The Icon and the Axe

The domain of history held out the promise of prophetic insight. Moscow, the great repository of Russian tradition, was specially revered by Musorgsky's circle, who gave it the name of Jericho, the city which had brought the Jews into the promised land of Canaan. The heartland of Russia was the new Canaan for the restless artists of the populist age. They wandered through it like holy fools of old, and turned to the ever-expanding volume of writing about its history rather in the way monastic artists had previously studied sacred chronicles in search both of worthy subject matter and of personal reassurance and inspiration. Their attention gravitated toward the late Muscovite period: a time similar to their own in spiritual crisis and social upheaval. The same fascination that produced Repin's image of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son and Surikov's picture of Morozova dragged into exile (as well as some of the most popular plays of Ostrovsky and A. K. Tolstoy) also led Musorgsky to devote most of his last thirteen years to two great historical operas dealing with the late Muscovite period. The first of these operas, Boris Godunov, deals with the beginnings of the century of schism; the second, Khovanshchina, with the end. Taken together, they begin on the eve of the Time of Troubles and end with the

self-immolation of the Old Believers and the coming of Peter the Great. They are permeated with the desire for artistic fidelity to the musical laws of speech and emotion; historical fidelity to the known desires and habits of the leading characters; and theatrical fidelity to such traditions as there were in Russian opera since Glinka. But the real triumph of these operas-that which gives them a unique place even in this century of rich operatic accomplishment-is that they tell with artistic integrity much about the aspirations of the populist age itself. A key to understanding his music-and perhaps the populist movement itself-lies in the confession that he made to Bala-kirev just a year after resigning his army commission:

I was oppressed by a terrible disease which came on very badly while I was in the country. It was mysticism, mixed up with cynical thoughts about God. It developed terribly when I returned to Petersburg. I succeeded in concealing it from you, but you must have noticed traces of it in my music. . . .10

This is as close as we are ever brought to the origins of the strange nervous disorder which framed his career and led him to drink himself into derangement and death. It is probably not accidental that he was occupied at the beginning of his career with translating Lavater, the spiritualist and physiognomist who had fascinated Russian mystics of the aristocratic century with his claim to be able to read the nature of men from the shape and expression of their faces; or that the greatest aria in Khovanshchina should be Marfa's strange aria of prophecy and divination. Musorgsky himself was endowed with a strange genius for penetrating through the outer veil of speech and action to the inner desires of his fellow men. There are traces of prophecy in Boris, though they are often concealed from view by the distracting addition of the Polish scene (demanded by Musorgsky's original theatrical producers); by the melodic and melodramatic additions of the Rimsky-Korsakov and other revisions used in present-day productions; and above all by the dramatic and critical overemphasis on the role of Boris, which has become conventional since Chaliapin.

If Boris is the sole-or even the main-focus of interest, the opera becomes little more than another of the many historical melodramas on themes that were characteristic of national theaters in the late nineteenth century. It is, indeed, rather lacking in subtlety and moral sensitivity when compared with the accounts of Karamzin and Pushkin, from which Musorgsky derived his story. Only when the opera is placed in the context of populism does the uniqueness and power of Musorgsky's version become fully apparent. For, just as his friend the populist historian Kostomarov insisted that the simple people rather than tsars were the proper subject of

the true historian, so does Musorgsky make the Russian people rather than the figure of Boris the hero of his opera.