The Icon and the Axe

Igor was Borodin's only mature opera, and came close to being a collective enterprise of the Russian national school even before Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov were called on to finish the work after his death. Borodin often composed in the company of his friends. He used his knowledge as one of the outstanding chemists of his age to devise a special gelatin for preserving his crudely penciled scores and also to help develop Russian medical education. Despite his cosmopolitan education and mastery of many languages and disciplines, Borodin looked to Russian popular culture for his dramatic subject matter. He died in Russian national costume at a benefit ball, and was laid to rest near Musorgsky and Dostoevsky in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery. If subsequent generations were to remember Borodin's opera primarily for the famed dances in the camp of the Polovtsy, those who first saw the opera in the melancholy Russia of the early 1890's must have felt a special sense of identification with an earlier scene in the same act. The lonely figure of Igor, defeated in his great campaign and frustrated by his captivity, seeks private consolation by summoning up-in some of the most ecstatic music ever written for the bass voice-the image of his faithful wife; and by stepping forward to sing a line that is echoed by the surging orchestra and might well stand as the unanswered lyric prayer of the populist age: "O, give, give me freedom."2 Left with "small deeds" and unfulfilled hopes, idealists in the age of Alexander III fled from the broad arena of history to private worlds of lyric lament. The failure of the populist age and its prophetic artists to find any new redemptive message for Russia was accepted as final. The only

consolation was to find beauty in the very sadness of life. The fairy-tale beauty of Chaikovsky's ballets, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty, began during this period their long service to Russia of providing childlike interludes of graceful fancy for a harassed people. The talent that was to produce in 1890 the powerful, at times hallucinatory operatic masterpiece, The Queen of Spades, had already fashioned from another famous text of Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, the most popular opera of the 1880's (thanks partly to Alexander Ill's special passion for it). The preoccupation of this opera with unideological problems of personal relations and its mood of lush musical melancholy corresponded in many ways to the spirit of the times. Lensky's tenor lament for his wasted youth and Onegin's own farewell to his lost love amidst falling leaves in the last act seemed to drown sadness in a gush of melody. The composer who had entered the Russian musical scene with a buoyant cantata of 1865 based on Schiller's "Ode to Joy" died in 1893, just nine days after conducting the first performance of his grief-laden Sixth Symphony, appropriately known as the "Pathetique."

The leading painter of this period, Isaac Levitan, retreated altogether from the world of people to become perhaps the greatest of all Russian landscape painters. Not a single human figure appears in the paintings of the last twenty-one years of his life.3 Yet Levitan, like Chaikovsky, projects a deeply human sense of sadness into the beauty of his work. Many of his best compositions-"Evening on the Volga," "Evening Bells," and "The Golden Autumn"-depict the afterglow of nature rather than daylight or the promise of springtime.

An even sadder mood is set in the work of Levitan's lifelong friend, Anton Chekhov. Nowhere more than in Chekhov's plays does one find the pathos-in-comedy of human futility portrayed with more beauty and feeling. Although his greatest plays were written early in the reign of Nicholas II, they reflect the mood that had developed under Alexander III, the period of Chekhov's development as a writer. "I am in mourning for my life," explains the leading character at the beginning of Chekhov's first great play, The Sea Gull. The idea of a dead sea gull as a symbol of pathos had been suggested to him by Levitan; but through Chekhov's plays the symbol became equated with the slow and graceful gliding out to sea of old aristocratic Russia.

Characters wander across the stage unable to communicate with one another, let alone with the world about them. "There is nothing for it," says Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya. "We shall live through a long chain of days and weary evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials which fate sends us . . . and when our time comes we shall die without a murmur." Consis-