In order to gain a sense of what it was like to live in Russia during Peter’s reign, Tolstoy surrounded himself with an enormous number of books and articles. They ranged from the thirty volumes of Ivan Golikov’s reverent
Musorgsky also revelled in the profusion of new books and articles which were gradually filling in the blank spots of Russian history, but he was extremely sceptical as to whether Peter’s reforms had really been beneficial. In the letter he sent to Stasov in June 1872, written in his typically opaque style, Musorgsky asserted that Russia had not progressed as a nation:
The power of the black earth will reveal itself when you dig down to the very bottom. It is possible to dig the black earth with tools alien to it. And at the end of the seventeenth century they did dig Mother Russia with
Musorgsky was overwhelmed by the task of having to fashion a libretto himself from the many disparate primary sources he was working with, and he never managed to finish the score for his opera. Tolstoy was not at all perturbed by the dimensions of his task, but his project never even got off the ground, as the more he read about Peter the Great, the less he attractive he became as a potential character in a novel. He was disappointed by the personality of Russia’s first emperor, later dismissing him as a ‘drunken jester’.8
Musorgsky’s alcoholism also played a part in diminishing any interest Tolstoy might have had in his music (it drove the composer to an early death in 1881, when he was just forty-two). Although he was later surprised how much he liked the Musorgsky songs performed for him in 1903, Tolstoy generally had little interest in contemporary Russian music, and remained oblivious to its achievements. Tolstoy and Musorgsky had a surprising amount in common, however, despite never coming into contact. They shared a passion for Russia and its history, a deep interest in the rich textures of the Russian language (while Tolstoy was composing his