Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Even Cui, a fellow member of the Mighty Bunch, smacked Mussorgsky in print: “There are two main flaws in ‘Boris’: chopped-up recitative and scattered musical thoughts, making the opera potpourri-like in places.” These flaws, in Cui’s opinion, were the result of “careless, self-satisfied, and hasty composing.”¹³

His friend’s hostile attitude bewildered Mussorgsky. “Behind this mad attack, this flagrant lie, I see nothing, as if soapy water had spread in the air.”¹⁴

Not surprisingly, Mussorgsky started his next opera, Khovanshchina (or “Khovansky Affair”), about the war the young Peter the Great and his cohort fought against the rebel streltsy (musketeers) and Old Believers, in 1682, feeling totally isolated. One of the few who came to his aid then was Filippov.

First Filippov created a sinecure for him in the State Comptroller’s Office, and when the composer turned out to be incapable of performing even nominal office duties and fled his job, Filippov (with a few friends) took on paying Mussorgsky a private pension so that he could concentrate on Khovanshchina.

Filippov was eager for Mussorgsky to complete the opera also because he was particularly interested in the schism, considering it the epochal event in Russian life. Pobedonostsev viewed the Old Believers as enemies undermining Russian Orthodoxy. His deputy commented, “No one has caused as much harm to the Church in her struggle with the schism as Filippov.”¹⁵

Filippov and Mussorgsky had lively discussions about the schism. The state comptroller provided Mussorgsky with books on its history, including his own writings. The composer read them avidly and used them to write his own original libretto for Khovanshchina, but he did not complete the opera, dying in 1881 at the age of forty-two. The funeral took place at the prestigious cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, arranged by Filippov and Pobedonostsev working together for once. Rimsky-Korsakov completed and orchestrated Khovanshchina.

Khovanshchina is perhaps the greatest political opera of all time. It does have a love subplot, but it is clearly secondary. The main thing is the clash of different political forces, expressed in music of such power and passion that the opera comes across as an expressionist thriller.

Mussorgsky conjured up idealists, opportunists, traitors, political pragmatists, and religious martyrs, who lived on the stage like real people. The self-immolation of the schismatics in the finale invariably moves one to tears. This opera will always be timely for Russia, since it probes the secrets of the Russian soul perhaps even more deeply than Mussorgsky’s more famous work, Boris Godunov.

A comparison of Khovanshchina with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, composed in 1834–1836, seems inevitable. Both operas deal with the Romanov struggle for power, but the approach of the two composers is strikingly different. Glinka portrayed the unity of monarch and people; his opera, created under the aegis and with the direct involvement of Nicholas I, instantly became the musical emblem of Russian autocracy. Khovanshchina was largely ignored by the Romanovs.

Glinka’s enemies of the Russian monarch are foreigners—the Poles; the center of Mussorgsky’s opera is the civil war inside Russia. For Glinka, the divine prerogatives of Mikhail Romanov were a given. Mussorgsky’s sympathies are with the rebels, even though intellectually he understands the inevitability of Peter’s victory.

Glinka’s opera is heroic and static, while Mussorgsky’s opera is fluid, contradictory, and profoundly tragic. The composer of Khovanshchina feels deeply for Russia and mourns its fate. Filippov may have had an idea of how to use it for patriotic propaganda, but it remained a puzzle for Alexander III.

When the Wanderer artist Surikov tackled the schism theme powerfully in his 1887 painting Lady Morozova, depicting an Old Believer being driven off into exile while the crowd of onlookers cheer and jeer her, the emperor and his entourage were also ambivalent. Surikov described Alexander’s visit to the show. “He came up to the painting. ‘Ah, that’s the yurodivy [holy fool]!’ he said. He figured out all the faces. My throat dried up from nervousness: I couldn’t talk. The rest, they were like gundogs all over the place.”¹⁶

Most of the Mighty Bunch, unlike many of the Wanderers, came from quite respectable families. But their aesthetic was revolutionary, in the artistic, not political, sense. The Wanderers, as they moved on, became singers of the new, bourgeois Russia. Alexander III is sometimes called the first bourgeois ruler of Russia. And in fact, in cultural issues, the emperor had very bourgeois tastes—and uncountable riches.