The Icon and the Axe

The Russian people frame the entire drama. It begins and ends with them. Boris is guilty before them from his first words, "My soul is heavy," to his last cry, "Forgive"; and the only alibi he ever offers comes at the height of his maddened clock monologue, when he claims that it was not he who killed the infant Dmitry but "the will of the people." It is the people's plight that is the focus of Musorgsky's attention; the climax of the opera comes in the last scene, which shows the people in the Kromy Forest after Boris is dead. This is a pure addition to the Pushkin version and to Musorgsky's own first version. But unlike the addition of the Polish scene, the forest scene was Musorgsky's own idea-one that drew from a variety of impressions he had gathered throughout the 1868-72 period. He discussed its contents with numerous historians and critics and wrote it in a state of enthusiasm at his "novelty and novelty-novelty out of novelty!"11

The "revolutionary scene," as Stasov called it, reflects with astonishing insight the revolutionary longings of the age in which Musorgsky lived, whatever it may or may not tell us about the original Time of Troubles. The scene was banned from public performances during the Revolution of 1905. The activities of the mob in the forest reflect in microcosm the search for a new basis for authority in late Imperial Russia. The people in the forest- like the populists who were headed there-have lost confidence in the Tsar and have a new and heady belief in the elemental strength and wisdom of the people. As the curtain opens, they are rejecting and deriding the first of five figures that come before the people as a possible alternative to the authority of the dead Tsar. They are mocking and torturing the boyars, the hereditary aristocracy that has gained its authority through an unholy alliance with the Tsar: "Boris stole a throne and he stole from Boris," they chant as they give the Boyar Khrushchev (sic) a whip for a scepter and a 100-year-old peasant woman for a "queen." The scene of mockery swells to a crescendo, with the magnificent chorus based on an old popular rhythm: "Slava boyarinu, Slava Borisovu," which becomes a kind of leitmotiv for the entire scene. Enthusiastic students left the theater singing this anarchistic chorus through the streets of St. Petersburg as Boris made its spectacular entry into the repertoire early in 1874 on the eve of the mad summer that took them off into Kromy forests of their own.

The second alternative to appear before the mob is the prophetic holy fool, or yurodivy, who had told Boris in a preceding confrontation before St. Basil's Cathedral that the "Tsar-Herod" had lost the right to pray for intercession from the Mother of God. He represented the quixotic longing to follow Christ, the half-heretical voice of Christian prophecy which was

so deeply enmeshed in the populist mystique. But his fate in Kromy Forest, like that of the fools who "went to the people," is to be robbed and humiliated by an ungrateful mob. His last coin is taken from him; and he retreats to the back of the stage to make room for the next suitors for the affections of the uprooted masses.

They are the vagabond, pseudo-holy men, Varlaam and Missail, who come out of the depths with bass voices and baser motives to fan the flame of revolution. It is these forest monsters who advise the mob that the Tsar is "a monster eating human flesh"; and they trigger a swelling chorus singing the praises of "power, beautiful power," "terrible and capricious power." The orgiastic climax comes with the women's cry of smert'l ("death"), and then the music swirls and degenerates into a kind of chaotic anticlimax. It is all a kind of uncanny picture of the populist revolutionary movement that was to come: inspired by vagabond conspirators from outside, finding climactic release only in a tsaricide in which women played a prominent part, and dissolving shortly thereafter.