocles. Whilst steeping and sunning, it seems I was the agency whereby all three daughters of a prominent family were rendered enceinte, a feat of treble indiscretion that led to dreary judicial proceedings, an elaborate but unavailing defense which I delivered entirely in iambic pentameters, a large settlement upon the dishonoured daughters, an official request to absent myself from Graecian soil, and a rather good mot of mine which I think will wrench a chuckle from even your tight Harley Street lips. On the train that took me from Greece, I had the misfortune to meet an American cleric of bloodless aspect and the possessor of a pronounced squint, who, catching my name and having sniffed the gossip, lugubriously lectured me! This presumptuous parson had the gall to inquire what “lesson” I had learned from the experience! Fancy! Fixing him with the most icy of glances, I replied: “Beware of Greeks—bearing Greeks.”
I write to you from St. Petersburg. Yes, I am cosily hugged by “the rugged Russian bear,” a cryptic creature, I assure you, warm and great-hearted, quick to laugh, and just as quick to plunge into pits of black toská—a word that haughtily defies translation, hovering mystically, as it does, somewhere between melancholy and despair. Neither melancholy nor despair, however, have dogged my steps here in this strange land. I have been most cheerful. There are wondrous sights to bend one’s gaze upon; exotic food and drink to quicken and quench the appetite; fascinating people with whom to talk. To your sly and silent question, my reply is Yes!—there are indeed ladies here, lovely ones, with flared bright eyes and sable voices; lambent ladies, recondite and rare. There are amusing soirées, as well (I will tell you of one in a moment), and there are evenings of brilliance at the ballet and the opera.
The opera here would particularly captivate both you and your Maude, I am certain, for I know of your deep love of the form. How enviously, then, will you receive the news that just last month, in Moscow, I attended the premiere of a dazzling new opus theatricum by the composer Pyotr Chaikovsky. It was a work of lapidary excellence, entitled Yevgeny Onyégin (I transliterate as best I can from the spiky Cyrillic original), derived from a poem of that name by a certain Pushkin, a prosodist now dead for decades, who—my friend, Colonel Spalding, tells me—enjoys a classical reputation here, but of whom I had not hitherto heard, since his works have not been translated into English, an error the Colonel is now busy putting right. [Lt.-Col. Henry Spalding’s English translation, transliterated as “Eugene Onéguine,” was published in London in 1881. However, other Pushkin poems were published in English translations by George Borrow as early as 1835.] The opera is a shimmering tapestry of sound, brocaded with waltzes and polonaises.
But St. Petersburg, I find, is richer in cultural life than even Moscow: I have been awed by the baroque majesty of the Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral, chastened by the mighty gloom of the Peter Paul fortress and properly impressed by the Smolny Monastery and the Winter Palace. À propos of winter, I have also been chilled to the marrow by the fiercest cold I have ever known. “Winter in April?” I can hear you say. Yes, the severe season stretches from November to April in this place, and the River Neva, which I can see, moonlit, from my window as I write, is frozen over, and has been thus, I am told, for the past six months! It is a great gleaming broadsword of ice, cleaving the city in two.
As for music: just last night, thanks to a letter of introduction from Spalding, I was received at a famous apartment in the Zagoredny Prospekt—nothing ostentatious, a small drawing-room, a few chairs, a grand piano, a table in the dining room loaded with the simplest food and drink . . . but what exceptional people were crowded, shoulder to shoulder, in that place. It was the apartment of Rimsky-Korsakov, who, I was pleased to discover, is not only a gifted and amiable gentleman, but speaks excellent English—an accomplishment not shared by many of his compatriots, whose social conversations are customarily couched in (or, at least, liberally laced with) French. The guests, myself excluded, were, to a man, composers and performers, some (I later learned) being members of a koochka, or clan, of musicians of which Rimsky-Korsakov is the nucleus.
You will laugh when I tell you that, not five minutes after being welcomed into the salon, I committed a faux pas. Wishing to take part in the musical discussion, I minutely described and lavishly praised the Chaikovsky opera I had enjoyed so recently at the Moscow Conservatorium. My tall host’s gentle eyes grew cold behind his blue-tinted spectacles (which he wears because of ailing sight) and I felt a distinct frost. The awkward moment soon passed, however, and a dark young man took me aside to drily inform me that “Our esteemed Nikolai Andreyvich considers Chaikovsky’s music to be in abominable taste.”
“Do you share that opinion?” I asked.
“Not precisely, but I do feel Chaikovsky is not a truly Russian composer. He has let himself be influenced by bad French models—Massenet, Bizet, Gounod, and so on.”
We were joined by a bloated, wild-haired, red-nosed, bleary-eyed but very courteous fellow who, after addressing me most deferentially, asked eagerly about the Chaikovsky work: “It is good, then, you think? Ah! Splendid! An excellent subject, Onyégin. I once thought of setting it myself but it’s not my sort of thing—Pyotr Ilyich is the man for it, there’s no doubt. Don’t you agree, Vassily Ivanovich?” he added, turning to my companion.
That intense young man shrugged. “I suppose so—but to tell the truth, I am growing weary of these operatic obeisances to Pushkin. One cannot blame a composer of the old school, such as Glinka, for setting Ruslan and Lyudmila, but what are we to think when Dargomizhsky sets not one but three Pushkin subjects—Russalka, The Triumph of Bacchus an
d The Stone Guest; when you joined the cortège five years ago with your own opera; and when Chaikovsky now follows the pattern with Onyégin?” He threw up his hands. “May that be the last!” he sighed.
“There is still The Queen of Spades,” said the unkempt man, mischievously. “Perhaps you will undertake that one yourself?”
“Thank you, no,” snapped the other (rather irritably, I thought). “I leave that to you.”
“I may just do it,” was the smiling reply, “unless Chaikovsky is too quick for me!” [He was: Tchaikovsky’s setting of “The Queen of Spades” or “Pique-Dame” was presented in 1890. And, later, Rimsky-Korsakov drew upon Pushkin for his operas “Le Coq d’Or” and “Mozart and Salieri” and Rachmaninoff also turned to Pushkin for his “Aleko.”] Elaborately excusing himself, the wild-haired man left us and began chatting with another group.
“Talented,” my young friend said in appraisal of him after he left, “but he lacks technique. His scores are crude, grotesque, his instrumentation a disgrace. Of course, he isn’t well. An epileptic. And, as you may have noted, he drinks heavily. That red nose was not caused by frostbite, no matter what he says. We try to help him, but he makes it difficult for us. A group of us offered him eighty rubles a month, on the condition that he would finish a certain opera. He accepted. At the same time, unaware of our assistance, another group of friends offered him a hundred rubles a month if he would finish a certain other opera. He accepted that arrangement, as well, and, as a result, has finished neither. Still, somehow, he goes on writing music. There is a tavern in Morskaia Street, called Maly Yaroslavets—any night you will see him there, drinking vodka, scribbling music on napkins, menus, the margins of newspapers, feverishly, almost as if—” He broke off.
“As if possessed?” I said.
“A somewhat lurid allusion, don’t you think? No, I was about to say, ‘almost as if his life depended on it’—as I suppose it does, for his interest in music is probably the only thing keeping him alive. To look at him now, Gospodin Stanton, would you ever guess he was once an impeccably groomed Guards officer, of refined breeding, a wit, a ladies’ man?” He shook his head dolorously. “Poor Mussorgsky,” he sighed.
Looking slowly about the salon, he then said, “The koochka is not what it was, sir. Do you see that pathetic creature sitting in the corner?” The gentleman indicated was indeed pathetic, a wraith who looked with glazed eye upon all who passed before him, responding feebly and mechanically to greetings, like an old man (although he was not old), then sinking back into motionless apathy. “That is, or was, the koochka’s vital force, its spine, its heart, its tingling blood. It was in his apartment we were wont to meet, he who held the group together, his the hands that firmly gripped the reins, his the whip that goaded us to frenzied effort. No man was more steeped in the classical scores, no memory was so vast as his. Now look at him. A coffin. His mind blighted by a mysterious malady. There he sits. His Tamara languishes unfinished. Music has ceased to interest him, he who breathed exotic harmonies every minute of the day.”
We had been walking toward this pitiful wreckage, and now my guide leaned close and spoke to him: “Mily Alekseyevich! How is it with you?” The man looked up and blinked vapidly; it was quite obvious he did not recognize the speaker. “It is I, Vassily Ivanovich,” he was forced to add.
“Vas . . . sily . . . ’Van . . . ovich . . .” A small, crooked smile of recognition twisted the poor man’s face for a moment, although the eyes did not kindle.
“Allow me to present an honoured guest from England, Lord Henry Stanton. Lord Stanton, ily Balakirev.”
The wretched fellow offered me a limp, dead hand, which I briefly shook; and then we left him, staring vacantly into empty air again. “Tragic,” my Virgil murmured; “and the final offense is that poor Mily, who once was the most vociferous of scoffers, now mumbles prayers and bends his knee to ikons.”
“I hope you are not an unbeliever,” I said lightly.
“I believe,” he said—a reply that would have satisfied me, had it not been for its dark colour, which seemed to imply meanings beyond the simple words.
“Surely,” I asked him, “such ruination of body or mind are not typical of your group?”
“Mussorgsky and Balakirev are possibly extreme examples,” he agreed. “But there, at the table, stuffing himself with zakuski,” he said, indicating a man in the uniform of a Lieutenant General of Engineers, “is Cui, who suffers from the worst disease of all: poverty of talent. And Rimsky, whose soul is corroded by his envy of Chaikovsky. As for Chaikovsky himself—he is not of our koochka, of course, being of the Moscow school—his sickness is so vile it scarcely can be spoken of . . .”
I trust, Bobbie, that if you read my poor scratchings to Maude, you will judiciously elide those passages that you, a man of medicine, may assimilate without discomfiture, but which would not be proper for her unworldly ears. Suffice it to say that the man whose opera so beguiled me in Moscow this past month is, in plain fact, an addict of that shameful vice for which, we are taught, Jehovah smote the cities of the plain.
This disclosure was so distasteful to me that I sought to change the subject of our conversation. The music of Yevgeny Onyégin still rang in my memory (though tainted now by that gross revelation) and I was therefore reminded of the poet on whose work the opera was founded.
“You spoke of Pushkin some moments ago,” I said. “I have been told he was an extraordinary poet. Why do you hold him in low esteem?”
“I do not,” he replied. “Pushkin was a genius. But suppose your English musicians persisted in setting only the plays and verses of Shakespeare, ignoring today’s English writers? This preoccupation with the past is stagnating most of Russian culture, and the music itself is as dated as its subject matter. Even Mussorgsky, whose crudeness is sometimes redeemed by flashes of daring, is being obtunded and made ‘inoffensive’ by Rimsky—a pedant who gets sick to the stomach at the sound of a consecutive fifth!”
Does it strike you, Bobbie, that this chap was annoyingly critical of his illustrious colleagues? It so struck me, and a little later in the evening I had an opportunity to challenge him—but at this precise moment in our conversation, we were joined by our host.
My initial “offense” regarding the music of Chaikovsky was now, happily, forgotten, and Rimsky’s eyes were warm behind the blue lenses. “Ah, Lord Stanton,” he said, “I see you have met our young firebrand. Has he been telling you what old fogeys we are, the slaves of tradition, and so on? Dear boy, for shame: our English visitor will carry away a bad impression of us.”
“No, no,” I said, “his views are refreshing.”
“He is our gadfly,” Rimsky said, with a diplomatic smile. “But we must all suspend our conversations—refreshing though they may be—and turn our attention to some music a few of our friends have consented to play for us.”
We all found chairs, and a feast of sound was served. Mussorgsky provided accompaniment for a song sung by a basso they called Fyodr [Not Chaliapin, of course, who was only six years old at the time; but possibly Fyodr Stravinsky, the singer-father of Igor]; after which a chemist named Borodin played pungent excerpts from an uncompleted opera (“He’s been at it for fifteen years,” whispered my young companion. “Keeps interrupting it to work on symphonies. A chaotic man, disorganized. Bastard son of a prince.”). Next, Rimsky-Korsakov himself played a lyrical piece I found charming, but which my self-appointed commentator deprecated as “conventional, unadventurous.”
I had, by this time, had a surfeit of his vicious carping. Taking advantage of a lull in the musical offerings, I now turned to him and, with as much courtesy as I could summon and in a voice distinct enough to be heard by all, said, “Surely a man of such austere judgement will condescend to provide an example of his ideal? Will you not take your place at the keyboard, sir, so that others may play at critic?”
He proffered me a strange loo
k and an ambiguous smile. A profound hush fell upon the room. Our host cleared his throat nervously. My heart sank as I realized that somehow, in a way quite unknown to me, I had committed another and possibly more enormous faux pas!
But I see the dawn has begun to tint the sky, and I have not yet been to bed. I will dispatch these pages to you at once, Bobbie, and resume my little chronicle at the very next opportunity.
Your peripatetic friend,
Harry
8 April
My dear Bobbie,
I left off, if I remember rightly, at that moment in Rimsky-Korsakov’s apartment when I committed some manner of gauche blunder merely by suggesting that a rather unpleasant young man, who had been so superciliously critical of his colleagues, play something of his own composition for the assembled guests. The embarrassed silence that fell upon the room thoroughly discomfited me. What had I said? In what way was my suggestion awkward or indelicate? Was the young man bitterly hated by our famous host? Unlikely, for he was a guest. Did the poor fellow have no hands? Not so: for, even now, he held wineglass and biscuit in long, slender fingers. I was bemused; I may have blushed. Only a moment passed, but it seemed an hour. Finally, the young man, still wearing the smirk with which he had greeted my challenge, replied, “Thank you, Lord Stanton. I shall play something of my own, if our host gives me leave?” He cocked an eyebrow toward Rimsky.
Recovering his aplomb, Rimsky said hurriedly, “My dear fellow, of course. The keyboard is yours.” And so, raking the room’s occupants with an arrogant look, the young man swaggered to the piano and was seated.
He studied the keyboard for a moment, then looked up at us. “I am in the midst of composing an opera,” he said. “Its source, you may be surprised to learn, is not a poem by the indispensable Pushkin or an old Slavonic tale. It is a modern novel, a book still in the writing, a work of revolutionary brilliance. It rips the mask of pretence and hypocrisy from our decadent society, and will cause an uproar when it is published. I was privileged to see it in manuscript—the author resides here in St. Petersburg. It is called The Brothers Karamazov. And this,” he concluded, flexing his spidery fingers, “is the Prelude to the first act of my operatic setting.”