NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD

A distinguished Russian diplomat, a visitor now in America, has asked us not to judge Russia too hastily; above all, not to abandon hopes for her future. The deposition of the Romanovs could not be accomplished without a social cataclysm and the presence of what Nicholas Murray Butler has so happily called “an inverted autocracy,” that is to say, contemporary Bolshevikism. But the newcomers, after tumbling over thrones and dynasties, cannot be expected to halt at any half-way house of outworn political expediency. Their slogan is: All or Nothing. Everything is permitted. Precisely the device on the victorious standards of that strange Old Man of the Mountain, from whose followers we derive the sinister word “Assassin.” Yet we are fain to believe that, as nothing long endures, the tremendous Russian muddle will be straightened out sometime. In the bad old days when the Russian moujik was not singing songs saturated with vodka, he spun legends shot through with the fantastic or grim with the pain of life. In the European concert his formidable bass voice made the voices of his neighbors seem thin and piping. Napoleon prophesied that before the end of the nineteenth century Europe would be either republican or cossack, and a Moscow journal has proclaimed that the “twentieth century belongs to us.” One need not be a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of a Russian for his country is a veritable passion. And from lips parched by the desire of liberty, though the Russian be persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, and murdered, this passion is ever voiced with unabated intensity. What eloquent apostrophes have their great writers made to their native land! The youngest among the great nations, herself a nation with genius, she must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. How Turgénieff praised her noble tongue: “O! mighty Russian language!”...

Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a sojourner among English ideas. Ivan Turgénieff, a Muscovite doubled by a Greek artist, was called a cosmopolitan by Dostoievsky—that profound and sombre soul—and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was not sufficiently national; whereas to western ears it once smacked too much of the Kalmuck. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered from the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. The case of Modeste Moussorgsky is altogether different. If Russian music, the organized musical speech of the nation, owes much to Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, nevertheless Michael Glinka was its father. Like Weber, he lovingly plucked from his native soil its wild flowers of melody, and gave them an operatic setting in his Ruslan and Life for the Czar. In his turn and representing the elder school are Darjomisky and Serov, while with New Russia blazoned on their banners follow César Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balikirev, Glazounov, Stcherbatchev, Rachmaninov, Arensky, Moussorgsky, and, last not least, Scriabin.

It might prove interesting to compare the cosmopolitanism of Tschaikovsky with Turgénieff’s. George Moore insists with Celtic obstinacy that Turgénieff is the greatest master of fiction, greater even than Flaubert, because his art is effortless. Certainly, the Russian is the most artistic among novelists. Tschaikovsky was suspiciously regarded by the lesser native choir, while the big men, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and Tolstoy had an army of imitators, who wore their blouses untucked in their trousers. It was a symbol. Their watchword was: We are going to the People! From the Intelligentsia, the students, to the peasant himself, this ominous cry was heard. It is still sounded. Its echoes are in Western ears. The Great White Czar would not heed the warning. Going to the People is a phrase indicating a savage reaction against cosmopolitan influences; Russia had successively suffered from the invasions of English, French, and German ideas, customs, manners, costumes. The rabid Slavophilist would have none of these. He disliked Italian pictures, loathed German philosophy, despised French literature, and hated English politics. Yet, from these seemingly disparate elements was born a national consciousness, a national culture. Its eclecticism caused its disintegration.

To comprehend latter-day Russian music we should remember that the national spirit pervades its masterpieces. And that spirit is not in a special compartment separated from the seven arts, but waters their roots. With us art is a tender flower, isolated as if in a hothouse. The artist in America lives in a vacuum, or else creates his own atmosphere. In Russia, “barbarous” Russia, as we condescendingly refer to her, an artist is first a patriot. The English critic, John M. Robertson, wrote in 1891: “In that strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in the production of truthful literary art, ... for justice of perception, soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in England with all our freedom, can offer no parallel.” Tyranny, then, may be forcing ground for genius! From Gogol to Artzibachev Russian literature achieved its spiritual freedom despite the Czar and Siberia. The reason we speak of these writers and composers is because to know them is to grasp the psychology of Russian music, which is so often inspired by the poems, novels, and dramas of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgénieff, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Gorky, Andreyev, Artzibachev, and by the paintings of Repin, Perov, Verestchagin, and, in the case of Prokofieff, by Boris Anisfeld.

We have elsewhere made a critical comparison of Dostoievsky with Moussorgsky; no need to refer to it here, except to say that when Dostoievsky wrote, “The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian soul is a dark place,” he accurately plotted his nation’s psychic curve. And let it be said in passing that the author of Crime and Punishment had developed the mystic idea (your Russian is nothing if not mystical) that from Russia must come the salvation of the peoples of the earth—from Russian Christianity. This notion became an obsession of the great-souled writer, in whose Karamasov Brothers and The Possessed (Besi), may be found the leading motives of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the superman, the eternal recurrence, the fantastic idea that eternity may be in a “boxed-in” bathhouse, an idea that Henri Barbusse, who is saturated with Dostoievsky, develops in L’Enfer, that infinity is contained within us. Eternity is Now. Tolstoy, who was best described by Count Melchior de Vogué in his epigram as having “the mind of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist” (“On dirait l’esprit d’un chimiste anglais dans l’âme d’un buddhiste hindou”) has not played as influential a rôle among Russian composers because he was essentially tone-deaf. His Kreutzer Sonata demonstrates how a man ignorant of music, great artist that he is, may write himself down absurdly. In comparison Dostoievsky is a spiritual reservoir of musical certitudes; while in Turgénieff, thanks to a natural sensibility and years of musical cultivation while sojourning in the household of the Viardot-Garcias at Paris—surely the happiest as well as the most artistic “ménage à trois” in history—he wrote of the art with sympathy and understanding.

The further one dives into the Orient the more chromatic become the arts, especially the tonal art. The chromatic scale was once the shibboleth of the Neo-Russian composer, and, being the artistic offspring of Liszt and the Slav, he vainly sought to veil his paternity by painting it over with local color. It was then a trackless and seldom explored country his, full of yawning harmonic precipices, melodies that are at once heavenly and hideous—like the mouth of a pretty woman with missing front teeth; mountainous ideals, bleak surprises, and rugged vistas. To-day matters have changed. The younger generation, headed by the astonishing Alexander Scriabin, has thrown chromaticism to the dogs. The whole-tone scale is monarch. Arnold Schoenberg declared the scale must escape the House of Bondage and be free from scholastic shackles. Modulation is to be as Free Love, which may supersede marriage—according to the recent programme of the Reds. Rebikov, Stravinsky, Serge Prokofieff, and Leo Ornstein have long ago nailed their color to the mast. It is unequivocally scarlet. Notwithstanding the seeming anarchy in all these social and artistic manifestations, we believe that to the Slav is the future. Out of darkest Russia may emerge the next world-composer. Scriabin may be only the Precursor of the new evangel. Dostoievsky is right. There is enough fire of righteousness in the Russians to burn up the world and all its wickedness. Russia is the matrix heavy with unborn genius, and who shall bear down too heavily now on her sorrow and travail? Water seeks its level. A country is no greater than her great men. And how truly great are those we have just named! New lamps for old. A new and glorious Russia for the old. Avos!