The Icon and the Axe

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