Natasha's Dance (66 page)

    This was the background to the intellectual conflicts over the conception of
Sadko
(1897), the opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. The evolution of the opera was typical of the collectivist traditions of the
kuchkist
school. The original idea had been given by Stasov to Balakirev as early as 1867; Balakirev passed it on to Musorgsky; and Musorgsky handed it to Rimsky-Korsakov. It is easy to see why Rimsky should have been attracted to the story of the opera. Like Sadko, Rimsky was a sailor (a former naval officer, to be precise) and musician who came from Novgorod. Moreover, as Stasov wrote to him with his draft scenario in 1894, the subject would allow the composer to explore ‘the magic elements of Russian pagan culture which are so strongly felt in your artistic character’.
⁹¹
In the standard versions of the
bylina
Sadko is a humble minstrel
(skomorokh)
who plays the
gusli
and sings of setting sail for distant lands in search of new markets for the town. None of the merchant elites will back him, so Sadko sings his songs to Lake Ilmen, where the Sea Princess appears and declares her love for him. Sadko journeys to the underwater world, where the Sea King, delighted by the minstrel’s singing, rewards him with his daughter’s hand in marriage. At their wedding there is such wild dancing to the tunes played by Sadko that it causes hurricanes and a violent sea storm, which sinks all the ships from Novgorod. When the storm subsides, Sadko is washed up, with a net of golden fish, on the shores of lake Ilmen. He returns to Novgorod, gives away his money to the merchants ruined by the storm, and endows the church of St Boris and St Gleb.

    For Stasov this
bylina
was the perfect vehicle for his cultural politics. The spirit of rebellion which Sadko showed against the Novgorod elites symbolized the struggle of the Russian school against the musical establishment. But more importantly, as Stasov hoped, the opera was a chance to draw attention to the Eastern elements of the Sadko tale. As Stasov explained in his draft scenario for Rimsky-Korsakov,
Sadko
was full of shamanistic magic, and this pointed to its Asian provenance, in particular to the Brahmin
Hariuansa
tale. The
skomorokh,
in

    Stasov’s view, was a Russian descendant of the Asian shamans (a view, incidentally, which many modern scholars share).
⁹²
Like a shaman, the
skomorokh
was known to wear a bearskin and a mask, to bang his
gusli
like a drum, and to sing and dance himself into a trance-like frenzy, chanting magic charms to call upon the spirits of the magic world.
⁹³
In the draft scenario Stasov underlined these shamanistic powers by having Sadko’s music serve as the main agency of transcendental flight to the underwater world and back again; and, as he emphasized to Rimsky-Korsakov, it was the ‘magic effect of his music that should be seen to cause the sea-storm, which sinks all the ships’.* Sadko’s odyssey was to be portrayed as a shamanistic flight to a dreamworld, a ‘spiritual voyage into his own being’, as Stasov mapped it out for the composer, and the hero of the opera should return to Novgorod ‘as if waking from a dream’.
⁹⁴

    There was good reason for Stasov to look to Rimsky as the ideal composer for the opera. Rimsky had in the past been interested in Stasov’s Eastern version of Sadko. In 1867 he had composed the symphonic suite
Sadko,
a work whose debt to Balakirev’s
Tamara
(‘far from completed at the time but already well-known to me from the fragments played by the composer’) was candidly acknowledged by Rimsky in his
Reminiscences.
⁹⁵
Sadko’s whirling dance is practically identical to the Tamara theme, and, like Balakirev, Rimsky used the pentatonic scale to create an authentic oriental feel.+ However, by the time of his
Sadko
opera, Rimsky had become a professor at the Conservatory and, like many professors, was rather too conformist to experiment again with pentatonic harmonies or oriental programmes for the plot. Besides, Rimsky by this stage was much more interested in the Christian motifs of the
bylina.
It was an interest which reflected his increasing preoccupation with the Christian ideal of Russia - an ideal he expressed in his last great opera,
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya
(1907). Rimsky rejected the draft scenario which Stasov, in his usual cajoling manner, had insisted

    * According to A. N. Afanasiev, the great nineteenth-century scholar of mythology, Sadko was the pagan god of wind and storms among the ancient Slavs (see his
Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu,
3 vols. (Moscow,1865-9), vol. 2., p. 214). + Sadko’s dance is even written in Balakirev’s favourite key of D flat major,

    he adopt (the only place where Rimsky gave way to Stasov was in the opening civic scene: it enabled him to begin
Sadko
with the large set-piece for orchestra and chorus that had become an almost mandatory feature for Russian nationalist opera). There was nothing in the music to re-create the Eastern feel of the symphonic suite - other than the common stock of ornamental features which composers in the past had used to evoke the ‘exotic Orient’ (Rimsky used it here to summon up the other-worldly Sea Kingdom). With the help of the Slavophile folklorists who had criticized Stasov, Rimsky made
Sadko
a ‘Russian opera’, with a civic Christian message for the public at the end. At the height of the wedding scene the Sea King calls upon the seas to overflow and ‘destroy the Orthodox people!’ But just then a Russian pilgrim (St Nicholas of Mozhaisk in the
bylina)
appears on the scene to break the Sea King’s spell and send Sadko back to Novgorod. By a miracle the Sea Princess is transformed into the river Volkhova, providing Novgorod with an outlet to the sea. Her disappearance is meant to represent the demise of paganism and the triumph of the Christian spirit in Russia - a spirit symbolized by the building of the church of St Boris and St Gleb. In the end, it seems, the conception of
Sadko
as a story linking Russia to the Asian steppe was far too controversial to produce on stage.
Sadko,
after all, was a national myth - as important to the Russians as
Beowulf is
to the English or the
Kalevala
to the Finns. The only place where Asia left its imprint on the opera was in Stasov’s design for the title page of the score. Stasov used the motifs of medieval manuscripts which he identified as clearly oriental in origin. The middle letter ‘D’ is formed into the shape of a
skomorokh
with his
gusli.
He sits there like an idol or a buddha of the East. The rosette underneath the letter ‘S’ was taken from a portal in the palace of Isphahan.
⁹⁶
The opera’s Christian message was subtly undermined by its very first utterance.

    In April 1890 Chekhov left from Moscow on a three-month trek to Sakhalin, a barren devil’s island in the Okhotsk sea, 800 kilometres north of Japan, where the Tsarist government sentenced some of its

    26.
Vladimir Stasov: title page of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera score
Sadko

capital ‘D’ formed around a
skomorokh
or minstrel playing the
gusli

    most dangerous criminals to penal servitude. Few of Chekhov’s friends could understand why the newly famous writer should abandon everything for such a long and miserable trip, especially in view of his own poor health. Chekhov himself told Suvorin that he was ‘departing

    totally convinced that my journey will yield a valuable contribution neither to literature nor to science’.
⁹⁷
But self-deprecation was natural to him. Whether he was driven by the end of a romance,* the need to find new inspiration for his work, the recent death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis, or simply the desire to escape from the oppressive atmosphere of his own illness, it would appear that Chekhov felt a desperate need to get away and achieve something ‘serious’ before he died.

    One of Chekhov’s heroes was the traveller and writer Nikolai Przhevalsky, who had opened up the world of Central Asia and Tibet to the Russian reading public when Chekhov was a boy. On Przhevalsky’s death, Chekhov wrote a eulogy which tells us a great deal about his state of mind. ‘One Przhevalsky’, Chekhov wrote,

    is worth dozens of scholarly institutions and hundreds of fine books… In our sick times, when European societies are seized by indolence, heroes are as necessary as the sun. Their personalities are living proof that besides people who out of boredom write trifling tales, unneeded plans and dissertations, there are people with a clear faith and objective who perform great feats.
⁹⁸

    Chekhov wanted to become a Przhevalsky - to carry out some obvious achievement for humanity and write something of greater consequence than the ‘trifling tales’ he had penned so far. He read a huge amount in preparation for the trip, researching everything from the geology to
the penal settlement of the remote island, to the point where he complained that he was being driven to insanity:
Mania Sachalinosa.
⁹⁹

    Chekhov’s original aim, as far as one can tell from his correspondence, was to ‘repay a little of my
debt to the science of medicine’ by focusing attention on the treatment of the prisoners in Sakhalin. ‘I regret that I am not a sentimentalist’, he wrote to Suvorin,

    otherwise I would say that we should go on pilgrimages to places like Sakhalin, as the Turks go to Mecca. From the books I have read, it is clear that we have allowed millions of people to rot in prisons, to rot for no purpose, without

    * With Lidya Avilova (a married woman).

    any care, and in a barbarous way… All of us are guilty, but none of this has anything to do with us, it is just not interesting.
¹⁰⁰

    During the three months he spent on Sakhalin, Chekhov interviewed several thousand prisoners, working up to eighteen hours every day and recording all the details on a database of cards which he had printed up for his research. Officials were amazed by the ease with which he gained the convicts’ trust, a capacity he had perhaps developed from his work as a doctor. It gave to his findings, which he wrote up in a simple factual style in
The Island of Sakhalin
(1893-4), the unmistakable authority of truth. In one of the final chapters of that work Chekhov gave an unforgettable description of the brutal beatings which were meted out on an almost casual basis to male and female prisoners alike.

    The executioner stands to one side and strikes in such a way that the lash falls across the body. After every five strokes he goes to the other side and the prisoner is permitted a half-minute rest. [The prisoner] Prokhorov’s hair is matted to his forehead, his neck is swollen. After the first five or ten strokes his body, covered by scars from previous beatings, turns blue and purple, and his skin bursts at each stroke.

    Through the shrieks and cries there can be heard the words, ‘Your worship! Your worship! Mercy, your worship!’

    And later, after twenty or thirty strokes, he complains like a drunken man or like someone in delirium:

    ’Poor me, poor me, you are murdering me… Why are you punishing me?’

    Then follows a peculiar stretching of the neck, the noise of vomiting. A whole eternity seems to have passed since the beginning of the punishment. The warden cries, ‘Forty-two! Forty-three!’ It is a long way to ninety.
¹⁰¹

    The passage made such an impression on the Russian public that it helped to bring about the eventual abolition of corporal punishment - first for women (in 1897) and then for men (in 1904). The campaign was led by members of the medical profession, with Chekhov in a vocal role.
¹⁰²

    A stirring indictment of the tsarist penal system,
Sakhalin
is also a masterpiece of travel writing whose extraordinary feel for the landscape and the wildlife of the Siberian steppe remains unsurpassed.

    Let it be said without offence to the jealous admirers of the Volga that I have never in my life seen a more magnificent river than the Yenisey. A beautifully dressed, modest, melancholy beauty the Volga may be, but, at the other extreme, the Yenisei is a mighty, raging Hercules, who does not know what to do with his power and youth. On the Volga a man starts out with spirit, but finishes up with a groan which is called a song; his radiant golden hopes are replaced by an infirmity which it is the done thing to term ‘Russian pessimism’, whereas on the Yenisei life commences with a groan and finishes with the kind of high spirits which we cannot even dream about. Shortly after the Yenisei the celebrated taiga commences. At first one is really a little disappointed. Along both sides of the road stretch the usual forests of pine, larch, spruce and birch. There are no trees of five arm-girths, no crests, at the sight of which one’s head spins; the trees are not a whit larger than those that grow in the Moscow Sokol-niki. I had been told that the taiga was soundless, and that its vegetation had no scent. This is what I had been expecting, but, the entire time I travelled through the taiga, birds were pouring out songs and insects were buzzing; pine-needles warmed by the sun saturated the air with the thick fragrance of resin, the glades and edges of the forest were covered with delicate pale-blue, pink and yellow flowers, which caress not merely the sense of sight. The power and enchantment of the taiga lie not in titanic trees or the silence of the graveyard, but in the fact that only birds of passage know where it ends.
¹⁰³