Tolstoy

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 Deeds of Peter the Great, Wise Reformer of Russia, published at the end of the eighteenth century, to the latest contemporary portraits by Slavophile historians, whose attitude to Peter’s reign was far more ambivalent. And then there were studies by historians such as Mikhail Semevsky, who respected Peter’s achievements but was repelled by his sacrilegious, Rabelaisian behaviour. General histories, monographs, memoirs, diaries, letters – Tolstoy devoured everything he could lay his hands on.⁶ He also perused pictures and contemporary portraits.

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 just such tools, so she did not immediately realise what they were digging her with, and, like the black earth, she opened up and began to breathe. And so she, our beloved, received actual and privy councillors, who never gave her, the long-suffering one, the chance to collect herself and to think: ‘Where are you pushing me?’… ‘We’ve moved forward!’ – you lie – ‘We’re still stuck back there!’…⁷

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 ABC, Musorgsky was reproducing children’s speech in his exquisite song cycle The Nursery), and a studious concern for authenticity which embraced the tiniest detail. In trying to conceive a way of writing about Peter the Great’s Azov campaigns against the Turks, in January 1873 Tolstoy wrote to a family acquaintance who lived in the south of Russia to ask very precise questions about the landscape by the River Don. What were the riverbanks like? What sort of grasses grew there? Were there bushes? Was it pebbly? Tolstoy certainly entertained high hopes for his Peter the Great novel,⁹ but he found he could not breathe life into his many drafts, no matter how hard he tried. It is somewhat ironic that in February 1873, just as the public was informed of his latest work in progress in a newspaper column, he was on the verge of giving it up.¹⁰ Within weeks he would be seized with a desire to write on contemporary themes, setting his new novel in the turbulent age in which he lived.