The Icon and the Axe

Just at this moment of revolutionary excitement a fourth alternative leadership for the mob is heard offstage: the sound of two Polish Jesuits from the entourage of the False Dmitry chanting a Latin prayer in measured tenor notes. Varlaam and Missail's booming bass voices incite the mob to haul off these "ravens and vampires," even though they themselves are committed to the support of Dmitry. The Jesuits are hauled off to be lynched. They represent Latinstvo, the oldest and most enduring symbol of Western ideology, which is rejected with particular violence by proponents of a special path for the Russian people, whether presented in an old Catholic or in a new liberal form. It was the unfortunate fate of the two Jesuits to arrive on the scene-like the constitutional proposals of Alexander H's last years-at the precise moment when revolutionary passions were aroused and their fate foredoomed. These two Jesuits are disciples of the sinister and diabolic Rangoni, who is not present in Pushkin's play but dominates the Polish act in Musorgsky's final version of the opera: a kind of reminder that Musorgsky's age was more profoundly anti-Western than Pushkin's. Finally, the fifth and last external force to come before "the people" appears: the False Dmitry himself, who is hailed as the new Tsar by the gullible mob. The masses in Kromy Forest, like those of Alexander's time, thus end up no better off than they were to begin with. They have a new tsar, who-we have been repeatedly led to believe-will probably be worse than the one he replaced, which was indeed the case with Alexander III. This is the final message that comes at the end as the mob leaves the stage, trailing blindly behind the False Dmitry. Bells ring; a red glow from a distant fire lights the background; and the humiliated fool steps forth. He,

like Boris before him, can no longer pray; and as the orchestra clears away the echoes of praise for God and Dmitry with a few lacerating chords of grief, the fool brings the opera to an end:

bitter tears

tears of blood

weep, weep, Orthodox soul  soon the enemy will come

and the darkness fall

the dark darkness

impenetrable …

weep, weep, Russian people,

hungry people.12

Musorgsky had plunged out into the deep but had not found "the other shore." The bark is lost at sea, a helpless prey for alien currents. We are left only with the cry of the man in the boat, in all its honest, agonizing simplicity.

He had written to Repin that "a true artist who should dig deep enough would have cause to dance for joy at the results";13 but fathoming the depths further led him only to "songs and dances of death," his most famous song cycle. The melancholia which overcame him-and which Repin has preserved in the haunting portrait of him painted two weeks before his death -is amplified in Khovanshchina, the chaotic and unfinished first part of a trilogy which occupied much of the last eight years of Musorgsky's life. The ostensible theme is the end of Old Russia in an orgy of wild excess, Khovanshchina, that ends in the self-immolation of the Old Believers in the last act; and the coming victory of "new" Russia that is foreshadowed by the offstage sounds of the coming Preobrazhensky regiment at the end. Yet there is no clear message; people no longer seem capable of affecting or even understanding what is going on. The mob at Kromy was at least able to look for answers and follow leaders, whereas the streltsy can only drink, dance, and give way to another mob which murders their leader, Khovansky. The arias of Boris involve a recognition of sin and a search for expiation; but those of Shaklovity, Marfa, and Dosifei are only lamentations and divinations, obscure in meaning and charged with foreboding. Gradually one senses that Russia is only superficially the subject of the opera, even though Musorgsky spent endless months studying Russian history before writing it. Russia is rather the background against which two deeper forces are contending for the destiny of men: the God-saturated world of nature and pride-saturated world of material force. Khovanshchina stands as a kind of mammoth naturalistic tone poem that begins at sunrise and ends in moonlight, that begins by the river in Moscow and ends with a fire in the forest.

The Christian substratum of Boris Godunov (and of early populism?) has been eliminated. The two scenes devoted to the streltsy show them as-to cite the phrase of the scribe in the opera-"beasts in human shape." In the carousing scene, they become, in effect, a mob of dancing bears exiled from humanity in the manner of peasant folklore. They are reminiscent of an extreme and debauched revolutionary circle of Musorgsky's time which mystified the police by referring to itself as "the Bear Academy."14 Their leader, Ivan Khovansky, is a "white swan" who is first hailed and then mocked after his assassination with the hushed and beautiful line "Glory and honor to the white swan."