Nietzsche's Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire 9780300216493

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Nietzsche’s Orphans

EURASIA PAST AND PRESENT

General Editors CATRIONA KELLY

University of Oxford DOUGLAS ROGERS

Yale University MARK D. STEINBERG

University of Illinois

Nietzsche’s Orphans Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire

Rebecca Mitchell

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College. Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Mitchell. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in PostScript Electra with Trajan types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941641 ISBN: 978-­0 -­300-20889-­4 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Andrew

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Contents

Preface ix Note on Transliteration and Usage xiii Introduction: In Search of Unity 1 O n e  Musical Metaphysics in Late Imperial Russia 25 t w o  Aleksandr Scriabin: Music and Salvation 61 t h r e e  The Medtner Brothers: Orpheus in an Age of Nationalism 104 f o u r  Sergei Rachmaninoff: The Unwilling Orpheus 137 f i v e  Musical Metaphysics in War and Revolution 165

Epilogue: Reverberations 207 Glossary of Names 227 Notes 235 Bibliography 291 Index 313

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Preface

As an inquisitive undergraduate piano performance student at the University of Saskatchewan, I spent long hours in the music library’s audio collection in search of new repertoire. One of my most striking discoveries was a recording of émigré pianist Vladimir Horowitz performing works by Aleksandr Scriabin, a composer hitherto unknown to me. Immediately captivated by the composer’s elaborate harmonies, intense drama, and mysterious mood, I began reading about this enigmatic figure from late imperial Russia. Why had Scriabin believed that music would usher in the end of the world, and what was the nature of his apocalyptic vision? What sort of cultural and intellectual environment had nourished Scria­bin’s seemingly megalomaniacal vision of his power to spiritually transform reality? What had his contemporaries made of his messianic claims? How did his vision interact with the political and social upheaval in the final years of the Russian Empire? My search for answers to these questions led me ever deeper into the mystical, philosophical, religious, and cultural circles of Russia’s prerevolutionary elite. Along the way, I discovered many unexpected interlocutors, from German philosophers to wealthy Moscow merchants and Soviet politicians. My quest to understand the “true” Scriabin soon transcended the composer himself, leading to engagement with ever broader questions of modernity, Russian identity, and empire. This book is the result of my exploration of the complex worldview of Russia’s cultural elite amid the turmoil of the early twentieth century as they sought to comprehend and prescribe solutions for the challenges of the modern age. My scholarly path took many twists and turns along the way, which both altered my understanding of this project and enhanced my overall intellectual develop-

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x Preface ment. For my early intellectual and musical formation, I am indebted to Bonnie Nicholson and Walter Kreyszig, who encouraged me to think critically about music itself. Two years of master’s-­degree study in piano performance at the Meadows School of the Arts (Southern Methodist University) were formative in shaping my approach to music, both as a performer and as a listener. From my piano instructor, Alfred Mouledous, I learned the delicate balance between emotional intensity and intellectual rigor needed as a performer, while Carol Reynolds supported my interest in Russian music and culture. Under the guidance of R. Carter Elwood, Joan DeBardeleben, Piotr Dutkiewicz, Marvin Glass, Andrea Chandler, and Vladimir Popov at Carleton University’s Institute of European and Russian Studies, I first engaged with the study of Russian history, politics, and economics. Fifteen months of study at St. Petersburg State University enabled me to immerse myself in Russian language, culture, and music. At the Department of History at the University of Illinois, this work developed from a musical and intellectual biography of Scriabin into an analysis of a generation of Russia’s cultural elite within the fraught final years of the empire. My advisor, Mark Steinberg, was unwavering in his support and enthusiasm for my work, and his critical perspective was formative in shaping this project as a whole. Conversations with John Randolph on topics ranging from imperial Russian society to philosophy, politics, and the impact of music on human life inspired new perspectives in my research. Mark Micale’s expertise on European cultural and intellectual history immeasurably strengthened this project, and Diane Koenker provided valuable feedback and encouraged me to explore more fully the social dimensions underpinning the world of Russia’s cultural elites. In the Department of Music, Donna Buchanan introduced me to the insights and perspectives of ethnomusicology, while supporting my specific scholarly interests. William Kinderman’s expertise in music and philosophy amended numerous oversights and provided a broader comparative perspective within which to place my own work. Many colleagues generously contributed to the transformation of this project from unruly manuscript to its final form. Lincoln Ballard, Andy Bruno, David Cooper, Karen Dawisha, Polina Dimova, Amanda Eisemann, Aileen Friesen, Venelin Ganev, Elana Jakel, Ryan Jones, Steven Jug, Scott Kenworthy, Michelle Kleehammer, Neringa Klumbyte, Katerina Levidou, Liliana Milkova, Harriet Murav, Jesse Murray, Steve Norris, Deirdre Ruscitti, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Jessica Shelvik, Valeria Sobol, Maia Solovieva, Ben Sutcliffe, Elina Viljanen, and James Welker all provided valuable feedback and assistance on various sections of the project as it developed. The 2013 conference “Music and Power: Historical Problems and Perspectives in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia”

Preface xi at Miami University offered a congenial environment for discussion, and I am thankful to all the participants at that event: Robert Bird, Andrew Burgard, Polina Dimova, Elena Dubinets, Leah Goldman, Peter Kupfer, James Loeffler, Stephen Muir, Megan Rancier, Richard Taruskin, Gleb Tsipursky, Lisa Cooper Vest, Marina Frolova-­Walker, and Patrick Zuk. Susannah Lockwood-­Smith and Lynn Sargeant offered commentary on chapters and conference presentations, while Philip Bullock, Polina Dimova, Leah Goldman, and Julia Mannherz all offered comments on the overall manuscript as it took shape. My larger arguments crystallized through presentations given at Middlebury College, Ohio State University, the Midwest Russian History Workshop, the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki, the Karl-­Franzens University in Graz, and through conversation with numerous students during my two years at Oberlin College. To be indebted to such a dynamic group of scholars is a privilege, and my work has been immeasurably strengthened by their thoughtful comments and critiques. Research on this scale would have been impossible without financial and institutional support from a wide range of sources. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Illinois Department of History and Graduate College enabled numerous trips to Russia, as well as shorter research trips to New York, Washington, DC, and Leeds (UK). Two years of funding as a postdoctoral fellow at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-­ Soviet Studies (Miami University) gave me the necessary time and space to reconceptualize this project in key ways, while an H. H. Powers travel grant from Oberlin College supported essential final research in Russia and Finland. Archivists, librarians, and staff at the National Library of Finland, the Russian National Library, the Russian State Library, the Russian Historical Library, the Russian State Library of Art, the State Central Museum of Musical Culture (Glinka Museum), the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Russian State Historical Archive, the Central State Archive of Moscow, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), the Aleksandr Gol’denveizer Museum, the Scriabin Museum, and the Bakhmeteff Archive assisted me in locating materials central to my research. Librarians at the Performing Arts Reading Room in the Library of Congress and Richard Davies, archivist at the Leeds Russian Archive, offered invaluable assistance in tracking down materials that I otherwise might have overlooked. Librarians Janice Pilch at Rutgers University and Masha Stepanova at Miami University offered additional guidance. I particularly thank Irina Lukka of the National Library of Finland, Tanya Cheboratev of the Bakhmeteff Archive, the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, the State Culture Foundation, Moscow/Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library, and Lincoln Ballard for permission to reproduce images from their collections.

xii Preface While assistance from all these individuals and institutions has made this work possible, I bear full responsibility for any mistakes or misinterpretations. At Yale University Press, I would like to thank my acquiring editor, Jaya Chatterjee, and my production editor, Ann-­Marie Imbornoni, as well as the series editors, Mark Steinberg, Catriona Kelly, and Doug Rogers. Meredith Phillips did valuable work with the initial file preparation. My copy editor, Duke Johns, did an excellent job preparing the manuscript for publication and caught many errors in the final stages of preparation. The manuscript also benefited from excellent feedback from two anonymous readers at Yale University Press, whose insightful comments strengthened the overall project. Friends and family have supported me throughout my efforts. My parents, Karen and Archie Mitchell, have been unwavering in their love and support, both emotional and financial. Ed Walker and Brenda Kurlansik provided a welcoming home base in Washington, DC, during several research trips to the Library of Congress. My parents-­in-­law, Tom and Carol Demshuk, as well as my brother and his family (Matthew, Suzanne, Jamie, Pat, and Terry) have all offered encouragement. Lisa Larson, Kaila Larson, and Darcy Lueke have provided a place of respite and calm in the midst of the writing process. Finally, my husband, Andrew Demshuk, has devoted endless hours to discussing, reading, and commenting upon this project in all its stages, from the first tentative beginnings to its current form. In thanks for his tireless devotion, I dedicate this work to him.

Note on Transliteration and Usage

Throughout the text, I have employed a modified form of the Library of Congress’s Russian transliteration system. When proper names have a generally accepted English variant, I have used this in the body of the text (Scriabin rather than Skriabin, Rachmaninoff rather than Rakhmaninov, Medtner rather than Metner). In citations of Russian sources, the names appear in transliterated form in the notes (Skriabin, Rakhmaninov, Metner). Prior to February 1918, Russia adhered to the Julian calendar, which, in the early twentieth century, was thirteen days behind the Gregorian. Unless otherwise noted, dates in Russian sources are given in the Julian style (Old Style), while European sources are given in the Gregorian style (New Style). In correspondence between Russia and Europe, both dates are generally given (as was common in original sources), separated by slashes. After February 1918, all dates given are in the Gregorian style. Unless otherwise indicated, all musical analyses and translations are my own.

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Introduction: In Search of Unity

Without music, life would be a mistake. —Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888 Only music is indispensable. —Aleksandr Blok, 1913

Writing for the influential St. Petersburg Russian Musical Newspaper in 1910, composer Vladimir Rebikov seized upon the Greek myth of Orpheus to explain late imperial Russia’s apparent cultural decline and social turmoil. Might this ancient legend—in which the musician Orpheus was torn to pieces by Bacchic worshippers—offer a metaphorical solution for the deepening crisis in Russian culture? Rebikov lamented that in the surrounding world, the Bacchic “song of the blood” had destroyed the Orphic “song of the soul.” Humanity had lost connection with higher, spiritual strivings and thrown itself into the dissolute celebration of mere physical existence. This tragic prehistory also set the stage for the composer’s vision of the future. Looking with disdain upon what he perceived to be the soulless physicality of the modern age, Rebikov prophesied that the moment was at hand when, “after many hundreds of centuries, Orpheus will be remembered [and] his lyre will be sought.” Far from a mere legend, the spirit of Orpheus was destined to be reincarnated in Russia. Passing into the hands of a contemporary musician, the lyre of Orpheus would “once more sound the victorious song of the soul in the hands of the resurrected god.”1 As had happened in ancient times, harmonies from the lyre of Orpheus would transform life itself, heralding the reawakening of a higher spirituality that had been lost in the 1

2 Introduction modern era. Through his music, this Russian Orpheus would reunite humanity, offering a deeper meaning for earthly existence than materialism and positivism could offer. While calling on his contemporaries to join him in his quest for the forgotten lyre of Orpheus, Rebikov at times suspected that he himself might be this musical messiah, sent to bring salvation to Russia and all humanity from the secularism of the modern world.2 Rebikov’s “parable” of the lyre of Orpheus was more than mere self-­ aggrandizement; born out of intense political, social, and cultural turmoil in the early twentieth century, it epitomized the central role granted to music in Russian society at the time. In a troubled age that inspired hosts of prophets, artists, and politicians to fervently seek out some form of unity (edinstvo), Orpheus and his art—music—held a central symbolic place.3 Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s interpretation of music as the ultimate unifying force in his 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy, many Russian cultural elites envisioned music as the most effective means of salvation from the perceived divisions of modernity. In the midst of the tumult of the 1905 Revolution, St. Petersburg translator, composer, and music critic Aleksandr Koptiaev voiced this expectation, predicting the appearance of a “musician-­poet, who would, through glorious consonances, unite society in its war for a new and better order.”4 Nikolai Suvorovskii was even more outspoken in his article on music published in the symbolist journal The Scales (Vesy), declaring, “Now the time of waiting for the Messiah has come.”5 By 1907 this salvific image of music had so saturated the Russian cultural press that symbolist writer Andrei Bely complained that “these days they talk as if music were a religion.”6 Considered far more than mere entertainment in late imperial Russia, music reigned in many imaginations as a force with transformative power for society as a whole. As poet Marietta Shaginian later reminisced, “in the circle in which I was born and raised . . . we considered music an essential part of all culture. . . . [music] was for us a cultural problem, which we discussed philosophically in its very essence, in connection with the epoch, with worldviews, with fundamental questions of life and death.”7 Soviet writer Boris Pasternak sought to capture the spirit of this bygone age when he dubbed it “the era of Scriabin”—a reference to its most famous composer.8 In the twilight of the Russian Empire, music thus offered a language for educated society to conceptualize and interpret the bewildering shifts of a rapidly changing world. Since the mid-­nineteenth century, music in general—and classical music in particular—has been intimately associated with Russian culture.9 Whether one considers attempts to create an empire-­wide music education system based on a European model after 1862; the concurrent effort to create a national Russian

Introduction 3 school of music spearheaded by the group of composers known as the “Mighty Five” (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-­Korsakov); the phenomenal early twentieth-­century success of the Ballets Russes (and of Igor Stravinsky, the composer most intimately associated with that dance troupe); the Soviet push to spread opera halls and classical music (alongside modern medicine, hygiene, and Marxist ideology) throughout its ethnically diverse territory; or the dominant position held by Soviet-­trained musicians in classical musical competitions at the height of the Cold War, music has played a key role in constructing both Russian and Soviet identities in the modern age. A marker of modernity and an embodiment of Russia’s central position in European high culture, music provided emotional catharsis to audiences living under strict political control and offered a symbol of cultural accomplishment amid Cold War tensions.10 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, music has helped to redefine “Russian” identity, whether through the rediscovery of Russian Orthodox music, reconstruction of Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s country estate (abandoned by the composer in 1917 and destroyed in the course of the Civil War), or the Russian Ministry of Culture’s recently expressed interest in purchasing Rachmaninoff’s personal archive and estate Villa Senar in Switzerland as objects of “unique cultural value.”11 How and why did music (especially classical music) expand so quickly from its relatively limited place in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­century Russian society into a key instrument in the construction of Russian identity?12 To understand music’s central role in the defining of both Russian and Soviet culture, we must return to the final years of the Russian Empire, in which a particularly imaginative conception of music captivated leading members of educated society. In this tumultuous era, music was widely interpreted as the ultimate transformative and unifying force, capable of overcoming the divisions of modern life and ushering in a new stage in human history: a view that, building upon contemporary usage, I refer to as musical metaphysics.13 More ephemeral than painting or sculpture (whose embodiment in space was constant and unchanging), and more elusive in meaning than poetry or literature, music was believed to be closer to spiritual than material reality. Moreover, as an art form deeply connected with the experience of temporality in an age in which basic conceptions of space and time were being transformed, music (it was believed) could help the human spirit transcend commonplace reality. In its envisioning of music’s power, musical metaphysics centered around three main concepts: unity, musical time, and the search for Orpheus. Building upon the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Russian thinkers imagined music as the

4 Introduction Dionysian unity underpinning reality itself, able to reunify a society struggling to overcome the divisive impulses of modern life. The experience of a musical work lifted an individual outside the realm of normal temporality into “musical time”; it fostered a mystical “lived experience” (perezhivanie) of moods (nastroenie), emotions (chuvstvo), and sensations (oshchushchenie) that held the potential to physically and spiritually transform humanity. As the individual whose creative work exerted this power over its listeners, the composer (or, in the metaphorical language of the time, Orpheus) dominated the imagined stage of musical metaphysics. Although specific interpretations of musical metaphysics varied, each aspect was regularly deployed in discourse about the role of music, what it meant to be “Russian” in the modern age, and in expressions of manifold hopes, fears, and dreams for the future.14 This book traces the formation and ultimate disintegration of musical metaphysics in late imperial Russia. It uncovers music’s troubled relationship to the search for a usable Russian identity in the final years of the empire, and interrogates the reasons for music’s particularly evocative power at this moment in history. Of course Russia was not the only country in which a metaphysical view of music melded with the search for national identity; other European countries and populations simultaneously professed to have distinctive musical talents and insights. To cite one prominent example, music was actively employed in various attempts to define German national identity as early as the eighteenth century. In place of preexisting regional, confessional, and even lingual diversities, music offered a space in which to imagine a unified German cultural identity distinct from the boundaries of the post-­1871 German Empire, though its precise conceptual limits were contested.15 Russia’s late imperial cultural elite (relative latecomers to music-­inflected discourse of the scale practiced by their German neighbors) confronted similar difficulties in defining the meaning of “Russianness” in relation to musical production: Was “Russian” music to be imperial (rossiiskii) or ethnic-­national (russkii ) in character? Was a “Russian” composer to be understood simply as a subject of the Russian Empire (in which case the Baltic German Nikolai Medtner or the Jewish musicians Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein were unproblematically Russian), or was “Russianness” an ethnic trait limited to only a portion of imperial subjects (as had been previously intimated by the anti-­Semitic outbursts of figures such as composer Mily Balakirev in the late nineteenth century)? Could one lay claim both to ethnically non-­Russian and imperial Russian identities at the same time? What broader impact might these conflicting imperial and national forms of identity, expressed through music, have on Russian society as a whole? Reflecting on these issues in 1912, liberal philosopher Evgenii Trubetskoi

Introduction 5 found music a useful means through which to differentiate between what he perceived as outdated exclusive (ethnic–­national) and ascendant inclusive (liberal–­ civic) conceptions of Russian identity. “I remember,” Trubetskoi reflected, “in the early 1880s, the young people of my generation did not see blemishes in Ruslan, they listened with enthusiasm to Life for the Tsar, and experienced ecstasy from the early works of Tchaikovsky.”16 By 1912, however, many of these once beloved melodies of his youth seemed “unbearably false to the ear,” and he concluded that “a good third, if not half of our national music consists of faded motifs, which are now unbearable to listen to” because they “clearly express some kind of long-­outlived national illusions, which are completely foreign to a modern educated person.”17 For Trubetskoi, like many of his contemporaries, music offered a space in which modern Russian identity, rather than being self-­ evident, was open to discussion. In addition to the ethnic/imperial divide, Russia’s relationship with its European neighbors also played an important role in shaping attempts to define “Russian” music in the modern age. In particular, much of the compositional language and the conceptual framework through which classical music in Russia was interpreted was based upon musical and philosophical works by German authors. What impact did such cultural borrowing have on Russian identity? Grappling with such quandaries, educated Russians engaged in a complicated process of borrowing, translation, and reinterpretation. In the case of musical metaphysics, this meant that rather than becoming committed disciples of Nietzsche, they were at best orphans, rejecting central portions of Nietzschean thought even while hailing his “philosophizing with a hammer” as a central prophetic voice in the modern age.18 These contradictions, and the generation of people entangled within them, form the subject of this book. Music, a central theme of contemporary discourse, provides the path through which to engage with these fundamental questions. NIETZSCHE’S ORPHANS

When compiling a list of mandatory books for the proposed music library at Moscow’s Shaniavskii People’s University in 1918, music educator, critic, and social activist Nadezhda Briusova started the list not with musical scores or music-­ theoretical texts, but with the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.19 This choice was dictated by her active involvement in prerevolutionary Russian musical life—a cultural world steeped in the metaphysical interpretation of music offered by these German philosophers. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Edith Clowes, and other scholars have uncovered a Nietz-

6 Introduction schean intellectual framework that was deeply ingrained in late imperial Russian and early Soviet cultural life.20 These ideas also provided a central basis for the conceptualization of music, as translations and analyses of Nietzsche’s writings on music—themselves inspired by the earlier writings of Schopenhauer—began to appear in the Russian periodical press by 1900.21 Such intellectual engagement was troubled at best, however, as Nietzsche’s prerevolutionary Russian admirers found much to critique as well as admire in his writings: in particular, questions of morality, national identity, and religious belief, problematized by this controversial “prophet,” excited sustained debate and discussion among his Russian disciples. Because of this conflicted relationship, I refer to these prerevolutionary Russian followers of Nietzsche as “orphans”: simultaneously embracing and rejecting ideals passed down in the philosopher’s intellectual testament. Nietzsche’s adamant amorality troubled many of his Russian admirers, who sought to reconcile his call for “myth creation” with a specifically Christian worldview, inspired in part by the mystical outlook of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, who had similarly granted music and the arts a key place in human experience. While longing for music’s positive transformative power, educated Russians also feared its darker, potentially amoral influence. Lev Tolstoy voiced anxiety over the influence of music upon human emotion in his story “The Kreutzer Sonata,” describing a jealous husband driven to murder under the influence of Beethoven’s violin sonata. Similarly, in his 1897 treatise “What Is Art?” (“Chto takoe iskusstvo?”), Tolstoy’s own conflicting responses to music inspired his definition of art as the “infection” of emotion passed from composer to performer to audience.22 Such concerns were common. In a 1903 letter to fellow poet Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely noted that while music was “closer than anything else to an insight of the otherworldly,” that other world contained both “good” (dobro) and “evil” (zlo).23 The same idea was voiced by Moscow composer and philosopher Konstantin Eiges, who argued that the “mystical” process involved in composing music involved a descent to a “lower realm,” which the true composer then transfigured into the “higher realm” of a musical work.24 Composer Nikolai Medtner claimed that musical talent could be given “either by God or the Devil.”25 Vladimir Rebikov’s own vision of Bacchic and Orphic music similarly stressed the moral rebirth promised by Orpheus in contrast to the amoral physicality of Bacchic music.26 Music was a potent but unpredictable force, for its power could be turned toward either moral or immoral ends. This emphasis on morality distanced the Russian adoption of Nietzsche’s Dionysian power from the precepts of its original prophet. A second problem facing Russian readers who looked upon Nietzsche as a prophetic voice was captured in the philosopher’s warning that “it seems to be

Introduction 7 scarcely possible to transplant a foreign myth with lasting success,” a claim that contradicted their own attempts to find Russia’s future in German intellectual heritage.27 In nineteenth-­century Russia, both philosophical thought and music education were dominated by German accomplishments. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were standard reading for intellectually inclined Russians, while the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner were generally considered the greatest representatives of the European musical tradition. The music conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow were modeled on the Germanic structure, making this the standard institutional form in which professional musicians were educated.28 By the early twentieth century, however, educated Russian society was increasingly ambivalent about the continued importation of foreign models of thought and artistic expression. There was a growing sense of the need for a specifically Russian culture, including models of philosophical thought and musical expression that would be distinct from German (and other Western) models—concerns that themselves built upon the ideas of earlier nineteenth-­ century Slavophile thinkers.29 Responding to the publication of the controversial article collection Signposts (Vekhi) in 1909, Margarita Morozova (a wealthy supporter of music, philosophy, and the arts from Moscow’s merchant class) mourned the “Germanic basis and foreign scale” of contemporary Russian cultural life expressed by these thinkers, arguing that the task faced by educated society was to abandon foreign models and instead to “define Russia’s individuality, to find Russia’s path.”30 Within this context, the embrace of Nietzsche’s ideas as a means through which to rejuvenate society was itself problematic. Similarly, the continued reliance upon musical styles that were deemed “German” in origin (such as an emphasis on traditional European musical forms, structures, and harmonies) was an issue of contention. In seeking to define their place within an increasingly nationalistic European context, particularly when they themselves could trace descent from different ethnic groups dwelling within the Russian Empire (Russian, Jewish, German, Ukrainian), Nietzsche’s orphans faced an unavoidable conundrum. Finally, the worsening division in late imperial Russia between the educated classes and the common people (narod ) was of immediate concern when viewed through a Nietzschean lens: Russian culture seemed in danger of dying if a new, unifying myth were not found for society as a whole. While Slavophiles such as Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky had argued in the mid-­nineteenth century that this new unity could be found in the Russian narod and Orthodox religion, in the late imperial era this idea seemed increasingly far-­fetched to Nietzsche’s orphans, who believed that the processes of industrialization and modernization had destroyed the traditional link between the peasant and the

8 Introduction village. This in turn was interpreted as having led to the breakdown of the natural Russian peasant lifestyle and morality.31 Facing this perceived moral decline of the peasantry, once the imagined bearers of Russian culture, many of Nietzsche’s orphans considered it their duty to preserve or resurrect “true” Russian culture in order to better prepare their country to face the modern world. What constituted “true” Russian culture was, however, also far from clear. In his 1906 article “Russia, Where Are You in the End?” philosopher Evgenii Trubetskoi highlighted this contemporary problem of Russian identity. He argued that while defining “Russia” had once been an easy task (replete with pastoral images and tolling Kremlin bells), the recent upheavals of war, revolution, and the granting of the October 1905 Manifesto that promised legal reform of the autocracy had all sparked conflicting definitions of what “Russia” had become. In place of “unifying ideas” that would create a shared sense of belonging, he argued, “the only ‘unity’ which we occasionally find is unity in negation and destruction.”32 Trubetskoi argued for a new Russian identity in which “Christian culture can unite fragmented classes and nationalities,” a vision that he elsewhere described as the “music of the future”;33 nevertheless, it is his identification of the problem of defining contemporary Russia (rather than his proposed solution) that offers a key to understanding the conflicted role of musical metaphysics in the final years of the empire. Music was envisioned as a means to bring about unity and to revive a shared Russian identity, but the form which that identity should take was hotly debated. Contrasting compositional styles were themselves caught up in larger debates over what sort of Russia should be built. Trubetskoi’s image of the “music of the future,” in which a patriotic Russian imperial identity (itself based upon an underlying Christian worldview) would unify all of the empire’s ethnic groups thus existed alongside narrower definitions that stressed exclusion along ethnic-­national lines. Within the context of an empire increasingly troubled by social and political upheavals, Nietzsche’s orphans struggled to define what form Russia should take in the modern age, and music, through its transformative power, offered a potential means through which to create this new identity. In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, musical metaphysics gained particular force, as music was explicitly linked with the dream of reuniting a society that seemed to threaten disintegration along class, ethnic, or political grounds. Commentators on music regularly sought to link their own visions of what Russia should become with specific musical styles and composers. In addition to stressing the conflicted nature of musical metaphysics as a worldview, the term “Nietzsche’s orphans” emphasizes the distinct nature of the historical actors dealt with in this book. These were individuals from a range of social, economic, artistic, and intellectual backgrounds who were participants in a

Introduction 9 single aesthetic community: a group of individuals united not by ethnic, religious, or political affiliation, but rather through voluntary participation in a shared aesthetic outlook on music and culture. As Catherine Evtuhov rightly notes, in contrast to a narrow caste with a unified worldview (the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s and 1870s with their revolutionary and materialist outlook), this late imperial intelligentsia stemmed from a wider range of social backgrounds and explored a wider range of possible responses to the historical problems confronting Russia in the modern era.34 Their shared sense of urgency for social transformation and their belief that music offered a potential means through which to overcome the divisions of modernity united these disparate figures. By framing Nietzsche’s orphans as a distinct aesthetic community whose emergence was linked to the final years of the Russian Empire, I trace how creative ideas interacted with social and political developments and emphasize interaction across institutional divides. The spread of musical, theatrical, and artistic life throughout the Russian Empire served to create new forms of social interaction, from the socially diverse milieus of the music conservatories, to the audiences of theater and opera houses, to the close collaboration between artists working in different expressive mediums. Ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay has stressed the important role musical performance plays in the process of community formation, suggesting a reclaiming and redefining of the term “musical community” in scholarly discourse.35 While music and musical performance were important aspects in the lives of Nietzsche’s orphans, the creation of an aesthetic community was by no means limited to this realm; as Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate have argued with regard to the historical connection between music and German national identity, the acts of writing about and discussing music within a particular social milieu are central in the process of constructing specific musical meaning at a given historical juncture.36 More recently, Anna Fishzon has demonstrated the potential value of the intertwined concepts of “emotional communities” (extreme emotional states articulated and enacted, in Fishzon’s analysis, by opera fans) and “celebrity culture” (in which both cultural and political actors “supplemented and competed with the weakened monarchy as national integrative symbols”) as a means of integrating the audience into the study of late imperial Russian music.37 In my examination of the late imperial period, when artists, musicians, poets, writers, and their audiences interacted frequently in various circles and clubs, I have found it most accurate to speak of an “aesthetic community.” I examine the interactive relationships among composers (“celebrities” and potential “national integrative symbols”), music critics (who gave voice to many of the ideas of

10 Introduction musical metaphysics in print form), and educated society more broadly (literary figures, philosophers, and other men and women who participated in contemporary discourse on music). By framing these various figures as members of an aesthetic community, I highlight the interactive and mutually constituting aspect of artistic experience. While a similar approach has been employed by historians examining the importance of various “publics” (literary, musical, theatrical), such analyses have generally focused on reception rather than upon how the process of artistic interaction itself brought a community into being and shaped its contours. In this sense, public suggests a division between the creators of culture and audiences; in contrast, community emphasizes the ways in which artistic discussions, views, and experience all forged a shared outlook within educated Russian society. Moreover, the circle of individuals involved in propagating this worldview was relatively small: “community” better captures the intimate, personal relationships between the small circles of historical actors who populate this book. By featuring shared ideals and worldviews expressed in both public and private media, this book emphasizes the importance of ideas in shaping history and artistic production, and explores how ideas about music bound together a generation of Russian cultural elites. For a group that transcended traditional boundaries of identity linked to professional roles, social origin, ethnic background, or religious belief, Nietzsche provided a shared vocabulary through which to discuss their views and conceptualize Russia’s potential future. Musical metaphysics thus evolved in the intersection between musical creativity and public discussion: cultural elites (musicians, philosophers, poets, and audiences) both shaped and were shaped by these ideas. This is not to claim that the people examined in this book fully conceived of themselves as a single group; in fact, the divisions and rivalries among them often seemed stronger than the similarities. Nevertheless, a shared language—replete with terminology such as “Dionysian,” “Apollonian,” “symbol,” “leitmotif,” “religious art,” “sobornost’,” “unity,” “mysticism,” “life-­creation,” “Orphic,” and “messianic”—points to the fact that despite varying opinions and sometimes vicious infighting, these diverse individuals shared certain assumptions, expectations, and fears about the world, Russia, and the modern age. For all their differences of interpretation, they fashioned a unified discourse, in which the range of meanings encapsulated by a given term were generally agreed upon. In this sense, they created what Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii refer to as a single “semiotic language,” one heavily indebted to Nietzschean thought.38 The troubled context of late imperial Russia, particularly the tense atmosphere of social, cultural, and political crisis after the 1905 Revolution, gave rise to the aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans. This group was united by a

Introduction 11 general belief that music could act as both a unifying and transformative force through which the divisions (social, cultural, and spiritual) wrought by modernity could be transcended and a new reality created. At the same time, the specific vision of “Russia” that was offered was far from unified. Thus, like Richard Taruskin’s recent description of the 1920s Eurasianist movement (whose intellectual roots can be traced to these prerevolutionary circles), the aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans was “a loose and dreamy association of the vaguely like-­minded,” rather than a tightly organized group.39 However, the very vagueness of belief that brought these individuals together offers a lens through which to explore contemporary divisions within Russian educated society. By examining music as a symbol commonly employed in public discourse, particularly through responses to three composers who figured prominently in contemporary discussions—Aleksandr Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Sergei Rachmaninoff—this book highlights how music and its interpretation directed the quest to reunite Russian society in an era of increasing dissolution. THE WORLD OF NIETZSCHE’S ORPHANS

In 1903 Moscow merchant Mikhail Abramovich Morozov died at the age of thirty-­two, leaving a fortune estimated at three million rubles to his wife Margarita Kirillovna Morozova (née Mamontova) and their four children. A famed beauty, the young widow had previously attracted ardent devotion from the young poet Andrei Bely (the first of many of his female muses) and was already a fixed personality in Moscow’s cultural circles, owing in part to her husband’s involvement in collecting and supporting Russian art. Though tragic, the death of her husband ultimately ushered in a new chapter of Morozova’s life, in which she devoted herself to artistic development and the quest to spiritually transform Russia itself. In an effort to cope with the dramatic life changes that followed her husband’s death, Morozova immersed herself in the study of music and philosophy. While traveling in Switzerland with her children in 1905, news of the revolution sweeping across Russia reignited the young widow’s interest in her homeland’s cultural and political life, and the end of March found her back in Moscow, hosting political lectures in her house on Smolenskii Boulevard. While these lectures were soon discontinued due to the attendance of individuals “illegally in Moscow,” Morozova continued to host political, cultural, and musical meetings on a smaller scale until the October Revolution of 1917. In addition to such lectures, she provided financial and intellectual support to the periodical Moscow Weekly (Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, 1906–1910) and the mystical-­religious publishing house The Way (Put’, 1910–18), served on the board of the Moscow divi-

12 Introduction sion of the Russian Musical Society, and, as an amateur pianist, studied privately with Scriabin and Medtner. Very quickly, Morozova and her salon emerged as a cultural meeting place, where a wide range of Moscow’s cultural elite gathered for philosophical, political, and musical discussions.40 The glistening chandeliers in Morozova’s drawing rooms, first on Smolenskii Boulevard and later in her more modest homes on Novinskii Boulevard and Mertvyi pereulok, watched over gatherings of poets, artists, musicians, politicians, and philosophers.41 Here the gaunt figure of classical scholar and poet Viacheslav Ivanov could be seen in conversation with the balding journal editor, literary theorist, and Germanophile Emilii Medtner, intently discussing the question of the Dionysian spirit or musing upon the philosophical significance of composers Nikolai Medtner (Emilii’s brother) or Scriabin. Romances flourished, such as the idealized love affair between Morozova and her intellectual guide, the liberal philosopher Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, or the less idealized but equally passionate attraction between Emilii Medtner and the young Russian-­Armenian poet Marietta Shaginian. Equally intimate social circles across Moscow’s salons, societies, concert halls, and publishing houses fostered the aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans. Within such social and professional circles, personal friendships waxed and waned: poets Andrei Bely, Ellis (Lev Kobylinskii), and Sergei Durylin pondered the meaning of Richard Wagner’s works and writings for contemporary life under the penetrating gaze of Emilii Medtner; the young philosopher Ivan Il’in discovered the “inherently Russian” spiritual depth of Nikolai Medtner’s music; and composer Aleksandr Scriabin, speaking in a hushed voice, shared his dreams of an apocalyptic artistic work with a circle of devoted admirers. Music, whether as a topic of philosophical conversation or as an organized performance, regularly presided over these gatherings.42 Late imperial Russia, an era often referred to as the “Silver Age” of Russian culture, was thus a period of intense spiritual and cultural activity, rooted in the active exchange of creative ideas in the empire’s urban spaces. Journals, concerts, literary salons, artistic exhibits, and philosophical meetings fostered a tight-­ knit circle of cultural elites and an atmosphere of intense intellectual exchange and creativity. Groups such as the Society for Free Aesthetics (Obshchestvo svobodnoi estetiki), the House of Song (Dom pesni), the Moscow Religious-­ Philosophical Society in Memory of Vladimir Solov’ev (Moskovskoe religiozno-­ filosofskoe obshchestvo pamiati Vladimira Solov’eva, henceforth the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society), and evening concerts sponsored by artistic journals such as Apollo (Apollon) brought cultural elites from various fields into direct conversation.43 As Moscow critic Leonid Sabaneev reflected in 1911, “our musical world is a small circle of people, well acquainted amongst themselves.”44

Introduction 13 These circles, societies, and institutions often overlapped in membership. As Marci Shore has observed of twentieth-­century Polish Marxist intellectuals, Nietzsche’s orphans were thus a group of Russian cultural elites who “moved about in entangled circles with shifting boundaries, connected to one another by not more than one or two degrees of separation.”45 Moscow was the center for many of these cultural circles as its growing wealth from trade and industry spilled over into artistic and cultural realms, giving rise to a wide range of musical opportunities distinct from the imperial realm of St. Petersburg.46 Here music emerged as a space in which educated society, rather than the state, sought to forge an understanding of Russian identity, at the same time that patrons of music and the arts increasingly hearkened from the merchant class rather than the nobility, their financial contributions and salons providing the basis for the exchange of ideas among members of Russia’s cultural elite. It was no accident that Serge Koussevitzky, conductor, double-­bass virtuoso, and founder of the Russian Music Publishing House, elected to establish himself in Moscow rather than St. Petersburg upon his return to Russia in 1910, finding in the empire’s second capital an environment more conducive to his own visions of creating new possibilities for Russian music.47 Cultural circles in Moscow also showed a greater affinity for the German philosophical tradition than those in St. Petersburg, where French culture tended to hold greater sway, and where “art for art’s sake” rather than spiritual transcendence was the slogan most often associated with the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) group.48 Reflecting upon the range of social interactions that she and her husband, Nikolai Medtner, attended in prerevolutionary Moscow, Anna Medtner listed “the Wednesdays at [Vladimir] Shmarovin’s, the Artistic-­Literary Circle, the Religious-­Philosophical Society, meetings at the publishing houses The Way (Put’), The Word (Logos), Musaget (Leader of the Muses), and others.”49 Without exception, each of these circles embraced a worldview based upon varying mixtures of German idealist philosophy, Russian mysticism, and the search for national expression.50 One of the central threads connecting Nietzsche’s orphans across these gatherings was the philosophical interpretation of music. Music, like the Silver Age itself, transcended artistic and intellectual divides, finding expression across such movements as the “new religious consciousness,” symbolist literature, and the philosophical trend toward “new idealism.”51 It included leading philosophical and literary figures who employed music as a symbol through which to discuss the transformation of Russian social and spiritual life (Trubetskoi, Blok, Bely, Sergei Durylin, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Ivan Il’in), and composers who— intentionally or unintentionally—created works that could be discussed within the framework of musical metaphysics. Some composers (Scriabin, Vladimir

14 Introduction Rebikov, Fedor Akimenko) actively sought to express their aesthetic views in literary or philosophical as well as musical form. Music critics, consisting primarily of a relatively small circle of contributors to Russian-­language journals and newspapers (including Boris Schloezer, Nikolai Findeizen, Leonid Sabaneev, Iulii Engel, and Boris Popov), helped to create the conceptual language through which these ideas spread. Even when direct artistic inspiration or admiration was absent (such as Bely’s dismissal of Scriabin’s music), these individuals interacted within the same range of philosophical ideas surrounding music.52 Reflecting upon the intimate cultural circles in which he participated, Emilii Medtner concluded that “between us, to one or another degree is an organic, eternal connection. We might pray to different gods, pursue different goals, but there is something that unites us into a single family.”53 This sense of a common cause, based on culture, was a defining characteristic of Nietzsche’s orphans. To be sure, musical metaphysics was limited, by and large, to the relatively privileged upper echelons of society. Although conservatory graduates, private music students, audience members, and dilettantes who expressed their views of music in occasional published articles or private conversation and correspondence expanded the scope of this intimate aesthetic community to a somewhat broader circle of educated Russian society, the individuals involved possessed a relatively high level of education, obtained at universities, conservatories, or church academies.54 And though their career paths often took them to smaller regional areas, most had spent time in one of the urban centers of the empire (primarily Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, or Kiev). Many (though not all) had traveled in Europe and envisioned themselves as both Russian and European citizens. Recognizing their relatively privileged status as recipients of higher education, all of them acknowledged the problem of an existing division between educated society (obshchestvennost’) and the common people (narod). In the years after 1905, a general spirit of muted opposition to tsarist authority emerged in much of their discourse, though, perhaps because of censorship limitations, open discussion of government policies was generally avoided; emphasis was placed upon “transcending” the problems of the day rather than seeking direct solutions for them. In January 1909, for instance, while celebrating recent developments in musical life in both imperial capitals (Moscow and St. Petersburg), Iulii Engel looked forward to the appearance of ever more musical talent at a future time vaguely defined as “when Russia will finally be given the possibility to freely develop all its spiritual strength.”55 It was the shared worldview of musical metaphysics that brought these actors into a single group: the belief that the divisions fracturing Russian society in the modern age could be overcome through

Introduction 15 the power of music. Within the increasingly fragmented society of late imperial Russia, music’s promise of unity held particular appeal. The community of Nietzsche’s orphans included both men and women; whereas women were more likely to pursue higher education in music, men tended to be the primary public articulators of this worldview.56 Nevertheless, women were eager participants and sometimes purveyors in the development of musical metaphysics. Recounting the development of her friendship with Sergei Rachmaninoff, poet Marietta Shaginian began by describing an emotionally intense evening spent with two female friends. After hours devoted to philosophical debates, the young women returned to one of their apartments; while her friends played through Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, Shaginian followed the score intently. The night culminated in a deep conversation between the three girls about the significance of Rachmaninoff’s music as a means through which to lead contemporary society away from the divisive impulses of modern life.57 In a 1909 letter to Evgenii Trubetskoi, Margarita Morozova reported that she was practicing piano at least two hours per day, which, together with her reading of Solov’ev and other philosophers, she considered a central part of her philosophical development.58 Shaginian and Morozova’s experiences were hardly unique. Active as music students, teachers, and performers both at home and onstage, women such as Morozova and Maria Olenina-­d’Alheim (founder of the House of Song) furthered the spread of musical metaphysics and spearheaded the organization of circles in which musical, artistic, and philosophical ideas were heard and discussed.59 Above all, they participated actively in contemporary discourse (both in conversations and in correspondence), expounding upon and critiquing key aspects of musical metaphysics. Some women also performed a more immediate role in the search for a contemporary Orpheus by taking on the role of muse and instigator for a particular composer. Both Anna Medtner and Tatiana Schloezer challenged societal norms in pursuing a conjugal relationship with their chosen composer. Scriabin abandoned his first wife and children to live with Tatiana, a choice that alienated both the composer and his new partner from certain social circles. Anna Medtner, after marrying Emilii Medtner in 1902, lived in an ill-­defined romantic triangulation with both Emilii and his younger brother Nikolai, until her divorce and remarriage to Nikolai in 1919. Anna and Tatiana also actively participated in the intellectual and creative lives of their partners. During a chance meeting with Tatiana and Scriabin, Emilii Medtner was pleased to note that “Madame Scria­ bin not only did not hinder us, but actually assisted us in conversation, translating into more understandable language the thoughts of Scriabin.”60 Perhaps more sensitive to Tatiana’s state of mind than the admittedly self-­absorbed Emilii

16 Introduction Medtner, the philosopher Vladimir Ern noted in a letter to his wife that, while “intelligent” and “‘self-­sacrificing,’” the impression that Tatiana left upon him was “very sad.” “She is entirely wrapped up in her husband,” he concluded, “having given up music and her own composing in order to devote herself entirely to him.”61 The desire to direct the creative path of her chosen Orpheus also marked the friendship between Marietta Shaginian and Rachmaninoff: the young poet considered it her “mission” to inspire Rachmaninoff’s creative output in what she considered an appropriate direction.62 In this sense, while gender did not negate female participation, it nevertheless channeled the course of that participation. Musical metaphysics also drew upon a host of assumptions about gender. It was commonly accepted that the male soul was, by nature, more “creative” than the female. Women might serve as helpers or sources of inspiration, but it was relatively rare for a female voice to appear in print. Philosophical ideals based on creative interpretations of Solov’ev’s concepts of “Sophia” and the “eternal feminine” further underpinned gender expectations.63 As James West has summarized symbolist writer Viacheslav Ivanov’s gendered view of creativity, “the female side draws [the male side] towards the ecstatic union in which it loses itself in becoming something greater than itself, while the male principle is the conscious self, able to exercise its will and choose between resisting or following the impulse for union with the divine.”64 While both male and female principles were necessary in this metaphysical interpretation of creativity, the female aspect was generally associated with passive matter, and the male aspect with creative spirit. For this reason, women, while inspiring creative activity, were generally viewed as unsuitable for creative work. As Scriabin concluded, “Women are the passive part, they are ‘matter’—they inspire us, but they also drag us below.”65 Thus, while his prophets or followers could include both men and women, Orpheus was nevertheless gendered male. The aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans also included individuals from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, all of whom sought, on some level, to answer Trubetskoi’s call for a new Russian identity. As James Loeffler, Denis Lomtev, and Lynn Sargeant have shown, diverse groups such as Jews, Germans, and students from a variety of social backgrounds all played important roles in the development of imperial Russian musical life.66 The spread of musical knowledge throughout the Russian Empire depended in part upon the efforts of the Russian Musical Society (RMO).67 From a modest beginning in 1859, by the early twentieth century a unified musical community was forming throughout imperial Russia, built upon the RMO’s institutional foundation. This community was itself based on an indistinct convergence between imperial and Russian

Introduction 17 national identity, as it was never clear whether the goal of the RMO was the creation of a Russian imperial (rossiiskii) or Russian national (russkii) musical culture.68 The RMO used the term russkii rather than rossiiskii, suggesting an emphasis on ethnic Russian identity, but in practice the organization incorporated members from numerous ethnic backgrounds—a fact not surprising, given the Jewish-­Russian cultural background of the founders, Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein. It was perhaps in order to highlight this possibility of an imperial (rather than an exclusively ethnic) Russian identity that Koussevitzky (who was himself born into a poor Jewish family in the town of Vyshnyi Volochok in the Tver region) named the Moscow music publishing house he founded in 1909 the Rossiiskoe (rather than Russkoe) muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo (Russian Music Publishing House).69 At the same time, internal divisions between specialists in the urban centers of European Russia and musicians in the provinces, harsh disputes within these urban centers, rising interest in local and ethnic music traditions, and the proliferation of alternative performance and educational opportunities gave rise to an increasingly polyphonic musical community across European Russia.70 Amid growing nationalist tensions and celebration of “national music,” the precise meaning of “Russianness” in musical life remained unresolved. Music’s potency as a unifying force depended in part upon local experience. By the early twentieth century, a dazzling array of concert opportunities were available in the larger urban centers of the Russian Empire.71 Concert activity in the provinces also grew exponentially, including performances by local artists as well as tours by orchestral groups and well-­known soloists: Koussevitzky took his entire orchestra on a number of concert tours along the Volga River, stopping in Rybinskaia, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Nizhnyi Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, and Astrakhan.72 Print culture was also central to the emergence of an aesthetic community with a relatively unified worldview. In the early twentieth century, symbolist journals such as The Scales (Vesy), New Way (Novyi put’) and The Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo) took the lead in advancing a metaphysical approach to the interpretation of music, a focus that continued through 1917. Many of these periodicals discussed new musical trends, hosted concerts, and printed speeches delivered by representatives of the musical community.73 Inspired by the lifting of government censorship in the aftermath of 1905, new periodicals devoted to music were founded in various urban centers, often targeting more specialized topics than the well-­rounded, balanced, and long-­lived Russian Musical Newspaper (Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta).74 These journals helped to foster a sense of connection across the lands of the empire, from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Odessa and Nizhnyi Novgorod. Periodical editors regularly published descriptions of musical activities in distant provin-

18 Introduction cial towns, encouraging the sense of an interconnected musical community centered in European Russia’s urban spaces but extending throughout the empire. Residents of provincial centers such as Perm, Rostov-­on-­the Don, and Tiflis were thus guaranteed space in the Russian Musical Newspaper alongside reports on the latest cultural events in the empire’s capitals.75 The vast majority of contributions came from a relatively small group of authors who served as music corre­ spondents for local newspapers as well as literary, artistic, and music journals. Of course, not all writers, philosophers, artists, audience members, orchestral musicians, choral singers, or teachers embraced musical metaphysics. For many individuals who pursued musical training, attended concerts, or reflected on music’s power, music served as a means of diversion, entertainment, or personal expression rather than a way through which to reunify society. Their interest in the contemporary philosophical discussions that appeared in the periodical press was often limited at best. In response to a questionnaire circulated to provincial music teachers by the Russian Musical Newspaper in 1913, most instructors demonstrated a distinct preference for articles of immediate practical use rather than of philosophical or aesthetic orientation.76 Similarly, among thirteen students interested enough in music to enroll in music education classes for workers in Moscow in spring 1918, six admitted to having “never” read any kind of books or articles on music prior to the class. Only two students of the thirteen claimed to have read specialized music journals in the prerevolutionary period, though neither could remember the journal names.77 The reach of musical metaphysics outside the immediate social circles in which Nietzsche’s orphans interacted, therefore, seems to have been relatively small.78 The importance of musical metaphysics thus stems less from the number of people who participated in this discourse and more from their relatively influential positions in the cultural life of late imperial Russia and the early Soviet state. The fate of Russia’s nobility, liberal intelligentsia, urban groups, merchants, workers, and peasants under the strain of Russia’s economic modernization have all attracted scholarly interest, leading to a general consensus on the gradual erosion of estate-­based identities in the final years of the empire. The growth of professions in the years after the Great Reforms of the 1860s stimulated new social identities that did not fit easily into older social categories. Late imperial Russia’s transformation into an increasingly modern state with an urbanizing population overwhelmed inherited autocratic political structures and estate-­based social groupings (soslovie), generating political and social groups that were multifaceted, fragmented, and constantly fluctuating. The emergence of a class-­based mode of social interaction added a new layer of complexity to what Alfred Rieber

Introduction 19 has referred to as a “sedimentary society,” silting over but neither displacing nor destroying older forms of social identity.79 Local, religious, and ethnic identities often proved as influential in determining personal loyalties as membership in a particular estate, and emerging national sentiment increasingly challenged older imperial forms of social cohesion. Within this context, new modes of viewing the world coexisted uneasily with older social and cultural patterns, fueling mutual distrust and misunderstanding that exploded into violence in 1905. In the aftermath of that revolution, the desire to reunify what appeared to be a dangerously fragmented society emerged as a recurring theme in public discourse. This quest to reunify the political and social realities of late imperial Russia shaped artistic production and perspectives. While the reaction against positivism and materialist culture in Russian society had gathered strength in the 1890s, the unrest and violence of 1905–7 awakened in philosophers, writers, journalists, teachers, and politicians an ardent yearning for a transfigured reality marked by community rather than division. Artistic experimentation, the revival of idealist philosophy, and a renewed quest for spirituality in Russian society all contributed to the emergence of a widespread search for unity in both social and cultural realms.80 For contemporary philosophers, poets, artists, and musicians, unity referred both to internal, spiritual unity (threatened by the perceived subject-­object duality of Kantian philosophy) and external, social unity (shattered by the 1905 Revolution).81 Socially, fears of a growing chasm between educated society and the common people led to attempts to reach out to the masses through artistic and educational activity. Intellectually, specialized scientific inquiry was believed to threaten the unity of human knowledge that had previously existed, a compartmentalization that could only be overcome, argued symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, through the “spirit of music.”82 Scholars disagree on the precise level of development of an active public sphere in late imperial Russia, but its growing presence in cultural (if not necessarily political) terms is well established. Missing from many of these analyses, however, is an examination of community formation that cut across professional, religious, ethnic, and estate-­based definitions of identity. Music offers a particularly valuable intervention here, as it brought individuals across older social divisions into direct interaction, providing “middling groups” with the opportunity to forge some form of Russian imperial identity distinct from the official spaces provided by the state.83 The ultimate fate of musical metaphysics provides insight into the fault lines that divided Russian society prior to the October Revolution of 1917, and also sheds light upon the continued importance of music as a means of defining identity in the Soviet and post-­Soviet contexts.

20 Introduction A N X I E T Y, U T O P I A , A N D M O D E R N I T Y

The final years of the Russian Empire were marked by a mixture of anxiety and utopian dreams. As scholars of the European fin de siècle have shown, widespread anxiety dominated public discourse and transcended national borders, touching upon basic human conceptions such as time and space.84 Examination of Russia’s particular experience offers an important corollary to much of this literature. While it has often been assumed that modernity and the fin de siècle were informed by secular rather than spiritual ideals, it is clear in the Russian context that the sacred was deeply entwined in social and artistic responses to modernity.85 The quest for Orpheus was, in essence, spiritual as well as social. Many concerns first voiced throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century became increasingly strident in public discourse through the final years of the Russian Empire. This mystical and apocalyptic spirit was intimately connected with the political and social upheaval of the time. Pervasive anxiety about the present coincided with the rise of utopian dreams, hopes, and expectations.86 Musical metaphysics, while responding to fears about the modern age, also partook in this parallel trend of optimism, offering a means to escape what Mark Steinberg has referred to as the “darkening landscape of the present.”87 Theorists of the experience of modernity in fin-­de-­siècle Europe have often argued that its true nature was expressed in the tension between the binaries of rationalistic modernization and the discontinuity or flux of immediate experience.88 Many of the persistent binaries that haunted intellectual and social life in Russia (individual and collective, sacred and secular, progress and degeneration, national and universal, thinking and being, ontology and epistemology, male and female, Apollo and Dionysus, Orpheus and Bacchus) paralleled musical discussions of consonance and dissonance, a binary to which music promised resolution.89 Regardless of their specific definitions of these terms, theorists agreed that the conflict between consonance and dissonance was, in some manner, resolved in a musical work. Modernist composers such as Scriabin and Rebikov sought to transcend the very concept of dissonance, suggesting a resolution of binaries that had structured human society for generations.90 Music thus offered the hope of resolving or transcending the binaries with which modernity was fraught, thereby ushering in a new era of harmony.91 One of the means through which music promised to overcome all binaries was through perezhivanie (lived experience), a concept that echoed both the late imperial Russian philosophical focus on experience rather than theoretical knowledge, and the exploration of questions of experience, intuition, and human consciousness by contemporary European philosophers such as Henri Bergson and

Introduction 21 Edmund Husserl.92 This emphasis was paralleled in the Russian musical realm by a focus on the process of listening and an emphasis on music’s ability to evoke emotion.93 As music critic Leonid Sabaneev argued, “one must experience [perezhit’] the idea that gives life to a creative work, in order to feel [pochuvstvovat’] and understand it.”94 While the content of a musical work was its spiritual “idea,” Sabaneev explained, this idea was expressed to an audience through the evocation of emotion.95 In this manner, emotion was a central category for interpreting music in late imperial Russia, although the question of “appropriate” emotion remained open to debate. In recent years, cultural historians have turned to the study of emotions as, in Mark Steinberg’s words, “a text that can yield meaning, as a subjectivity situated in time and place, and as a form of social practice with real causative effect in the world.” In the case of Russia, Steinberg has argued that early twentieth-­century Russians “viewed . . . emotions as signs to be read in order to diagnose the state of their society, culture, and polity.”96 Emotion was a central attribute in the aesthetic discourse surrounding music, and critics frequently encouraged emotions connected with positive human experience, while denigrating what were considered negative or pessimistic emotions believed to have a deleterious impact on listeners. The musical evocation of emotion was itself a way through which a Russian composer might either transcend the divisions of modernity or fall victim to them. Within this context, the particular emotions aroused by a composer’s music offer deep insight into contemporary Russian fears, hopes, and anxieties about modern life. Orpheus was not simply to create unity, but also to conjure the correct type of unity through the evocation of specific emotions. M E T HO D O L O G Y A N D ST RU C T UR E

As an intellectual history of music’s cultural meaning (as expressed within the aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans), this book does not seek to offer a social history of musical life in late imperial Russia, nor does it examine any one of the various literary, artistic, and musical stylistic trends of the Russian Silver Age; earlier research has demonstrated the wealth of creativity that abounded in all artistic realms of the late empire and examined the complex social milieu underpinning musical creativity.97 Instead, this book examines the rise and fall of a particular worldview centered around the symbolic meaning of music, addressing the role played by music in, as Celia Applegate has phrased it, the “making of the modern self ” in the final years of the Russian Empire.98 I argue that music offered both a central method and field of discourse through which historical actors in late imperial Russia conceptualized key issues (including so-

22 Introduction cial transformation, time, modernity, and personal identity). Music also played an important role in discussions over what it meant to be “Russian” in the midst of a rapidly changing society. In reconstructing the world of Nietzsche’s orphans, I have closely examined leading artistic and musical journals of the day and analyzed imperial-­era newspapers published in Moscow and St. Petersburg. As Soviet musicologist Iurii Keldysh observed, the years between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions marked a particularly impassioned period of discourse on music, whose sheer wealth of material demands attention from cultural historians.99 Other papers, journals, and books, together with extensive archival research in the personal and professional correspondences of key figures in imperial Russian musical and cultural life balance out my source base.100 In approaching the study of public discourse as a means through which to evaluate musical meaning at a particular historical juncture, I contribute to a growing scholarship that views music as deeply embedded in cultural and historical practice.101 Defining any community based on a shared worldview poses inherent difficulties, perhaps the thorniest of which is the question of reception. While a great deal of material is available about the leading figures who promulgated their ideas in print or music, it is much harder to access the worldview of those buying the journals, reading the articles, or attending concerts. Did they agree with the articles they read in the Russian Musical Newspaper, Music, or Music and Life? Did they even read the articles? How widely did these journals circulate? In the concerts they attended, did audience members actually experience the unifying power of music they were regularly encouraged to identify? Statistics on periodical circulation are incomplete, though the average cost of music journals, together with anecdotal evidence, suggests that circulation was primarily limited to those from the middling and upper strata of society.102 Such data also fail to document to what extent these ideas were truly embraced. Nevertheless, memoir accounts, together with archival letters from relatively unknown figures responding to and reiterating many of the themes found in the printed press, demonstrate that a small but active portion of Russian educated society was interested in music (either as performers or listeners) and embraced the image of music’s unifying power.103 These individuals constituted the core aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans. Chapter 1 analyzes the chief tenets of musical metaphysics in late imperial Russia: unity, musical time, the search for a contemporary Orpheus, and the related expectation of a transformative “mystery” (misteriia). To that end, it demonstrates how Nietzschean ideas were reinterpreted to better suit the immediate concerns of Russian society. In attempting to integrate Nietzsche’s

Introduction 23 principles with the Christian-­based worldview of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, Nietzsche’s orphans struggled to reconcile an amoral view of reality with a deeply felt sense of religious purpose. More than a means of personal escape from contemporary problems, music (as shown by the establishment of the Moscow People’s Conservatory in 1906 and the House of Song in 1908) was a means through which Nietzsche’s orphans strove to bring about social transformation. Even when attempting to reach out to the lower echelons of society, however, Nietzsche’s orphans remained fundamentally disconnected from the reality of the lives of workers and peasants. Chapters 2 through 4 assess the individual creative careers of three of Moscow’s most admired composers: Aleksandr Scriabin (1871–1915), Nikolai Medt­ ner (1879–1951), and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943). These individual composers provide a key focus, as the quest for musical transformation often found expression in a “search for Orpheus”—an attempt to identify the contemporary composer who might, through his musical creativity, reunify society. Moreover, contemporaries tended to draw direct comparisons between the compositional styles of Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner, tying these musical trends into broader discussions of identity and debates over Russia’s future.104 Despite their markedly different compositional styles, contemporaries interpreted each man’s musical language within a conceptual framework built upon ideas of temporality, national identity, and tradition: ideas that were themselves central to debates about Russia’s role within the European and world community. An engagement with the ways in which contemporaries employed these three composers to discuss broader cultural trends concretely exhibits the metaphorical conceptual framework of the time. After examining the development of each man’s place in Russian culture, chapter 5 traces the disintegration of musical metaphysics in Russia. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the harsh realities of political, social, and economic upheaval splintered this idealistic worldview: increasing nationalist tensions alienated both Medtner and Rachmaninoff from their potentially Orphic roles for Russian society. Scriabin’s sudden death in April 1915 splintered his circle of disciples, who alternately interpreted this tragic event as a sign of the composer’s individualistic failing to truly embody Orpheus, as the spiritual defeat of Russia itself, or as a mystical lesson for his contemporaries. The aftermath of the February 1917 Revolution witnessed both the continued search for music’s unifying power and a growing disenchantment with all three composers. Finally, the epilogue traces various threads of musical metaphysics in the post-­1917 context. While utopian aspects of music making continued into the early Soviet era in modified form, this more “practical” age increasingly casti-

24 Introduction gated the philosophical underpinnings of musical metaphysics as a dream, born in the upper echelons of society and disconnected from the narod it had sought to unite. For some of Nietzsche’s orphans, both in the Soviet Union and in exile, music became a space of memory, an emblem of a quest for a better world that had failed to come into being. For others, the values and visions of musical metaphysics continued to develop (albeit in altered form) in both Soviet and émigré contexts. By examining the rise and fall of musical metaphysics, the complex relationship between culture, society, and politics gains new focus. Though seldom explicitly political in their engagement with music, Nietzsche’s orphans nevertheless sought to overcome the limitations and divisions that they identified in modern society. The apparent failure of their dream after 1914 resulted in no small part from their isolation from larger society and from the rise of exclusionary nationalist sentiment, which fractured rather than united their aesthetic community. That many of their musical dreams continued to reverberate long after the collapse of the Russian Empire demonstrates both their adaptability and tenacity. In this sense, the fate of musical metaphysics represents far more than the rise and fall of a particular aesthetic style—it also reveals how Soviet utopianism and even post-­Soviet national visions were themselves born out of the twilight of the Russian Empire.

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Musical Metaphysics in Late Imperial Russia

One who is unmusical will understand nothing. —Andrei Bely (1904)

In 1913 Ivan Mikhailovich Abramushkin, a voice teacher from the town of Aleksandriia, sought to convince the Russian State Duma that music alone had the ability to “combine the will of every separate person into a single collective will.” Rather than citing the authority of Orthodox theology or Russian intellectual tradition to support his argument, Abramushkin turned to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, Abramushkin claimed, “a person expresses himself as a member of the highest universality in dance and song.” For this reason, he concluded, “music is one of the mightiest means of acting on education, the development of feelings and character formation.” This unifying and moral vision of music compelled him to implore the Duma to require that all elementary school teachers receive musical training and teach choral singing in their classrooms. By bringing students together into a common chorus, Abramushkin envisioned a means to overcome social divisions in the Russian Empire.1 Such arguments for music’s importance even gained the support of State Duma representatives: a vote held in February 1914 agreed that music and singing should be required subjects for all women training as teachers.2 German philosophy, Russian social engagement, and music had forged a powerful combination. For this provincial Russian teacher, like many of his urban contemporaries, music promised sobornost’: unity in multiplicity. Abramushkin’s letter to the Duma exemplifies how many late imperial commentators reinterpreted Nietzsche’s ideas to fit their immediate social context.

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Through its unifying power, music could save Russia from the accursed problems of the modern age: social disintegration, cultural decadence, and despair. The immediate experience (perezhivanie) of music could transform unrest and dissent among the narod into community, reshape individual and social identities, and provide a new basis upon which to build a unified society. Men and women such as Abramushkin sought in music both the expression of an ideal, unified world that was absent in contemporary society and a transformative power that might bring this ideal world into existence. This chapter explores the intellectual framework of musical metaphysics in order understand both how and why music was granted such import, and, even more significant, how this worldview informed responses to modernity and attempts to construct Russian identity in the late imperial period. As Jane Fulcher has argued, understanding the significance and range of music’s symbolic meaning within a given society requires close examination of the ways in which historical actors sought to ascribe specific meaning to musical works, often through textual and philosophical interpretation. Such scripts themselves drew upon larger cultural interpretations that were current within a given society.3 While valuable scholarship has addressed the impact of Nietzschean ideas in Russia from philosophical, literary, and musicological angles, no detailed cultural-­intellectual history of musical meaning in late imperial Russian thought has yet been offered.4 In this chapter, I illustrate how key concepts borrowed from German idealist philosophy combined with Russian intellectual tradition as philosophers, musicians, journalists, artists, theologians, and literary figures shaped a distinct worldview that influenced both interpretations of music’s social import and musical creativity itself. Late imperial Russians regularly turned to translations and summaries of philosophical texts in order to find solutions to what they considered the most pressing problems of modern life. While loosely based on philosophical ideas drawn from the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the understanding of music they derived from these sources was based on a combination of interpretation (and misinterpretation) of the portions of texts they read, glosses on those texts written by contemporary commentators, and their own preconceptions.5 Russian translators and commentators on music who were able to read Nietzsche’s German texts chose, by and large, to neglect the philosopher’s later works in favor of his youthful texts, which celebrated the Dionysian dithyramb as the ultimate unifying force.6 In this sense, musical metaphysics emerged in Russia as a process of translation and adaptation rather than direct implementation of Nietzschean ideas.7



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The translation of ideas and concepts from one context to another is shaped both by general discourse and by individual interpretation. For this reason, my analysis is built upon a synthesis of a wide range of voices expressing similar ideas (drawn from the periodical press, personal letters, diaries, and memoirs) and close analysis of the writings of several individuals who provided particularly significant expositions of musical metaphysics. By highlighting conceptual categories and discourse rather than individuals, I investigate the process of translation and reinterpretation of philosophical concepts, and demonstrate the multifaceted and ubiquitous nature of this discourse. After an overview of how music was interpreted as a metaphysical symbol of higher reality in late imperial Russia (particularly built on the philosophical legacies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Vladimir Solov’ev), this chapter explores the fundaments of musical metaphysics, which was built upon three interrelated concepts: unity, musical time, and the search for Orpheus. For all its internal contradictions, this mystical trinity inspired in Nietzsche’s orphans an expectation of a contemporary “mystery,” an artistic-­liturgical act through which contemporary reality might be transformed. The exact nature of that transformation, however, was unclear. My examination of musical metaphysics closes with the disconnect between this worldview’s instigators and their intended audience, as embodied in the experience of the Moscow People’s Conservatory. Despite their yearning to transform Russian society, Nietzsche’s orphans ultimately practiced an insular discourse: while shaping and delineating the boundaries of their own aesthetic community, they were at best only marginally aware of the actual social and political conditions of late imperial Russia. Convinced that they were seeking unity, they were in fact often only reinforcing their own isolation and division. T H E F O U N DAT I O N S O F M US I C A L M ETA P H Y S I C S

The Symbol of Music In 1844 German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer penned an influential interpretation of music as a metaphysical force equivalent to the will that lies at the basis of existence. Inspired in part by his own love of music (nurtured by regular practice on his flute), Schopenhauer raised music to the summit of artistic creation in The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), arguing that music and the phenomenal world were “two different expressions of the same thing.”8 Unlike other art forms, music did not attempt to represent any individual idea or concept; rather music, like the entire

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phenomenal world, provided “a copy of the will itself ” that underpins existence.9 The absence of specific concepts or ideas in music enabled it to express that which was inexpressible by other means.10 Mere human knowledge was conceptually unable to convey the realities that were depicted through music, which was “in the highest degree a universal language.”11 This glorification of music’s universal nature as portraying something specific and distinct, yet outside the realm of conceptual knowledge (thus intimately connected with irrational intuition as opposed to rational knowledge), highlighted music as the quintessential Romantic art form. Schopenhauer’s interpretation was based on a Kantian dualist description of the world as divided into phenomenon (sensation) and noumenon (the thing-­in-­itself ). Schopenhauer defined the noumenon as Will—a dynamic principle, devoid of structure, of which we therefore can have no knowledge. Will ultimately underlies all our actions and is the true cause of them, despite the fact that contingent explanations may be given. “Representation” or the phenomenal world is nothing more than the “objectification of Will,” that is, Will that appears to our perception in multiple forms. While Will itself is singular, lying outside the concepts of time, space, and causality, it takes on multiple forms in its objectification in the phenomenal world. For Schopenhauer, because music was equated with this singular Will, it was, in essence, outside the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer’s dramatic interpretation of music’s unique status, while initially garnering less interest than his older contemporary Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, eventually found an ardent supporter in the young Friedrich Nietzsche, who happened across a copy of The World as Will and Representation in an antiquarian shop sometime between 1865 and 1867.12 Nietzsche’s discovery of Schopenhauer, together with his parallel discovery of the music of Richard Wagner, transformed his entire life and worldview. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872), built upon Schopenhauer’s image of music as an irrational and emotional force that preceded the logical division of the world into disparate entities and rational concepts.13 Developing Schopenhauer’s dualistic interpretation of existence, Nietzsche introduced the figure of Dionysus as the metaphorical representation of the fundamental unity underlying and preceding the phenomenal world (Schopenhauer’s Will). Music, in Nietzsche’s terminology, was the most perfect expression of the Dionysian (collective) impulse and was, in its very essence, opposed to the Apollonian (individualizing) impulse.14 He equated Apollo with the physiological experience of the “dream state,” as well as with Schopenhauer’s world of representation, while Dionysus was linked to the physiological state of “drunkenness” and to Schopenhauer’s concept of Will. Attempts to use human language as a means through



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which to express music’s essence were destined to fail, because “music . . . symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and before all phenomena.”15 Nietzsche’s reworking of Schopenhauer’s philosophy transformed the latter’s negative understanding of human experience and philosophy of quiet resignation to an active embrace of existence, a reinterpretation of the human condition that proved appealing to many. To Schopenhauer, the contemplation of art enabled the individual to momentarily step outside oneself, forgetting his or her own misery. Music, as the highest embodiment of Will (rather than merely a representation of the phenomenal world), bypassed the spatial representation of the physical world for the experience of Will itself, escaping the cycle of suffering that defined individual human existence. Nietzsche developed this distinctive role of music beyond the individual to apply to society as a whole, arguing that music had a crucially important task to play in reuniting an increasingly individualized and fragmented modern society. He asserted that music alone offered a symbolic depiction through which individual suffering could be accepted and embraced.16 The pure Dionysian impulse would overwhelm an individual mind if expressed in its full force, but its embodiment in a musical composition made it comprehensible to the human mind.17 As an art form, music could thus pre­ sent primordial unity within a form that allowed the listener to comprehend it without his or her destruction as an individual: the Apollonian power reshaped the underlying Dionysian spirit into a formal structure that could be grasped by the limited individual mind. This individualization of music’s expression of universal or primordial Will provided the symbol through which an individual could grasp and embrace life as it truly existed. A musical composition was thus a symbol through which the human mind might comprehend and embrace the underlying unity of existence.18 Modernist movements across Europe celebrated the ability of art to open access to another realm of existence, but the special status of music found particular sympathy among Russian cultural elites, who elided the philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer with that of Vladimir Solov’ev.19 Inspired by his own mystical visions of the “Divine Sophia” and committed to fusing Christian theology with German idealist philosophy, the Russian Neoplatonic philosopher argued that music was the most “direct or magical” expression of beauty, in which “the deepest internal state connects us with the true essence of things and with the other world (or, if you like, with the ‘being in itself’ of all that exists), breaking through every conditionality and material limitation, finding its direct and full expression in beautiful sounds and words.”20 Through this shared emphasis on art and music, Solov’ev provided a key impetus through which Nietzsche’s orphans elided Christian morality with Nietzsche’s Dionysian will.

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These disparate intellectual influences (Solov’ev, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer) were drawn together by Russian symbolist writers Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Blok, and Andrei Bely. In evening discussions over a glass of wine, talks delivered at the Society for Free Aesthetics, concerts hosted by the journal The Golden Fleece, Margarita Morozova’s evening salons, and in written analysis and correspondence, all three men developed a theoretical worldview in which music held a central place. Ivanov, whose study of ancient history in general and Greek mystery cults in particular had left an indelible imprint on his personal worldview, insisted that music was “the mightiest of arts,” and that the poet of the new age would “teach with music and myth.”21 He believed that this emphasis on music had been Nietzsche’s prophetic vision for humanity, echoing back to the Hellenic philosopher Socrates, who shortly before his death “dreamed that a heavenly voice commanded him to study music,” though it was only in Nietzsche that this heavenly command had been fulfilled.22 For Ivanov, music was a herald of the dawning new age, the symbol of the secret essence of life that had been lost in the modern era. A new, musical prophet was required to reunite society shattered by Socratic rationality and give meaning to human existence again.23 Rejecting the rationalist worldview of his own mathematician father (a professor at Moscow University), Andrei Bely similarly assigned unique metaphysical import to music.24 Because music had no form in the physical world (being composed purely of sound in time rather than possessing a physical, spatial component), Bely elided the concepts of music and symbol, claiming that “music ideally expresses a symbol” and “a symbol is always musical.”25 Such vague metaphorical language presented its own issues, as fellow poet Aleksandr Blok, similarly musing over the place of music, pointed out to Bely in 1903. “Your face was hidden at that very moment when it was time to state whether music was the ultimate or not the ultimate,” Blok complained, concluding that “it would be better to say that musical art will cease to exist as soon as we ‘return to a religious understanding of reality.’”26 Blok’s critique exposed an important contradiction within the emerging discourse of musical metaphysics: music was conceived both as a compositional art (consisting of specific works) and as a symbol of religious transcendence (a path of mystical insight into a higher reality). It seemed unlikely that music per se could effectively fulfill both tasks. Blok’s critique notwithstanding, Bely’s elision of music as a metaphysical symbol and music as a specific art form was common in the cultural circles of his day. For St. Petersburg composer and music critic Aleksandr Koptiaev, directly inspired by his own translations of writings by Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, only the “mysterious, hidden art” of music could overcome the



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failings of modern, rationalistic culture that had gained hold in the current age and provide the transformative impetus for re-­creating life on a fundamentally new basis.27 Moscow music philosopher Konstantin Eiges also argued in metaphysical language that music, unlike other arts, did not simply “re-­create reality or . . . bear some relation to a structure in the phenomenal world.”28 Rather, it was the “highest spiritual embodiment,”29 incarnating the “uplift into another, higher world.”30 Music “immediately touched upon heavenly beauty, which has no relation at all to the phenomenal world, the world of representation.” Drawing directly on Solov’ev, Eiges concluded that music was a “magical” art, which intuitively gave access to the underlying essence of existence.31 For the artist Wassily Kandinsky, music “has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul”—and thus provided an example of a more “spiritual” path that all art should follow in the modern age.32 Such intimations provided little guidance about musical style but invested great importance in the art of music per se. Through an active embrace and adaptation of these various intellectual trends, late imperial Russians came to interpret the impact of music as essentially spiritual: a path from ordinary reality to higher spiritual insight, from the “real” (realia) to the “more real” (realiora).33 This framing of music’s transformative power was admittedly vague, linked more to a metaphysical symbol of music than to the experience of a given musical work. But the very vagueness of its formulation enabled adherents to freely adapt musical metaphysics to those musical styles most appealing to their individual tastes. Rather than determining specific stylistic attributes, musical metaphysics thus provided a framework of shared expectation within which musical experience was interpreted by educated Russians: a future transformation focused upon concepts of unity, musical time, and the search for Orpheus, which together gave rise to the expectation of a contemporary “mystery” (misteriia). Music as Unity Unity (as the final goal in art and life) and music (as its ultimate expression) arose as the most influential symbols from this late imperial Russian melding of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Solov’ev—even though the form and content of that unity remained undefined.34 For Nietzsche, the Dionysian art of music was the artistic embodiment of “primordial unity” that underlay and preceded the phenomenal world. As the uniting spirit, Dionysus had struggled to overcome the individualizing influence of the phenomenal world.35 Modern society had become too individualistic and lost touch with this underlying unity of existence, a trend that Nietzsche identified as the triumph of Socratic rationality over both

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Apollonian and Dionysian artistic impulses.36 Tragedy, Nietzsche argued, had been the artistic means through which the ancient Greeks had learned “the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the prime cause of evil” and broken “the bonds of individuation,” replacing them with “a restored oneness.”37 He insisted that in ancient Greek tragedy “a public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown.”38 Rather, there was a unity between creator, actor, and spectator that reflected the underlying unity of humanity. Theater offered a symbolic embodiment and reinterpretation of primordial, Dionysian unity, re-­created through the purifying lens of Apollo. In this way, Nietzsche suggested, unity could be enacted or created. Immanent in Nietzsche’s thought was also the concept of zhiznetvorchestvo (life-­ creation)—art as means through which to transform or “create” life, one of the central tenets to emerge in Russian symbolist literary thought in the late imperial era—though the philosopher spoke of “overcoming” (überwinden) or “transfiguring” (verklären) existence, rather than “creating” it.39 For Nietzsche, transcendent values or morality did not exist: value was assigned to existence through the creative act itself. In its Russian translation, however, the Dionysian concept of unity (edinstvo) merged with two additional concepts with deep religious significance: theurgy (teurgiia) and collectivity (sobornost’), a reinterpretation that drew heavily upon the writings of Nietzsche’s Russian contemporary, Vladimir Solov’ev. Like Nietzsche, Solov’ev stressed art’s transforming power. For Solov’ev, however, human artistic creativity was intimately linked with the idea of theurgy or “divine action”: artistic creations not only transformed but also spiritualized reality. Emphasizing the division between spiritual (eternally perfect) and material (existing) reality, Solov’ev saw in art an embodiment of Beauty that served as a link between these two realms. “Beauty” served to transfigure (preobrazhit’) material reality through the “incarnation of another, higher-­than-­material element in it.”40 Solov’ev imbued his aesthetic theory with a specific Christian mission: the “transformation of physical life into its spiritual counterpart.”41 Thus the transforming power of art was immediately connected with a moral goal: Beauty always worked to advance Truth (istina) and Goodness (dobro); indeed, beauty was “only the physical form of Goodness and Truth.”42 In Solov’ev’s vision, human history was an expression of the “eternal battle between the cosmic (harmonizing) beginning and the chaotic process of cosmogenesis.”43 This gnostic vision of reality emphasized the historical process, the gradual spiritualization (harmonization) of the material world over time and the deification of humanity (bogochelovechestvo).44 Art held an important place in this process, because it symbolized the bringing of form to initial chaos and advanced the transformational process itself. Solov’ev asso-



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ciated moments of chaos with forms of destruction, death, and evil.45 Thus, while Nietzsche started from an ambivalent view of the nature of reality itself, Solov’ev imbued reality and the historic process with Christian morality, criticizing the German philosopher for his abandonment of any religious, mystical basis for his philosophy. As Irina Paperno has noted, this theological slant entered into later readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Russia, which in turn influenced the development of musical metaphysics.46 Nietzsche’s orphans were enthralled by Solov’ev’s claim that contemporary European art had reached its highest development as pure art and now required the appearance of a new, theurgic art that would reunify material and spiritual realms. They prophesied that the theurgic art soon to appear would not merely represent but transform (preobrazhat’) the world.47 For Nikolai Berdiaev, who abandoned his youthful Marxist convictions after 1905 and devoted himself instead to religious philosophy, it was clear that “in our nervous, searching, transitional, unembodied and unfinished epoch, the spirit of music rules.” Nevertheless, dissatisfied with the disunity of the current age, Berdiaev awaited the future appearance of true “theurgic art, [which is] synthetic and collective [sobornoe]. [Theurgic art] is something that is still unseen, an undiscovered pan-­ art.”48 For Moscow-­based composer Fedor Akimenko (who divided much of his time between composing salonesque pieces for piano, writing Nietzschean-­style aphorisms on art, seeking ways to access the higher “astral plane,” and musing upon the potential existence of Martians and the quality of their musical life), music unquestionably possessed an uplifting influence upon the moral and spiritual abilities of its listeners, eliminating mere physical desires. Art—particularly music—was, he concluded, the “religion of the future.”49 Troubled by Nietzsche’s rejection of religion, Bely argued that the divine spirit must be returned to the artistic creative process, claiming that “creativity, carried to its conclusion, directly turns into religious creativity: theurgy.”50 Echoing these theurgic ideas as late as 1917, the young music critic Igor Glebov (who would later, under the name Boris Asaf’ev, enjoy acclaim as the father of Soviet musicology), argued that “art is transformation [preobrazhenie]”51 and that, in the end, while “the musical element is the basic element of all genuine art,” “all art is ultimately defined by its relation to religion.”52 For Viacheslav Ivanov, the form of this religion was also clear in its basic outlines. Arguing for the “internal oneness of Beauty and Goodness” and equating the true Nietzschean superman with Christ, he claimed that Nietzsche’s failure had been his inability to reconcile his own visions with Christianity.53 Nietzsche’s image of a unifying, Dionysian spirit found fertile soil in a country with a lengthy intellectual tradition focused on the concept of sobornost’, a term

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derived from Orthodox theology and developed in particular by Slavophile writers Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and Konstantin Aksakov in the mid-­ nineteenth century.54 Sobornost’ suggested a communal or collective existence, “the quality of being in accordance with the unity of all, of the unity of humanity in God.”55 The noun sobornost’ was related to the adjective “sobornyi” (the Slavic translation of the Greek term katholikos, meaning “universal,” “whole,” or “all-­ embracing,” which was employed in the Nicene Creed to refer to the unity of Christian faithful in a single community) and to the noun sobor (alternately meaning “gathering,” “council,” or “cathedral”).56 The Slavophiles emphasized the collective (sobornyi ) nature of Russian peasant life as a fundamental cultural characteristic distinguishing Russia from Europe. This idea of a communal, unified people became inextricably linked with the image of Russia’s national character and its imagined future messianic mission. Music was considered to be particularly evocative of sobornost’, as demonstrated by Aksakov’s 1859 metaphor that compared the ultimate embodiment of sobornost’—the peasant commune—to a “moral choir” in which the voice of the individual “is heard in harmony with all other voices.”57 To differentiate his aesthetic thought from the political connotations connected with the Slavophiles, Solov’ev coined the alternate term vseedinstvo (all-­ unity), defining artistic theurgy as the “active transformation of reality for the goals of achieving positive or true vseedinstvo.”58 In other words, theurgic art was to reunite the physical and spiritual realms, ushering in a new era of unity and harmony. The term sobornost’ was employed in a similar way by neo-­Kantian philosopher Sergei Trubetskoi, the elder brother of Evgenii Trubetskoi, head of the department of philosophy at Moscow University, and editor of Russia’s first philosophical journal, Voprosy filosofii. His unexpected death in 1905 turned him into an inspiration for and symbol of Russia’s quest for spiritual and intellectual truth. Both terms (vseedinstvo, sobornost’) subsequently entered into the general vocabulary of Nietzsche’s orphans, while the messianic underpinnings of Slavophile thought continued to enjoy popularity as an interpretation of Russia’s task in the modern world.59 That the idea of sobornost’ found such broad social resonance in late imperial Russia has been further demonstrated by Julia Mannherz. Amid her analysis of the communal emphasis granted to occult-­mental prayer, she observes that “ordinary readers and occult publishers” “shared aspirations with symbolist writers and religious thinkers” in seeking ways through which to enact this desired communality.60 Yet it was music that seemed to offer a particularly striking enactment of sobornost’ for many members of educated society. Aksakov’s vision of sobornost’ inspired Orthodox priest, mathematician, and theologian Pavel Florenskii to combine it with a more accurate understanding of



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peasant song. Highlighting the heterophonic style of singing that existed among the Russian peasantry (in contrast to both the homophonic and polyphonic styles of the West),61 Florenskii insisted that Russian peasant choirs possessed “full freedom of all voices, uniting with each other, rather than one voice dominating another. . . . unity is achieved in the internal mutual understanding of the performers, and not through external boundaries. Each individual, more or less, improvises, but this does not destroy the whole. Quite the opposite, [the whole] is firmly connected, because every performer agrees with the general act . . . in other words, Russian song is the realization of that ‘choral beginning’ upon which the Slavophiles thought to prop up Russian society.”62 In his own philosophical work, Florenskii “wished to say the same thing that the soul of the Russian narod express in song”—to express this quest for sobornost’.63 Against this eclectic philosophical backdrop of Nietzschean, Slavophile, and Solov’evian thought, the gulf separating the common people (narod) from the educated few became clear amid the flames of revolution in 1905, leading to reinvigorated calls for unity within Russian society.64 Caught up in the spirit of the times, Bely determined that the very structure of Russian society would have to be transformed before true communal creation (sobornoe tvorchestvo) could be achieved: the current context, he argued, made communal art impossible, as there were merely “individualists who dream of sobornost’, and individualists who do not dream of it.”65 Both Ivanov and Blok similarly mourned the division between educated society and the people, seeing this divide as symptomatic of modern times.66 This confrontation with popular discontent in 1905 helped to grant music’s unifying role a more explicitly social slant, as musical harmony was regularly employed as a metaphor for social unity. This approach was itself based in part upon the Greek concept of harmonia, used variously to refer to musical consonances, the ordering of the cosmos, and the harmonious interactions of peoples.67 In this vein, Aleksandr Maslov, editor of the music journal Music and Life (Muzyka i zhizn’) and an ethnographer with populist sympathies, argued that “music calls forth a harmony of feelings between various distinct individuals and is a means of making the heart beat in sympathy, just as the strings of a musical instrument or human voices sound in consonance. . . . music is an instrument of social unity and agreement.”68 The greatest task that music faced in the modern era, concluded numerous commentators, was to overcome the social divisions within which it had developed: the split between educated society and the narod. The “decline” that some people had commented upon in modern music was believed to spring from the fact that it was distant from the needs and desires of society as a whole. In the past, argued an anonymous critic, art “was not divided into ‘low’

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art and ‘high’ art, but was all-­national [vsenarodnyi ]—even more than that, it was collective [kollektivnyi].”69 Classical music had evolved as entertainment for the upper class; it was now necessary for music to reach people of all social origins, in order to reforge the social fabric of the empire.70 Inspired by such populist ideas, in September 1905 Aleksandr Koptiaev momentarily forgot his obsession with Nietzschean philosophy and expectation of a latter-­day Orpheus, and warmly encouraged the formation of peasant orchestras and choirs as means through which the narod could engage in the process of making music and rebuilding social bonds.71 Through reuniting society and transcending class conflict, it was believed that music would fulfill its proper role as an educational, civilizing, and unifying (in short, a harmonizing) force. The Russian narod that Maslov, Koptiaev, and others hoped to reach was itself a construct: an idealized image of a pure Russian folk awaiting the guiding hand of the intelligentsia to form a coherent national group. For members of educated society who worked more immediately among the people, music was not simply a means of creating a unified narod; it was an instrument through which to forge a particular kind of collective unity or identity. For the Orthodox clergy, music (embodied in the reintroduction of communal singing into liturgical service) was seen as a means of combating the divisive influence of sectarianism within peasant society. In a July 1905 missive to the Holy Synod, Bishop Gury of Simbirsk argued that in current Orthodox practice “the clergy offer their hymns of thanksgiving, supplication, and glorification, [while] the people are reduced to the role of passive listeners.”72 In contrast, the emotional appeal of music in sectarian worship, in which people could freely participate, was luring away Orthodox believers. The obvious solution, Bishop Gury concluded, was the Orthodox revival of communal singing, a call seconded by other members of the clergy. Between 1905 and 1917, it was regularly argued (both in letters and in the press) that communal singing should be employed in the Orthodox liturgy to reawaken spiritual devotion among the peasantry and to protect the confused souls of Orthodox peasants from the seductiveness of both revolution and sectarian worship.73 Music in this framing was connected not just to national unity but also to religious unity. In the liberal press, music was further envisioned as a symbol for creating political unity. Philosopher Evgenii Trubetskoi found in music a metaphor for a transformed Russian Empire, in which patriotism toward one’s own country would replace “narrow nationalism” and allow all peoples of the empire (including Jews, Poles, and Russians) to find common ground. In Trubetskoi’s vision, the “music of the future” sounded the triumphant strains of equal citizenship rights, the end of autocratic power, and an embrace of Christian morality as



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the governing basis for society.74 Other political figures voiced similar ideas in the pages of Trubetskoi’s journal Moscow Weekly (Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik). Vasilii Mikhailovich Petrovo-­Solovovo (Marshal of the Nobility of the Tambov region, member of the Octobrist party, and one of the founders of the Tambov division of the Russian Musical Society) emphasized music’s ability to transcend social divisions by developing “mutual solidarity between people” and furthering “the striving to combine personal and social life into a single whole.”75 Historian and liberal activist Sergei Kotliarevskii employed the figure of Frédéric Chopin as a symbol of the underlying “physical and spiritual commonality” shared by Poles and Russians, a commonality that now demanded recognition, he concluded, through political reform.76 In 1908 the idealistic young singer Maria Olenina-­d’Alheim returned to Moscow after several years in Paris with her own unifying vision: the creation of a communal performance space that would eschew capitalist relations and embody the true values of collective creation. With the support of her husband, the musicologist and philosopher Piotr d’Alheim, she founded the House of Song.77 Expanded into a regular society in 1912, the House of Song sought to create a communal environment in which “three necessary factors: artist-­creator, performer, and the public” worked together for the creation of a true artistic work, and in which the public would have “as important a place” as the artist-­creator.78 Because of this emphasis on collective experience, the society published all the texts of songs performed in Russian translation and circulated them to members prior to each concert. Texts for any potential encores were similarly included in the precirculated bulletins, as the spontaneity of performing a piece “off the cuff ” did not permit the audience to reflect on the synthesis of music and textual meaning.79 Even more unusually, the House of Song did not sell tickets for its performances, which were open only to paying members of the society. As Olenina d’Alheim explained, “for twelve years, the founder of the House of Song has striven to attract to her concerts not chance listeners, but those who consciously take part in communal creative activity [sovmestnoi tvorcheskoi deiatel’nosti], on the basis of a common understanding of art. These listeners are members and candidates of our Society. Opening our doors in this fashion [by selling concert tickets] not only contradicts the goals of the institution of our Society, but would even bring into question the very purpose of our Society’s continued existence.”80 Ironically, the theoretical limiting of attendance for the House of Song was even greater in practice. Open in theory to anyone who wished to subscribe and attend concerts (and of course pay the membership fee—already restricting access to a small portion of Moscow’s overall population), this “collective” was in fact restricted in size by the most mundane of causes: the Small Hall of the

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Moscow Conservatory (where most performances were scheduled) had limited seating and could only accommodate a portion of those interested in participating.81 This emphasis on collective participation extended far beyond the question of concert attendance. The House of Song regularly sponsored contests for translations of poetic song texts into Russian, and each season Olenina d’Alheim performed a concert whose program was decided entirely by society members through a democratic vote. Similarly, musical classes connected with the House of Song sought to create conditions in which “the unifying spirit of saintly Art” would genuinely develop, creating “new artists” who, “free from the concerns of service or commercial considerations,” would embrace this collective artistic path pioneered by the society.82 Such considerations encapsulated the emphasis on unity and life transformation through art that were at the heart of musical metaphysics, and thus appealed to many contemporaries from Moscow’s cultural elite.83 Captivated by the idea that music combined national expression with universal human goals, Olenina d’Alheim similarly emphasized programs that incorporated various European song traditions and (to the chagrin of less tolerant supporters such as Emilii Medtner) insisted on the central place of Jewish folk music for European culture as a whole. Such liberal expressions of musical unity coexisted with exclusionary nationalist rhetoric. Boris Popov, a music critic tied to cultural circles in both Moscow and Perm, elected a sharply ethnic understanding of “Slavicness” that excluded those composers without sufficiently Slavic heritage from identification as “Russian” artists.84 In contrast, Popov’s sworn enemy Emilii Medtner devoted his life to the development of closer cultural ties between German and Russian culture, even while seeking to exclude what he considered to be “foreign Jewish” influence from European culture as a whole.85 Of course, the definition of musical style according to ethnic identity was not inherently negative; as James Loeffler has demonstrated, Rimsky-­Korsakov’s challenge to his Jewish students to develop a Jewish national musical style found fruitful soil in the final years of the Russian Empire.86 Moscow’s House of Song similarly sought to build an understanding of music that emphasized both what the society considered as the inherent ethnic-­national content of musical composition and the universal element underpinning all genuine art.87 Nevertheless, the insistence that musical style was intimately connected with ethnic identity existed uneasily alongside the image of music as a unifying force: could music truly be universal if it contained inherent national characteristics? Moreover, with the growing nationalist movements within the Russian Empire in the aftermath of 1905, the quest for ex-



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pression of a distinctly Russian ethnic identity increasingly seemed to suggest a failure to establish a coherent Russian imperial (rossiiskii ) identity. Although music inspired many educated Russians to envision a new world that transcended the divisions of modernity, contemporary listeners cherished their own hopes and expectations of what that unity would entail. The goal of unity was a silver thread running through all discourse on musical metaphysics, but the form that unity should take was vigorously disputed. Emphasis on ethnic nationalism interacted uneasily with the realities of musical life in the multiethnic Russian Empire, in which individuals from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds (including Russians, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, and many of mixed heritage) cooperated in building an imperial musical community. Musical Time Temporality—the human experience of the passage of time (rather than the “objective,” “universal,” or “natural” time connected with the external world)— is, as David Couzens Hoy has argued, “a basic feature of interpretations of the world.”88 When experiences of temporality change, overarching interpretations of the external world and human existence also change. Reinhart Koselleck has shown that post-­1789 Europe experienced a shift from cyclical, repeated time (embodied in tradition) toward progressive, linear time (a product of the Enlightenment); society increasingly mused on the future rather than the past as the imagined ideal and goal.89 Faith in linear time nonetheless began to lose ground in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century Europe: the impacts of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization potentially came to portend the decline rather than the improvement of human life. But a return to traditional patterns of religious and spiritual belief was seen as an even less viable alternative. In no small part, this quandary emerged from a growing crisis of perception, because new technological innovations and scientific discoveries were transforming the lived experience of both time and space. Distances seemed to shrink with the expansion of railroad networks, the measurement of time was standardized to simplify schedules, and in 1905 Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity critiqued the very possibility of a single, objective time.90 Within this increased discourse on time and temporality, music emerged as a crucial method through which to engage with time itself. In 1905 German philosopher Edmund Husserl employed music as a means to examine the phenomenological experience of time. Rejecting earlier attempts to define the lived experience of temporality as a series of “now” moments that fade into the past, Husserl based his philosophical analysis in part on the ex-

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ample of a musical melody to theorize how time itself was experienced. He emphasized the unity of experience that enabled a listener to link together the experience of hearing an entire melody as a single event spread out temporally, incorporating both an aspect of recent memory (retention) and the expectation of what was to come (protention). The temporal aspect of one note preceding or following another was an inherent part of the experience, both in the initial experience and in any later remembrance of the melody, demonstrating that temporality itself served as an inherent aspect of human psychological experience and was not equivalent to external measurements of time.91 French philosopher Henri Bergson similarly applied music to demonstrate what he called “duration” or “psychological time,” which, he argued, contains an indivisible unity “melted together like the notes of a melody,” contrasting with uniform time, which was a measurable quantitative entity, analogous to space. For Bergson, duration offered intuitive insight into genuine reality, in contrast to the formal, mechanistic knowledge bequeathed by Kantian philosophy.92 For both philosophers, music—an art form intimately connected with time rather than space— provided a key way through which to conceptualize the temporal, subjective experience of life itself. In the Russian context, focus on the passage of time usually gave way to the transcendence of time—through music. Embracing the metaphysical image of music he had previously critiqued in Andrei Bely, poet Aleksandr Blok wrote of “calendar time” and “musical time,” in which the former referred to the measurable, linear passage of time captured in history, and the latter described the “incalculable” experience of immediate connection to the spirit of music underpinning reality.93 “Musical time” facilitated a way to “emerge from calendar time, from the flight of the days and years of history which gives no knowledge [of the All],” an argument that highlighted the transformative significance granted to music in late imperial Russia more broadly.94 This image of temporal transcendence mirrors the conceptions of time voiced by Russian religious figures such as Simon Frank and Evgenii Trubetskoi, who both, as Katerina Levidou has observed, critiqued Bergson for “ignoring the essentially timeless nature and all-­encompassing unity of the absolute” in his concept of duration.95 Thus, in contrast to Bergson and Husserl, the connection between music and temporality generally expressed in the Russian context was connected with mystical transcendence through artistic theurgy. Musician Nadezhda Briusova identified in music a “moment of insight” that was itself “outside of time” (i.e., musical time) while the path to it was “through time.” Dismissing the division between a musical composition (which exists in time) and this moment of insight that exists outside of time, she argued that through the action of creative will expressed in



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a musical composition, “unruly time [i.e., historical time] must become a pure expression of light itself . . . without temporal death. Time that has been entirely transformed [preobrazhennym] is eternity.”96 Broadening Blok’s terminology, I use “musical time” to reference this attempt to step outside space and time and access the absolute. Musical time was seen as a messianic or eschatological transcendence of linear time, a path to higher reality.97 Whether attained through historical progress or recognition of ancient truths contained in an idealized past, musical time suggested a moment of transformation from the existing (often degraded) state of human experience to a higher one. For Nietzsche’s orphans, musical time offered a symbolic means through which to transcend current reality and enter into a higher level of existence. The categories of progress and decadence underpinned contemporary debates over musical time. While “progress” in this context emphasized the development of humanity (technologically, scientifically, and intellectually) from a lower to a more advanced phase of existence, “decadence” offered an alternate, anxiety-­filled interpretation of the path of history. In the mid-­nineteenth century, Hegelian philosophy had postulated a completely logical account of the history of human civilization, based upon the assumption that historical time told a story of unending progress (embodied in nature, art, and human reason itself ); in contrast, fin-­de-­siècle culture throughout Europe was criticized as representing not the advancement of human civilization but rather the decline and eventual collapse of Europe’s leading role, a reinvention of a cyclical conception of time in which civilizations rise and fall. The image of historical decline was evoked in Max Nordau’s Degeneration (Entartung, 1892), which was quickly translated into Russian. It inspired concern over the degeneration of contemporary society both in human psychological and physical health as well as in the artistic realm.98 Fears over the direction of Russian social change vied with more optimistic assessments, and the popular press dwelt at length on the “decline” and “decadence” of contemporary Russia. Particularly in the aftermath of 1905, emphasis on music’s transformative impulse expressed a deep-­seated anxiety about modern life and a thirst to transcend the problems of the present. Music was believed to offer a means of salvation for humanity through an eschatological break with the past: in the words of Blok, a move from “calendar time” to “musical time.” Through its direct appeal to mood, emotion, and experience rather than human reason, music was seen as an escape from the present age. For those uneasy with the apparent growth of individualism, positivism, and materialism in modern life, music offered spiritual and psychological transformation, an expression of higher spiritual and emotional forms from which a more advanced humanity would emerge in the future. Per-

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haps the most spectacular artistic envisioning of “musical time,” Aleksandr Scria­ bin’s envisioned Mystery (through which he expected to bring an end to time itself ) was part of a larger discourse more modestly expressed in the contemporary press. Evgenii Braudo (who after 1905 divided his time between serving prison and exile terms for revolutionary activity and writing philosophically inspired music criticism) insisted that by emotionally preparing the human psyche for a new form of existence, a musical work had the potential to usher in the revolutionary break from calendar time to musical time. Music, he argued, “opens before us a realistic picture of the feelings of the new future man and accustoms us, amid the prosaic conditions of contemporary life, to the spiritual life of the future.”99 Conceptions of musical time were not limited to metaphysical musings; rather, they found expression in specific debates over the evolution of musical style. For philosopher Boris Schloezer, already under the mystical spell cast by his idol Scriabin, the increased musical dissonance of modernist works expressed a transfigured human spirit, freed from the earlier limitations of human history. Once, Schloezer claimed in Schopenhauerian-­inspired terms, music had known no other possibility than to shift from consonance to dissonance and back; similarly, human existence had known only two paths: either the endless cycle of striving to satisfy desires (ever replaced by new ones after momentary fulfillment) or else the denial of all desire and a search for calm. Contemporary music, in his view, expanded dissonance while minimizing consonance; it increased the process of change, striving, and motion while minimizing rest or resolution. While such a focus on constant striving suggests Bergson’s idea of duration, Schloezer nevertheless connected his interpretation of music with a more eschatological vision of temporality. The fact that at least some modern humans were now able to find pleasure in dissonance suggested that a “deep transformation has taken place in the human spirit” and proved that “a small group of people, more or less consciously, develop in themselves different ideals of life.” By listening to new music, these select few were undergoing individual psychological transformation, which Schloezer saw as a necessary prerequisite for the transformation of human society as a whole.100 Taking time away from her self-­proclaimed mission of reawakening the communal spirit of the narod through teaching them collective song, Nadezhda Briusova likewise argued that Scriabin’s experimentations with harmony and rhythm offered “a portent of an entirely still unseen and to us incomprehensible sensation of time,” destined to usher in a changed humanity.101 Such ideas echoed occultist and Scriabin disciple Piotr Demianovich Uspenskii’s call for the emergence of a “new higher race” that would solve the social and political questions



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“so sharply apparent in our time” on an “entirely different level and in an entirely different form than we imagine.”102 Even St. Petersburg composer and music critic Viacheslav Karatygin, no great admirer of the metaphysical musings of his contemporaries, embraced an image of music that emphasized a progressive histori­cal view: while dismissing Scriabin’s philosophical rantings, he embraced his progressive search for new musical forms to express contemporary experience, while critiquing both Medtner and Rachmaninoff for continuing to explore “outmoded” forms of musical creativity.103 Although this emphasized break with past traditions suggested a modernist worldview in which new sounds and techniques would forge a new human psyche (often connected with the music of Scriabin), calls for overcoming the present through musical time were not limited to critics who espoused a modernist musical style. Rather, music of all types was commonly connected with a rupture in human history itself. The journal Music and Life, while devoted to the study of Russian folk song and Orthodox church music, defined its view of music in terminology reminiscent of a modernist manifesto: “the old art no longer acts on us because it has lost its living connection with life, [which is] changing its forms,” argued an anonymous contributor in the journal’s first issue.104 For Aleksandr Maslov, an outspoken opponent of Scriabin’s music and worldview, musical time was intimately connected not with modernist techniques but with social revolution. The only true advancement in music, he argued in a 1906 letter, “has been closely connected with political revolution and with the renewal of the life of the narod . . . the successes of the agrarian workers’ revolution are also the successes of music.”105 Emilii Medtner, while fundamentally opposed to any discussion of “progress” in the musical realm or modernist compositional techniques, proposed nevertheless that music could lift individual experience out of temporal reality and offer access to what he defined as “absolute reality.”106 Regardless of aesthetic style, music was thus envisioned as a mystical force capable of both transcending mundane experiences of temporality and ushering in a new reality. In Search of Orpheus The image of an artistic genius whose music was destined to mend the rifts in contemporary society was central to the worldview of musical metaphysics.107 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had called for the appearance of a “genius” in whom both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses would be united.108 He described this unity of impulses as “the union, indeed, the identity, of the lyrist with the musician” that existed as the central component of ancient Greek art. He called for a similar figure to appear in the modern era, described as the “music-­ practicing Socrates,” who would combine the rational and irrational impulses of

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humanity.109 Such a creative artist would provide a symbolic depiction of Dionysian unity through the embodiment of music’s essence in space and time, a process made possible through the Apollonian impulse that offered form and structure to inchoate unity.110 While the image of Zarathustra and the “overman” has dominated popular understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy, it was this image of “genius” in The Birth of Tragedy (rather than the “overman” of Thus Spake Zarathustra) that underpinned musical metaphysics. In his first work, Nietzsche took great pains to differentiate between the figure of genius and individual identity. The “self ” of the lyric genius was “not the same as that of the waking, empirically real man” but rather the “truly existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things.”111 While both individual and universal components (genius and nongenius) coexisted, the individual subject had no impact on the creative process as such, serving only as the individualized expression of the unified creative impulse, “the medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through appearance.”112 The genius thus embodied the universal. In Russia, Nietzsche’s image of a “music-­practicing Socrates” who would unite the rational and irrational aspects of humanity elided with another figure borrowed from Greek mythology: Orpheus. Because of the emphasis on music’s theurgic power and the transformative moment to be reached in “musical time,” the figure of Orpheus or, in Viacheslav Ivanov’s words, “the miracle of Orpheus” (the ability to transform material reality through art) was evoked as a symbol of true theurgic genius.113 Alternate traditions glorified him as a Thracian singer, “the father of song,” or the priest of the “mysteries of Dionysus.” His parentage itself was traced to the Muse Calliope and Oeagrus, or to Apollo himself. Among the many tales surrounding Orpheus, the two most enduring were his ill-­fated journey to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, and his death at the hands of Thracian bacchantes. The constant in these myths was Orpheus’s connection with mousike, the “art of the Muses.” Orpheus’s music was more than just an art form; it had an immediate impact both on his listeners and upon the natural world. This Orphic power captivated the imagination of generations of European composers; in the context of the Russian Empire, it found particularly vivid reinterpretation in the imaginations of Vladimir Rebikov and his contemporaries, who envisioned the composer as a prophetic or even a messianic figure.114 If music was truly the highest form of art, the underlying unity out of which the entire material world sprang, then the composer—the individual who controlled the art of giving order and harmony to sound—was, at least potentially, the ultimate prophetic visionary. While this fascination with Orpheus predated the events of 1905, the role of



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the artistic genius was given particular attention in the aftermath of revolution. For Aleksandr Koptiaev, it became clear that Nietzsche’s philosophy was, in the end, of limited use for contemporary Russia, because it failed to solve the inherent conflict between individual genius and the crowd. For this reason, Nietzsche’s mission had to be adapted for the contemporary Russian context. Only in Russia, Koptiaev believed, could unity be attained between the narod and the great composer who would arise to lead them. “Believe me,” he argued dramatically in 1908, “in Russia something never before heard of is beginning.”115 Developing the same strand of thought, music critic Evgenii Braudo hinted that it was the duty of a future Russian composer to transcend the division between music’s aristocratic background and its future connection with the narod.116 Regardless of such hopes, in the aftermath of 1905, the disconnect between artists and the narod remained strong. Ivanov concluded that the very emergence of the concept of an individual genius was a symptom of the divide between the people and the intelligentsia. In its purest form, he argued, genius was intimately connected with the collective identity of a people rather than with any individual.117 While the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath had emphasized the division between the narod and the educated classes, Ivanov claimed that this gap could not be bridged by political leaders; it demanded a “singer,” whose creation of new unifying myths would imply a reawakening of the collective spirit of Dionysus. Russia’s current crisis was due to an overemphasis on individualistic dreams and isolation from the narod, which Ivanov considered the “basic fact of the contemporary history of the spirit.” Rather than enlightening the narod with higher knowledge, contemporary artists were stranded at the heights of artistic inspiration, glorying in their own, secret knowledge. Thus Ivanov mourned in 1906 that “the crowd has lost its organ of speech: the singer.”118 In contrast, he celebrated the figure of Orpheus as the “bearer of the ideas of wholeness and unification.”119 Ivanov’s outlook resonated with his contemporaries. Mesmerized by the envisioned role of a Russian Orpheus, in January 1911 Emilii Medtner asked Ivanov to submit an article on Orpheus for a book series devoted to mysticism forthcoming from his publishing house, Musaget.120 The Russian Musical Newspaper gave visual expression to these utopian visions of a latter-­day Orpheus who could overcome the divisions made so evident by the 1905 Revolution, when it introduced a new sketch into its pages in 1906: a Greek figure holding aloft a lyre and a small vessel with flame (fig. 1.1). The outline of a sun behind the androgynous figure’s head suggested an affiliation with Apollo, but the lack of textual references left specific interpretation of the unnamed Greek deity open for the viewer to determine. In future issues the sketch tended to be placed prior to articles or stories that dealt with more

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mystical aspects of musical experience, and its placement immediately before Vladimir Rebikov’s story “Orpheus and the Bacchantists” in 1910 deepened the potential for direct association with Orpheus.121 Russian visions of Orpheus also mingled with Christian messianic imagery. Ivanov saw in Orpheus the synthesis of Apollo, Dionysus, and Christ. “Orpheus,” he wrote, “is the creative Word that moves the world, and signifies God the Word in the Christian symbolism of the first centuries.”122 Developing this religious aspect of Orpheus as creator, Bely argued that a theurgic approach to art required a creative personality that served as a “temple of God in which God dwells.”123 Philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev echoed this image of a divine spark, housed within the individual creative genius, claiming that the role of the artistic genius was “another kind of sainthood.”124 Eliding Orpheus and Christ as embodiments of spiritual (rather than physical) existence, Rebikov contended that “Orpheus is not a myth” but rather “one of the parables of the Unknowable God. A parable of the battle between Spirit and matter.”125 The prophetic task of the composer was to keep alive the message of God in times of spiritual darkness, to “catch, from time to time, particles of [Orpheus’s] song,” a calling that required spiritual and moral purity. “In order to create,” wrote Rebikov in a letter to fellow composer Stepan Smolenskii, “you must have a soul that resembles a temple. You must have a pure soul. Then you will see God.”126 Similar Christian terminology emerged in texts by Scriabin’s followers, who employed terms such as “prophet” (prorok), “Lamb of God” (agnets), and “Messiah” (messiia) when referring to their composer of choice.127 But this messianic vision of Orpheus carried potential dangers, as Vladimir Solov’ev warned in his analysis of Pushkin’s death. For Solov’ev, the embodiment of genius in human form brought with it both the responsibility of greater morality and the danger of failure (due to fallen human nature).128 Even a supreme genius such as Pushkin could be mistaken or go astray, succumbing to the weak, all-­too-­ human aspects of his personality. Lev Tolstoy further developed this question of an artist’s moral culpability: if art was defined in terms of its ability to “infect” others with the same emotion the artist experienced when creating the work, the question of art’s positive or negative effect could be solved only through reference to its influence on the audience.129 A work of art was thus only as “good” or “moral” as the impact it had upon its audience. In this interpretation, the figure of genius could serve either heaven or hell, awakening both morally beneficial and destructive impulses in his audience. Drawing on this tradition, music philosopher Konstantin Eiges developed an extensive metaphysical analysis of the moral basis upon which musical creativity took place.130 He argued that mysticism in general (and musical mysticism in



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Figure 1.1. Unnamed sketch from Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta no. 1 (January 1, 1906), 8. Courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

particular) could stem both from higher and lower impulses. “Lower mysticism” was “the mysticism of chaos, manifested as drunkenness, raving, the experience of horror, etc.” Eiges emphasized that the clearest manifestation of the “higher” mystical impulse was creativity, while the “lower” mystical impulse found its purest expression in destruction. Musical creation, he argued, was distinct from other forms of artistic creation. Only a composer could embody both the lower (Dionysian) and higher (Apollonian) mystical impulses. Whereas other artists were inspired by an object or idea in the phenomenal world, which “reflected heavenly beauty,” the composer “has a different character: strong excitement, leaning toward drunkenness, seizes him, when in the moment of inspiration he not only indefinably feels ‘the touch of another world,’ but also enters into this other world with his entire soul and contemplates the transcendental as a particular sound world-­order in all its unearthly beauty.” Eiges claimed that in entering this other world, a composer experienced the pure Dionysian state, “the destruction in consciousness of the boundaries between ‘I’ and ‘not-­I’” which would seize the composer, “freeing him from his own, concrete ‘I’” such that “his will unites with ‘first-­unity.’”131 This direct experience of Dionysian unity distinguished musical creativity from all other artistic activities, but it also made musical inspiration particularly dangerous, as the composer entered into a realm of lower mystical experience. According to Eiges, the composer’s experience of the frantic, ecstatic, Dionysian state gave rise to the impulse to translate that experience into the most immediate form possible in the phenomenal world: that of sound (the “will to sound”). In this interpretation, the inchoate will of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer was assigned a goal: the striving for sound, most specifically musical sound. The experience of the Dionysian state then served as the inspirational basis out of

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which music emerged as a higher, mystical experience. Through the composer’s creative genius, the initial chaos of the Dionysian impulse would be transformed into the “crystallized musical phrases” of higher, mystical experience, referred to by Eiges as “musical mood.” This mood, together with “contemplative and religious moods,” was itself a “mystical state.” “True” music thus transformed Dionysian chaos into a higher, mystical experience beyond the realm of rationality. If a composer failed in transforming Dionysian chaos into an ordered, mystical experience, he failed in his creative task. For this reason, the composer who entered into the lower, satanic realm for creative inspiration held a position of tremendous power and moral responsibility.132 While the need for Orpheus seemed obvious to Nietzsche’s orphans, the form he might take and the musical style he might espouse gave rise to sharp divisions. Writers on music often expressed strong partisanship, passionately supporting the claim of “their” composer to the lyre of Orpheus at the expense of other composers. Such debates found their origin in Nietzsche’s own youthful fixation upon Richard Wagner, and the identification of Wagner’s errors often served as the starting point in attempts to identify the contemporary Russian Orpheus. In his 1905 article “Wagner and the Dionysian Act” (“Vagner i dionisovo deistvo”), Ivanov employed blatantly theological overtones in emphasizing both Wagner’s import and his shortcomings. Ivanov highlighted Wagner’s place as both the second founder of the new, Dionysian work (after Beethoven) and the “first forerunner of universal myth creation.” Ivanov posed this glorious role as analogous to the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. With the image of the Baptizer in mind, he proclaimed that “it is not the place of the founder to be the culminator, and the forerunner must diminish.”133 Just as the preaching of John had given way to that of Christ, Wagner would give way to a greater artistic visionary, an Orpheus who would unite elements of Dionysus and Christ and bring theurgic art to fruition.134 Ivanov’s contemporaries also tended to view Wagner as a transitional figure, who was expected to be followed by a Russian genius.135 Reflecting on her youthful love of Wagner in 1909 in a personal letter to Evgenii Trubetskoi, Margarita Morozova noted that her intellectual and spiritual awakening had begun through performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle that she attended at Bayreuth. At the same time, she argued that Wagner, though he had recognized the need for spiritual transformation in Parsifal, had been unable to fulfill this calling, a “Christian task” that he had left to Russia.136 Developing the comparison even further, writer Sergei Durylin (a frequent guest at Morozova’s salons and secretary of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society after 1912) argued in 1913 that Wagner’s importance for contemporary Russia stemmed from the fact that



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he “was the last German in whom the spirit of music was the spirit of Christianity.”137 In the modern age, Durylin concluded, since Christianity was an inherent aspect of Russian rather than German identity, the new Orpheus would have to be a Russian. Russian critics and audiences could be fickle, and their preferred composer might change with little explanation. In an October 1906 article for the journal The Pass (Pereval’), Boris Popov painted a vivid image of contemporary Russia as a city in which a great beast stalked the streets at night, and in which fundamental spiritual truths were daily threatened with destruction.138 In this nightmarish scenario, he initially held up the figure of Rebikov as one of the “chosen ones” who might save Russia from the darkness of contemporary life, an assessment echoed by other critics. By 1907, however, Popov had cooled toward his former idol. Disgusted with the perceived individualism of the composer’s recent piano compositions (op. 35 and op. 36), Popov lashed out against both Rebikov and his own earlier interpretations of the composer’s mission.139 Inquiring into the broader significance of Rebikov’s failure, Popov fell back on an interpretation reminiscent of Eiges’s warning about music’s potentially negative power, which would reecho throughout late imperial Russian discourse on music: Rebikov had succumbed to the seductiveness of “individualism,” demonstrating that “he was not born to be a leader and teacher.” Rebikov, Popov concluded, was “a momentary prophet, who spoke of some distant feelings, of the final freeing of music, and then fell silent, retreating into the depths of his [individual] ‘I.’”140 In his next article for The Pass, Popov had already located another potential Orpheus: Scria­ bin.141 Despite such changes in allegiance, the symbolic language with which these figures were described remained constant, demonstrating the powerful influence musical metaphysics held on the contemporary imagination. While critics such as Popov might back different composers at different moments, the concurrent embrace of several composers as the “true” Orpheus clearly demonstrates both the belief in musical metaphysics and the underlying divisions within Nietzsche’s orphans. Of central importance for my analysis is not the relative persuasiveness of one or another assessment of a contemporary composer, but the exclusivist form of the discourse itself. In each of the three case studies that follow (Scriabin, Medtner, and Rachmaninoff ), supporters were regularly confounded by the problem of how to prove that their selected composer was the genuine Orphic figure.

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Musical Metaphysics in Late Imperial Russia A Musical Mystery

By 1912 it was common knowledge in most Moscow cultural circles that composer Aleksandr Scriabin planned to bring about the apocalyptic end of human history with his final composition—a work of collective human experience he referred to as the Mystery (Misteriia).142 Less widely acknowledged was the fact that Scriabin’s totalizing vision was itself partially a product of musical metaphysics, and that this search for a “mystery” was in fact a broader search within educated society. Conversations and debates over unity, musical time, and Orpheus culminated in a general expectation of a “mystery”—a quasi-­liturgical or religious act through which contemporary Russian society would be transformed. While this envisioned mystery had its roots partly in Nietzsche’s celebration of Greek tragedy, his Russian orphans drew inspiration from a range of sources, creating an image of a mystery intimately linked to the search for a contemporary Russian identity. Ivanov’s study of the Orphic cult of Dionysus and his fascination with medieval religious mystery plays helped him to imagine the transformation of contemporary theater into a liturgical act.143 He argued that these medieval mystery plays, together with tragedy and comedy, “must become the hearths of the nation’s creative or prophetic self-­determination,” a means through which to define Russia’s path.144 Bely similarly embraced the concept; while admitting that Nietzsche had never employed the term “mystery” for referring to the “final conclusion of our culture,” he rhetorically asked, “Is not the mystery [misteriia] the final link in the evolution we are experiencing?”145 This concept of a mystery similarly conjured up the idea of musical time. As Walter Benjamin observed, in a medieval mystery play the notion of historical time itself is blurred, becoming an aspect of eternal (or musical) time.146 Such was the case in late imperial Russia, where the idea of a mystery loosely corresponded to a liturgical or religious event, enacted to transform existing reality itself. Most intriguing were the numerous attempts to enact some form of mystery. In 1908 journalist Vladimir Botsianovskii described a St. Petersburg group that sought, in all but name, to stage such a mystery. The “Order of Universal Genius Brotherhood” sought to initiate collective worship (sobornoe sluzhenie) through collective creative action. Music was granted center stage in this brotherhood, as shown in a photograph included by Botsianovskii. The “high priest” in charge of the group’s “rite” alternated between speaking and playing his violin. His outfit was modeled after the traditional robes of an Orthodox priest, with the single exception of the violin held in his hand, which completed his attire (fig. 1.2).147 In the closing creed, described by a bemused Botsianovskii, members of the order synthesized their belief in God with an emphasis on creative action, chanting

Figure 1.2. Photograph accompanying article “U geniev,” Teatr i iskusstvo no. 22 (1909): 390. The caption reads, “The high priest, who is called the General-­Provocator.” Courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

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“may your prayerful address to God appear in creation: personal, individual, and collective creation.”148 Such an emphasis on combining individual and collective creativity in liturgical expression vividly embodied the ideal of sobornost’. Genius and creativity were understood as inherent parts of every person, linking the individual to the collective. In seeking to stimulate the advent of collective creation though imitation of a liturgical service, the brotherhood sought, in its own way, to enact a mystery. In 1912 the House of Song even more explicitly attempted to produce a collective “mystery,” this time based on a 1903 French translation of the seventh-­ century text Uttararamacharita by the Indian poet Bhavabhuti.149 The “careful and deep study of this drama” was to serve the society’s fundamental goal of awakening a collective, spiritual creative impulse among participants and society members. By facilitating performers’ entry into the “secret of creative thought” and “spirit of creation,” the play would “pull them out of their unconsciousness” and provoke deeper spiritual insights—all goals typical of envisioned mysteries of the time.150 To further participation from all members, the House of Song offered a competition for the best Russian translation of the French text, to be used in the eventual performance.151 All society members were encouraged to attend rehearsals in 1914, when they began to offer this symbolic experience for all.152 Perhaps most striking, however, was the Nietzschean reinterpretation of the poem’s significance for a Russian audience. As anonymous authors in the Bulletin of the House of Song concluded, the text provided a metaphorical depiction of the struggle between secular and spiritual power, embodied respectively by King Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) and his wife Sita (an avatar of the goddess Lakshmi). This struggle was, they argued in an amazing feat of cross-­ cultural misreading, the same metaphorical conflict between secular modernity and spiritual belief that was depicted in the works of both Nietzsche and Wagner. By sending his wife Sita into exile, King Rama symbolically separated himself from religious belief. In her exile, Sita gave birth to two children, Kusha and Lava, who, in the interpretation of the House of Song, symbolized the dual powers of music and tragedy, a clear reference to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. These two children then brought about the reunion of the two spouses “in another higher world,” mirroring a return to religious belief through the artistic transcendence offered by the Dionysian and Apollonian powers of music and tragedy. In this way, the Hindu tale was reinterpreted according to late imperial Russian desires and concerns. For many, the idea of a mystery also suggested an imminent fruition of the connection between religion, Russian identity, and music, and a transcendence of the perceived threat of disintegration that Russia seemed to face. This con-



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nection was inspired by reflections upon Richard Wagner’s final opera Parsifal: commonly referred to as a “mystery” in the Russian periodical press, its mystical, Christian character served as an inspiration to seek a uniquely Russian mystery.153 At the age of twenty-­six, poet and budding religious philosopher Sergei Durylin was equally inspired by Wagner’s Parsifal, Vladimir Solov’ev’s religious philosophy, and Russian messianism, envisioning a future in which Russia would take the leading role in contemporary Europe. For Durylin, both the form and the subject of the awaited Russian mystery was clear. In his 1913 book Wagner and Russia (Vagner i Rossiia), which appeared under the auspices of Emilii Medtner’s publishing house Musaget, Durylin argued that Wagner’s failure to bring about a genuine mystery through Parsifal was caused by a disconnect between the composer and the German people—a disconnect caused not by the composer’s shortcomings but by Germany’s loss of its Christian foundation. Contemporary Germany, Durylin concluded, embodied the individualism and divided nature of modern life. In contrast, the creation of a true Christian mystery was a specifically Russian task.154 Building upon his interest in archaeology and ethnography, Durylin cited the myth of the vanishing city of Kitezh as an example of the Russian narod’s deeply Christian view of the world, suggesting that this particular myth was ripe for artistic development by a Russian composer. Such a composer would succeed where Wagner had failed, creating a true Christian and folk mystery because of Russia’s close connection to Christianity. Rimsky-­Korsakov had previously sought to create an opera based on the legend; not having understood his mission, however, he had failed to become the “artist myth-­creator” that Russia needed.155 This Russophile interpretation of the awaited mystery gained general approbation among many of Nietzsche’s orphans, and the myth of Kitezh was a particularly fruitful topic for mystical and increasingly messianic imaginings of Russian identity at this time.156 Another take on this late imperial quest for a mystery was attempted by Rebikov, who conceptualized his trilogy of “musical-­psychological dramas” (entitled Drama of the Spirit) as a commentary on the fall of the human spirit into the material world; through experiencing the works, he hoped to carry an audience through the various spiritual and emotional states of the characters, enabling them to grasp that “human striving toward knowledge and power” would lead ultimately to the death of their souls.157 To supplement this more negative commentary, his work The Antichrist was intended to carry its audience through the “egoism of matter” back to the “victory of Spirit.”158 Like most of the envisioned mysteries, Rebikov’s Antichrist was never completed; nevertheless, based on sketches shown to him by the composer, Odessa Theological Seminary professor Aleksandr Gorskii concluded in 1916 that Rebikov, though unacquainted

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with the philosophical writings of Solov’ev, had intuitively moved Russian religious thought forward to a new level of development—a task that no philosopher had managed.159 Common to all these nebulous attempts to evoke a mystery were a focus on collective experience, the overcoming of composer/performer/audience divisions, and a shared emphasis on music’s awakening of irrational emotion as the means through which to transcend historical time and, through mystical experience, access absolute or musical time.160 The experience of music in a contemporary mystery thus was interpreted as a mystical “act” (deistvo) or “experience” (perezhivanie), with the potential to transform human existence and understanding. The search for this mystery emerged as a common theme, and attempts to define its content were intimately linked with attempts to define Russian identity in the modern era. M US I C A L M E TA P H Y S I C S I N P R A C T I C E : S O C I A L T R A N SF O R M AT I O N T HR O U G H M US I C

As members of educated society, Nietzsche’s orphans were self-­consciously aware of the divisions between themselves and the broader narod. Particularly after 1905, they sought through music to overcome these social divisions and reunite with the people. However, within these discussions lurked a certain confusion regarding exactly who they sought to reach: discussions focused alternately on peasants, workers, and members of “middling classes” whose musical tastes were not considered sufficiently developed. While unclear about the population they sought to reach, however, Nietzsche’s orphans were clear about their own task: to enlighten the benighted population of Russia and to direct their spiritual energies in what they themselves believed to be the correct direction. In practice, Nietzsche’s orphans thus viewed themselves as a sort of cultural vanguard party (to adopt a term from Leninist politics). Their contradictory understandings of the narod, however, together with an inability to recognize the genuine desires of the people they sought to reach (which seems to have often been personal expression rather than sobornost’) undermined their practical attempts to create unity. Nietzsche’s orphans identified two potential obstacles in their attempts to overcome social division through music after 1905: music education and concerts were prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of Russian workers and peasants, and the poorer classes seemed to have lost the ability to distinguish good music from bad. According to contemporary assessments, the narod was ever more “polluted” by the effects of modern life, expressed in (among other



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things) popular interest in urban songs. In response to these problems, members of Russian musical society genuinely sought to reach out to the “people”: a growing number of concerts offered cheap or free tickets; music education institutions sought to provide stipends to the most qualified students; public lectures devoted to music history, aesthetics, and good taste aimed to educate the population; music libraries opened to provide greater access to relevant literature; and, perhaps most striking of all, “People’s Conservatories” (narodnye konservatorii ) were founded in several urban centers. The establishment and fate of the Moscow People’s Conservatory demonstrates, at the individual level, both the accomplishments and the limitations of musical metaphysics. Established September 3, 1906, the Moscow People’s Conservatory (or Mu­ sical Section of the Moscow Society of People’s Universities, henceforth MPC) declared its founding task to be the “spreading of musical knowledge to as broad a range of the population of Moscow and Moscow province as possible, and to cooperate in this task within the boundaries of Russia.”161 Established as an autonomous organ of the broader People’s University (with a separate board and election), it proposed to arrange general and special music courses, schools, concerts, and lectures; to publish music, books, brochures, and teaching material; and to provide libraries, museums, music, and instrumental equipment. In its first year of existence, the MPC enrolled 627 students, sixty-­two of whom were directly admitted to the second, more advanced course.162 It was the MPC’s explicit purpose to expand music education to the narod to develop greater social cohesion and an improvement in morality among the population. This educational process was meant to foster spiritual development: just as the people needed education in the external, scientific realm, they needed education in the internal, emotional realm. Through the immediate engagement of song, it was believed, the common people could be taught the value of collective creation, combining their individual voices into a more complex and unified whole. Creative, communal performance would further the internal life of the people and better prepare them for future historical and social developments.163 In light of its founding principles, the MPC focused almost exclusively upon choral singing as the basis of musical education.164 The individual ability to perform instrumental works only mattered in the educational program insofar as this was “necessary for the general musical development of students.” Nadezhda Briusova, one of the conservatory founders, argued at length about the importance of developing the creative spirit of the Russian narod through active participation in folk choirs. In her mind, choral work would expose the narod to the immediate experience of collective synergy, whose highest possible achievement would be the creation of genuine “folk operas,” in which each individual

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composed a unique part (napev). In these works, each individual’s free creative potential would combine with all others into a single, collective whole. Briusova held, nonetheless, that even such a high accomplishment as “folk opera” was not yet a “true musical drama,” which would include “all the voices of nature.”165 Yet this embrace of popular music education was haunted by a lingering anxiety about the narod. The organization of concerts for the masses had to proceed cautiously, warned Briusova, as the people had to be educated in the proper manner of responding to music; otherwise, exposure to high art would cause more harm than good.166 Perhaps not surprisingly, she reserved a leading role for the musical elite. While the narod would collectively create the “folk drama” through individual composition of their part, it was Briusova and her colleagues who must, as leaders, “connect together all the compositions of all the authors” into a greater whole. In her mind, those who had founded the MPC and taught music to the workers were therefore “conductors of [the narod ’s] musical creation.”167 By the seventh year of operation (1912–13), choral classes were offered in the Nikitskii and Sukharevskii districts of Moscow. Students could study at the MPC for up to three years at a cost of four rubles per year for the first- and second-­year courses, and a variable sum for the third year, depending on the number of hours and students enrolled. Courses were open to both men and women once their voices had changed (generally not younger than fifteen to seventeen years of age). In the first two years, the classes met two times per week from 8 to 10 p.m., demonstrating a genuine wish to appeal to workers. No prior musical knowledge was required of students when they enrolled, though they had to know how to read and had to possess some level of musical ability. By the second year, students were expected to know simple intervals, possess an elementary knowledge of music theory (scales, rhythm, measures), and be able to sing a simple melody from music at sight. Each year ended with an examination, and at the end of the third class, students received a certificate.168 Space rather than interest kept the numbers at the MPC limited, as the number of interested students regularly outnumbered available spaces. Inspired by the success of the MPC, the Artistic Subsection of the All-­Russian Gathering of Activists in the Society of People’s Universities and Other Educational Institutions of a Private Nature (Vserossiiskii s’ezd deiatelei obshchestv narodnykh universitetov i drugikh prosvetitel’nykh uchrezhdenii chastnoi initsiativy) adopted a 1908 resolution that the MPC should serve as a model for the establishment of similar institutions connected with People’s Conservatories throughout the country.169 Despite this relatively coherent structure, division over the MPC’s ultimate mission continued among its founders, highlighted by an ongoing conflict over



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solo classes. When the program was established on November 8, 1906, it was decided that the MPC should strive to offer access to solo instruments and lessons to as many students as possible. On January 24, 1907, the possibility of giving wider access to solo instrument instruction was raised, and further discussed again on January 31. The decision to broaden solo classes passed with minor changes on March 29, with the explicit understanding that these classes should foster musical technique but not develop virtuosity.170 The question was again debated on September 1; ultimately, while solo classes continued to be offered, the number of spaces was extremely limited.171 The objections raised against training soloists reiterated standard tropes from musical metaphysics: it would develop individuality and empty virtuosity (the ills of modernity) at the expense of the unified communal artistic experience offered by choral singing. In practice, educated Russians often found that their goals of encouraging a collective identity among workers and peasants were met with indifference or incomprehension from the very narod whom they sought to protect. Jeffrey Brooks has noted this divide: while educated elites encouraged a rejection of individualist aspirations (all too common in the penny press), the mix of moralizing literature and belles lettres they encouraged met with limited success among the people.172 A series of questionnaires completed by students of the vocal conducting program of the MPC shows a similar divide. Out of forty-­three students, nine respondents seemed dismissive of the very basis of the course in which they were enrolled (the preparation of teachers to conduct choral ensembles among the narod ), requesting instead the possibility of studying individual musical performance.173 One male respondent specifically asked to study piano, while a female respondent voiced the same request, stating that she “lived a different life” when she heard music.174 Perhaps the most poignant request for such instruction was voiced by one Iusiia Sokolova, who scribbled out a heartfelt request to Briusova: “I can ask you only one thing: give me the ability to develop musically, at least a little bit, to allow me at least a small but active participation in singing and music. . . . This question is the most painful for me. I cannot quietly listen to your lecture because every word of yours shows me my musical illiteracy, and awoke [sic] in me a thirst for knowledge. . . . before me was the fateful question: why can’t I play myself, when I love music, when music sounds in my ears at home?”175 Such responses demonstrated a clear disconnect between the stated purpose of the courses in which the students were enrolled and their personal goals in attending the MPC. Rather than seeking collective creative experience, they yearned to develop their own personal talents and find ways to express their own emotional perspectives. This divide in turn echoed a larger gap between the expectations of

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educated society, which sought to impose a particular “Russian” cultural vision, and an urban population more interested in exploring their own personal subjectivity than in forging a new form of collective identity. Embracing the image of music as intimately connected with emotion, the students longed to focus on the individual emotional states expressed in musical works, evincing a striking disinterest in the MPC’s communal focus. One respondent, tired of the instructional focus on choral singing, complained, “For me personally, the ability to feel in music that which was felt by the creator of a musical work is most important. I think that it would be good if you performed for us some musical work and explained the feelings and the forms that the performance awakens in you or that were felt by the author.”176 Another student wrote that she desired to “listen to the meaning that music has played, plays, and will play in the life of humanity,” adding critically, “in my opinion, you have little touched on this so far.”177 When asked whether he or she could listen to an entire selection of music without losing focus, a third student responded that this was only possible if the music “corresponds to my experiences, to the personal music in my soul.”178 For these students, regardless of the lectures they attended, music was first and foremost a means of personal expression, not a tool for the moral and spiritual transformation of society. Such perspectives echo an emphasis on the inner self, the “psychological and intimate over the political and social” that Anna Fishzon, Edith Clowes, and others have identified both with cultural elites and with Russia’s “middling groups” in society.179 This suggests that ideals of individuality and self-­expression had saturated Russian society to a degree not fully acknowledged by the cultural elite, who continued to cling to an idealized image of an inherently communal narod. The actual social origins of the students at the MPC further demonstrate the lack of clarity with which the narod was conceived by Nietzsche’s orphans. Though courses were held in the evenings to facilitate worker attendance, the requirement of basic literacy prior to commencing studies limited the number of potential students, while even the modest fee for classes was often prohibitively expensive. As a result, students tended to come from the universities and lower bureaucracy, with a decidedly low percentage of workers.180 While acknowledging this shortcoming, no solution was found by the conservatory organizers for this fundamental problem. The experience of the MPC demonstrated that the much-­celebrated educational and unifying power of music met with relatively little response from workers or peasants, many of whom (it was feared) preferred the degenerate influence of urban songs and chastushki (a folk genre of short, lively, and often satirical songs). At the same time, the students they attracted seldom desired moral and spiritual transformation through collective



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creation; instead they sought the acquisition of specific musical skills, generally in solo vocal or instrumental performance, which were viewed either as a means for self-­expression or as practical skills through which to improve their financial well-­being. Misunderstanding and miscommunication, rather than harmonious building of a unified Russian identity through music, seems to have been the norm. C O N C L US I O N

Music provided a powerful symbol of unity through which educated Russians could grapple with the increasing divisions they saw emerging in contemporary society, particularly in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. Music was viewed not merely as a symbol, however, but also a moral or ethical force with the power to transform existing reality, thereby transcending increasingly evident societal divisions. As Rosenthal concluded in her study of symbolist thought, music was itself the “basis of a new cosmology, a new way of viewing the world, a counter faith to the rationalism, materialism and economic individualism of the Enlightenment.”181 Nietzschean thought provided the basis for interpreting music’s meaning. His metaphysical interpretation of music as the ultimate Dionysian and unifying art appealed to intellectual traditions centered around both the Slavophile value of sobornost’ and a belief in Russia’s messianic role in human history, as well as the intelligentsia’s call for revolutionary social change. This gave rise to musical metaphysics: a worldview that elevated music as a means of salvation from the problems of contemporary life. The Orphic figure of the artistic genius was central to this process, with salvation envisioned as the creation of social, spiritual, and cultural unity. This Russian concept of unity was imbued with moral, religious, and national implications that were wholly or partially absent from Nietzsche’s vision of a Dionysian unity. However, there were three fundamental contradictions inherent in the doctrine of musical metaphysics: an unbridgeable gulf between Nietzsche’s orphans and the ill-­defined narod they claimed to represent; a lack of consensus on the Orphic figure who would lead them toward it; and an emphasis on “Russianness” that was increasingly interpreted in a manner that served to isolate subgroups within the aesthetic community rather than to unite them. Lack of agreement over the end goal of social transformation, failure to recognize growing national conflict within the empire, and inability to bridge the divide between educated society and the vast majority of the Russian population undermined musical metaphysics from the outset. In short, musical metaphysics provided a form of belief without specific content: while the assumed need to transform

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society through a musical Orpheus was shared, disagreement over the basis and desired end result of that transformation highlighted the divisions rather than the potential unity within the aesthetic community. Though minor at first, with the increasing strain of war and revolution, these tensions ultimately led to the implosion of this worldview, experienced by some former adherents as a loss in religious belief. In the end, an insurmountable gulf stretched between Nietzsche’s orphans and the “children” they sought to reach. While envisioning themselves as spiritual and moral beacons for their less fortunate compatriots, in practice they could not even identify them. In the final analysis, music did not create unity.

2

Aleksandr Scriabin: Music and Salvation

Scriabin was a prophet. He was Orpheus on the edge of a new epoch. —Aleksandr Brianchaninov, 1915

On April 16, 1915, Leonid Leonidovich Sabaneev, music critic, mathematician, and composer, stood with a disconsolate stare at the grave of his friend, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Scriabin, in Moscow’s Novodevichii cemetery. At a time of raging war, the most celebrated living composer in Russia had fallen victim not to an enemy bullet on the battlefield but to commonplace blood poisoning at the age of forty-­three. For Sabaneev, the death of Scriabin meant the loss of his idol. Over the preceding five years, Sabaneev had spent almost every evening with the composer, listening to him perform new works, discussing Scriabin’s mystical worldview, and basking in the light of his creative genius. Sabaneev had also penned critical analyses, impassioned proselytizing essays, and piano reductions of orchestral scores, always to support the same claim: in Scriabin, Russia had found its Orpheus. The sudden death of Russia’s claimed musical messiah— who had been in the midst of composing his magnum opus, the Mystery (Misteriia), intended to bring about the unification of all humanity and, in a final moment of universal ecstasy, to usher in the end of the world—was incomprehensible to Sabaneev. He dreaded the task that lay before him that night. Rather than pen another passionate defense of Scriabin’s new compositional style or hint about the significance of the forthcoming Preparatory Act (the forerunner of the Mystery), he had to write an account of his friend’s funeral.1 Luminaries of Moscow’s intellectual, musical, and artistic life filed past Sabaneev’s still silhouette to pay their final respects at the grave: Viacheslav Ivanov, 61

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Sergei Bulgakov, Serge Koussevitzky, and the poet Jurgis Baltrušaitis were in attendance, together with thousands of Muscovites who had gathered to bid the composer farewell. Sabaneev’s train of thought was interrupted by the approach of Father Pavel Florenskii: priest, philosopher, and occasional visitor at Scriabin’s evening gatherings, where the composer had imparted his vision of the coming Mystery. With lowered eyes, Florenskii informed Sabaneev that, although Scria­ bin had failed to complete the Mystery, Florenskii had experienced a vision of the future, disclosing that Scriabin’s final goal would come to pass in another thirty-­three years. Musing upon Florenskii’s conviction years later, Sabaneev concluded that he had been correct, at least in part: Florenskii had had a foreboding of his own death in the Soviet Gulag in 1948. Displaced by the passage of years, the spirit of Scriabin continued to inspire his former follower to weave myths into his perceptions of a rapidly changing world.2 Like many of the prophecies that circulated among Scriabin’s erstwhile disciples, closer investigation does not bear out this remarkable coincidence: Florenskii’s untimely death came in 1937, not 1948.3 But factual accuracy had little place in the construction of the mythology surrounding Scriabin, either before or after his death. More than any other figure of the time, Scriabin embodied the search for Orpheus. In Moscow, Scriabin and his music were the main focal points of musical life from his 1909 return after several years in Europe until his death in 1915: premieres of his latest works (particularly The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus) were central cultural events, and Scriabin admirers avidly collected reviews and articles devoted to his genius.4 Notwithstanding the everyday experience of death amid the Great War, Scriabin’s funeral attracted a crowd of thousands, forcing organizers to issue tickets the night before to prevent overcrowding during the service.5 Nevertheless, both the church and the nearby side streets overflowed with people, and a throng of thousands followed the coffin to its final resting place, only disbanding hours after the funeral (fig. 2.1).6 In the months after Scriabin’s untimely death, speeches, poems, and articles devoted to the composer echoed a single refrain: Russia had lost its “greatest musical genius.” He was repeatedly referred to in religious terminology such as “Orpheus” (Orfei), “chosen one” (izbrannik), “prophet” (prorok), Lamb of God (agnts), or simply “messiah.”7 This “Scriabin phenomenon” (or “Scriabin psychosis,” as less generous contemporaries such as Bulgakov and Nikolai Medtner described it) provides the most spectacular illustration of musical metaphysics in late imperial Russia.8 Who was this composer who had so captured the imagination of Russian educated society in the final years of the empire? In his early musical and philo-



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Figure 2.1. Photograph of Scriabin’s funeral by Sergei Ivanovich Manukhin. First published in Rampa i zhizn no. 17 (April 26, 1915). Courtesy of the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture, Columbia University, Evgenii Gunst Collection.

sophical development, Scriabin seemed particularly ill-­suited to fill the unifying role of a contemporary Russian Orpheus. His Second Symphony, premiered in 1902, garnered criticism for its modernist style that unnerved the established musical elite. In a letter to the young composer’s benefactor, timber merchant Mitrofan Beliaev, Anatoly Lyadov (the conductor of the symphony’s St. Petersburg premiere), complained bitterly about the new work, grousing that “decadents crawl out from all sides, from all cracks.”9 Rumors swirled in 1904 about the “decadent” young composer, whose sudden resignation from his teaching position at the Moscow Conservatory was accompanied by a romantic scandal with a seventeen-­year-­old student, the abandonment of his children and first wife (the talented pianist Vera Ivanovna Scriabina, née Isakovich), and the establishment of a second household with his mistress Tatiana Schloezer. As Sabaneev later recalled (with an unacknowledged nod to poet Aleksandr Pushkin), it was even whispered at this time that Scriabin’s mistress had given birth in Paris “not

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to a little mouse or frog, but to some sort of unknown creature,” whose body had been pickled and turned over to a local museum.10 Russian cultural circles gossiped even louder about Scriabin’s “bizarre” philosophy and worldview after impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s 1907 Russian “historical concerts” in Paris. Over tea one evening, as Margarita Morozova later recalled, Scriabin sought to explain to his fellow Russian artists the significance of his newest composition, The Poem of Ecstasy. This work, he claimed, would elicit a state of ecstasy in its listeners as they experienced “the harmony of sounds, harmony of colors, harmony of scent,” a claim that repelled and astonished fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-­Korsakov.11 A mood of sarcastic mockery often accompanied discussions of the composer, and the circulation of such extravagant images and stories associated Scriabin with ongoing fears about individualism, decadence, and the decline of both Russian and European civilization. A slight figure with a handlebar mustache and all the mannerisms of a dandy, Scriabin appeared an unlikely figure for Orphic pretensions. Shortly after its founding in 1909, Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Publishing House (Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo) began to produce postcards dedicated to leading participants in Russian musical life, as a way of introducing the public to the image as well as the music of contemporary Russian composers. These visual traces illuminate the ways in which composers, as well as their music, were packaged and sold for consumption. A postcard devoted to Scriabin, issued around 1910, captures this general discrepancy between the composer’s Orphic dreams and meticulously styled demeanor (fig. 2.2). Here Scriabin’s diminutive stature, fastidiously groomed hair, and impressive mustache all figure prominently. The starched shirt collar, upturned, highlights a carefully knotted tie, perfectly centered. His hands rest loosely, one on the arm of an elaborately carved chair, the other delicately on his lap, and he gazes dreamily into the distance, seemingly unaware of the camera lens. Was this truly the form that Orpheus should take? Nevertheless, in the eyes of many contemporaries, Scriabin’s transformation from “decadent” to “prophet” took place in a mere seven years. Scriabin’s permanent return to Russia in 1910 was accompanied by an influential reinterpretation of the composer as an embodiment of the Russian quest for unity and collective identity.12 Sabaneev experienced and participated in this process firsthand: in 1910 his passing acquaintance with the composer deepened into a close personal friendship that transformed his entire life. Together with a growing circle of disciples, Sabaneev was immersed in Scriabin’s messianic visions for five formative years. The composer repeatedly explained that his pending Mystery was destined to bring about the end of the world; humanity, however, was not yet ready for this final act. For this reason, Scriabin sought to

Figure 2.2. Postcard of Scriabin. First published by the Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo (Moscow, ca. 1910). Courtesy of Lincoln Ballard.

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create a group of devoted disciples who (by exposure to his philosophical ranting) would pass through a period of spiritual “preparation” and cleansing to ready them for their future task in his apocalypse.13 This image of Scriabin as an inspired yet insane genius is familiar to twenty-­ first-­century audiences, and the intellectual and cultural sources that underpin his music and philosophy have been explored in some depth.14 However, the relationship between the composer, his philosophy and music, his disciples, and Russian educated society more broadly remains murky at best. Who were the men and women who gathered to listen to Scriabin’s music and philosophy, and what insights did they take from these evenings? Did they support his apocalyptic vision? Did they simply humor a madman who wrote appealing music? What dreams, hopes, and expectations did they bring to their interactions with the composer? Did the obsession with Scriabin and his music within the larger aesthetic community suggest curiosity about (and perhaps agreement with) his ideas, or was it his musical language and his status as a compellingly “Russian” cultural visionary that most captivated his audiences? The key to understanding the significance of what writer Boris Pasternak later referred to as the “Scriabin era” lies not simply in analyzing Scriabin’s texts and music, but also in exploring how his music and ideas productively interacted with contemporary society, producing conflicting visions of what Russian identity itself should become in the modern age. After the Great War, two revolutions, and the ensuing Civil War of 1917–22, both those who remained in the Soviet Union and those who emigrated reinterpreted their memories and distanced themselves from the interests and identities they had held in this “prehistorical era”; the cult of Scriabin became intimately entwined with memories of a past world, now lost forever.15 Through critical examination of the prerevolutionary press, personal letters, and diaries, as well as published and unpublished memoirs from later eras, this chapter seeks to disentangle contemporary views of Scriabin from later mythologization and to clarify the intellectual assumptions and expectations that shaped both Scriabin’s musical production and the reception of his music during his lifetime. I find that Scriabin’s own emphasis on unity, transcendence of space and time, and historical progress echoed a wider quest in contemporary society for future-­oriented human spiritual progress, an association that was interpreted by many contemporaries as a uniquely Russian attribute. In this version of Russian messianism, Russia (in the figure of Scriabin) embodied the next step in universal human development through its transcendence of the individualist and materialist limitations of modern life, the latter of which found their clearest expression in con-



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temporary German culture. In Scriabin’s bold musical innovations and daring philosophy, followers perceived a symbol of the future of Russia itself. In the first section of this chapter, I place Scriabin’s philosophical ideas within the broader framework of musical metaphysics, analyzing how, despite the initially solipsistic worldview he professed, his personal myth came to interact productively with contemporary social and intellectual concerns over unity (edinstvo) and collectivity (sobornost’). The second section explores public discussion of Scriabin and his music in the years 1909–13, when the composer’s connection with Russia, strained through his departure abroad in 1904, was reforged. Debates raged over whether this composer embodied the sicknesses of modernity or offered a singular means through which to overcome them. Finally, the third section delves into the personal interactions between Scriabin and several of his most devoted disciples: “Scriabinists” who were active participants in helping to shape his developing musical and philosophical world and who elided his anticipated Mystery with Christian and political meanings that fit their own (rather than the composer’s) visions. Alternately berated and forgotten by later analysts, the hopes and expectations of these individuals provide an intimate glimpse into the “Scriabin phenomenon” that unfolded at a deeply personal level. An interactive analysis of these three factors clarifies the relationship between Scriabin and Russian society. FROM ZARATHUSTRA TO SOBORNOST’: S C R I A B I N A S I N T E L L E C T UA L

In the summer of 1904, Scriabin sat in an open-­air cafe in La Belotte, Switzerland, sipping a glass of lemonade and musing upon the insurmountable distance between human perception of the physical world and the external world itself. A diverse range of intellectual influences and personal connections had combined to bring Scriabin to this particular time and place: influences that would continue to shape his intellectual and artistic development into a self-­proclaimed Orpheus.16 Scriabin attained this mental breakthrough thanks to the embrace of core tenets of musical metaphysics: the ideals of edinstvo and sobornost’ and the belief that music could transform reality itself. A complex intellectual evolution from extreme individualism and narcissism to a collectivist worldview is easily traceable in the composer’s philosophical notebooks. However, these individual philosophical discoveries also emerged out of social conversations and interactions within the larger aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans. Scriabin’s decision to devote himself to composition and philosophical reflec-

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tion was financed in part by the support of his former piano and philosophical student, Margarita Morozova, who, after the death of her husband in 1903, emerged as one of the leading supporters of Russian cultural life, political reform, and religious renaissance among the merchant class of Moscow.17 In Morozova Scria­ bin found both a kindred spirit, willing to embrace his vision of music as a transcendent art form, and a well-­connected supporter, whose home in Moscow was already noted as a gathering place for Russia’s musical and cultural elite.18 At the same time, Scriabin’s philosophical explorations in 1904 continued a path inspired by his friendship with philosopher Sergei Trubetskoi, his attendance at meetings of the Moscow Psychological Society (the leading Russian neo-­idealist philosophical group of the day) and conversations with Boris Schloezer, a trained philosopher and the brother of his mistress, Tatiana Schloezer.19 In the coming months, attendance at the Second International Philosophical Congress (dedicated in large part to the ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte), personal acquaintance with Marxist philosopher Georgii Plekhanov, and the discovery of Helena Blavatsky’s occult doctrine of theosophy further broadened his conceptual palette.20 While Scriabin’s reflections on human consciousness, artistic creativity, and genius paralleled similar explorations by contemporaries such as Trubetskoi, Bely, Ivanov, and Blok, in Scriabin this broad range of influences and ideas came into contact with one of the leading musical minds of the time. In the years prior to 1904, Scriabin had already been attracted to a philosophical worldview that granted art, and particularly music, a central position—ideas that he, like many contemporaries, had found in the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His interpretation of the world as a source of unavoidable suffering, transcendable only through life affirmation and artistic transformation, was embodied in an unfinished opera text from 1903. In the extant sketch, the hero, a philosopher-­musician-­poet (who bears a striking resemblance to Scriabin’s self-­ image at the time) professes his message to humanity in Zarathustrian-­inspired language. Similarly, the text to his First Symphony celebrates art as “the bright dream of life” in whom “a person will find / The living joy of consolation”— a sentiment to which the young Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy could have signed his name, though the latter might well have found Scriabin’s poetic execution lacking. Between 1904 and 1906, however, Scriabin’s image of an individual philosopher-­musician-­poet transcending reality was gradually succeeded by a focus on the collective experience of unity and the dematerialization of the physical world itself.21 This shift from extreme individualism toward a greater engagement with the philosophical problem of the relationship between the subjective “I” and the external world echoes the focus on unity and sobornost’ that was an integral part of musical metaphysics.



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Scriabin’s own involvement in German idealist philosophy was prefaced by the intellectual activities of his first philosophical guide, Sergei Trubetskoi, who, dissatisfied with the materialist philosophy dominant in Russian intellectual life and inspired by the work of Vladimir Solov’ev, helped usher in a reawakening of serious intellectual involvement with German idealist philosophy. In his 1889 article “On the Nature of Human Consciousness,” Trubetskoi argued that the basic problem facing contemporary philosophy was the question of the nature of consciousness, or more specifically the question of whether or not knowledge itself was entirely subjective.22 This was because, Trubetskoi observed, it was “in consciousness [that] we know all that we know. For this reason, if [consciousness] is only subjective, then there is nothing for us outside the subject of consciousness, everything belongs to it.”23 For Trubetskoi, like many of his neo-­idealist colleagues in the Moscow Psychological Society, this specter of subjectivism that seemed to lurk in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant represented a central challenge for contemporary philosophy. Through selective adoption from Kantian thought, Trubetskoi sought to find a path forward through the examination of consciousness that would enable him to bridge the divide between the individual and the larger universe: in short, he sought a path from the individual to the collective.24 Whether causally connected or not, Trubetskoi’s quest to overcome the divide between individual consciousness and external reality significantly underpinned Scriabin’s 1904 musings.25 As he savored his lemonade and admired the scenery around him, Scriabin reflected that humans could only know their own subjective experience of the world; they had no knowledge of the world itself. In seeking to define the limits of rational knowledge, Immanuel Kant had distinguished between noumena and phenomena, the thing in itself (outside the realm of human knowledge) and our perception of it (what we can know). In contrast, in his initial musings Scriabin (inspired in part by his own subjective idealist interpretation of Johann Gottfried Fichte’s philosophical response to Kant) managed not only to question our ability to know the external world, but also to erase the very existence of the external world, concluding that “if we can affirm everything only as subjective event, then it [everything] can be only a result of our activity. Our singular and thus free and absolute activity. Thus, the world is the result of my action, my creation, my desire (free).”26 The inability to achieve any genuine knowledge of the external world in itself—a problem acknowledged by Kant—meant, Scriabin concluded, that the world simply did not exist outside of the individual creative mind. And if the world did not exist, it also meant that other minds or individuals did not exist either. This leap from an analysis of the limits of subjective knowledge to a broad (and

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problematic) statement about the nature of reality might well have made the Königsberg philosopher turn in his grave, to say nothing of Scriabin’s first philosophical guide, Trubetskoi, who sought in his philosophy to reconcile rational philosophy and religious belief in a higher deity. By denying the material world independent existence outside of his mind, Scriabin initially viewed the universe (space and time and all objects existing within them) as his own mental creation. To study reality, he concluded, ultimately meant to study his own consciousness, as the external world was nothing more than a reflection of his consciousness at a given moment: “I affirm the world (universe) as a series of states of my consciousness (of my activity [creation]) . . . to carry out an analysis of reality means to study the nature of my active consciousness, of my free creation.”27 Scriabin’s definition of the external world as a creation of his own mind, as both contemporary and later analysts have pointed out, potentially led to extravagant claims of godhood.28 Indeed, the ecstatic, pseudoprophetic narrative voice that emerges at various points in Scriabin’s notebooks encourages such interpretations: “I am nothing, I am only that which I want, I am God. The universe is my toy, [it is] the play of light beams of my dream,” he wrote around 1904 or 1905.29 Such a solipsistic vision seems unlikely to have attracted widespread approbation from Russian educated society, compositional brilliance notwithstanding. However, Scriabin’s continued philosophical evolution toward an emphasis on sobornost’ and unity ultimately brought the composer closer to the intellectual musings of his contemporaries. His intellectual search received perhaps its most direct challenge in discussions with Marxist philosopher and revolutionary Georgii Plekhanov in the months following the 1905 Revolution.30 The fundamental opposition of their worldviews left no real hope of resolution, but the tensions unmasked in their disputes nevertheless left a lasting impression on both men.31 According to later reminiscences, the composer was then wont to make particularly extreme idealistic statements, once apparently proclaiming to Plekhanov that “we create the world with our creative spirit, with our will . . . the laws of gravity do not exist for it. I could throw myself from this bridge and not hit my head on the rocks, but rather hang in the air through the strength of my will.” In response to this dramatic assertion, Plekhanov calmly suggested, “Try it, Aleksandr Nikolaevich!”— an experiment that the composer elected not to attempt.32 Though materialism was fundamentally foreign to Scriabin’s philosophical views, under Plekhanov’s influence the composer’s reading expanded to incorporate excerpts from Marxist philosophy.33 In Plekhanov’s later assessment, this exposure, “while in no way having made him a supporter of historical materialism,” nevertheless left Scriabin with a better understanding of the essence of the philosophy than most



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Marxists possessed.34 It also served to deepen his understanding of the debates surrounding the nature of reality, persuading him that his youthful goals of life affirmation and the transformation of life through art required a stronger philosophical basis that acknowledged the apparent multiplicity of the universe and offered more rigorous arguments for the idealist stance that he espoused. Scria­ bin thus turned to developing a philosophical system that would answer these intellectual challenges. While Plekhanov provided a challenge to Scriabin’s deeply idealistic worldview, it was Trubetskoi’s idealist philosophy that offered a more congenial conceptual framework for the composer. In 1889 Trubetskoi had already posited the same question with which Scriabin now struggled: “How can I truly know that outside of me there is a universe and that the complex events around me are the action of real causes?”35 In other words, how can one know that there is an independently existing reality? For Trubetskoi the answer to this puzzle, as he argued in his article “The Basis of Idealism,” was the fact that consciousness itself was “a product of the interaction between ‘I’ and ‘not I,’ spirit and body, subject and external world. ‘Pure states of consciousness’ do not and cannot exist anywhere, for every state [of consciousness] is a relationship.” The very existence of consciousness presupposed both an object being perceived and a perceiving subject. “Everything there is exists in some sort of relationship; that which is not in a relationship does not exist, it has no being. . . . Relationship is the basic category of our consciousness and the basic category of existence.”36 Nor was this simply true on an individual level. Trubetskoi wrote that, in addition to individual consciousness, there was also a “collective consciousness” (sobornoe soznanie), which encompassed yet was greater than the sum of individual human consciousnesses, and which historically had shaped human knowledge as a whole. Beyond collective consciousness was absolute consciousness, equivalent with God. For Trubetskoi collective consciousness was a prerequisite for the ability to posit the existence of the external world: he argued that “the only thing that is true for me is that which is true in general and unconditional form, that which must be the same for all.”37 The advancement of human knowledge came through one’s ability to relate one’s own ideas and experiences to the wisdom and knowledge contained in collective consciousness. Through relationship, Trubetskoi concluded, the threat of subjective idealism was effectively countered. At the same time, the existence of collective consciousness protected the individual from a potentially destructive pantheism that emphasized the existence of the Absolute at the expense of the individual—a mistaken path that Trubetskoi associated with German idealism. Scriabin moved beyond extreme individualism through embracing a similar

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emphasis on relationship as a defining feature of consciousness and knowledge. While in 1904 he had argued that “nothing can be affirmed or proposed outside the sphere of consciousness . . . another person is a complex of my sensations and only in these experiences of mine does he exist for me,” Scriabin soon found this view of reality unsatisfactory.38 “Only I exist,” he posited in a later series of notes from 1905–6. “Multiplicity seems to have been called forth with my creative imagination. I play. What horror to come to such a conclusion! I am alone! I play. But all this would be a terrible deception, a game without partners. A battle with mannequins, with the assurance of victory.”39 In seeking to avoid such an unpalatable conclusion, Scriabin turned, like Trubetskoi, to a consideration of the category of “individual consciousness,” concluding that individuality required an Other against which it could be defined: “For without the reality of multiplicity, there is not individual consciousness, which is a relationship to other individual consciousnesses and exists only as a relationship to them. . . . And so it emerges that I not only cannot deny the external world, but I could not exist without it. My individual consciousness, which has relation to other individual consciousnesses, would cease to exist.”40 Thus, Scriabin concluded, the individual existed only as a result of his relationship to multiplicity. Just as Trubetskoi’s argument grew out of a desire to defend idealist thought from the trap of extreme subjectivism that he saw in German neo-­Kantianism, with its “reductionist, immanentist tendencies,”41 Scriabin’s definition of individual consciousness demonstrated a desire to step outside the subjective worldview in which he had ensnared himself. In both cases, the desire to move beyond the individual to the collective was echoed by musical metaphysics’ obsession with unity and sobornost’. Scriabin’s philosophical quest, however, did not simply mirror that of his former guide. Trubetskoi’s conception of collective consciousness had provided a middle ground that defended the individual from simply being elided with the Absolute, a reason why Randall Poole has argued that his thought was essentially liberal in its intent.42 In contrast, while moving away from solipsism, Scriabin struggled to differentiate the individual from an underlying absolute consciousness. Upon closer examination of the concept of “consciousness,” he concluded that individual consciousness was differentiated not by its form, which he argued was always the same, but through the specific content contained by individual consciousness. Consciousness thus consisted of two aspects: that which was experienced (the content), and the awareness of an unchanging “I” which experienced the content (thus existing outside of space and time). This awareness of a subject (the unchanging “I”) was identical to all people: what changed was only the content of their individual experiences. From this, Scriabin argued, there was really only a single consciousness, existing outside time and space. The mul-



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tiple, individual embodiments of consciousness within the universe were merely spatiotemporal embodiments of that single consciousness: “It is clear that this is not about the multiplicity of consciousness, but of one and the same consciousness, that is, generally of consciousness, being experienced by the multiple states vertically (in time) and horizontally (in space). . . . the expression ‘individual consciousness’ is conditional. One consciousness exists, individual consciousness is its nickname when it is experienced in a given moment and a given place.”43 In his initial interpretation of reality as purely the creation of his own mind, Scriabin was also troubled by the question of why, if he was indeed the creator of the world and all the conditions existing within it, it was not arranged in such a way as to be most beneficial to him. His original explanation, dating from 1904, was relatively weak. Life, he claimed, would be unbearably dull if one experienced leisure and satisfaction at all times. Some amount of suffering was necessary in order to break the monotony of existence and make moments of pleasure that much more memorable.44 He was himself not entirely convinced by this reasoning, however, and in 1906 he turned the question around, asking what these concepts of “consciousness” and “will” referred to. He concluded that while the world was created by the action of his consciousness (which was free), his will, or desire to change the conditions in which he was located as an individual, was limited: “My mind is the carrier of the higher principle of unity of the universe, and my will is the carrier (individual) of personal will. Consciousness, as the ability to conceptualize, does not belong to a single individual, it is universal.”45 Thus it was his individual will that rebelled against the condition that universal consciousness had placed him in. By differentiating between a single, universal consciousness, and multiple, individual wills, he believed that he had found the solution to this contradiction. His individual self suffered limitations in time and space, because it was through the struggle of individual wills to overcome their suffering that universal consciousness developed. Individual suffering was therefore necessary for the development of universal consciousness. In such an articulation, Trubetskoi’s liberal defense of the individual was entirely absent: having driven out solipsism, Scriabin’s thought threatened the loss of the individual in the Absolute—a critique later raised by poet Marietta Shaginian in her celebration of Rachmaninoff ’s superior intuitive insight. Nevertheless, the same need to overcome the fear of isolation through an emphasis on relationship was common to both Scriabin and Trubetskoi. For Scriabin, the act of creation brought into existence the very categories of time and space through which reality was experienced, an interpretation with significant repercussions for his view of musical time. Kant had famously argued that space and time were categories that were imposed on sensory percep-

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tions by the active mind, thereby locating them in human consciousness rather than external reality. Scriabin followed a similar approach, arguing that creation itself was equivalent to the mental process of differentiating objects in the world around him. Because one object can only be made distinct through its relationship to another object, it was the act of creation or differentiation that gave rise to a world filled with a multiplicity of objects and one that was experienced within the categories of time and space: “To create is to differentiate. To create something means to limit one thing with another. Only multiplicity can be created. Space and time are the forms of creation, sensation (feelings)—its content.”46 In this conception, history and historical time were created by the active mind. Musical time, or the transcendence of historical time, required this act of differentiation to be brought to an end. This would lead, Scriabin believed, to a return to the unity underlying our present physical manifestation in space and time. In a sketch of this process, Scriabin placed both “God” and “my incarnation” in the center of a swirling figure eight that stretched both upward/backward (manifestations of the “past” and “search for God”) and downward/forward (manifestations of the “future” and “rest in God”) (fig. 2.3). Unity (edinstvo), Absolute Being, or communality (sobornost’) was manifest in the center, where Scriabin located both himself and God. Musical time, in this conception, was linked to the eradication of space and time and a return to the center from which past and future sprang. Although he argued that space and time had no objective existence, Scriabin nevertheless envisioned the history of the universe as a developing, teleological chain of a single consciousness, referred to alternately as unity, God, and the Absolute—a perspective that echoed the model of dialectical process common to German idealist philosophy (particularly Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte). From thesis to antithesis to synthesis (or, in the composer’s own words, “the existing order of things,” “dissatisfaction with them and striving to achieve a new order,” and “accomplishment of goal”), Scriabin envisioned the development of Absolute Being.47 According to Scriabin, the universe and everything within it emerged from an initial unity or from an Absolute. In this unity there was no differentiation, no space and time, no action, no individuality—in short, nothingness. Change was introduced into the equation through a blind striving toward freedom, newness, and individuality: the individual will. Once this striving for newness appeared, it came into opposition first with the static, undifferentiated unity that had preceded it, and second, with other, separately striving wills, each seeking to escape the initial unity. This unity was the “center” from which different parts strove to escape: “From the center, eternally from the center, (?) striving. And look—resistance is overcome—a mass of seg-

Figure 2.3. A. N. Scriabin, philosophical sketch. The handwritten text (from top to bottom) reads “Past” (Proshedshee); “Search for God” (Iskanie boga); “My Incarnation” (Moe voploshch[enie]); “God” (Bog); “Future” (Budushchee); “Peace in God” (Uspokoenie v bog). From Mikhail Gerzhenzon, ed., Russkie propilei: Materialy po istorii russkoi mysli i literaturi, vol. 6 (Moscow: M. and S. Sabashnikov, 1919), between pp. 156 and 157.

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ments break away together with one main section. A new center, surrounded with a mass of segments identically striving from the center.”48 For Scriabin this striving for change and newness was embodied in an Orphic figure of “genius” whose actions would push historical development forward. “Every epoch has its own geniuses,” he claimed, “whose point of departure in action was always the existing order of things, created by their predecessors.”49 Compared to him, “other individuals were nothing more than ‘spray, the sparks of the consciousness,’” because this genius embodied “all the tinges of feelings of different people.”50 Whereas at times of greater wholeness the Orphic genius guided historical development/differentiation and the creation of multiplicity, at other historical junctures he also served as a unifier. Since the present age was one of differentiation and multiplicity, the Orphic task that the creative genius was to fulfill in the current stage of human consciousness, according to Scriabin, was a return to unity, Absolute Being, or the “realization of the idea of God.”51 Thus, for Scriabin, historical progress was both linear and cyclical: initial unity was followed by a time of multiplicity and differentiation (awakened by figures of genius), and then a return to unity through a synthesizing figure of genius. This new unity was itself informed by the period of differentiation that preceded it, offering a higher synthesis than the previous one.52 Such a pattern of historical development underpinned all human values: morality itself, Scriabin argued, was a relative rather than an absolute truth. While murder was considered a sin in contemporary culture, Scriabin argued that “there were prior epochs, prior races, in which murder was, on the contrary, a moral good deed.”53 While musical time as a transcendent moment eradicated space and time as such, each cycle of return was to bring a higher dialectical synthesis. While space and time were the form of experience, and the Orphic genius was the figure who would push human development forward, Scriabin also identified the content of experience: sensation or feeling. Such an interpretation played into his compositional intent—as Moscow composer Mikhael Gnesin noted, after performing a new composition for colleagues, “[Scriabin often asked] ‘What do you feel here?’ When I said something once about entirely new harmonies in one of the excerpts, he said, as if correcting me, ‘New sensations [oshchushchenie].’ This term was closer to him.”54 The highest form of experiential content, which would bring space and time to an end and usher in eternity, was the lived experience [perezhivanie] of world ecstasy: “Absolute Being is not a single moment, it is all being, it is all-­embracing, heavenly consciousness, which, at the same time, will be the final moment in time and space, the final boundary, the moment of radiating eternity. . . . The moment of ecstasy will stop being a moment (of time); it will swallow all time. This moment is Absolute Being.”55 Scriabin believed that



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the subjective, individual “I” would cease to exist in this moment of world ecstasy, and the multiple material manifestations would merge into single Absolute Being: his version of musical time. The gendered assumptions underpinning musical metaphysics are particularly apparent in Scriabin’s vision of unity through ecstasy. Much of the composer’s metaphorical language when describing the “ecstatic” moment of final unity was highly sexual in nature. In Morozova’s later assessment, Scriabin envisioned this moment “as world, cosmic unification of masculine and feminine beginnings, of spirit and matter . . . an erotic act, a blessed end, a return to Unity.”56 While the eroticism of both his metaphorical images and musical performance indications is undeniable, Scriabin employed the sexual encounter as a metaphor through which to depict the overcoming of isolation in the world through union with an external Other:57 “As a person in the moment of the sexual act, in the moment of ecstasy loses consciousness and all his organism in all its points experiences bliss, thus God-­man, experiencing ecstasy, will be filled with universal bliss and burn up in fire.”58 When this moment of world ecstasy was achieved, Scriabin believed that individual desires and striving would vanish, and only a single, unchanging consciousness would remain. The male/female duality, a metaphor for the spiritual and material planes of being, would similarly be transcended. Scriabin’s interpretation of sex as a metaphor for the duality of a material world awaiting transcendence was based on a shared stock of symbols in late imperial Russia concerning gender relations. As Olga Matich has highlighted, symbolist writers of the time sought to harness the creative energy that sex was believed to embody through enacting sexuality in numerous ways, ranging from complete sexual abstinence to orgiastic ceremonies and romantic “triangulations.”59 Russian philosophers, while agreeing on the central importance of the creative energy embodied in sexual activity, often reached fundamentally contradictory conclusions. Thus, while Nikolai Fedorov had called for the abandonment of physical reproduction in favor of scientific study aimed at the resurrection of the “fathers” of humanity, Vasilii Rozanov called for childbirth as the ultimate embodiment of God’s creative energy among humans. Inherent in all such views was a gendered image of reality, in which the female aspect was identified with passivity, the material world, and the “eternal feminine,” and the male aspect with creative activity, genius, and the spiritual realm. While a woman could represent the “world spirit” (Sophia) and incite creative activity, she herself was unable to create. Scriabin’s use of sexual images in his musical compositions similarly drew upon these gendered views of reality and creativity.60 Like many of his contemporaries, he viewed creativity as a quintessentially male space of activity. The communal act through which Scriabin envisioned bringing about the end

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of humanity (and the world itself ) in a moment of collective ecstasy was his Mystery, the driving force behind his creative work in the final years of his life.61 First conceived as early as 1901, the imagined contours of the work changed together with his general shift away from an individualistic toward a collective view of the universe. Distinct from the Christian image of the apocalypse, Scriabin’s Mystery was a joyful vision in which original, Dionysian unity would be experienced in a moment of pure ecstasy, and the multiplicity existing in space and time would be overcome. Amid the conflicting reports of the Mystery (whether from Scriabin or his acquaintances), certain general traits consistently linked the composer’s vision to concepts employed more widely in musical metaphysics. The desire to overcome all forms of division in search of initial unity was expressed in his intention to combine music, dance, poetry, perfume, and color within a single work. As a “mystery” rather than a mere performance, he linked the work conceptually with religious practices (ancient mystery cults and medieval Christian practice), a reincarnation of the previously existing unity between religion and art that had been lost in the modern age.62 Richard Wagner’s perceived failure to overcome the division between audience and performer was to be rectified in Scriabin’s work, which would do away with divisions between composer, performer, and audience: in his Mystery “there will not be any of these forms, these symbolizations and allegories . . . the footlights are a barrier between the audience and performers—they must be destroyed.”63 Similarly, the Mystery was envisioned as a universal rather than national experience: all peoples of the world would come to experience this final act. In keeping with Scriabin’s lifelong rejection of all nationalism, in a 1910 interview the composer went so far as to reject the idol of his youth, Chopin, claiming that the Pole, though of exceptional musical talent, had been “crushed by nationalism.”64 By the time Scriabin described his work in this manner, his intellectual inspiration had expanded far beyond the realm of German philosophy, incorporating ideas and mystical concepts borrowed from theosophical doctrine. Founded by Russian émigré Helena Blavatsky, theosophy gained popularity in elite and middle-­class circles throughout Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.65 Scriabin became acquainted with Blavatsky’s central work, The Secret Doctrine (in French translation) in 1905, discovering in it another conceptual language through which to express his worldview.66 But his adoption of theosophy, like his adoption of other philosophical systems, was partial at best.67 Instead, his selective adoption of theosophy mirrors the eclecticism that Julia Mannherz has noted as typical of popular occult practices in Russia at that time.68 In particular, Scriabin borrowed the terms “manvanataras” and “pralayas,” referring to alternating periods of activity and passivity, multiplicity and



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Figure 2.4. A. N. Scriabin, philosophical sketch. From Mikhail Gerzhenzon, ed., Russkie propilei: Materialy po istorii russkoi mysli i literaturi, vol. 6 (Moscow: M. and S. Sabashnikov, 1919), between pp. 156 and 157.

unity, in the universe. Such concepts mapped easily onto his dialectical model of history, in which periods of unity were followed by active striving and differentiation. Despite seizing upon this occult terminology, Scriabin remained disappointed in what he considered theosophy’s failure to give sufficient emphasis to the role of music in the world historical process.69 Nevertheless, aspects of theosophical doctrine colored his worldview after 1905, adding to the kaleidoscope of influences on his creativity.70 The venue envisioned for the Mystery was a semicircular building resembling a temple, built in India on the edge of a body of water. The building, combined with its reflection, would form a complete circle (fig. 2.4). While the site was initially envisioned as a single temple and then as a series of buildings, Scriabin later talked about uniting architecture and dance, so that the architectural columns themselves would move, dissolving from solid matter into color. Nature itself was to be incorporated into the Mystery, which would extend beyond humanity to all living beings. The final intent was to bring about the union of material and spiritual realities as well as the union of all individuals. In short, it was intended as the ultimate enactment of unity or sobornost’, through which the physical world would cease to exist.71

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The Mystery was to be performed in India over the course of seven days, opening with the music of bells, calling people to this “final act.”72 Each of the seven days would be devoted to one of the human “races” that theosophical doctrine taught would mark the different phases of existence, with the fifth day devoted to the current stage of human development.73 During this time, all humanity would “remember the best moments of its history,”74 reliving or reexperiencing (perezhivaia) those moments. Troubled by the theosophical claim that the current age was only the fifth age of humanity (which conflicted with his personal conviction that his mission was to bring about the end of humanity as such), and convinced that theosophy failed to assign sufficient importance to the role of art, Scriabin came to believe that through his Mystery, time itself (and, correspondingly, human evolution) would be sped up, with the last two ages of human evolution taking place on the sixth and seventh days of the Mystery.75 At the end of seven days, humanity would experience a moment of world ecstasy, symbolically expressed in the image of a “final dance” of all humanity, reuniting with God. This “involution,” “dematerialization,” or return to unity would begin with “the contemplation of [musical] harmony,” because, according to the composer, harmonic contemplation and dematerialization were “one and the same.”76 Although Scriabin had initially envisioned himself as the messianic figure who would usher in the moment of world ecstasy, his place in the Mystery changed as his philosophical worldview developed: though he remained a key figure, he increasingly believed that he could never reach the goal of world ecstasy without the active participation of all individuals. He therefore aimed not to transform the existing world through his individual creative will, but rather to provide a center around which all humanity would congregate to collectively bring about world ecstasy, unity, and the dissolution of space and time. Thus the mature Scria­bin would later argue that “[creativity] cannot be individual. There has to be a principle, there has to be unity. . . . Otherwise there is madness and chaos, the absence of a principle.”77 To truly fulfill his Orphic calling, he would have to overcome the limitations of his individual consciousness. This philosophical obsession with unity had a direct impact on Scriabin’s compositional language, as can be seen perhaps most clearly in his only completed work that sought to synthesize music, philosophy, and color: Prometheus.78 Premiered by conductor Serge Koussevitzky in Moscow in 1911, Prometheus was envisioned as a composition that would, both in its musical language and in its broader symbolism, dialectically combine opposites into a higher unity. The published score’s cover design by Jean Delville (a Belgian artist and follower of theosophy) was commissioned at the request of the composer, who did not find the regular cover design used by Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Publishing House ap-



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propriate. In contrast to the regular cover design by Ivan Bilibin (which sported a gusli player, an instrument associated with traditional Russian culture), Delville’s cover depicted an androgynous figure, the unity of masculine and feminine aspects (fig. 2.5).79 The lyre, the instrument of Orpheus, here evokes the Pythagorean image of the harmony of the spheres, with the sun and cosmos seeming to emanate from the strings of the instrument. Both the choral and instrumental parts in the score demonstrated a synthesis between instrumental and vocal music, while the composer seemed to abandon the use of language altogether, thus not limiting vocal expression to a single human language.80 Instead the choir sings entirely on open vowels. Color (an early envisioning of a light display) was to be incorporated into the work’s symphonic fabric, a project in which the Moscow chemist and electrical engineering professor Aleksandr Mozer assisted Scriabin, though the premiere was ultimately held without the color display owing to technological challenges. Each color in turn had a specific philosophical concept assigned to it. In response to his disciple Sabaneev’s skepticism about this aspect of Prometheus, Scriabin emphasized that unity was the driving idea behind the entire work: “Why do you protest sound accompanying color? There must be a Single Principle, everything must be brought to unity (edinstvo) . . . because of this there must be correspondence between color and sound. It is necessary, otherwise it is unthinkable, there would be no principle, no unity.”81 Scriabin’s most striking musical innovation was his creation of a new harmony (the mystic or Prometheus chord), which replaced major-­minor tonality as the work’s harmonic foundation. He argued that the fundamental aspect of the Prometheus chord was its synthesis of two basic aspects of musical language (melody and harmony) into a single underlying unity, serving as the basis for both harmonic and melodic material throughout the composition. Melody and harmony were nascent in the chord structure, expressed linearly in time (melody) and vertically in space (harmony). In this way, Scriabin claimed, “harmony becomes melody and melody becomes harmony.”82 Richard Taruskin has offered an insightful analysis of the ways in which Scria­ bin’s musical language in this and subsequent works extinguishes functional harmony, and, by extension, traditional understandings of temporality, leading to “an eschatological revelation, a gnosis that only music may impart: the full collapse of time and space and the dissolution of the ego.”83 Simon Morrison has expanded upon Taruskin’s perspective with his analysis of the “death harmonies” in Scriabin’s later Preparatory Act sketches as “projections” that “expand the qualities of musical stasis” previously found in the Prometheus (or mystic) chord.84 Both analyses emphasize how Scriabin’s music sought to overcome temporality. As Taruskin has shown, the Prometheus chord was derived from scales that were

Figure 2.5. Cover to Aleksandr Scriabin, Prometheus. Designed by Jean Delville. First published by Édition Russe de Musique (Moscow, 1911). Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­USZC4-­14462.



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Example 2.1. Whole-­tone scale, octatonic scale, and Prometheus chord.

symmetrical rather than asymmetrical in structure.85 The Western tonal system of the common practice period (in use since the seventeenth century) was constructed on the basis of two scales, major and minor, each consisting of an asymmetrical division of whole tones and semitones, which served to underpin conceptions of consonance and dissonance. As Scriabin sought ways in which to create unity and minimize (and ultimately eliminate) the consonance–­ dissonance duality, he turned to the whole-­tone scale (consisting entirely of whole tones) and the octatonic scale (alternating between semitones and whole tones), both of which offered intervallic symmetry lacking in the major-­minor scales (ex. 2.1a–­b). The defining characteristic shared by these two scales is symmetrical immobility—absence of the musical relations of consonance and dissonance and the symbolic baggage associated with them. However, this was only the first step in Scriabin’s musical quest for unity. In constructing the Prometheus chord, Scria­ bin combined pitches from both the whole-­tone and the octatonic scale. Comparison of the pitches contained within this harmony with the whole-­tone and octatonic scales above shows that the second note (D) is derived from the whole-­ tone scale, while the fifth note (A) is derived from the octatonic scale. The first, third, fourth, and sixth note are shared by both scales (C, E, F-sharp, A-­sharp/ B-­flat). The Prometheus chord unites these two different scales into a single whole (ex. 2.1c–­d ). Through combining melody and harmony into a single chord, Scriabin believed that he had overcome an evolutionary division between the two. In his words (as later quoted by Sabaneev), “It was first in classical music that [melody and harmony] were separated. This was the process of differentiation, the falling of Spirit into Matter, until it became melody and accompaniment, like in Bee-

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thoven.” Scriabin envisioned his own task as a dematerialization of music, resurrecting its lost spiritual purity and oneness: “And now with us begins synthesis: harmony becomes melody, and melody becomes harmony.”86 By reuniting melody and harmony, Scriabin sought to artistically overcome the spirit/matter divide that Neoplatonism, gnosticism, and theosophy all held to be the basis for the emergence of the universe from initial unity. Scriabin believed that the concepts of consonance and dissonance also lost meaning through the use of a single chord as the source of both melody and harmony. Just as melody and harmony were now derived from a single chord, traditionally consonant and dissonant intervals coexisted in the chord itself. Conflict and resolution (consonance and dissonance) no longer served as the primary rhetorical means through which music progressed. The tritone, the most dissonant interval in classical harmony, existed, eternally unresolved, within the Prometheus chord. The musical significance of the tritone was connected to its symmetrical structure. The tritone bisects the octave in half and in itself contains the potential to resolve into multiple tonalities. It was this multifaceted potentiality, rather than the choice of one or another resolution, that seems to have made this interval particularly attractive to Scriabin.87 No longer two elements that were distinct by their very nature, traditionally consonant and dissonant intervals coexisted within the musical material from which the work developed. Scriabin argued that the very concept of “dissonance” thus lost its meaning, and the Prometheus chord itself was to be regarded as “consonant.” Recognition of the higher unity symbolically expressed in Prometheus would require the listener not only to contemplate the unity of the whole but also to experience, through the act of listening, a sense of harmonic and rhythmic timelessness—the overcoming of historical time and accessing of musical time through musical experience.88 In Scriabin’s mind, Prometheus was still merely an initial artistic expression of the path he was to pursue in the future: the return to unity and overcoming of the multiplicity embodied by the physical universe in space and time. Music as a mere art form was insufficient to accomplish this task. As Scriabin was said to argue, if one were to “return to initial being, to unite with it, or, at least, join with it as the basic and initial action, then the path to it would have to be completely different, unusual, and in some sense even secret and in any case, extraordinary.”89 The composer believed that such a path toward complete unity would soon be uncovered in his Mystery, the work toward which he turned ever more compositional energy. While the symbolist and theosophical influences underpinning Scriabin’s worldview are generally recognized, I would also emphasize Scriabin’s general indebtedness to the larger worldview I have defined as musical metaphysics, evi-



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dent in the very terms he chose to express his task. The search for unity (edinstvo) is a silver thread running through Scriabin’s philosophical notebooks, his mystical imaginings, and his compositional language. Unity would be achieved, he concluded, through the collective participation of all people in the creative process, a participation that would trigger the move from historical time to musical time. The development of his musical language was shaped not by new sound combinations per se, but by his search for new experiences (expressed musically) that were ultimately intended to evoke unity. Scriabin believed that through the shared experience of ecstasy, humanity would move beyond the limits of space and time to a reunion with the Absolute. Within this worldview, he explicitly self-­ identified as the new Orpheus, embracing as his own the task of world transformation through music.90 THE SCRIABIN PHENOMENON I N L AT E I M P E R I A L RUSS I A

There is only one God, Scriabin, and Sabaneev is his prophet. —Vladimir Derzhanovskii to Igor Stravinsky, 1913

In November 1910 a new weekly periodical dedicated to music was launched in Moscow. Entitled simply Music (Muzyka), the journal declared music to be “one of the highest manifestations of cultural life” and boldly defined its goal as “supporting everything that allows for the growth and wide dissemination of musical culture in society.”91 Though claiming to champion all musical styles, the partisanship of the journal was clear from the first issue: Scriabin and his music stood at the very center of its interests. Already in the inaugural issue, the journal offered a carefully sculpted image of the composer: in place of a photograph, a sketch of the composer in action at the piano (realized by Leonid Pasternak) suggested a musical style and experience that was fleeting, ephemeral, and inherently modern (fig. 2.6). The first article, placed immediately after this sketch, was an analysis by Leonid Sabaneev of the composer’s newest composition, Prometheus. Appearing some months before the work’s official premiere, Sabaneev’s analysis gave the impression of imparting gnostic insight to his readers. In Prometheus, he argued (a refrain he echoed repeatedly in subsequent years), Scriabin’s transcendence of traditional harmonic relations embodied not just musical but universal human progress in the modern age.92 Music’s celebration of the composer was one of many voices in the public discourse that surged about the composer after his return to Russia in January 1909

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Figure 2.6. Sketch of Aleksandr Scriabin by Leonid Pasternak (March 10, 1909). First published in Muzyka no. 1 (November 27, 1910): 5. Courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

after five years abroad. The so-­called “Scriabin weeks,” which stretched through March 1909 and witnessed the Russian premieres of the Third Symphony and The Poem of Ecstasy, established him as one of the leading “modernist” Russian composers.93 After his permanent return to Moscow in 1910 (at the instigation of Serge Koussevitzky), Scriabin emerged, in the words of one contemporary, as Russia’s “most fashionable composer,” whose music elicited intense debate within educated society: a controversy in which Music occupied one extreme end of the spectrum.94 In these vying interpretations of the composer as prophet versus decadent, Nietzsche’s orphans debated fundamental questions about Russian identity and Russia’s place in the modern world. Even before the composer’s return, philosopher Boris Fedorovich Schloezer (the composer’s brother-­in-­[common]-­law and one of his most passionate admirers), prophesied Scriabin’s significance for contemporary Russia.95 Schloezer’s articles, published in the Russian Musical Newspaper (1908) and the daily newspaper Russian Bulletin (1909), together with program notes he penned for the composer’s new works, introduced educated society to a very different Scria­ bin than the “degenerate” who had left Russia in 1904.96 This “new” Scriabin’s



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creative quest had transformed him from an individualist into a universal genius, whose creative work marked the dawning of a new cultural epoch. Schloezer employed religiously tinged language that connected Scriabin metaphorically with John the Baptist, describing the composer as “the forerunner [predtecha] of a new era of history.” In “Scriabin’s entire life as an artist and thinker,” Schloezer argued, the future of humanity was encapsulated. For the majority of people, life was “an unconscious play of the interchange of creation and destruction, rising and falling.” Humans mistakenly attributed causes to externally existing phenomena, when in fact they freely created the reality around them. Scriabin, according to Schloezer, had stepped beyond this limited worldview to recognize the subjectivity of all values and of reality itself. In The Poem of Ecstasy, having recognized that there was no goal in existence except for constant play, Scriabin strove to express the “joy of free action,” the moment of “ecstasy” in music.97 Ecstasy would come when “spirit, having achieved the highest level of action, as if tearing itself away from the embrace of reasonability and relativity, experiences its own essence to the end, [experiences] free action.”98 Schloezer’s interpretation of Scriabinesque ecstasy echoed Henri Bergson’s emphasis on artistic intuition as a means through which to step outside calendar time and experience internal time (duration) via the flux of existence. However, it was Schloezer’s emphasis on the communal (sobornyi) aspect of Scriabin’s artistic discoveries as central to humanity’s future that placed his analysis firmly within the conceptual framework of musical metaphysics.99 According to Schloezer, Scriabin’s search for “ecstasy” was not limited to individual experience; rather, “Scriabin wants cosmic ecstasy, so that the entire universe will experience that moment in unity. . . . ecstasy cannot be a personal, but only a collective creation.” This collective aspect of Scriabin’s vision distanced him from earlier cultural visionaries and marked the beginning of a new era in human history. The Poem of Ecstasy, with its abandonment of traditional tonal relations and celebration of dissonance was, hinted Schloezer, only the first insight for contemporary listeners into the great “freeing of spirit” that would come in future creative works, certain to stem from collective rather than individual creation.100 In returning to his homeland to share his vision with his compatriots, Scriabin embodied the collective goal to which all society was striving in the modern age: the free development of the human spirit. Perhaps most striking in Schloezer’s analysis of Scriabin was what he omitted. Though by 1908 Scriabin was absorbed in planning his Mystery and increasingly well-­versed in theosophical concepts, Schloezer’s article gave no hint of Scria­ bin’s apocalyptic dreams. This omission was certainly not from an absence of awareness: together with his sister Tatiana, Boris Schloezer had spent extensive

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time with the composer and was well-­acquainted with his theosophical leanings. Rather, Schloezer extracted those aspects of Scriabin’s creative development that he found most appealing—an emphasis that highlighted the collective and progressive aspects of Russian identity and minimized the occult aspects of the composer’s creative path.101 Human progress, collectivity, and psychological development, rather than mystical transcendence, were the themes that most attracted Schloezer. Despite later claims that “no one could understand a word” of Schloezer’s article when it appeared, Sabaneev offered a rather similar association of Scria­ bin’s music in his own passionate proselytizing for the composer, which filled the pages of Music from 1910 onward. He claimed that Scriabin’s music elicited entirely new human experiences that were associated with a collective rather than individualist impulse.102 Contemporary audiences, he argued, could no longer access the same emotional responses that their predecessors had felt in listening to compositions by Bach or Haydn, as their own spiritual lives and emotional experiences had evolved to a new level and demanded a new musical language of expression.103 Sabaneev believed that as humanity progressed spiritually, human hearing would advance to the point where contemporary dissonances would come to be accepted as consonances, a development that would in turn drive further musical and spiritual development.104 Through his innovative compositional language, Sabaneev concluded, Scriabin’s Orphic task was to bring these new experiences to humanity as a whole. For Sabaneev, like Schloezer, it was Scriabin’s prophetic insight into universal human experience that both explained the composer’s compositional development and made it universally applicable to audiences. Sabaneev’s defense of Scriabin’s universality focused upon the Prometheus chord employed in varying forms in the composer’s later works, connecting its construction to the very laws underpinning the physical universe. Sabaneev argued that Scriabin had, through creative exploration, intuitively constructed the chord from pitches deriving from the natural overtone series—the pitches that emerge simultaneously with the main pitch (the fundamental) when it is sounded.105 He claimed that the Prometheus chord was derived from the overtones 8–14, omitting number 12 (ex. 2.2).106 In this analysis, the echo of a well-­known Romantic trope can be heard: the microcosmic world of the individual and the macrocosmic external universe correspond, uncovered through the intuitive creativity of genius. Scriabin’s music thus embodied the harmony of the spheres underpinning all existence. Emphasizing the same trope of unity so beloved by Scriabin, Sabaneev further argued that the Prometheus chord incorporated all four “consonant” triads of classical music: major, minor, diminished, and augmented, combining them



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Example 2.2. Overtone series and Prometheus chord.

into a single unity (ex. 2.3).107 This inclusion of all four conventional consonant harmonies within a single chord demonstrated the transcendence of traditional functional harmony (the motion from dissonance to consonance, rather than their coexistence). Sabaneev further strengthened this claim by pointing to Scria­bin’s omission of the clearest dominant function: the absence of G, the twelfth overtone. In traditional tonal harmony, musical modulation (movement from one key area to another) was based on the circle of fifths, or movement through the dominant. By omitting the dominant note G from the Prometheus chord, traditional movement between key areas was abandoned.108 While ostensibly framing his interpretation of the Prometheus chord as scientific, Sabaneev’s analysis was heavily idealist in conception, based upon the assumption of the priority of individual creative genius as the force through which evolution or “progress” occurred. As one critic of Sabaneev’s theory pointed out, Scriabin’s music in fact did not make use of the pure overtone series: adjustments made to instrumental tuning to allow for free movement from one key area to another (so-­called “tempered tuning”) meant that the composer’s music, written for tempered instruments such as the piano, could not sound the pure overtone series.109 First universally adopted for Western music around the time of J. S. Bach as a way to enable free movement from one tonal center to another, “tempered” tuning required the slight alteration of several pitches, resulting in a tuning slightly different from natural tuning’s pitches that were derived directly

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Example 2.3. Intervallic relationships within Prometheus chord.

from the overtone series. In example 2.2a, the bracketed notes signify the pure overtones altered in the system of tempered tuning: the eleventh, thirteenth, and fourteenth overtones (F-sharp, A, and B-­flat) have been adjusted from their naturally occurring equivalents. But such a critique overlooked Sabaneev’s fundamentally idealist basis of argument. By linking Scriabin’s harmonic language to the harmony of the spheres while dismissing this technical complication to his claim, Sabaneev—like Schloezer before him—sought to demonstrate that the composer did not merely give voice to subjective experience but also embodied an underlying collective truth, equally applicable to all humans.110 Both Schloezer and Sabaneev’s interpretations ultimately rested upon the image of a modern-­day Orpheus, a creative genius whose work pushed forward human spiritual development. Rejecting more scientifically based approaches to acoustics as a means through which to advance musical language, Sabaneev insisted that true progress in music would come through the figure of the individual creative genius, who intuitively combined developing musical language with an expression of his own historical milieu.111 “To approach art from the point of view of logic and ‘healthy thought,’” he argued (in direct contrast to the logical and scientific approach that he would later pride himself on in the Soviet era), “is to not understand it at all, for art does not contain any kind of ‘healthy thought’ in it.”112 Operating under the sway of musical metaphysics, he claimed that “before all else and after all else, music is secret and mighty magic.”113 Such claims, though ostensibly universal, easily blended into discussions of the relationship between music and Russian identity. Some of Nietzsche’s orphans, deeply concerned with the perceived gap between the narod and educated so-



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ciety, sought to grant Scriabin the more specific role of contemporary unifier of the Russian people, drawing a direct link between the composer and their understanding of what Russian identity should become in the modern era.114 This was not connected with the composer’s musical language (which, most commentators agreed, had little in common with the “Russian” compositional style of other artists),115 but rather with the spiritual calling to overcome the divisions of modernity and lift humanity to a higher spiritual level, an interpretation indebted to Russian messianic ideas. For Sabaneev, Scriabin’s evolution beyond the simple Russian nationalism of the nineteenth century marked his devotion to the ideal of religious synthesis of the arts and the spiritualization of contemporary life, a focus that raised Russia to the first place in world culture.116 In Scriabin, he concluded, Russia had found its first musician-­philosopher, who followed and perfected the path of Wagner.117 Building on this interpretation of Scriabin as the modern embodiment of the “Russian idea,” by 1908 Aleksandr Koptiaev was convinced that Scriabin was the contemporary musician-­philosopher he had awaited in the midst of the 1905 revolution.118 Unaware of the composer’s theosophical leanings prior to their personal meeting in 1909, Koptiaev interpreted Scriabin’s music in a language heavily indebted to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and to stereotyped assumptions about Russian culture based on Slavophile writings of the mid-­nineteenth century.119 In contrast to European rationalism, he argued, Scriabin’s music embodied the irrational, emotional spirit of Russia: “To the devil with measured German music . . . [we are] not ashamed of our own, Slavic passion, and in a wonderful, Bacchic ecstasy, seizing each others’ hands, we remember again the great name ‘Scriabin.’”120 Here at last was the composer who would develop the emotional, ecstatic, collective, Dionysian, and Russian side of music rather than its formal, Apollonian, and German side. In Koptiaev’s view (presaging the argument in Durylin’s 1913 book Wagner and Russia discussed in chapter 1), Scriabin succeeded where Wagner had failed. Although Wagner had been a “Slav in character,” he had abandoned the teachings of Nietzsche in his last work (Parsifal), returning to the embrace of a “neo-­Catholic morality.” It had fallen to Scriabin to correct this path. To emphasize the dominant role of Slavic cultural identity in the modern age, Koptiaev similarly reinterpreted Nietzsche as a “Polish thinker,” who had prophesied the “elemental strength” and “Dionysian beginning” of music (which Scriabin now reawakened).121 Music critic Boris Popov seconded Koptiaev’s analysis of Scriabin’s innately Slavic nature in a 1909 article that, while ostensibly devoted to Chopin’s hundredth anniversary, served as a pretext for a lengthy soliloquy upon Scriabin’s

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significance.122 Just as had occurred in Chopin’s time, Popov claimed, “the mysterious future of music has stopped its fiery tongue above the head of a Slav. . . . One thing is unquestionable: the genius of Chopin has found a worthy disciple. And there is something prophetic in the fact that this disciple is a Slav and lives in a time that is equally perilous for his homeland. . . . And through that connection, through that consciousness of a higher unity, the consciousness of a national unity, a blood unity, grows and strengthens.”123 Like Schloezer, Popov employed religious imagery in his analysis, echoing the biblical narrative of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon Christ’s disciples in the form of tongues of flame. In Popov’s article, however, unity was specifically national and even biological in nature. Scriabin’s ethnic Russianness was an inherent aspect of his claim to the title of Orpheus. For these orphans, Russia was the natural country in which Nietzsche’s aesthetic ideas could come to fruition. They argued that since Slavs were, by their very nature, “formless,” Russian music gave the most adequate expression of the Dionysian spirit. The essence of this spirit was found not in the use of folk melodies but in a “character of eternal languor, eternal striving toward something unknown, eternally unfulfillable.”124 Scriabin was the musical harbinger of the message first expressed by Nietzsche: a rejection of existing norms and morals in life and the building of new ones. This image of Scriabin emphasized Russia’s messianic role in contemporary culture: while he was the product of a specifically Russian environment, his mission was universal. All nations required Dionysian rebirth, Koptiaev argued, but Russia’s tragic conditions had made the appearance of this genius possible. Echoing this sentiment in his own assessment of Scriabin, Popov declared that “future Slavic art will be not only national, but will carry new discoveries to all humanity.”125 Ironically, this new cultural discovery was often best expressed through references to the German intellectual tradition, a typical contradiction found in the conceptual thought of Nietzsche’s orphans. Scriabin, “the savior of music,” had discovered, according to Koptiaev, “the real musical Dionysian world, which Schopenhauer had conceptualized in a confused manner and of which Nietzsche had raved.”126 Nevertheless, this nationalist interpretation of Scriabin’s music also drew on existing tropes of Russian messianism: his music was believed to embody a higher spiritual message, central to the contemporary context Russians found themselves in, but also speaking to a broader humanity. In contrast to German rationalism (expressed in music as well as in thought), Scriabin’s musical insight was formless, giving sound to immediate, organic experience. In short, it was deeply “Slavic.” The Russian messianic idea, rooted in the image of Moscow as the Third Rome, and expanded by the Slavophiles in the early nine-



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teenth century, was canonized by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his famous 1880 speech on Pushkin, in which he stated that “to become a genuine Russian means to seek finally to reconcile all European controversies, to show the solution of European anguish in our all-­humanitarian and all-­unifying Russian soul.” Such claims were now considered particularly applicable to Scriabin: the composer’s very universality was a sign of his Russianness.127 Such adulation was far from ubiquitous. Interpretations of Scriabin as embodying human spiritual progress and genuine Russianness met with sharp criticism. Schloezer’s 1909 newspaper article was accompanied by a note from the editor in which he officially distanced himself from Schloezer’s “fanaticism.”128 Symbolist theorist and music critic Emilii Medtner derided any attempt to define musical style through the concept of “progress” as inherently faulty, claiming in contrast that Scriabin’s success was the embodiment of fleeting modernist fashion at the expense of true transcendent art. Such “false Dionysianism” (as Medtner termed it) provided the main target of his 1912 book, Modernism and Music (Modernizm i muzyka), in which contemporary musical style was interpreted as a sign of the decline rather than development of contemporary Europe. A true musical genius (such as his brother Nikolai Medtner) followed “eternal” musical laws, argued Emilii, rejecting the chimera of historical progress. Emilii’s vehement rejection of Schloezer’s claim that consonance and dissonance themselves were relative terms that evolved over time both encapsulated the conceptual and aesthetic distance between the two men and led to a permanent parting of ways.129 Discussions of Scriabin’s music shared a common underlying theme: they focused upon whether or not the composer’s musical works truly embodied a transformed human spirit (itself associated with Russian identity), or whether they reflected the individualistic disintegration of modernity. Moreover, despite philosophical glosses that interpreted the spiritual significance of the composer’s musical voice, Scriabin’s increasingly complex harmonic language (particularly in Prometheus and after) presented challenges to Russian audiences.130 Debates in the Russian musical press often framed the question of Scriabin’s music in Wagnerian terms: was it really the “music of the future”?131 If so, what sort of future did it promise—one of universal spiritual progress or degeneration? While accepting the conceptual terms of this debate, Scriabin’s detractors repeatedly attacked his apparent “individualism” and lack of spirituality—both markers of his presumed failure to overcome the challenges of modernity. One of the sharpest attacks on Scriabin’s music in 1909 appeared in the pages of Music and Life (Muzyka i zhizn’), a journal with a self-­declared goal of overcoming the division between “high” musical culture and the narod: a division,

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it was argued, that was a product of recent social history.132 Aleksandr Maslov, active as a music ethnographer and teacher at the Moscow People’s Conservatory since its 1906 founding, attacked the composer with a sardonic rendition of the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”133 In Maslov’s telling, the courtiers became so carried away with their own deception of the king (that his “new clothes” were in fact nakedness) that they themselves forgot the falsehood and, in the end, were deprived of reason. It was this story “with all its details” that “unwillingly comes to mind in connection with the appearance of the composer A. N. Scria­ bin on the musical horizon.”134 To Maslov, Scriabin was symbolic of contemporary culture’s glorification of the individual, a trend signifying the sickness of the modern age: “What does the essence of this ‘music of the future’ include? . . . Developed vertical and horizontal sound combinations, caressing the ear, or thoughts containing some high moral or social ideals? Nothing of the sort. In deformed forms, in extreme short melodic themes with heady harmonies, sometimes cacophony, Scriabin transparently tells us about himself.” Maslov claimed that Scriabin’s compositional failure stemmed from the extreme solipsistic philosophical ideas underlying his music. Scriabin, Maslov argued, equated “‘Spirit and the universe,’ ‘Spirit and I (the author [i.e., Scriabin]),’” and finally “I [Scria­ bin] and God.” For Maslov, in contrast, the true “music of the future” should “call us to a world of equality and free space.” Convinced that music should foster collective discourse and forge social unity, Maslov concluded, “We must, with disgust, turn away from this idea of cynical glorification of personality, having nothing in common with healthy life.”135 Such critiques were part of a broader concern over modernity’s perceived glorification of individualism. Symbolist poet Dmitrii Merezhkovskii inspired extended debate in the press for his emphasis of personal freedom over patriotic feeling.136 Scriabin’s detractors similarly emphasized the composer’s individuality, amorality, and distance from the Russian people. Dmitrii Arakchiev mourned Scriabin’s desire to carry the listener “to the other side of Good” in his Poem of Ecstasy and expressed the wish that the unquestionably talented composer would “return to this side and talk in such a general-­human language as his peers,” holding up Rachmaninoff as an example worthy of emulation.137 Even critiques that focused ostensibly upon the composer’s music (rather than his philosophy) often fell back upon the charge that Scriabin’s art was fundamentally individualistic in nature. His extensive focus on solo piano rather than large orchestral works, and his pianistic skills, which (though of high caliber) were singularly unsuited to performance in large halls, were often cited as evidence of his individual rather than collective focus.138 The physical effects of Scriabin’s music were also cited as eliciting the nervous-



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ness and tension of modern life, rather than awakening the transcendent spirituality intended by Scriabin through his vaunted “ecstasy.” In 1909 critic Grigorii Prokof’ev concluded that Scriabin’s newest music exceeded physiological limitations, arguing that “our hearing cannot perceive an unending set of dissonances, unresolved and moving from one to the next in an unending chain.”139 Viktor Val’tor, writing for the newspaper Conversation (Rech’) in 1911, similarly emphasized the physical rather than spiritual impact of Scriabin’s music, claiming that “Scriabin calls forth ecstasy in the public not so much by musical as by physical means, most of all by the strength of sound, especially dissonances.”140 Rather than awakening a higher spiritual reality, Val’tor intimated, Scriabin’s music functioned on a lower, merely physical level. Similarly, in response to a survey by a St. Petersburg newspaper regarding the possibility that music could harm its listeners (a query inspired by the Russian premiere of Richard Strauss’s Elektra at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1913), out of eight musicians polled, seven were reported to have acknowledged that music indeed could have an immediate effect (either positive or negative) on the listener; of these, five specifically cited Scria­bin’s music (particularly Prometheus and The Poem of Ecstasy) as having a harmful effect. For N. F. Solov’ev, “it is unquestionable that the works of Scria­ bin and Strauss’s Elektra have a negative influence on the psyche. The speed of rhythmic movement of both composers awakens a storm in the soul of the listener.” Vasilii Il’ich Safonov claimed that when he had recently conducted Prometheus, one of the listeners at the concert fell into a faint, and that he himself suffered from the tension the music evoked. Most dramatically, composer Aleksandr Glazunov recounted that a young musician, carried away by the music of Wagner, committed suicide—a deleterious influence that he intimated Scria­ bin’s music also might have.141 In these negative accounts, Scriabin’s “decadent” style was explicitly connected with German examples and stereotypes. Russian educated society was divided in its response both to Prometheus and to Sabaneev’s elaborate theoretical arguments in support of the work. While expectations were high (one anonymous fan sent Scriabin a request to sign a postcard with a line of music from Prometheus),142 reviews of the work were mixed. Some commentators praised its popular success, while others emphasized the whistles and other negative responses. Sabaneev insisted in a review for Voice of Moscow that “I have never been a witness to a similar ovation in relation to Scriabin: for half an hour, the public did not leave.” But reviewers for the newspapers Early Morning (Rannee utro) and Theatre (Teatr) both noted that while a small handful of “extreme innovationists” and “feverish admirers of Scriabin” applauded, the vast majority of the audience was left in confusion and uncertainty.143 A work such as Prometheus, hinted an anonymous reviewer for Music

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and Life, smacked of the decline and disintegration endemic to modernity rather than historical progress.144 Similar critiques of Prometheus were leveled by other disenchanted critics, who believed that Scriabin was abandoning his Orphic mission of unifying and transforming Russian society.145 Scriabin and his compositional innovations offered a space in which Nietzsche’s orphans debated not just musical style but also their own contradictory visions of Russia’s present and future. Caught between utopian dreams of a transfigured future in which Russia would lead European cultural development to new heights, and anxiety about the illnesses of European (and implicitly also Russian) modernity—individualism, decline, and decadence—Scriabin and his music served as a measurement for Russia’s own spiritual health. As these tense public debates proved, educated society was far from agreement upon Russia’s past, present, or future. I N T E R P R E T I N G M US I C A L S A LVAT I O N : T H E S C R I A B I N I ST S A DA P T S C R I A B I N

By 1910 Scriabin’s Moscow apartment had emerged as a key meeting place for a subsection of Nietzsche’s orphans. Like the larger aesthetic community in which they participated, the Scriabinists were an eclectic mix: artists, old nobility, wealthy merchants, and members of Russia’s emerging professional classes mingled freely at evening performances and discussions devoted to Scria­ bin’s music and ideas. Those who belonged to what Sabaneev later called the “inner circle” of Scriabinists met with the composer almost daily, while others attended on a more infrequent basis.146 At these evening gatherings, the composer would premiere new works, discuss philosophy, and elaborate on the planning of his Mystery. However, by most accounts (both contemporary and posthumous), despite the intense interest and admiration that he garnered, there were few if any ardent believers in the Mystery, even among the Scriabinists. Rather, these orphans brought their own expectations, hopes, and dreams to their meetings with the self-­proclaimed prophet. Composer Fedor Akimenko, an occasional visitor to Scriabin’s home, was no exception. While he and Scriabin discussed music’s role in contemporary life through a shared mystical language of “astral planes,” Akimenko was too enthralled with his own role as a creative artist to pay homage to Scriabin as the modern Orpheus.147 Though it varied in degree, such skepticism in the singularity of Scriabin’s role seems to have been the norm for many. Rather, it was Scriabin’s general vision of musical transcendence and his quest for unity that proved particularly alluring to his contemporaries. The aura of mys-



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ticism surrounding the composer and his circle called forth gentle mockery from Sabaneev, who referred to the composer ironically as “Messiah Absolutovich” in correspondence with musician Aleksandr Krein.148 At the same time, however, Sabaneev’s writings celebrated the mystical, religious aspect of Scriabin’s music as the dominant development in the modern age. In 1925, retrospectively describing his reaction to Scriabin’s philosophical rantings, Sabaneev mused that “just a bit more, and this madman, for whom all was so clear and basic, would soon turn out to be the single sane one, and all of us, tossed about by the waves of chaos and uncertainty, would be the insane ones, because we had not yet achieved this conviction in the existence of unity and principles.”149 For Morozova, Scriabin offered artistic fulfillment, personal friendship, philosophical inspiration, and escape from the trials she faced with her husband’s illness and ultimate death in 1903. In this difficult time, she poured herself first into piano lessons and then philosophical studies with the thirty-­one-­year-­old Scriabin.150 She later reminisced that “it was very difficult for me to believe in [the Mystery], it called forth a very complex battle in my soul.”151 Nevertheless, “when he spoke, his eyes were so dreamlike, they sparkled with joy. . . . what he said, those various thoughts and fantasies that were in him, and that belief in the victory of the creative strength of humanity opened some sort of unending horizon to me, and I felt that the limits of my spiritual life expanded. This called forth such elation, such a desire to live and act. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before.”152 This contradictory impulse was also described by music critic Iulii Engel, who argued that this “poet of God’s goodness” could “through the strength of his internal concentration” not only cause others to “perceive the dream created by him as something real” but in fact could “infect others with it also.”153 For the philosophy student Boris Fokht, it was as he listened to Scriabin discuss his Mystery that “I truly understood with what a great man Fate had connected me.”154 Ultimately, one should not underestimate the influence of personality on contemporaries; impossible to recapture from the dead pages of newspapers and dusty tomes, this spiritual electricity that Scriabin exuded in person exerted an effect impossible to entirely comprehend today, for it could be fully known only through lived experience. For those who made up Scriabin’s inner circle after his return to Russia, the composer answered, first and foremost, a deep personal need. For Dr. Vladimir Bogorodskii, a former social democrat turned mystic who made Scriabin’s acquaintance in 1910, these evening gatherings provided a space in which to seek spiritual fulfillment and ponder the nature of truth. In the midst of a cholera epidemic, memories of his evenings with Scriabin kept Bogorodskii from despair, despite his own reservations about the Mystery. In an undated letter to the com-

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poser, Bogorodskii wrote despondently of the situation in Kharkov region, where “dark rumors, mystical horror, and panic” reigned, and where, amid the constant march of death, “the moon and stars look on all of this indifferently, coldly.” He concluded that “I live in part through remembering . . . you, dear Aleksandr Nikolaevich . . . our conversations . . . about truth . . . where is it? Which one of us is right?” Rather than a statement of belief or conviction, this correspondence speaks of a soul searching for meaning, particularly given Bogorodskii’s closing wish to “become better acquainted with your worldviews” and his admission that “I am not at all acquainted with those tendencies that you represent.”155 The doctor’s recognition of a fellow spiritual seeker in Scriabin echoed an intimate search for meaning amid the overwhelming flux of modern life. For some, Scriabin’s significance was tied to their own image of Russia’s salvific mission. For Viacheslav Ivanov, whose friendship with the composer also deepened in 1910, Scriabin’s celebration of unity and sobornost’ convinced him of the close spiritual connection in their artistic goals. In Ivanov’s later assessment, Scriabin’s “theoretical expression of sobornost’ and of choral action . . . differed from my expectations only insofar as they were, for [Scriabin], an immediate, practical task.”156 At the same time, Scriabin’s refusal to recognize Jesus Christ as a unique Messiah was a source of deep frustration and disappointment for Ivanov.157 Ivanov reconciled these aspects of Scriabin’s personality after the composer’s death in 1915 by claiming that the composer had been in the process of undergoing an “internal cleansing and penitential internal experience,” leading him back to Christianity. “A convicted, conscious Christian Scriabin was not yet,” asserted Ivanov, “but the name of Christ he unendingly praised; he untiringly sought and craved for, he firmly believed in Christ as the universal Word, served him in his own way.”158 Summarizing the inherent contradiction felt by many Russian admirers of Nietzsche and their hopes for a Russian transcendence of the German philosopher’s limitations, Ivanov reflected optimistically that Scriabin, unlike Nietzsche, had believed in God.159 Similarly reading their own desires and dreams into the foppish composer and amateur philosopher, Princesses Marina Nikolaevna Gagarina and Varvara Nikolaevna Lermontova, sisters of Scriabin’s former philosophical guide, the late Sergei Trubetskoi, found in Scriabin and his music a mystical transcendence of their material conditions through associating him with Russia’s Christian mission. While adopting certain “Scriabinist” terminology in their discussions of the composer’s music and ideas, they showed little genuine devotion to the actual intent of Scriabin’s Mystery.160 Seeking to develop Scriabin’s acquaintance with the increasingly popular Russian religious philosophy of the day, Gagarina even persuaded the composer to attend meetings of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical



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Society, where Evgenii Trubetskoi, Vladimir Ern, Sergei Bulgakov, and others regularly presented their vision of Russia’s Christian essence.161 For both sisters, like Ivanov, the mystical insight provided by Scriabin’s music was closely linked to their image of the composer as a fellow seeker of Christ (though he himself did not yet realize it) and an embodiment of Russian spiritual culture. Lermontova claimed in 1917 that Scriabin was “a great genius, dreaming of sacrificing his life to return humanity to God.”162 This interpretation was also projected to Russian society more generally. The poet Nina Serpinskaia later recalled attending an evening concert featuring Scriabin and hosted by Gagarina. Though lacking the means to provide much in way of refreshments to those in attendance, Gagarina nevertheless managed to cast a “serious and portentous” mood over the entire event: “The hostess forgot herself and didn’t notice [the modest circumstances], while her inspired face and distracted gaze . . . invisibly directed all the experiences of those gathered,” recounted Serpinskaia. This mood was infectious; Serpinskaia reflected that “with his music, Scriabin made everything around purer, deeper, more meaningful. Triviality fell silent and vanished. People who had grown cold, already unfit for any expansiveness in life, unwillingly opened themselves to the pathos of the author of the Poem of Ecstasy.”163 Unlike at other “decadent” gatherings of the cultural elite of Moscow, Serpinskaia intimated, Scriabin’s music awakened something deeply spiritual and transcendent. Such personal investment in Scriabin’s significance often led to jealousy over interpreting his creative intent. A scarcely veiled hostility underpinned Sabaneev’s later account of Aleksandr Brianchaninov’s appearance amid Scriabin’s admirers. Sabaneev complained bitterly that “not only is he unable to differentiate between Scriabin’s music and someone else’s, but in general is unable to differentiate music from ‘nonmusic.’”164 A nobleman with an estate in the Perm region, a strong admiration for Napoleon, and a love for political dalliance, Brianchaninov introduced Pan-­Slavic politics and Anglophile views into Scriabin’s inner circle. Together with his wife Mariia Brianchaninova (née Gorchakova), Brianchaninov encouraged Scriabin’s interest in India as the location for his Mystery, finding in the work not the end of the phenomenal world but a future vision of the dominance of Slavic culture through Russian political and military victory, which he believed would come to pass through political affiliation with England. Brianchaninov offered to introduce the composer to British officials and assist in the practical matter of purchasing land in India for the performance of the Mystery (which, he logically concluded, would need the official approval of the British government).165 At the same time, he vehemently proclaimed a Pan-­Slavic interpretation of the modern age, in which it was the messianic task of Russia to serve as the guiding light for the other Slavic peoples and ultimately for all humanity.

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His journal The New Link (Novoe zveno, 1913–16), for which both Scriabin and Sabaneev served on the editorial board, trumpeted its preference for Slavic peoples, arguing that the only rational way to improve the human condition was to focus “first [upon] the good of Russia itself, then the good of Slavs, to whom the Russian people belong, then the good of Europe, from the culture of which humanity feeds and only then the good of all humanity.”166 This task was equally important in cultural and political circles, and Scriabin, as the embodiment of contemporary Russian culture, held a central position in Brianchaninov’s imagined transformation. In a footnote added to Eduard Stark’s extensive review of a Moscow performance of Wagner’s Parsifal, which called for the creation of a Russian version of Wagner’s “mystery,” Brianchaninov portentously stated “as we know, A. N. Scriabin has already been working for more than two years on a Mystery, a task incomparably broader than the legend of Parsifal.”167 Stark’s review echoed the widespread expectation of a composer who would express the Russian narod’s message for humanity and, given Brianchaninov’s annotation, the reader was led to the conclusion that Scriabin was in the process of creating this very work.168 Such interpretations creatively reframed Scriabin and his Mystery according to the personal worldview of the disciple in question. There were limitations to this creative reinterpretation of Scriabin’s significance, however. For some of Nietzsche’s orphans, the distance between the composer’s philosophy and their own vision of Russian identity simply grew too wide to transcend. While Morozova had been one of the leading influences behind Scriabin’s initial return to Russia in January 1909, her philosophical explorations had already led her along a path fundamentally different from her former “teacher.” After making the acquaintance of Evgenii Trubetskoi in 1905 (and subsequently falling in love with him), she was drawn increasingly to the religious writings of Solov’ev, and she became firmly committed to a Christian vision of the Russian narod. After attending a performance by the composer, she acknowledged her increasingly conflicted attitude toward Scriabin in a private letter to Trubetskoi: “The basis and generally everything in [Scriabin’s] credo is foreign to us! But in experiences, colors, surges—he is close to me and beloved!”169 Trubetskoi, unimpressed by Morozova’s inner conflict, harshly attacked Scria­ bin’s worldview. Grouping Scriabin’s music and philosophy with the thought of German philosophers Hermann Cohen and Richard Avenarius, he criticized the lack of genuine religious transcendence in all three men. “Despite Solov’ev, they name death and time as rulers,” he argued to Morozova. Scriabin’s obsession with ecstasy and the Mystery was, for Trubetskoi, a sign of his inherent lack of genuine spirituality and his inability to transcend historical time and achieve higher spiritual insight. “There are very few people today with wings, able to fly



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above time. And this inability of theirs they give out as philosophy,” he concluded dismissively.170 In response to such repeated critiques, Morozova assured her beloved that she could only embrace a Christian-­based mystical interpretation of the world in which the “national and Christian task of Russia” held a central place.171 “The Dionysian ecstasy of Scriabin breaks apart at my feet,” she claimed in August 1909, vowing that she would “listen to him only in death.”172 A personal falling out with Scriabin brought about by her continued friendship with the composer’s first wife brought their once close relationship to a bitter end, leaving Morozova free to seek her Orpheus elsewhere.173 Similar disillusion with the gulf separating his own understanding of Russian music (and, by extension, Russian identity) and Scriabin’s worldview was expressed by music critic and onetime Scriabinist Aleksandr Koptiaev’s troubled reaction to the 1911 premiere of Prometheus. A short time before, Koptiaev had embraced Scriabin as the incarnation of Nietzsche’s musical prophet. Prometheus, however, was a step away from the collective vision that he believed Scria­ bin had found in his previous works through their formless, improvisatory nature. The “Russian formlessness” that he had previously identified in Scriabin’s practice of delaying resolution of dissonance had shown, Koptiaev claimed, that the composer had freed music from the “past influence of epoch, nation, and place” expressed in musical cadences, thereby pursuing the redemptive task of Russia itself.174 Enthralled by his own interpretation of Scriabin’s Russian messianism, Koptiaev was fundamentally disappointed by the composer’s continued harmonic development. Rather than delaying and prolonging cadences, thereby heightening emotional and dramatic tension, in Prometheus Scriabin sought to do away with the interplay of dissonance and consonance altogether. Unlike Scriabin’s earlier works, Koptiaev mourned, Prometheus did not “draw us with it” but instead underlined the disconnect between audience and composer.175 In this development Koptiaev saw not the unifying figure of Orpheus or the musical prophet he had previously envisioned, but instead a great genius going astray and abandoning his task of speaking to the narod. Scriabinists and former Scriabinists alike envisioned a wide variety of “mysteries,” none of which fully accorded with the composer’s own vision. Schloezer and Sabaneev both lauded the composer as a harbinger of a transformed humanity, whose music would usher in a deep spiritual transformation never before imagined. For Bogorodskii, Scriabin offered intellectual stimulation and exploration in his quest for truth, while for Ivanov, Gagarina, and Lermontova, his mission was inextricably entwined with a Christian vision of Russia’s messianic task. In Brianchaninov’s view, this messianism took on distinctive racial and political attributes. To varying degrees, the interpretations of the Scriabin-

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ists themselves impacted Scriabin’s own imagining of his Mystery. There was no reason, Scriabin concluded, why Brianchaninov’s political union with England and racial dominance of Slavs might not provide the preparatory basis for the Mystery, just as it was possible (in a nod to Ivanov) to incorporate Christ into the list of messiahs who had transformed humanity.176 In the end, the very openness of Scriabin’s Mystery provided space for his supporters to create their own visions of the future. It was only when Scriabin’s notions about music and philosophy came into too direct conflict with their own vision of Russia’s future that admirers such as Morozova and Koptiaev gave up attempts to reconcile their own views with the composer’s intentions. The lure of Orpheus was powerful indeed. C O N C L US I O N

Scriabin’s personal evolution from extreme individualism and narcissism to a collective vision of music’s ability to create unity resonated with the mystical inclinations of many of Nietzsche’s orphans. The concept of the Mystery offered the composer’s own creative model through which to deal with the challenges of modern life: in a final moment of ecstasy, all the divisions that had emerged in human history would be overcome and absolute unity achieved—a transcendent vision that echoed a range of mystical, philosophical, and occult doctrines, but which was itself closely tied to the crisis of modernity. With the composer’s return to Russia, his music was framed as a central space for discussing the relative health or sickness of Russian society. For supporters such as Boris Schloezer and Leonid Sabaneev, the musical innovations revealed in The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus embodied a positive image of human spiritual progress in the modern age: views that, given the author’s close association with the composer, were often taken as Scriabin’s own views.177 Though not inherent in either disciple’s writings from this time, this idea of progress became easily entangled with a growing nationalist discourse that celebrated Scriabin’s inherently “Russian” or “Slavic” characteristics. Despite the composer’s own rejection of nationalism, many of his supporters embraced him not simply as a symbol of progress but also as a symbol of Russia’s messianic role in the contemporary world. Scriabin’s contemporaries strove for a future loosely inspired by the anticipated Mystery yet largely based upon their own hopes, desires, and fears. Just as his supporters adeptly wielded concepts from musical metaphysics in interpreting Scriabin’s significance, those who rejected his Orphic claims employed the same intellectual framework, arguing that his music embodied contemporary decline, decadence, and individuality—the illnesses of modernity—rather than a path through which to overcome them. In the public eye Scriabin thus came to sym-



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bolize not just a collective, universal future led by Russia but also a decadent present in which true moral and religious values had been lost. From a twenty-first-­century perspective, the dramatic appeal of Scriabin’s apocalyptic dream might seem difficult to grasp. In the anxious context of the time, however, it appeared not just comprehensible but indispensible. Sensing the lack of a unified society, Nietzsche’s orphans embraced music (seen as existing in time but not space) as an ideal way to unite artist and audience in a distinctive momentary bond, and to conjure human emotion and underlying irrational impulses. Music became the art form in which collective action could best occur: the ultimate path through which unity might be enacted. Scriabin’s own artistic vision interacted productively with this broader outlook, culminating in the formation of a group of Scriabinists: people who did not necessarily espouse the composer’s particular vision of the future, but who longed for some kind of social or cultural transformation through music. In the end, as Sabaneev poignantly reflected, Scriabin became the “sort of genius that ‘I needed’”: a contemporary Orpheus whose music might overcome the divisions of modern life to usher in a new stage in Russian (and human) history and identity.178 Precisely what that better future would be, however, remained open to question, a problem that became eminently clear with Scriabin’s sudden death in the midst of war in 1915.

3

The Medtner Brothers: Orpheus in an Age of Nationalism

In his youth, Nikolai Karlovich Medtner, a Moscow composer of Baltic German descent, developed a habit of writing down melodic fragments and themes that occurred to him at moments of creative inspiration. These fragments in his musical notebook served as the melodic basis from which he would later weave together the fabric of a musical work. By 1918, however, these musical motifs had taken on a malevolent guise. Waking at night in a fever, he would see musical fragments enter his bedroom, where they clustered together threateningly in a corner, mocking him with their sheer number and disunity. “In such cases,” his wife Anna recounted, “he would call out for help to drive ‘them’ away (it was always some kind of ‘them’). . . . when he had almost come to himself, he continued to insist that ‘they’ had entered [the room] and were standing there in the corner, and that [I] had not driven them away.” Surrounded by these aural phantoms, he would cry out, “The whole point is unity. What shall I do with this multiplicity?”1 Disunity and chaos had penetrated into the most personal spaces of Nikolai’s life. The very melodies that had come to him in moments of creative inspiration now haunted him, dwelling in a creative netherworld, neither fully formed nor able to fall silent. In his inability to weave them together into a composition, Medtner saw the realization of his failure to fulfill the true calling of a composer: to transform chaos and disunity into form through music.2 He had felt a foreboding of this catastrophe in 1917, when he mourned to his friend the Hegelian philosopher Ivan Il’in that “I myself am filled only with the shadows of unfinished creations.”3 Nevertheless, he continued to cling to his vision of music as a unifying force and to hope that he might yet fulfill his task. In 1920, despite the catastrophic experiences of war and revolution, Medtner continued to insist that

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“I still want to overcome the break of modernity. . . . I still believe that this is my primary calling.”4 A broader understanding of the musical metaphysics of late imperial Russian life enables us to make interpretive sense both of Medtner’s nightmare and his continued hopes. Drawing upon Nietzsche’s vision of the Dionysian, unifying power of music, Russian cultural elites integrated the Nietzschean interpretation of contemporary life and music into a general discourse concerning the increasing divisions they saw emerging in modern society. As shown in the previous chapter, the search for a musical Orpheus (a composer capable of reuniting a broken society) identified Scriabin as an image of societal unity wrought through human spiritual progress. Nevertheless (in contrast to Scriabin’s own universalizing worldview), this celebration of progress contained within it a hubris about Russia’s ordained historical purpose that threatened to take on an exclusivist nationalist hue. Nikolai Medtner embodied an alternate vision of cultural unity and musical salvation in response to the challenges of a rapidly modernizing society. In place of the emphasis on temporal progress and Russian nationalism that surrounded discourse on Scriabin, Medtner’s comparatively strict adherence to classical musical tonality was seen to interrogate the very meaning of concepts such as progress, tradition, and—most strikingly—Russian identity. Because of his mixed German and Russian cultural background, some of Medtner’s supporters argued that he symbolized the unification of Nietzsche’s German heritage with the purity of Russian spiritual life, an interpretation that embraced the possibility of an imperial Russian (rossiiskii) identity that transcended ethnicity. Through Medtner, his followers claimed, Russia could take on its rightful role as the leader of a pan-­European cultural transformation, reuniting the social and spiritual bonds shattered by modern life, and overcoming the disunifying tendencies endemic to “modernist” music in Europe. Despite such Orphic expectations, Medtner’s recurring nightmare provides a glimpse into a soul in conflict. After having helped to create an interpretation of music as a unifying force that could forge an imperial rather than ethnic Russian identity, Medtner was forced to confront the collapse of his metaphysical worldview in the years between 1914 and 1921. While the impact of both the Great War and the 1917 February and October Revolutions reverberated throughout educated Russian society, Medtner felt them with particular keenness, because his life’s work had sought to unite German and Russian cultural traditions. War with Germany stifled his creative strength, increasingly causing him to doubt his own artistic calling. His self-­imposed exile from the fledgling Soviet Union deprived him of his Russian motherland. And in the end, he discovered life in contemporary Germany to be as distant from his creative spirit as the experimental culture

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in Soviet Russia. He ultimately became a spiritual exile: the quintessential embodiment of the contradictions inherent in all Nietzsche’s orphans. This chapter examines Medtner’s role within the broader discourse of musical metaphysics. Like Scriabin, his views on music were fundamentally shaped by his social and cultural context, leading him to embrace the Orphic image of the composer’s task as his own. By selecting Nikolai Medtner as their emblem of unity, members of Russia’s cultural elite (led by the composer’s elder brother, the cultural critic and philosopher Emilii Medtner) chose an artistic response to the problems facing contemporary Russia that rejected the chimera of unfettered progress for the imagined reestablishment of eternal laws underpinning life and art. Through its Platonic embrace of “eternal” musical laws that governed composition, Medtner’s music was expected to transform existing reality through the mystical insight it offered into the Absolute.5 Put into the symbolic language of the time, Nikolai Medtner’s followers believed he was the true claimant to the lyre of Orpheus, who would mend the divisions of Russian society and life through his music. In contrast, the imagined musical fragments huddled together in a corner of his bedroom in 1918 embodied the disunity that the composer feared had triumphed in Russian culture and society. The contemporary reception of Nikolai Medtner’s creative output was interpreted through a broader intellectual shift occurring at the time: the emergence of an increasingly nationalist (russkii) worldview in opposition to an imperial (rossiiskii) one.6 The Russian Empire had long existed as a multiethnic space, and the Baltic German population in particular had often enjoyed a relatively privileged status within the imperial system.7 By the early twentieth century, however, questions of ethnic identity and belonging became increasingly important. While prerevolutionary critics often framed Medtner as a “German” composer, both Soviet musicologists and Russian émigré audiences later embraced the “fundamentally Russian” basis of his creative output. In contrast to earlier attempts to uncover innate “Germanness” or “Russianness” in Medtner’s compositional style, I explore the worldview underpinning these categories in the late imperial Russian context, connecting them with broader questions of music’s relationship to social and cultural life and ultimately with a growing nationalist discourse. I build upon an observation suggested by Carl Dahlhaus, who argued that “it is possible to regard nationality . . . as a quality which rests primarily in the meaning invested in a piece of music or a complex of musical characteristics by a sufficient number of the people who make and hear the music.”8 I find, however, that Medtner does not fit comfortably within the emerging nationalist (russkii) discourse of late imperial Russia, embodying instead an “imperial” (rossiiskii ) ideal in which the universal laws governing music and life were the product of



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all human endeavor, and which, in the modern age, were perhaps most perfectly embodied in the work of an imperial Russian who transcended mere ethnic division. For Medtner, the fact that the musical “laws” he valued were themselves in large part historically derived from Germanic musical tradition demonstrated the temporal discovery of absolutes, which had proceeded in recent history primarily within German musical culture. While numerous musicologists have demonstrated that the “universal” values and forms embodied in German classical music are themselves constructed, Medtner embraced this vision of music, a view that affected his own aesthetic and creative decisions. For this reason, regardless of the constructed nature of this definition of music, as an intellectual historian I take Medtner’s perspective seriously when examining the significance of his stylistic choices and their relation to identity.9 Nevertheless, Medtner’s perspective failed to capture the realities confronting members of Russian educated society at the time, as growing ethnic-­national allegiances gradually replaced the purportedly universal image of musical language and the imperial citizenship within which the composer had worked. This chapter is divided into three sections. After an introduction to the aesthetic community centered around Nikolai Medtner, his influential elder brother Emilii, and Anna Medtner (née Bratenskaia)—with whom both brothers were romantically involved—I offer a close analysis of their philosophical and musical worldviews. For both brothers, music served as a symbol for and a means of accessing “Absolute Truth,” which existed beyond time and space. In contrast to Scriabin, the vision of musical time they espoused involved the recognition of “eternal truths” that had found expression in earlier cultural production, most notably in German music and culture. Rather than focusing on the future, they therefore embraced an idealized image of the musical and cultural past that itself echoed contemporary concerns with European decline or degeneration. The final section examines the contemporary reception of Nikolai Medtner’s music—in particular, the challenges of defining Russian identity in late imperial Russia through an Orphic figure of mixed German-­Russian ethnic background. T H E M E D T N E RS

“Emilii Karlovich [Medtner] has a brother, Nikolai, who composes music . . . a wonderful pianist and composer. He is the creation of Emilii Karlovich.”10 With this less than complimentary introduction, poet Andrei Bely opened his Soviet-­ era account of his personal relationship with Emilii and Nikolai Medtner. To the mature Bely, Nikolai might very well have appeared to be the “creation” of his elder brother. Once Bely’s close friend, mentor, and publisher, Emilii Medtner

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later became one of the writer’s harshest critics. Emilii was equally passionate as a friend or enemy, and his eventual animosity toward Bely was as strident as his initial support had been all-­encompassing.11 It is within this charged atmosphere that Bely’s initial embrace and subsequent dismissal of Nikolai Medtner and his music must be understood. As early as 1903, Bely had endorsed Nikolai’s music in the warmest terms, publicly hailing the young composer not merely as a “creator” but as a “composer-­theurgist,” a theme that he reiterated in his personal correspondence with both brothers.12 Such extravagant praise was echoed by other members of Russia’s cultural elite. In a series of passionate letters to the composer, symbolist writer Sergei Durylin insisted that Nikolai’s songs were “truly the key to life-­creation [zhiznetvorchestvo] and resurrection.”13 Given this context, Bely’s subsequent dismissal of Nikolai Medtner’s place in late imperial Russian culture as a construct of his elder brother suggests an attempt to deconstruct an earlier process of myth creation in which he had taken active part. Nevertheless, while Nikolai was not purely the “creation” of his brother, the image associated with his name in prerevolutionary Russia was deeply indebted to Emilii’s active support of his musical talent. Trained initially as a lawyer at Moscow University and briefly serving as a state censor in Nizhny Novgorod, Emilii Medtner found his most formative role as a music critic, symbolist theorist, and devotee of the German cultural legacy embodied in the works of Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, and Wagner. In Goethe he discovered the “universal man” for whom “life and works were an indivisible whole,” an ideal of harmony that seemed particularly timely in the atmosphere of anxiety and disintegration that haunted early twentieth-­century Russia.14 In Nietzsche and Wagner he identified a continuation of Goethe and the last great German artists before the onset of contemporary decline. After resettling in Moscow in 1906, Emilii began publishing music articles in the journal The Golden Fleece under the pseudonym “Vol’fing” (itself a nod to Wagner’s Volsungs, suggested by Bely), which emphasized his musico-­critical approach to contemporary Russian culture and sought to awaken admiration for past Germanic culture among Russia’s cultural elite.15 In 1909, when both symbolist journals The Scales (Vesy) and The Golden Fleece were about to discontinue publication, Emilii succeeded in founding the new publishing house Musaget with the financial support of Hedwig Friedrichs, whose acquaintance he had made during a trip to Dresden, and who continued to hold out hope that eventually he would marry her. Named after Apollo, leader of the muses, whose power in Emilii’s Nietzschean-­inspired view harnessed Dionysian impulses and created an organic culture, Musaget was dedicated to the question of Russia (and Europe’s) cultural crisis. It incorporated leading figures of the literary symbolist movement (Bely, Aleksandr Blok,



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and Viacheslav Ivanov) at the same time that it emphasized the importance of German culture and music. A Russian branch of the German philosophical journal The Word (Logos), also published by Musaget, began to appear in 1910, followed by a cultural-­philosophical journal, Works and Days (Trudy i dni), in 1912.16 For Emilii Medtner, contemporary Russia and Europe’s salvation lay in the resurrection of the great German culture of the past, to be concentrated in the figure of his younger brother Nikolai. Nikolai Medtner, eight years younger than Emilii, had demonstrated prodigious early musical talent that seemed to justify the Orphic significance that his brother sought to bestow upon him. He enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory at the age of twelve—in the same year that both Scriabin and Rachmaninoff graduated.17 Emilii encouraged Nikolai’s decision after graduation to abandon a promising career as a concert pianist and devote himself to composition. Such a career held little or no material promise in imperial Russian society; moreover, the young Nikolai had majored in performance rather than composition, and few outside his immediate family even knew of his compositional activities. With Emilii’s support, however, Nikolai prevailed upon his parents and devoted himself to the potential turmoil and setbacks of a compositional career. Emilii Medtner’s close relationship with his younger brother extended to a shared love interest: Anna Bratenskaia. Anna, the younger sister of Mariia Bratenskaia (a schoolmate of Nikolai and Emilii’s sister Sofiia), was a gifted violinist with whom Nikolai became romantically involved while both were students at the Moscow Conservatory.18 However, a marriage between the two was not forthcoming, possibly due in part to the objections of Nikolai’s parents. After Nikolai left for a concert tour of Europe, Anna and Emilii grew closer, and they married in 1902.19 While the details of Anna’s relationship with Emilii remain somewhat unclear, Nikolai and Anna once again became romantically involved after the former’s return from Europe.20 Whether to avoid scandal or because of a deeply felt personal connection, Emilii, Nikolai, and Anna lived together for the next six years, undertaking extensive trips to Europe as a threesome on numerous occasions.21 After Emilii’s departure abroad to undergo psychoanalytic therapy with Carl Jung, he granted Anna a divorce in 1915. She and Nikolai celebrated their formal wedding in 1919.22 Nevertheless, Anna and Emilii maintained an intense and emotional written correspondence until the latter’s death in 1936. Personal connections placed the Medtners at the center of Moscow cultural life. Friendship with Bely led to their introduction to the poet’s own muse, Margarita Morozova, whose home on Smolenskii Boulevard had emerged as one of the central cultural gathering points of the day.23 In 1906 Morozova hosted a piano evening devoted to Nikolai Medtner’s music, an event that inaugurated

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a close acquaintance between the Medtners and Morozova. After her previous piano teacher, Scriabin, left for his extended European sojourn, Morozova began taking lessons from Nikolai and quickly became an intimate member of the Medtner circle, exchanging visits, letters, and shared impressions on music, philosophy, and the place of Russia in the modern world. Through Morozova the Medtners also entered into the orbit of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society, a gathering space for Russian religious philosophers (including Evgenii Trubetskoi, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florenskii) who often met at Morozova’s house. Alongside his hope that Morozova’s fortune and interest in music might inspire her to fund the press that he was already envisioning, Emilii Medtner also found in Morozova an intriguing intellectual companion; though their philosophical views differed radically, Morozova financially supported the elder Medtner’s further studies in Germany and his planned biography of Nietzsche.24 Mutual affection, belief in music’s preeminent role in contemporary life, spiritual searching, and practical economic need bound this circle together. For the Medtners, music was the quintessential art of the modern age, the area of cultural activity in which the divisions of modernity were most keenly felt, and where, it was hoped, these divisions could be overcome. Emilii experienced these conflicts on an intimate level. As a teenager, he had begun to suffer from “nerves,” expressed by hearing problems that, in extreme moments, caused him physical pain.25 For him, music thus held a special place, both symbolically and physically. Insisting that an understanding of music was an essential attribute for any contemporary intellectual, Emilii struggled to learn basic music theory (turning to Nikolai for guidance); but for all his efforts to express himself through improvisatory sessions at the piano, he regularly lamented his lack of innate musical skill and envisioned his true (and unfulfillable) creative calling to have been that of a conductor.26 Stricken by his obvious failure, he resigned himself to being, in Bely’s words, a “conductor of souls,” directing the creative impulses of others, particularly his younger brother.27 Emilii Medtner’s devotion of considerable time and energy to his younger brother’s prodigious musical talent was based on his conviction that Russia (and Europe more broadly) awaited a composer who would save culture from the dissolute trends of modern life, musically expressed in the works of Max Reger, Richard Strauss, and Scriabin. To prepare Nikolai for this important task, Emilii took upon himself the task of serving as his younger brother’s intellectual guide in the realm of philosophy and literature, particularly in his interpretation of the German tradition. Emilii claimed that the two European “souls” most closely related were the Russian and the German.28 In Emilii’s interpretation of Nietzsche, these European souls embodied the two creative aspects, Dionysian and Apollo-



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nian. Emilii argued that Nietzsche’s aesthetics had been deeply misunderstood in Russia; the ecstatic, Dionysian (and Russian) side had been overemphasized at the expense of the formal, Apollonian (and German) side. For Nietzsche’s prophetic call to be fulfilled, a balance between Dionysian and Apollonian, between German and Russian natures, was needed. Nikolai Medtner, a “true German” descendant raised in the Russian cultural milieu, seemed to fit this calling admirably.29 It was thus Nikolai in whom Emilii envisioned a latter-­day Orpheus, and from whom Emilii awaited a musical work that would transform contemporary reality. It was a task, moreover, that Nikolai himself proved more than willing to embrace. M US I C A N D T H E C R I S I S O F M O D E R N I T Y : M US I C A L M E TA P H Y S I C S I N A M E D T N E R I A N K E Y

The lyre of music has come untuned, not in itself, but in our imagination and consciousness. —Nikolai Medtner, 1935

In her Soviet-­era reminiscences, Margarita Morozova purposely employed the single term “Medtner” to refer to her interactions with Emilii, Nikolai, and Anna, suggesting that it was impossible to disentangle her memories of this remarkable trio into relations with separate individuals.30 What Morozova experienced on a personal level is borne out in the surviving sources, including numerous photographs of the three (fig. 3.1). The philosophical worldview of the Medtners was shaped through an almost daily exchange of ideas between Nikolai, Emilii, and Anna (both in person and by letter), creating an interpretive framework within which their individual perspectives regularly overlapped. Though Emilii’s prodigious writing on Russian culture offers a sharp contrast to Nikolai’s much smaller literary output, the intellectual influence between the brothers was far from one-­sided. Emilii felt ill at ease dealing with specific questions of music theory or formal technique, and in this realm he deferred to the knowledge of his younger brother.31 As a trained musician rather than a philosopher, Nikolai in turn left broad theorizing of the social significance of music and art to Emilii. In her dual role as romantic muse and epistolary correspondent, Anna served as a bridge and interpretive intermediary between the brothers. To access the Medtners’ version of musical metaphysics, this chapter references personal correspondences, notebooks, reminiscences by family and friends, musical compositions, and the published musical analyses of both brothers—most notably Emilii’s 1912

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collection of essays Modernism and Music (Modernizm i muzyka), an important though deeply problematic analysis of the place of music in contemporary Russian and European life,32 and Nikolai’s 1935 book Muse and Fashion (Muza i moda). While the latter work falls outside the chronological timeframe of this study, close examination of Nikolai’s letters and personal papers demonstrate a remarkable consistency of thought throughout his lifetime; the concepts in Muse and Fashion appear with near identical terminology in letters dating from years earlier.33 By combining the writings of all three Medtners, a well-­developed philosophical aesthetic emerges, addressing both questions of compositional specifics and metaphysical symbolism. Appalled by the excesses of modernity, yet committed to a vision of music as the unifying thread of contemporary culture, the Medtners sought to recapture an aesthetic sense based upon emotion, intuition, and a recognition of eternal laws that they believed underpinned all artistic expression. As the sole composer of the three, Nikolai was expected to resurrect these ideals in music. Complaining about the limited treatment of music in the cultural press in 1907, Emilii Medtner insisted that a public debate over musical modernism was needed to address the social and cultural ills plaguing Russia. In a letter to the symbolist poet Ellis (Lev Kobylinskii), Emilii observed that “the question of new music seems to me to be one of the most important tasks of modern culture and moreover, one of the sharpest, calling for immediate resolution in one way or another.”34 This was because “at the present time, not a single art suffers from such a sharp decline as music.” He regretted that existing Russian periodicals did not devote sufficient space to musical polemics, mourning that “The Golden Fleece [for which Emilii happened to serve as primary music critic] apparently has no intention of expanding its musical section.”35 In his foreword to Modernism and Music, he restated this belief, declaring that his decision to write the book stemmed from his “certainty that the majority of specialists and amateurs were too easygoing toward the darkening of contemporary musical and, in part, of all artistic consciousness.”36 Desperate to initiate this much-­needed conversation, he circulated copies of Modernism and Music among his acquaintances in the musical and literary world, even giving a copy to a stranger with whom he had struck up a discussion about music’s place in contemporary culture.37 What was the interpretation of music that Emilii Medtner so yearned to awaken in his contemporaries? Particularly jealous of Scriabin’s successes in Russia after 1909 (which, he believed, came at the expense of Nikolai’s fame), Emilii wrote a 1912 letter to Viacheslav Ivanov excoriating the image of historical progress espoused by Leonid Sabaneev, Boris Schloezer, and others, deriding the “half-­literate Scriabin and the illiterate Scriabinists” who celebrated the his-

Figure 3.1. From left to right: Emilii, Anna, and Nikolai Medtner (early 1900s). Courtesy of the State Culture Foundation, Moscow / Culture-­images / Lebrecht Music and Arts.

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torical evolution of emotions and believed that “ecstasy” was the ultimate goal. In contrast, Emilii insisted that emotions could not serve as a proper aesthetic category, and that true “progress” in art was impossible—progress in one area of art meant regression in another.38 This argument, restated in various forms in his published analyses of music, encapsulates the fundamental difference between the Medtnerian and Scriabinist understandings of musical metaphysics. In contrast to Schloezer and Sabaneev’s emphasis on historical progress, both Emilii and Nikolai Medtner emphasized “eternal laws” that governed music and harshly condemned modernist compositional practices, seeing in them the artistic expression of the social ills of modern society: empty individualism, chaos, and disunity. The brothers’ sense that modern humanity had lost touch with its spiritual foundation aligned them with many other contemporary social commentators, while their rejection of “modernism” and “progress” in music echoed a broader critique of the idea of the “progress” or “evolution” of the human soul itself. For both Emilii and Nikolai, such concepts as “consonance,” “dissonance,” and “tonality” were not relativistic descriptions of traditional musical language (as suggested by contemporaries such as Sabaneev and Schloezer), but absolute values, comparable to the spiritual values that contemporary society had rejected out of hand.39 True value in art, argued Emilii, “is timeless.”40 The Medtnerian image of musical time thus focused upon an idealized past, said to have yielded eternally sublime cultural works now in danger of being forgotten. Transcending historical time did not require the embrace of human evolution and transformation (mislabeled by many as progress)—this in fact was part of the problem in contemporary society; it required instead the recognition of Absolute (and unchanging) Truth, which found vivid expression in music. Having perused the copy of Modernism and Music sent to him by its author (with the dedication “to my respected opponent”) and understanding its primary targets to be himself and his idol, Sabaneev sardonically noted in a letter to Scriabin that “war has been declared!”41 While rejecting the Scriabinist ideal of historical progress in music, the Medtners did not reject the possibility of human discovery and scientific accomplishment—advancements of the modern age. Rather, all forms of exploration shared the ultimate goal of providing mystical insight into Absolute Truth, which underpinned all human experience. For Emilii, the paths of the creative artist and rational scientist began with opposite assumptions but ultimately led to insight into Absolute Truth. The path of artistic creation, including music, led to “symbolic mysticism,” while the path of theoretical (scientific) creation led to “allegorical mysticism,” but both paths led to the mystical experience of Absolute Truth.42 In both cases, unlike the envisioned bombast of Scriabin’s Mystery, this



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mystical experience was internal rather than external. In a shorthand sketch, Emilii laid out these dual paths as follows: Belief in miracles (Grace) (Presupposition of religion) Myth (Theology and cosmogony) Religion (Form of world) Artistic creation (Path) Practical causality in mystery (misterii ) and symbolism Theurgy Symbolic mysticism Mystical experience (perezhivanie) as internal experience (opyt) ↓ absolute truth (ideiia-­i stina) ↑ Internal experience (opyt) as mystical experience (perezhivanie) Allegorical mysticism Natural magic Logical causality of concepts and their allegorism Theoretical creation (Path) Science (Form of the world) (Presupposition of science) Metaphysics (Natural philosophy) Belief in knowledge (Power)43

Absolute Truth united both universal and individual experience, stepping beyond mere subjectivity into a higher experience of pure unity.44 While different paths to that truth were possible, truth itself was preexistent and eternal rather than a synthesis of dialectical opposites that play out over the course of history, as Hegel (and more recently the Scriabinists) had argued. Thus, Emilii argued, “dialectics have no place when there is pure Truth.”45 Nikolai similarly dismissed Hegel’s dialectical development in history, writing in his notebook that “not everything that exists is real, and not everything that is real exists,” an obvious reversal of Hegel’s claim “that which exists is Real.”46 For Nikolai, this image of Absolute Truth found expression in his idea of “initial melody” or “initial song,” an idea that grew out of his devotion to both Christian and Platonic metaphysics.47 The initial melody was equivalent to the Platonic Form of music, in which all imperfect, earthly music partook. Earthly music strove to approach this initial melody, but (because it was inescapably tied to the physical realm) it could never fully attain the pure expression of the Form of music. The remembrance of an initial, heavenly melody inspired composers to creative action as they sought to recall and give voice through musical composition to the echo of it that sounded in their “internal hearing.” Musical cre-

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ativity was based upon intuitive knowledge of this initial, mystical song, and an individual composition was an attempt to mirror this initial melody, however imperfectly, in the temporal realm. Central to this concept of the initial melody was the related idea that music, in its essence, expressed unity. Thus, Nikolai claimed, “the sound [of the initial melody] is for us the living symbol of unity and simplicity. All complexity, all variation of human song is included within it.” The initial melody embodied a forgotten spiritual existence, in which all human souls were united in a higher level of being. At the same time, the initial melody served as the source from which the multiplicity of musical languages in the temporal world sprang: “The first song, which sounded once in the world, left in the soul of humanity a single ‘living sound,’ and the sound of that song became the starting point for the harmonization of all other sounds among themselves.”48 Musical creation mirrored the experience of human life itself, in which the Absolute had given rise to the multiplicity of the material world, and which continued to exist within each individual. Nikolai Medtner’s initial melody or “being of song” served as the irrational parallel to what Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev had considered the rational biblical concept of Logos.49 Both the initial melody and Logos, like Platonic Forms, existed eternally outside space and time but also conveyed spiritual insight.50 Initial melody and Logos thus symbolized two potential paths through which it was possible to access the realm of the Absolute, with the former representing an immediate, intuitive, and experiential path and the latter a rational, cognitive path. As Nikolai argued, “the final goal of all paths is in essence always the same.”51 The initial melody, like Logos itself, was thus a symbolic evocation or memory of the higher spiritual reality that existed outside the dualistic divisions of this world, in which both rational and irrational human impulses were ultimately united. In Nikolai’s words, “Spirit is there, where thought feels, and feelings think.”52 For Nikolai the Absolute was itself commensurate with God, and a spark or remembrance of the Absolute existed within all humans. The underlying unity of thought and feeling, rooted in the Absolute, “live[s] within us in the very depths of our soul. . . . it is the root, uniting us with the first days of God’s creation. This is ‘reminiscence’ in Plato’s terms.”53 As an immediate, intuitive path through which to draw closer to God, music was, by its very nature, religious.54 The “religiosity” of art was related not to the choice of subject matter but rather to its underlying purpose: the harmonization of feeling and thought. Nikolai argued that “the closer the balance between thought and feeling, the closer [one is] to the Spirit.”55 Thus, through closely mirroring this balance through art,



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humanity could draw closer to the underlying unity connecting all humanity with one another and ultimately with God. Indeed, in his draft notes to Muse and Fashion, Nikolai explicitly stated that the goal of his book, while ostensibly about music, was to write about “God and religion” and against “Apollonism and modernism”—the empty celebration of mere form.56 In discussing music, Nikolai applied a binary structure, in which he associated particular musical structures with philosophical concepts. The “center” referred to the Absolute toward which humanity eternally strives (although never finding an exact replication of the Absolute in the temporal world, humanity was driven by faith in its existence). The “peripheral” referred to physical embodiment in space and time (by its very nature temporary and fleeting). For Nikolai, the center was associated with concepts such as “the being of song,” “the Spirit of music,” “unity,” “calm,” “contemplation,” and “inspiration.” In contrast, the peripheral was represented by “great musical art” or “the expressed song,” “multiplicity,” “diversity,” “action,” and “craftsmanship”—the manifestation of the eternal in the material world.57 As a composer, he further associated specific compositional techniques with a broader metaphysical understanding of the world. The center was associated with “conceptualized sound” (the “song” as heard with one’s “internal hearing”), the tonic, consonance, tonality, “prototypes of consonant chords,” and “prototypes of chords and their resolution.” In contrast, the peripheral was the realm of motion in time, dissonance, and need for resolution. All prototypes of temporary dissonant notes and chords were classified as peripheral, as were “chance harmonic forms” (passing notes, suspensions, anticipations)—a temporary disruption to the calm of the center, to which all music referred and should ultimately return.58 A striking evocation of Nikolai’s idea of initial melody and creative intuition is found in his first published composition, the “Prologue” for piano from his Stimmungsbilder (Mood Pictures, op. 1). He had found a poetic expression of his conception of initial melody in Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “The Angel,” a work to which he returned throughout his life. In this poem Lermontov described a “young soul” carried to earth by an angel to begin its temporal existence. The song of heaven, heard by the soul while being carried to earth, “remained without words yet alive” in its memory. Despite its struggles on earth, it “could not abandon the sound of the heavens,” finding that, in comparison to the perfect song of heaven, “the songs of the earth were dull.” The image evoked by Lermontov echoed Plato’s definition of true learning, which the latter considered to be an act of “remembrance.” Truth existed eternally, and the task of learning was merely to teach people to remember that which their earthly incarnation had led them to forget.59 Nikolai’s “Prologue” bore the first two lines of

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Lermontov’s poem as an epigraph, suggesting the idea underpinning the work as a whole. A simple ABA form that develops a single melodic idea (or mood), the “Prologue” demonstrates several compositional devices that became typical of Medtner’s musical style more generally: complex cross-­rhythms, a clearly conceived melody, and a relatively traditional harmonic fabric that draws on Romantic compositional style—all attributes that were occasionally pointed to by contemporaries as linking him to the musical tradition of Johannes Brahms. Throughout the short work, the cross-­rhythms that are woven into its very fabric serve to disconnect the melody from its harmonic accompaniment, giving it a sense of floating in a different space. From its initial tonal home in E major, the clearly defined melody wanders into increasingly distant harmonies, with the melody itself shifting from its opening whole-­step motion (G-­sharp–­F-­sharp–­G-­sharp) to a chromatic half step (G-­sharp–­G-­natural–­G-­sharp) in the middle section. This progression echoes Medtner’s philosophical conceptualization of moving from center to periphery (marked by increased dissonance, chromaticism, and dynamic action) before it returns to E major with the recapitulation of the opening melody (ex. 3.1). Returning to the work eight years after its initial composition, Medtner discovered that the melody matched the text of the poem virtually syllable by syllable. Taking this as a good omen, he published a new version of the work (with minor revisions) as a vocal setting of Lermontov’s poem in 1909.60 The entire poem was again quoted as an epigraph in Nikolai’s 1935 book Muse and Fashion, demonstrating the composer’s continued commitment to this ideal of initial melody.61 As Barry Martyn has observed, this early work can well be seen as containing in miniature form the aesthetic basis of Medtner’s entire compositional output.62 For Medtner, the melodic fragments that served as the basis of his music were not his own creation. Rather they occurred to him unbidden, reminiscences of the initial melody existing outside time and space, the strains of which echoed in his own mind in moments of “inspiration.” Nikolai ascribed a similar creative process to all great composers. The procedure of revising musical themes or melodies demonstrated in the compositional notebooks of Beethoven were, Medtner claimed, the product of the composer seeking a more precise embodiment of the melody that had come to his “internal hearing” in a moment of inspiration, rather than a conscious attempt to work out a structurally more perfect theme.63 The composer strove to express his vision of the initial melody, the remembrance of which served as the source for his artistic inspiration. The collective heritage of past musical compositions provided the basis from which the “laws” governing music (that which helped composers draw closer to the initial melody) could be



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Example 3.1. Nikolai Medtner, opening from “Prologue,” Acht Stimmungsbilder, op. 1, no. 1. Adapted by author from original score (Moscow: Iurgenson, 1903).

extrapolated and developed further. These rules had not been created by a single individual but were ultimately the collective creation of all humanity. This focus on balance, harmony, and mental absorption in higher ideals also found physical expression in a postcard issued around 1912 by Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Publishing House (fig. 3.2). In contrast to the postcard depicting Scriabin, the photographer here emphasized Nikolai Medtner’s poise, balance, and implicitly active nature, together with his relative indifference to mere physical surroundings. Seated on a nondescript chair, dressed in a suit that similarly attracts little attention, he gazes directly at the camera, acknowledging the presence of the viewer. His hands rest casually on his knee, seemingly ready to spring into action. The composer’s intellectual rigor and active engagement

Figure 3.2. Postcard of Nikolai Medtner. First published by the Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo (Moscow, ca. 1910). Author’s collection.



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thus appear to dominate. Indeed, several critics of the day reflected upon the musical distinctions between Scriabin and Medtner in gendered terms, seeing in Medtner a “masculine” spirit in opposition to Scriabin’s more “effeminate” nature: stereotypes similarly highlighted in these visual depictions produced for popular consumption. In keeping with the connection drawn by both brothers between compositional practices and metaphysical meaning, the Medtners critiqued contemporary Russian interpretations of Nietzschean philosophy that emphasized the formless Dionysian impulse to the exclusion of all else. Both Nikolai and Emilii believed that Absolute Truth was accessible only through the unification of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses into a single whole, and they stressed that Nietzsche had called for balance between both aspects of humanity, not merely the embrace of Dionysian formlessness. In the Russian reading of Nietzsche, Emilii saw a “tearing apart of Apollo and Dionysus,” which he dismissed as nothing more than “one-­sided, ecstatic superstition.”64 He critiqued as “false Dionysianism” the contemporary embrace of musical modernism and the abandonment of traditional (major–­minor) tonal relations (both symptomatic of the ills of contemporary life), calling instead for a return to a more balanced (and tonal) compositional approach. The main targets of his critique included the “modernists” Max Reger, Richard Strauss, and Scriabin, whose music, he argued, embraced new techniques simply for the sake of their newness.65 At the same time, he rejected the relativity of musical language suggested by colleagues such as Nadezhda Briusova (a People’s Conservatory activist and aficionado of Russian folk song), who suggested that “harmony” and “dissonance” were relative, culturally constructed terms. As Andrei Bely later reminisced, when Briusova sought to introduce the whole-­tone scale as an alternate (and equally legitimate) form of musical material in discussions at the Society for Free Aesthetics, Emilii Medtner “would fall ill with a strange form of illness.” The whole-­tone harmonies so loved by Briusova evoked “retching and fainting” in Emilii, though he remained “drily respectful” to Briusova herself.66 The adoption of such musical scales were, for Emilii, yet another sign of the loss of the eternal laws of music. In his analyses, he tended to elide musical modernism with “Dionysianism” (or “false Dionysianism”)67 and collapse these concepts into his cultural critique of the fragmentary nature of modern society in general and Russian educated society in particular. This attack on modern music was paralleled by his personal dislike of such mystical movements as theosophy and anthroposophy (increasingly popular among colleagues such as Bely, Ellis, Ivanov, and Scriabin), which for him exemplified false Dionysianism: lack of a central, unifying focus, and an obsession with external rather than internal truth.68

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This attack on musical modernism’s obsession with newness, innovation, and individuality was enthusiastically supported by Nikolai. Creativity, both brothers insisted, was not synonymous with reckless individuality: it sprang from the underlying unity that existed between people. Without this shared basis connecting all people, Nikolai argued, artistic inspiration was impossible: “If we refuse to recognize the unity of the first theme of music, if we do not believe in its existence, in its inspiration, then we cannot believe in individual inspiration, that is, in true musical intuition.”69 In other words, individual creative action could not exist if there was no unified basis from which all human creativity sprang. Without unity, it was impossible to judge any artist’s achievement, because artistic creation was then merely, as Emilii noted, the “unfettered development of individuality” rather than an attempt to approach Absolute Truth.70 Without this recognition of initial unity, human creativity was doomed to fragmentation and chaos, a tendency dominant in contemporary modernist music by such composers as Reger, Strauss, Scriabin, and Vladimir Rebikov.71 This lack of balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces embodied in contemporary music signified a modern society bereft of the creative, unifying power inherently necessary to tie a culture together. In seeking to rediscover this unifying cultural impulse, Emilii Medtner, like many of his contemporaries, turned to the figure of Orpheus and the ancient “Orphic church” of Delphi.72 Like Rebikov, who hoped to catch a glimpse of Orpheus in his own compositions, for Emilii the spirits of Apollo, Dionysus, and Orpheus took on personal significance: he interpreted his personal failure to master the art of music as a sign of his own inability to act as a contemporary Orpheus. He vividly compared himself to the ill-­fated Dionysus, torn apart by the Apollonian creative impulse that existed within him but which he was unable to bring to fruition. Instead of giving form to that creative impulse through musical composition, the Dionysian impulse tore him apart, shifting his energies from a unifying to a destructive impulse.73 In contrast to his own inability to bring unity to chaos (a failure that he attributed to his insufficiently “contemplative” personality), Emilii envisioned in his brother Nikolai the consummation of the unifying, creative genius—the embodiment of Orpheus.74 While Nikolai’s interpretation of musical creativity privileged the role of initial melody, for Emilii the role of the composer was central, linking together the concepts of unity, salvation, and creation. For him “the striving of reason for unity always leads to creation.”75 Unity was not something that existed in the physical world; rather it needed to be re-­created through the work of artistic and scientific geniuses. Thus, Emilii claimed, “salvation comes through creation.”76 In this context, the composer, like a prophet or priest, was a mediator between



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the divine and the human realms; unlike a prophet or priest, however, whose power and insight were based on understandings of a higher being, salvation was brought about (in Emilii’s mind) through the very act of creation. “Salvation” thus became the search for unity through the act of creation: Emilii’s own variant of “life-­creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo).77 The true calling of the musical genius thus held immediate cultural significance: to overcome the divisions wrought by modernity, a belief that aligned Emilii with the rest of Nietzsche’s orphans. In contrast to Scriabin’s mystical visions of an ultimate performance that would physically unite all humanity, Emilii envisioned a “true” mystery: an internal, transformative experience incompatible with the “mysticism” and “pseudo-­religion” of theosophy and anthroposophy. Dismissing what he considered the external mystical searching of both Bely and Ellis, underlined in his 1910 statement (borrowed from Goethe) that “within the bounds of my religion, which includes a genuine mystery, there is no place for mysticism,”78 Emilii argued for an internal mystical experience that would create a bridge between external, temporal reality and Absolute Truth. Such a “genuine mystery” would be an enactment in which the forms or allegories of myth creation were brought to life and in turn would give rise to an internal, emotional transformation—an Orphic task to be fulfilled by his younger brother.79 Emilii received confirmation of this interpretation of Nikolai’s importance for European society as a whole while participating in one of the most widespread aesthetic rituals enjoyed by European cultural and intellectual elites at this time: a pilgrimage to the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth to hear the composer’s final work, Parsifal, regularly referred to in the Russian press of the day as a “mystery.”80 Because it was limited to performances in Bayreuth until 1913, the only way for Russian Wagnerians to experience this latter-­day “mystery” was through pilgrimage to the homeland of the “Meister,” Richard Wagner. Emilii’s account of Parsifal focused not just on the musical performance but even more on his internal, lived experience, and it was heavily imbued with ecstatic, mystical language. In a 1912 letter to Margarita Morozova that overflowed with passionate excitement, he wrote: It was there [at the Bayreuth performance of Parsifal ] that the greatness of Kolia [Nikolai] as a human became clear to me. In the solitary theater garden, where he quickly ran after the end of the [second] act, I experienced with him one of the strongest and most wonderful moments of my life. We were entirely alone. I could not speak a word. Gasping from the unbearable excitement, he spoke words that were unbelievable in their depth and appropriateness and,

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I repeat, I could not decide where there was more greatness: on the stage or here in the experience that was so congenial that Wagner, if he had arisen from the grave, would have welcomed Kolia as a brother. . . . this is the secret, brought about through art; this is the mystery of communion [prichashcheniia81] through art; this is true “theosophy.” I have in mind that transformation, that genuine ecstasy, which seized Kolia through Parsifal. How pitiful and humorous to me in that moment was Scriabin with his ecstasy, his Blavatsky and his Tatiana Fedorovna, and Bugaev [Bely] with his theurgy, theosophy and Asia [Turgeneva]. What was pitiful and humorous to me was namely the academicism, the absence of true, genuine internal gestures in the ecstasy of both our friends, that gesture to which I was a witness listening to Parsifal and observing the enraptured Kolia.82

After this experience, Emilii’s belief in his younger brother’s gifts continued to grow. By 1913 Nikolai had become, in Emilii’s eyes, “simply the most perfect and strongest personality of our time,” an “entirely ancient person and at the same time, a Christian.”83 Emilii vested his brother in Wagner’s garments, calling upon him to fulfill the task that the German composer had only begun to approach with Parsifal. The next musical Orpheus, Emilii believed, would not compose only piano miniatures but also grand operatic and orchestral works.84 He would, moreover, compose in a musical language indebted to the “eternal laws” most recently embodied in the music of Wagner (in contrast to the style of modernists). While Nikolai’s compositional style accorded with the second of Emilii’s demands, his ability to fulfill the first was open to question. Emilii thus saw it as his duty to rebuke Nikolai for the “fear of Dionysus” displayed in his avoidance of large-­form musical works. Given this context, Leonid Sabaneev could hardly be critiqued when he saw Emilii’s 1912 book as a declaration of war. Nor was Sabaneev alone. As a symbolist poet, self-­proclaimed expert on Dionysus, recent convert to the Scriabin cult, and collaborator with Emilii’s publishing house Musaget, Viacheslav Ivanov sought a careful balancing act when reviewing the pseudonymous Vol’fing’s book Modernism and Music, subtly but sharply calling Emilii to task. While agreeing that the full depths of the classical musical tradition (in particular Beethoven) had not yet been explored, and while assuring his readers that Vol’fing was indeed burning with the fire of Dionysus and the need to defend himself, Ivanov chided him both for seeking to flee the Dionysian impulse within him and for his one-­sided misrepresentation of Dionysus.85 Rather than directly discussing the relative value of modern music per se, Ivanov rejected Vol’fing’s attempt to connect particular values or musical styles with Dionysus as impossible, as it sug-



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gested that there could be a more or less correct form of manifestation of the Dionysian spirit, thereby connecting the god of action with the physical forms of the phenomenal world. Rather than being a true defender of Dionysus, in his attack on the “false Dionysianism” embraced by contemporary Russian critics, Vol’fing himself prized “the art of music in its embodiment,” and, concluded Ivanov, “he defends her earthly, physical life.” In contrast to Vol’fing’s assumption that the “contemporary major and minor correspond to the primordial presence of two opposing beginnings in music,” Ivanov argued that while “the spirit of music is immortal, [and] its name is Dionysus,” “its form can decay,” suggesting that Vol’fing’s attempts to associate the spirit of Dionysus with the tonal minor (which, by extension, then needed to be balanced by the major sounds associated with Apollo) was by its very nature misguided.86 Hardly embodied in specific musical sounds that provided eternal insight into the Absolute, Ivanov contested, Dionysus was instead pure action, impossible to embody in any particular sound combination. Specific compositional style was, therefore, historically contingent: a subtle nod to Scriabin, Ivanov’s Orpheus of choice. Ivanov’s review emphasized an underlying contradiction in the Medtnerian version of musical metaphysics. While both the Medtners and Ivanov envisioned music as a potential space of mystical insight into Absolute Truth (which existed outside time and space), the Medtners associated this vision of eternity with a particular compositional style that, as Ivanov pointed out, was itself historically contingent. This was in essence a different understanding of the relation of musical language to temporality itself. For Ivanov, like many other contemporary admirers of Scriabin, the compositional style of a work evolved over time— as Ivanov eloquently argued, the “minor” sound that was once employed by the worshippers of Dionysus in ancient times was scarcely to be recognized in the “minor” sounds used by contemporary musicians.87 Music could provide a path to greater insight, but did not embody that insight, as it took on different forms at different historical junctures. For the Medtners, by contrast, musical language acted simultaneously as a path of insight to Absolute Truth (through intuitive experience awakened by a musical work) and as an embodiment of the underlying unity that existed only in Absolute Truth, captured in eternal musical laws governing the use of consonance and dissonance. Though framed in different terms, this was the same problem that had puzzled Bely and Blok in their 1903 correspondence about music: was it possible to equate actual existing music with the spirit of music itself? Was music timeless, or was it in fact a product of the temporal world? Even while striving for the eternal, the Medtners were trapped within their own temporal experience. This point was expressed with particular force in Emilii’s obsession with the relationship between music and national

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identity—an issue, moreover, that found a sympathetic echo in the broader cultural milieu of the time and shaped the late imperial reception of Nikolai’s music. BE T W E E N E M P I R E A N D NAT I O N

For the young Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote The Birth of Tragedy, the modern “destruction of myth” was caused by a lack of national culture, the result of an overly rationalistic (Socratic) approach to life forced to “nourish itself wretchedly on all other cultures” rather than developing its own.88 This emphasis on national identity presented Russian educated society with a conundrum: Nietzsche’s orphans could not fully claim this intellectual heritage without rejecting their “Russianness,” yet by embracing Nietzsche they were potentially guilty of destroying their own national myth through the adoption of a “foreign element.” Challenges to Russian national identity were compounded by the empire’s multiethnic substance, together with the mixed ethnic background of leading figures in cultural and musical life. Thus, while claims of cultural unity with the “folk” and the organic nature of art were standard aspects of the Romantic trope of music in late nineteenth-­century Europe, these concepts were particularly fraught in late imperial Russia, where questions of identity were entwined both with an awareness of Russia’s indebtedness to European thought and culture, and with a dilemma over whether being “Russian” was ultimately linked to a concept of universal citizenship (imperial Russian or rossiiskii ), or to ethnic heritage (national Russian or russkii ). This conflicting heritage was particularly evident for the Medtner brothers, who sought a balance between what they perceived as German and Russian cultural influences. While other Russian orphans might embrace Nietzsche through defining him as a “Slavic” rather than German thinker, the Medtner brothers were keenly aware of the contradictions inherent in their own relationship both to Nietzsche and to Russian identity. Whereas inclusion of Germanness as a potential component of an imperial Russian identity would confirm their own status as Russian citizens, a definition of Germanness in opposition to Russianness would configure them, in essence, as representatives of a foreign—and potentially hostile—culture. Furthermore, while both brothers envisioned the merging of German and Russian identities as the way to overcome the divisions of modernity, their divergent understanding of nationalism’s broader significance marked the most striking conflict between them. Thus it is hardly surprising that the troubled relationship between imperial and national Russian identities shaped contemporary interpretations of Nikolai Medtner’s music.



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For Emilii, Russian culture could only overcome the crisis of modernity by embracing the German cultural legacy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which he perceived the purest embodiment of the unity of universal and individual human impulses (with the figure of Goethe serving as the ultimate unifying genius).89 Connecting his emphasis on music’s importance with this general Germanophile ideal, Emilii insisted that “for German culture, music has a meaning incomparably more fateful than for the future of any other nation.”90 Speaking in Nietzschean terms, he specifically associated German identity with Apollo and Russian identity with Dionysus, suggesting that the merger of the two cultures would resurrect a path toward the Absolute.91 Nevertheless, the German aspect dominated over the Russian in his thinking. Emilii linked his nationalist vision with the narod as the source of unified values and culture, arguing that “the most valuable [work] created in art in general and especially in music is immediately linked with the narod, stamped with the unrepeatable characteristics of a given race.” It was the narod who ultimately gave rise to great art, through the inspiration their collective work offered to individual geniuses, the figures in which “national” tastes were most purely distilled. Since such values were poorly expressible in verbal form, other artistic forms, particularly music, were required to bring them to life.92 The most “correct” artistic tastes (those drawing closest to the “impossibly wonderful Absolute”) thus ultimately arose, Emilii concluded, from a national/racial basis. Even while emphasizing the importance of nationalism in musical production, Emilii dismissed earlier attempts by the “Mighty Five” (Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-­ Korsakov, Cui, and Mussorgsky) to produce a genuinely Russian musical style, despite their outspoken claims of nationalism; while relying on folk melodies to add external color, he argued, they had failed to grasp the internal essence of the music. Continuing his attack on non-­Germanic music with an unspoken nod to Scriabin, he argued that “modernist” composers had abandoned even this nationalistic coloring; in seeking to create a new sound, they floundered in empty individualism, embracing contemporary chaos and decline rather than seeking to overcome the divide between educated society and the common people. The great Russian composer of the future, in contrast, would recognize that he was “often more cut off from the narod than representatives of educated society in other countries” and that “a constant, real connection with [the narod ] will be necessary to him.”93 Given what he saw as the contemporary decline in Russian musical culture and the undeveloped creative spirit of the Russian narod, Emilii concluded that creative transformation required a bonding of Russian with German cultural (particularly musical) accomplishments, especially as the Rus-

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sian and German spirits were the most closely related.94 Because “Germanism” was “not narrowly national,” he argued, it was “capable of fertilizing the sound creation of related peoples.”95 Emilii’s obsession with national identity spilled over into a racial interpretation of contemporary Europe’s illness and envisioned salvation (heavily colored by the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner, and his own sharply anti-­ Semitic worldview).96 Differentiating between Aryan and Jewish “culture, psychology, and mindset,” he argued that Jews had introduced a “foreign” element into European spiritual life.97 Following earlier arguments by Wagner and others, Medtner identified the “mercantilist” influence of the Jewish race as the cause of decline in contemporary musical life, pointing to the absence of “Jewish compositional genius” as evidence of their lack of genuine musical talent, and to their musical “barbarity” (expressed through virtuosic performance) as evidence of the “fruitlessness and creative weakness, not of particular individuals, but of the entire nation.”98 In contrast to Jewish “foreignness,” he envisioned a Europe in which both Russian and German cultures shared an underlying “Aryan” root. While he believed that earlier German culture had embodied the absolute ideals he valued, he found in current cultural trends the devastating influence of the “foreign culture” of Jews, who now dominated musical life. For the “cheap materialism” of modern European life to be truly overcome, he ranted in a letter to Anna Medtner, Jews must “spiritually and also physically combine with Europeans, or leave. This half-­combination, this continuation of the Jewish tendency damages both sides.”99 He called for an end to public performance culture (stereotyped as Jewish), to be replaced with specialized, private circles who would perform musical works for select audiences with a strictly educational intent. To overcome contemporary decline, he called for new musicians (both from the lower and upper classes) who, rather than being “ripped from the earth” (i.e., separated from their national roots), would “belong to the ethnic kernel of a given nation,” thereby embodying national spirit. These deeply national artists, he argued, would counteract the false “internationalism” that currently reigned in European music, which was itself the result of Jewish influence.100 Such virulence was difficult for Emilii to maintain on a personal level, however; he wrote to Anna (still his legal wife, though by now living openly with his younger brother) to reassure her that his article was not intended as a personal attack on her own Jewish ancestry. “You are unusual, and, like [Joseph] Joachim, you have become German (really Aryan),” he insisted, adding that he himself was “not an anti-­Semite, not even in the manner of Wagner or Chamberlain”— reassurances that Anna passed over in silence.101 In contrast to his brother, Nikolai Medtner balanced his embrace of German



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culture with a greater respect for his Russian identity, all without any commentary on the place of Jews. Under Emilii’s guidance, Nikolai had discovered a “passion for Goethe” as early as 1903.102 Like his brother, Nikolai drew a distinction between the perfect balance between “form and content” accomplished by Goethe and the “lack of form” that he perceived while reading Russian poets such as Fedor Tiutchev and Afanasii Fet, and he acknowledged the musical influence of German composers on his compositional style, citing the romances of Schumann and Brahms as the most immediate influences on his own songs at a 1909 concert of the House of Song.103 But whereas Emilii’s gaze was intensely focused on German cultural achievements, Nikolai sought to create a new synthesis between Germany and Russia, arguing that German artistic form and Russian spiritual life were closely interrelated. This conviction seems to have been connected, in part, to Nikolai’s firm devotion to Christianity and his understanding of it as transcending national difference, in contrast to Emilii’s less defined concept of an Absolute.104 Thus, Nikolai observed, “is it not true, how much there is in common between German art and Orthodox religion?”105 Through combining the best of both national cultures, he suggested, one would draw nearer to the Absolute, which stood outside any national boundaries. Such a view also complemented the younger brother’s critique of Nietzsche’s dismissal of Christian morality. In Nikolai’s worldview, the artist could not “create” morality from nothing; rather, he must learn to hear the “initial song” and seek to imitate it in his own work. The despair and spiritual anguish of the modern age could be overcome through incorporating Christian theology into Nietzsche’s thought and back into European culture more broadly. While neither Nikolai nor Anna actively countered Emilii’s frequent anti-­Semitic statements, Nikolai eschewed racial language and focused instead on critiquing specific compositional styles; his true homeland was, first and foremost, the “country of music” with its own special laws and requirements for citizenship.106 At the same time, Nikolai defined himself fundamentally as a member of imperial Russian society in contrast to the West. In a letter to the journal Music, he complained about a recent St. Petersburg performance in which he was scheduled to appear as a soloist for Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the visiting conductor, Willem Mengelberg. Their disagreement over the musical interpretation of the work reached such a feverish pitch that, after a single rehearsal, Medtner withdrew from the performance. In his letter, the composer lamented that the lack of respect he received from the conductor demonstrated the “disdain which foreign musical travelers continue to hold toward Russian artists.” He concluded that this incident was not just a personal insult to a soloist from a conductor, but “still more important, to a Russian artist from a visiting

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foreigner.”107 Such a claim echoes a lengthy tradition of Russian attempts to measure themselves through European eyes, but it also demonstrates the young composer’s self-­definition as a Russian, based on a cultural and civic rather than racial understanding of belonging. Nor was Emilii’s explicitly racial and anti-­Semitic vision of Russia’s future attractive to all of Nietzsche’s orphans. Responding to the elder Medtner’s 1912 book, Leonid Sabaneev rejected the former’s emphasis on “nationalism” and “race,” introducing instead the concept of “patriotism.” While Medtner claimed that the “virtuoso period” currently being experienced in Germany (and in Europe more generally) was the fault of “foreign Jewish” influence, Sabaneev instead argued that virtuoso periods had occurred in earlier times; as such, they were not connected with Jewish influence but rather were “organically connected with the political climate, namely with the epoch of reaction.” Hence the blame for contemporary divisions in society rested with political rather than ethnic factors.108 Espousing his own progressivist view of history, he argued that “the national element is always secondary in art. It gives only an external color and aroma to the universal-­human [obshchechelovechsekii] [element] . . . that exists in a composition.”109 In conclusion, he stated that “a genius does not belong to himself or to his nation, but to all humanity.”110 For Sabaneev the hope for the future was embodied not in exclusive national identity but in the contemporary recognition in Russian society that music was “almost a religion,” and in the hope for the transformative experience that music could introduce to society as a whole.111 Despite such attempts to explicate a musical identity separate from national identity, the question of Nikolai Medtner’s Germanness or Russianness remained a central point of contention for contemporaries. Perhaps echoing his own imperial Russian self-­definition, many of Nikolai’s admirers framed his contributions in relation to spiritual values that, while perhaps universal, were believed nevertheless to have found particular emphasis in Russian religious and cultural tradition. In his 1903 article “On Theurgy,” Andrei Bely celebrated the ability of Nikolai’s music to overcome the “division” in modern life, a task that had been previously recognized by Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov but that required a composer of Medtner’s stature to complete.112 Similarly, in a 1906 review of Medtner’s Goethe-­Lieder (op. 6), Bely linked the composer’s musical style with the “realm of the new religious consciousness of our days,” hearing in these songs freedom “from the dogmatic forms and appearances constraining us.” In contrast to both Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, whose music he found insufficiently “deep,” he found in Medtner’s music a “potion” that “truly heals the soul” through a return to the “eternally known in all times”—a musical depiction of the eternal, similar to that previously expressed by Beethoven and Schu-



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mann but now expressed by an imperial Russian citizen. Bely’s assessment linked Emilii’s celebration of German culture with an affirmation of the central role to be played by Russian culture in the modern age. Divided from these earlier German musicians “by the chaos of the surrounding conditions of modernity,” Nikolai was the “only Russian composer who affirms rather than destroys life.” By taking over the now forgotten path toward spiritual insight that had once been followed by other great artists, Nikolai was deemed both a deeply modern and a “Russian” artist, responding to contemporary social and cultural needs.113 Building further upon this idea in their 1909 meeting in Germany, Emilii Medtner, Bely, and Ellis agreed to reunite Russian culture around a new “center, the living symbol of which is Kolia [Nikolai], as the most outstanding, most steadfast, most irreproachable artist of contemporary life.”114 In a follow-­up letter to Emilii, Ellis further developed this messianic language, claiming that “the most holy and highest relation to art that I have ever seen is that of Nikolai Karlovich [Medtner].” Dismissing the views of their contemporaries as “an alloy of eternal values, thrown into the ocean of hooliganism in Russia,” he reproached the elder Medtner for his doubts regarding this cultural vision and encouraged him instead to “overcome your indecision and modesty, for this comes to you from Satan.”115 An even more explicit connection between Nikolai and Russian identity was offered by Sergei Durylin, who became acquainted with Nikolai’s music in 1910 shortly after beginning collaboration with Emilii’s publishing house Musaget. In contrast to Durylin’s strained relationship with Emilii, he established a close friendship with the younger brother. Ignoring Emilii’s emphasis on Nikolai’s German identity, Durylin heralded the composer’s music as the truest expression of the Russian spirit in music, linking Nikolai directly with past Russian cultural giants. Durylin saw in Nikolai the embodiment of Pushkin’s “genius of pure beauty,”116 claiming further that “you resurrect Pushkin and Tiutchev. I cannot better and more clearly express that which I and many others receive from your music, and [what] I in particular receive from your letters. It is freedom. This, in one word, is what we receive from you.”117 Living eighty miles from Moscow and only able to “remember” Nikolai’s songs, Durylin wrote that they continued to “beat in my soul, like a pure key of life-­creation (zhiznetvorchestvo).”118 The philosopher Ivan Il’in, a convinced Hegelian and rising star in the Russian philosophical community, vividly demonstrated this shifting interpretation of Nikolai’s national identity. He first came under the sway of Emilii’s musical interpretation of contemporary culture after reading Modernism and Music.119 He was also deeply impressed with Nikolai’s music, with which he became acquainted in April 1913.120 At first Il’in’s praise of Nikolai’s music echoed Emilii’s cultural inter-

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ests, as he heralded Nikolai as “the only continuer of German music,” finding therein the resurrection of spiritual depth so lacking in modern culture.121 However, the exchange of philosophical ideas and texts between Emilii and Il’in soon led to a clash in both their philosophical inclinations and national preferences. Il’in’s attempts to better acquaint his new friend with the thought of Hegel—a philosopher whose image of historical progress was itself anathema to Emilii— underlined a growing intellectual rift between the men.122 By March 1914 the worldviews of Il’in and Emilii had fundamentally parted; in response to Emilii’s recent publication Thoughts on Goethe (Razmyshlenie o Gete), Il’in argued that both Medtner brothers were too German in nature, and that Nikolai’s saving grace was that he was “more Russian” than Emilii. In contrast to Emilii’s emphasis on German culture, Il’in offered an interpretation of history that emphasized Russia’s influence and destiny.123 Despite this growing estrangement with Emilii, Il’in’s relationship with Nikolai grew ever closer. By late 1913 he had dropped the German aspect in his interpretation of Nikolai’s music, emphasizing instead the composer’s “incredibly spiritual” nature.124 In the following years, as their friendship developed, he sought to offer paternalistic oversight for the composer’s reading of philosophy; by convincing Nikolai of Russia’s role in history, the philosopher hoped to reinforce the composer’s self-­image as a fundamentally Russian composer.125 These conflicting concepts of Germanness and Russianness (in their multiple variants) were themselves part of a larger contemporary discourse about national and imperial identity. In seeking to define authentically Russian music, contemporaries turned to balalaika orchestras, the collection and study of folk songs, and the search for a new, reinvigorated Russian choral tradition through the incorporation of folk music practice into Orthodox compositions.126 In this quest for musical Russianness, the opposing categories of German identity and German music (particularly the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart) provided a convenient reference point. Margarita Morozova distanced herself from what she considered Emilii’s “Germanic” Apollonian side in favor of a neo-­Slavophile interpretation of the power of music, arguing in a letter to Evgenii Trubetskoi that “at its root, [Emilii’s] view on art is foreign to me: he is more of an aesthete and ‘Apollonist,’ while I cannot accept art in any way other than through the religious and ‘Dionysian’ in it, which seems to me to be closer to the world soul.”127 Sabaneev’s non-­nationalist critique of Nikolai’s music as embodying “an entire ideology of retrospectivism” (rather than “the general and natural process of evolution” in musical life) was an interpretation that struggled to find support in a climate in which music was regularly assigned ethnic attributes.128 While seeking to employ nationalistically tinged language in assessing Nikolai



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Medtner, many of his contemporaries voiced a certain degree of confusion, caught between their own unclear delineations between imperial Russian and ethnic Russian identity. In a 1913 concert review, Iulii Engel concluded with some bewilderment that, among all the notable composers that had appeared in Germany since the time of Brahms, there was “not one in whom the ‘holy flame’ of these hereditary testaments burn as clearly and purely as in Medtner, whose homeland is Moscow.”129 Similarly, Konstantin Eiges identified a certain “ambiguity of belonging” in Medtner, which he argued distanced the composer both from Russian audiences and fellow Russian composers.130 Such contradictions were given a rather more ominous interpretation by critic Grigorii Prokof’ev. “Although Medtner finished the Moscow Conservatory and lives almost all the time in Russia, there is nothing Russian in his musical works,” he concluded.131 Prokof’ev emphasized that the composer’s predominantly Germanic creative heritage, “untimeliness,” and devotion to form and “strictness” (in an age and country ever more concerned with the abandonment of form for free emotional expression) demonstrated a failure to strike a balance between his “Slavic” and “German” temperaments—the latter, Prokof’ev hinted, had won out over the former. Nevertheless, Prokof’ev held out hope that Medtner might yet embrace “general human” principles through developing his Slavic—and neglecting his German—character traits.132 Within this context, the Medtnerian devotion to the existence of musical form and tonality as an expression of the Absolute took on a problematic discursive meaning; it could be viewed not as a recognition of “absolute” laws but as a betrayal of Russian heritage. In an extensive review for the journal The Pass (Pereval’), Boris Popov voiced a particularly harsh analysis of Nikolai’s failures along ethnic lines. “In Medtner,” wrote Popov, “there is too much German blood.” This Germanness, in Popov’s mind, was expressed in Nikolai’s use of traditional sonata form, his song settings of German poetry (specifically Goethe), his lack of Dionysian passion, and his “naked petit-­bourgeois mentality”: all markers of his German, rather than Slavic, nature. But for Popov the most striking of Nikolai’s shortcomings was in his “soul.” Using the metaphor of a November rose that blooms unexpectedly long after summer has passed, Popov emphasized Nikolai’s complete lack of purpose in contemporary Russia: “But Medtner’s soul? What may I say of it? Is it Medtner’s fault that he was not born half a century earlier? Then his roses would have bloomed fully . . . the final luxury of a dying epoch. Today they are only November roses. Final, pale, and unnecessary.”133 This closing emphasis on Nikolai’s “soul” was scarcely accidental. It suggested a clear distinction between a dying German and a young, vibrant Russian “soul” that would be the new creator of history. A similar interpretation was hinted at

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by St. Petersburg composer and music critic Viacheslav Karatygin, who summarized Nikolai’s music as being simply “without soul.”134 Such critiques implicitly suggested that owing to his ethnic heritage, Medtner could never be a genuine member of Russian culture—a clear expression of an ethnic-­national understanding of Russian identity that foreshadowed wartime travails. C O N C L US I O N

Popov’s negative assessment of Nikolai’s work incited rage from Emilii Medt­ ner against the “entirely out-­of-­place Germanophobia” in the Russian cultural press.135 But his bluster only further highlighted the exclusionary rhetoric that was increasingly saturating Russian cultural life. In an appendix to Modernism and Music written in 1911, Emilii attacked contemporary Russian music critics who asserted that cultural—and particularly musical—hegemony had recently passed from Germany to Russia. To counter this dismissal of German achievements, he rejected all claims concerning the three Moscow composers most often cited by contemporaries as exemplifying Russia’s musical hegemony: Scria­bin, Rachmaninoff, and Nikolai Medtner. Despite Scriabin’s “purely Slavic nature,” Emilii concluded that the composer was “in principle international, intentionally universal (or as the Scriabinists love to say—cosmic).” Thus, Scria­ bin’s music could in no way serve as an example of Russian claims to cultural dominance. He found Rachmaninoff ’s music to be a mixture of “aristocratic” and “intelligentsia” tendencies, as irreversibly cut off from the genuine Russian narod as the output of his mentor Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. Suddenly a populist, Emilii fumed that such music could not represent Russian culture as a whole. Nikolai, he concluded, could only be considered a Russian composer “through misunderstanding,” because his German “tribal origin” was apparent in “every note” of his music, which lacked any trace of “the influence of surroundings in which he was born and raised.”136 When critics recognized his brother’s talent, Emilii emphasized, they were in fact celebrating German rather than Russian accomplishments, a claim that reinforced his argument that the guiding light for Russian culture was both national and German in nature. While glorifying his brother’s talent, particularly his dual place as both a German and a Russian composer, he insisted that Nikolai was, in essence, “entirely German.”137 While Nikolai Medtner’s musical style, together with his emphasis on absolute values, might seem to strike a conservative tone in comparison to Scriabin’s experimental musical language, the Medtner brothers’ interpretation of music’s role in contemporary life was deeply modern, embodying both fears of social and cultural degeneration and a growing emphasis on identity that was connected to



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ethnic origin. Emilii Medtner’s racial stereotyping of Jews demonstrated a shift toward a modern, biological description of ethnicity, a development that was to yield terrible consequences in the course of the twentieth century. Contemporary responses to Nikolai’s music demonstrated a similar shift, as Nietzsche’s orphans sought to define his relationship to the construction of a contemporary Russian identity. Whether an individual could genuinely combine “imperial patriotism” (linked to Russian identity broadly understood) and national (non-­ Russian) identity was a point of heated contention, particularly as ethnic minorities became increasingly vocal in the years after 1905. As the ideal took hold of a nation-­state in which a single ethnic group would wield political and territorial power, the mixed identities that were relatively commonplace in the imperial context became ever more problematic. Just as the nature of Russian identity was deeply contested in discourse surrounding Nikolai Medtner, the vision of musical time espoused by both Medtner brothers expressed an image of modernity that was similarly anxiety-­laden. It was generally agreed among many of Nietzsche’s orphans that contemporary German culture and society (embodied in Strauss and Reger) had embraced the individualistic impulses of modernity; once the country in which folk song and art song (lieder) were closely linked, Germany had lost the unity between educated society and the narod.138 These modern ills, themselves the markers of cultural decline and degeneration identified by Max Nordau in 1898, also confronted contemporary Russian culture.139 Both brothers hoped to overcome these divisions through music: Emilii through Nikolai’s embrace of his German heritage and resurrection of the absolute values expressed in earlier German cultural achievements, Nikolai through the merging of German culture and Russian spirituality. In the final analysis, the Medtners were participating directly in contemporary debates over Russian identity. Distaste for modern German culture provided common ground for conversation between Emilii’s Germanophile ideals and the neo-­Slavophile vision of Russia as the potential messiah of Europe espoused by many of Scriabin’s followers. Contemporary Germany (symbolic of the West in general) was held up as an example of the path that Russia should not follow. For the Medtners, however, Russia’s own trajectory seemed questionable at best. The Scriabinists’ reckless embrace of historical progress, emotion, and individuality threatened to draw Russian culture along the same path that had already led Germany astray. Anxiety about Russia’s future path and present crisis was ubiquitous in late imperial Russia, and many cultural commentators located the source of degeneration in the contemporary social environment.140 For Nietzsche’s orphans as a whole, music promised a means through which to transcend

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these social ills; for the Medtners, this required both a rejection of the Hegelian vision of historical progress and a belief in Absolute Truth, which might be intuitively reached through a return to earlier truths embodied in past German culture. As a result, musical metaphysics often expressed an anxiety-­laden image about the future that emphasized the need for a transcendence of the present through a return to “eternal truths.” For Nietzsche’s orphans, Nikolai Medtner was ultimately a contradictory figure. Caught in the maelstrom of emerging nationalist discourse, his German heritage proved difficult for some to reconcile with his potential role as a Russian Orpheus. For the Medtners, the imperial Russian foundation upon which their lives and creativity were based was strained to the breaking point with the outbreak of war between Russia and Germany in 1914. Nikolai’s Orphic mission to reunite the divisions wrought within human society and culture in the modern age would ultimately shatter on the rocks of an emerging nationalist discourse.

4

Sergei Rachmaninoff: The Unwilling Orpheus

In 1921 Sergei Alekseevich Sundukov-­Holms was struggling to adapt to his new existence in Middletown, Connecticut. A native of Tula, he found it difficult to embrace small-­town American life. His hardship was exacerbated both by loneliness for the family he had left behind in Russia and by “shattered nerves” brought on by events preceding his emigration. In Middletown he gradually found his boredom (skuka) transformed into melancholy (toska), ultimately leading to suicidal tendencies.1 On frequent walks he looked for deep spots in the river where he could drown himself. Entering stores, he found himself searching for a revolver so he could put an end to his sufferings. It was in this state of mind that he learned of an upcoming concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall featuring Sergei Vasil’evich Rachmaninoff. He decided to “listen to Russian music” one last time before the end. Sundukov-­Holms had loved music since childhood and in Tula had often “fallen asleep to the sound of music: the song of nightingales in the garden, a good war orchestra in the Kremlin garden, the strum of a balalaika in the garden or song by harp, or there, far off in the distance, a harmonica, drum or choir.” In his American exile, such memories of his beloved Tula and of this “irretrievable happy time” only plunged him deeper into depression. All this changed on the evening of March 13, 1921, when he heard Rachmaninoff perform at Carnegie Hall. In a letter of gratitude he later wrote to the composer, Sundukov-­Holms claimed that it was Rachmaninoff ’s music that had saved him from his suicidal despair: “At your concert, my sorrowful thoughts dispersed and I received an easing of my melancholy. Returning to Middletown, Connecticut, I began to recover. Although I am not a musician, several [musical] motifs remained in my mind for a long time and supplanted sorrowful thoughts.” Sundukov-­Holms

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ended his reflections with a comment regarding the composer’s appeal to his compatriots. Through music, he claimed, Rachmaninoff “eased Russian spiritual suffering and g[ave] them hope for a better future.”2 In Sundukov-­Holms’s view, Rachmaninoff was a figure of salvation not only for him personally but for all Russians separated from their homeland. In the aftermath of the 1917 revolutions, Rachmaninoff emerged as a unifying figure for many exiled Russians. Growing up in Moscow, E. Medvedova failed to understand the passionate affection her acquaintance Colonel Stremoukhov felt for Rachmaninoff ’s music. In a 1935 letter to the composer, she described her arguments with Stremoukhov over Rachmaninoff: “at that time, your compositions were incomprehensible to me, and though I did not miss a single one of your concerts . . . I strove to prove that Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-­Korsakov were higher than Rachmaninoff. But he waved his hand and said ‘Wait. Your heart will fall sick, and you will understand Rachmaninoff.’” Looking back upon her youth from her present exile in Dresden, Medvedova admitted that only now could she grasp the significance of Rachmaninoff’s music and that she found immeasurable joy in the thought that “Sergei Vasil’evich Rachmaninoff exists, that he is recognized around the world, and that he is ours, Russian, a Muscovite.” Moreover, Rachmaninoff provided a model for her daughter of genuine Russianness in the midst of exile. The young girl, her mother proudly stated, possessed a “pure Russian soul,” dreamed of playing the piano like Rachmaninoff, and had his portrait hanging in her room.3 For symbolist poet Konstantin Bal’mont, the very act of writing to the composer served as a means of conjuring his lost Moscow world. “When I write to you,” he mused in a 1922 letter, “in spirit I am in Moscow, in an overfilled hall, and your unerring fingers enchantingly scatter a diamond rain of crystal harmonies.”4 Of the three composers examined in this book, Rachmaninoff most successfully emerged as a unifying figure for a shared “Russian” identity in the postrevolutionary period. This imagined Russian identity, however, hearkened to an idealized world that no longer (and perhaps never had) existed. In assessing the memory work through which German expellees from Silesia dealt with the loss of their homeland in the aftermath of the Second World War, Andrew Demshuk identifies two mutually informing images of Heimat (homeland): the Heimat of memory (“a pristine, timeless, and bygone German homeland that had never really existed”) and the Heimat transformed (“[expellee’s] perception of Silesia as it now existed in Poland”). Rather than seeking territorial restitution, Demshuk argues, many of these expellees chose instead to “reside in memory”—they cherished their idealized image of the past, shuddered at the changes wrought in their absence, created a community in exile tied to memory rather than political



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intentions, and gradually adapted to life in a new homeland.5 For Russian émigrés after 1917, Rachmaninoff ’s music performed a similar task. The composer’s music was imagined as an embodiment of the melancholic Russian soul: eternally exiled from its homeland after the rupture of war and revolution, yet able to awaken feelings and memories of a lost world, thereby forging a sense of community in exile. Familiar in popular literature, this was also an image embraced by the composer himself.6 In post-­Soviet Russia, the composer has similarly come to symbolize a usable Russian identity from the imperial era, a trend highlighted by the erection of a statue in central Moscow, the restoration of his prerevolutionary estate in Ivanovka, and increased performances of both his secular and sacred works.7 Within the prerevolutionary worldview of Nietzsche’s orphans, however, Rachmaninoff’s role was far more contested. His compositional style, often interpreted as both old-­fashioned and outdated, did not satisfy those who awaited a fundamentally new musical sound to usher in a transformed human spirit.8 At the same time, the perceived melancholic nature of his music was interpreted by many as symptomatic of the problems of modernity rather than a means through which to overcome them. Finally, the composer’s unwillingness to engage in broader philosophical interpretations of music’s significance left him with a far more ambiguous relationship to musical metaphysics than either Scriabin or Nikolai Medtner, both of whom (albeit to varying degrees) embraced their roles as theurgic transformers of a troubled world. Thus, the fact that others gradually molded Rachmaninoff into a symbol of Russian identity in the postrevolutionary period had little to do with any personal identification with the task of Orpheus; rather, it emerged from a collision between musical discourse, social turmoil, and the search for a definable Russian identity, which crystallized only once the Russian Empire itself was gone. In this sense, unlike both Scriabin and Medtner, Rachmaninoff was ultimately an unwilling Orpheus who found himself ensnared in (rather than synergizing new directions for) metaphysical discourse concerning music’s role in contemporary society. This chapter explores the conflicted attempts of Nietzsche’s orphans to place Rachmaninoff’s music within the framework of musical metaphysics. Leading the initiative to claim Rachmaninoff as Russia’s awaited Orpheus was the young poet Marietta Shaginian, one of the composer’s most ardent disciples.9 Herself a product of the religious and philosophical circles of late imperial Russia, Shaginian was a passionate advocate of Rachmaninoff’s music, celebrating the compelling ability of his music to express and protect the individual (lichnost’) from the dehumanizing effects of modern life, an argument that she coupled with direct attempts to influence the composer’s musical language. Despite Shaginian’s

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enthusiasm, responses by other contemporaries demonstrate that Rachmaninoff’s greatest appeal to audiences had more to do with his ability to express contemporary moods and individual emotions than his role as a unifying, Orphic figure. These conflicting interpretations of Rachmaninoff provide the focus of the first section. At the same time that Shaginian sought to proclaim Rachmaninoff’s importance to Russian society, Nietzsche’s orphans were nervous about the sort of emotions that Rachmaninoff ’s music seemed to awaken in contemporary audiences. The second section thus examines how concern over Rachmaninoff’s “sad” and “pessimistic” music, itself viewed as an immediate expression of “the life of the Russian soul,” echoed a deep-­seated anxiety about the contemporary moods voiced by educated society more generally.10 While Rachmaninoff was unquestionably one of the most popular performers of the time, many prerevolutionary music critics dismissed his compositions as mere “salon music,” appealing to the low tastes of contemporary audiences.11 His apparent embrace of the negative emotions of contemporary life, such as pessimism (pessimicheskie nastroenie), melancholy (toska), and grief, made his particular brand of musical Russianness problematic for Nietzsche’s orphans. The present-­day Orpheus they envisioned was expected to overcome rather than embrace the negative moods aroused by contemporary life. The recurring emphasis on the cyclical dimension of human existence, found in the symphonic compositions premiered after Rachmaninoff’s 1909 return to Russia (The Isle of the Dead, 1909; The Bells, 1913), offered a very different image of human existence than either Scriabin’s ecstatic transcendence of individuality or Medtner’s embrace of the absolute. These works instead were seen as expressing strong emotions of fear and anxiety. For this reason, despite the composer’s popular appeal, his evocation of Russian folk elements, and his “Slavic” nature (repeatedly noted by contemporary critics), many of Nietzsche’s orphans dismissed his music because it addressed the desires and needs of contemporary audiences too explicitly. These audiences, with their embrace of Rachmaninoff ’s pessimistic moods, were themselves targets of suspicion. Rather than being viewed as representatives of the idealized narod in whom music would reawaken collective impulses lulled to sleep by the siren song of modernity, Rachmaninoff ’s admirers were often characterized as part of the “musical masses” whose individualism embodied the sicknesses of contemporary society. Despite Shaginian’s support and approval, Rachmaninoff himself proved unwilling to seize the lyre of Orpheus. As this chapter’s final section reveals, his personal disposition and dislike of metaphysical explorations of music’s symbolic meaning, combined with insecurity over his own compositional talent, made



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him uneasy about the salvific role that Shaginian and others sought to thrust upon him. Attempts to force Rachmaninoff into a “correct” Orphic framework that ill-­suited his compositional and intellectual style demonstrate how musical metaphysics shaped late imperial reception of music. Even when confronted by a genuinely popular figure who might have served as a means of bridging the divide between themselves and the “musical masses,” Nietzsche’s orphans proved unwilling or unable to overcome the gulf that divided them from broader society. RACHMANINOFF AND THE DEFENSE OF LICHNOST’

In 1911 the Russian-­Armenian poet Marietta Shaginian was a twenty-­three-­ year-­old student searching for a cause to which she could devote her life. Enthralled with the desire to be part of a “living collective,” shortly after her arrival in Moscow in 1908 she had already immersed herself in the circles of Russia’s cultural elite. She joined the Orthodox “Circle of Those Seeking Christian Enlightenment” led by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Novoselov, which numbered approximately two hundred members, including philosophers Pavel Florenskii, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Ern, and the symbolist Sergei Durylin, the latter already pondering the relationship between Russian spirituality, music, and Richard Wagner.12 Disillusion soon set in, however, as she found such a worldview to be a “dead, terrifyingly false world, formed upon the rejection of development and culture.”13 She then turned to the teachings of symbolist writer Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, inspired by his call for a “new church” and his synthesis of religious and revolutionary impulses.14 Once again, disappointment soon set in, and she concluded that “there was nothing real” within this group, only “self-­ deception” and “a parasitic existence.” Over the next four years (1908–11), she passed through numerous infatuations, including brief but intense epistolary exchanges with Merezhkovsky’s wife, Zinaida Gippius (living in St. Petersburg) and Andrei Bely, with whom she exchanged a flurry of letters from December 1908 through April 1909.15 Her next, and until then most formative, conversion was her discovery of Rachmaninoff and her adoption of the Medtnerian brand of musical metaphysics in 1911.16 That same year Shaginian chanced to hear a paper entitled “Collective and Crowd,” offered by a young student enrolled in the philosophy department at Moscow University, which compared a genuine human collective to an orchestra and likened a crowd to a chaos of uncontrolled sounds. The anonymous young man’s comments sparked Shaginian’s own musings, based on her training in music as well as philosophy. Reflecting upon the divisive elements of con-

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temporary life, she came to see the key to Russia’s spiritual transformation in music, despite the fact that she, like Emilii Medtner, had already begun to develop serious hearing problems and struggled to make out the quiet moments in a musical performance.17 As a student regularly attending concerts in Moscow and discussing the most renowned artists of the day with her friends, she placed the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff within this “broad, general philosophical approach to music.” Rachmaninoff at this time was at the height of his popularity with Russian audiences, but he often found himself targeted by critics, who considered his compositional style too “traditional,” preferring Scriabin’s modernist experimentations to his own late Romanticism. Moved by the tragic story of the failure of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in 1897 and his subsequent temporary withdrawal from public life, Shaginian and her friends feared that their beloved idol might “lose his path to the future” and accept the judgment of critics who “underlined the inescapable sorrow of his music.”18 Shaginian’s growing belief that Rachmaninoff’s music uniquely embodied “Russianness” might well have been inspired not just by the composer’s music but also by the postcard image circulated by Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Publishing House in 1912 (fig. 4.1). This postcard contrasts strikingly with those of Scriabin and Medtner discussed earlier. While the first two presented carefully staged images of the composer against an empty background, Rachmaninoff is portrayed in the very act of composing. His physical presence is minimized, and attention is instead focused on the creative process of the artist. It is not the composer himself but his work that matters to the observer here. He is seated peacefully at his country estate, Ivanovka, presumably looking over a new composition. Rather than wearing a formal suit, he is dressed in dark trousers and an untucked white shirt that resembles a peasant kosovorotka. More accessible than the images of either Scriabin or Medtner, this photograph of Rachmaninoff expresses a homey scene, melding creative genius and the Russian countryside.19 Such general impressions aroused by Rachmaninoff’s image and music deepened for Shaginian after an evening in February 1912 spent in philosophical conversation with her friends, which ended with a play-­through of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. After this collective participation, in which “we all participated . . . reading the page with our eyes in order to turn it, soaking up the unfurling, broad melody from the first part, and singing along, as if invited by the music,” she became convinced that Rachmaninoff’s music contained “a deep contemporary understanding . . . an uncovering in music of the life of society, the questions and character of a human of this epoch.” More than just an echo of the problems of modern life, in the Second Concerto she and her friends also heard “an escape . . . in great, loving humanity, love for the beautiful in humanity,

Figure 4.1. Postcard of Rachmaninoff. First published by the Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo (Moscow, after 1909). Author’s collection.

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and a battle for a better life.” Having tired of her earlier correspondence partners, she determined to write a letter to the composer “laying out the belief in him that we had felt,” that he was “a Russian person [russkii chelovek]” who was “needed for genuine Russian culture.”20 Rather than sign her own name, she used the pseudonym “Re,” a reference to the musical pitch D.21 In her letter she suggested that Rachmaninoff alone could provide the necessary cure both for her own “illness” and for that of contemporary society. Despite the anonymity of the letter, her passionate language touched an empathic chord in the composer, who responded to her first sorrowful letter: “Write to me. . . . what is wrong with you? With what are you ill, and why does your letter evoke such a sorrowful impression?”22 Based upon the correspondence that grew out of this initial letter, however, Shaginian soon became convinced that she had a better understanding of the philosophical importance of music than did Rachmaninoff, and that it was her task to help him develop a “broad gaze” on his own role in the evolution of Russian music. This she sought to do by constantly emphasizing her “unlimited belief ” in his gifts as both a composer and a performer, and by emphasizing that the narod needed him to complete his “historical mission” to “oppose mysticism and theosophy and renew the development of Russian musical culture.” For Shaginian, her correspondence with the composer was not merely for personal fulfillment; she later reflected that she “wrote much about what Russian society lived and breathed at that time” and that her task was to help Rachmaninoff “experience and understand the historical necessity of his music.”23 Rachmaninoff soon discovered the true identity of his correspondent, and found Shaginian to be a sympathetic and intelligent listener, both to his music and his concerns in life. The relationship between the composer and the poet was deeply personal; both artists sought intimate support and understanding in their epistolary interactions. Their correspondence turned into friendship; already in his second letter, Rachmaninoff turned to her for recommendations of literary works suitable for musical setting. Soon after, he dedicated one of his romances to her: “The Muse,” based on a poem by Pushkin.24 Shaginian returned the compliment, dedicating her 1913 collection of poems, entitled Orientalia, to Rachmaninoff.25 Shaginian’s devotion to Rachmaninoff and belief in his mission led her to seek to convey her philosophical understanding of his music to a broader audience, a desire that brought her into intimate contact with the Medtner family circle. In fall 1912, having penned a passionate defense of Rachmaninoff’s music in response to what she perceived as a lack of understanding by contemporary critics, she approached Emilii Medtner’s publishing house Musaget with the manu-



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script. After an intense meeting in which Medtner’s appreciation of her critique of modernity and its particular embodiment in contemporary music was tempered by his personal dislike of Rachmaninoff ’s music, Medtner agreed to publish the article and offered to acquaint her more closely with the music of his brother, Nikolai Medtner.26 The article subsequently appeared in September 1912 in Emilii’s journal Works and Days (Trudy i dni).27 In a letter to fellow symbolist Viacheslav Ivanov, Emilii wrote in his half-­admiring, half-­denigrating manner (imbued with the racial bias that underpinned his own worldview) that “this Asiatic has happened upon the key point, [she has] touched the very heart of modernism.”28 Despite the development of a tumultuous and often painful affair with Emilii and a deepening friendship with Anna and Nikolai Medtner that resulted from this initial meeting, it was in the music of Rachmaninoff (rather than Nikolai) that Shaginian continued to hear a vision of Russia’s transformed future.29 She sought to take on the same prophetic role that Schloezer and Sabaneev were offering to Scriabin and that Emilii Medtner was offering to his brother Nikolai, both through her personal interactions with the composer and through her own written analyses. What views did Shaginian express that so impressed Emilii Medtner that he was willing to publish her article, despite his dislike of Rachmaninoff’s music? Shaginian’s analysis of contemporary music voiced many of the general assumptions associated with musical metaphysics, and it is within this context that her 1912 article is best understood. Inspired by German idealist philosophy, she considered music to be the “valuable internal cement” that “unites” all “ranks of the universe.” In contrast to this unifying function, she argued that music in the modern age had come instead to serve as “a means of unhooking.” This tendency was indicative of a broader social decline that “showed all the symptoms of center evasion.” She claimed that contemporary music (particularly the work of the “highly talented Scriabin”) was symptomatic of the “air of corruption” of contemporary life and heralded a great catastrophe in the near future.30 Having set the stage for her main argument, she then turned her attention to Rachmaninoff’s Orphic mission. She contended that music was “the most human of arts.” The danger of modern music lay in the fact that composers who elected such a style had forgotten the human basis that made music accessible to all, including animals and children. The fact that modern music was growing less accessible to audiences was a symptom of its becoming less and less human in its orientation, trapped between the mistakes of mysticism (collapsing the idea of God and human) and pantheism (collapsing ideas of animal and human). Sensing this dangerous tendency, her former idol Andrei Bely had sought to denigrate music entirely in his article “Against Music,” but, Shaginian insisted, he

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had himself fallen into subjectivity in his critique, caused in part by the inability of words to fully capture the essence of what music expressed. The true battle for music (and the future) would take place not in words but in music. In Russia, she contended, this struggle was led by two figures: Sergei Rachmaninoff and Nikolai Medtner. While the guiding hand of Emilii Medtner led her to suggest that she recognized the importance of both composers, it was Rachmaninoff who emerged as the true hero in Shaginian’s analysis. The current musical battle between “modernists” and “traditionalists” was not merely about aesthetic styles; rather it concerned the future of Russian society. Rachmaninoff’s music voiced the cry of “the personality [lichnost’] of humanity that battles and defends itself, demanding for itself a human, fundamentally human scale.”31 This interpretation of the importance of the human personality suggested an inherent critique of the mystical transcendence preached by Ivanov and Scriabin, but it also reflected contemporary social and political debates, particularly about the relation between the individual and society. The Russian term lichnost’ has been translated alternately as “personality,” “individual,” or “selfhood.” As Derek Offord has noted, differing interpretations of the role of lichnost’ within Russian society underpinned political and philosophical distinctions within the nineteenth-­century intelligentsia, serving “not only to explore inward subjectivities but to challenge conditions of Russian, and modern European, life that violated human dignity and human rights.”32 In the years after 1905, this question of lichnost’ was not limited to intellectual circles but spilled over into the broader periodical press.33 Connected with the legal reforms of 1906, it was also increasingly entwined with contemporary discussions about the changing nature of identity within the Russian Empire, as well as critiques of existing political structures and social relations. For figures such as Evgenii Trubetskoi, the question of lichnost’ was part of an active critique of the existing autocratic system and an attempt to redefine the relationship between the individual and central authority within the multiethnic empire. Should modern identity within a state be defined according to individual characteristics (civic identity, citizenship, natural rights) or to collective identity (ethnic origin, religious affiliation)? As Eric Lohr has demonstrated, a neo-­Kantian theory of citizenship was advanced at this time by liberal political thinkers who emphasized natural rights over obligations to the state.34 Lohr argues that “late imperial Russia’s particularity lay perhaps in the absence of faith among contemporaries that existing law, institutions, and traditions could provide the basis for an evolutionary move from powerless subject to rights-­endowed citizen. Lacking a usable past, for better and for worse, many Russian liberals turned to categorical im-



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peratives and universal, moral sources to define the ideal citizen.”35 The concept of an ideal citizenship, based on neo-­Kantian moral imperatives rather than existing Russian laws, served as the basis through which a more inclusive citizenship based on the rights of the individual was imagined. This universalist image of equality, in which individual citizenship rights would receive preference over older legal differences based on ethnic or religious differences, was, in the words of Trubetskoi, the ideal “music of the future” toward which Russia should strive. Shaginian’s emphasis on Rachmaninoff ’s preservation of lichnost’ addressed these modern concerns of the relationship between the individual and the external world. At the same time, rather than calling for legal reforms and the introduction of equal rights among the citizens of the empire as a means through which to protect the individual, she approached the problem of lichnost’ from the worldview of musical metaphysics, as she sought to preserve the distinctiveness of the individual within an emerging modern state through the nonrational medium of music. Music’s role was partly to enact a higher reality, thereby providing the transformative basis for a new sort of lichnost’, but it was also to protect the individual from being consumed by the “demonic chaos” that threatened it. Turning to musical terminology, she identified the locus of Rachmaninoff’s musical power in his use of dissonance and rhythm, which she argued differentiated him from the destructive influences of modern music, embodied in the music of Scriabin.36 While both Schloezer and Sabaneev had highlighted Scriabin’s use of dissonance as symbolizing his transformed relationship to external reality, Shaginian argued that Rachmaninoff ’s restrained use of dissonance emphasized his more human, individual direction. Whereas Scriabin used dissonance for the “breaking of humanity, for the overcoming of the boundary of individual consciousness,” Rachmaninoff employed dissonance “only in order to more sharply shade the human element, to affirm it face to face with world harmony.” Even in his most dissonant moments, such as “the risky harmonies in the Liturgy (for example the ‘Holy Immortal’),” his conception of the relationship between God and humanity remained strong, “not leaving him even for a minute, so that even in prayerful song, when the soul must blur in God, illuminated by Him—he [Rachmaninoff ] still sees the human and God, one against the other, sees not the union of them, but their interrelationship.” In contrast to ancient Russian icon painters, who “achieve[d] holiness through the loss of individuality,” Rachmaninoff maintained his “human feeling.” Building upon this analysis, Shaginian did not believe that the true calling of Orpheus was to transcend the division between the human and the divine but rather to recognize the unique status

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of humanity within God’s creation. Within this worldview, the preservation of lichnost’ was of central importance, and it was only Rachmaninoff’s music that genuinely protected these boundaries.37 Rhythm played a similar function to dissonance in Shaginian’s interpretation of music. It preserved individual personality, this time in relation to the animal impulses that exist within human nature. For Shaginian, rhythm was the “middle condition of the world,” the “alphabet of the language of God, lying between Alpha and Omega.” She rejected the claim that music began with rhythm, emphasizing instead that music could only begin with an idea. After this initial impetus, however, it was rhythm that made music accessible and comprehensible to its listeners. The crisis of the current “‘transitional’ (as they love to call it) time is particularly strikingly expressed in the loss of rhythm. . . . we have lost rhythm not only in art (it is particularly noticeable in painting and in music), but also in society and in daily life [byt’].” Inappropriate use of rhythm could be dangerous, because it appealed to the animal instinct rather than the human. Modern music, including Scriabin’s search for musical ecstasy, evoked this base desire. In contrast, Shaginian pointed to Rachmaninoff ’s constant emphasis on the regularity of rhythm that gave particular “truth and hope” to his music, which, though “valuable in all times,” was “now exceptionally needed and healthy. Listening to any of his pieces, one can trust ahead of time that it will not betray you, it will not fall into chaos.”38 Shaginian’s interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s music echoed contemporary arguments regarding the nature both of the individual and of culture in general. As recent scholarship has shown, the desire to make space for the individual (lichnost’) within religious, political, and social life was a shared concern among such diverse groups as liberal philosophers, workers, and the “middling groups” of Russian society.39 The philosophical debate sparked in 1909 by Signposts (Vekhi), a collection of articles by former Marxists including Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, Petr Struve, and Mikhail Gershenzon, similarly emphasized the importance of individual spiritual development rather than what many contributors now considered the false allure of revolutionary politics.40 Nevertheless, in a political realm in which the place of the individual was a point of debate rather than a legal right, Shaginian’s claim that Rachmaninoff defended the individual against destructive, assimilative tendencies took on a political meaning: it was Rachmaninoff, rather than Scriabin or Medtner, who used his musical gifts to protect the desires and needs of individuals, helping them to pursue an independent, decidedly modern existence.41 At the same time that she celebrated Rachmaninoff’s defense of lichnost’ against the ravages of modernity, Shaginian failed to avoid nationalistic stereo-



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types in her analysis. This echoed a growing tendency toward ethnic stereotyping among educated Russian society. For Shaginian, Rachmaninoff’s emphasis on lichnost’ was an embodiment of his “Slavicness,” which (in keeping with neo-­ Slavophile interpretations) she believed drew more from the internal, subjective development of humanity than from external forms. She explicitly contrasted his pure “Slavicness” with Nikolai Medtner’s “Germanness”: while Medtner was the greatest painter of images in music (a skill she connected with his “Germanism”), Rachmaninoff ’s “tireless remembrance of the human” and his “‘subjectification’ of external phenomena” were “excellent marks of Slavicness.”42 Rather than simply depicting external forms or images (like Medtner), Rachmaninoff’s music used external images as symbols, through which he penetrated into the spiritual level of experience.43 In short, Rachmaninoff’s music was more human, which Shaginian believed made his music essentially more Russian. When Shaginian began her public defense of Rachmaninoff in 1912, she was far from the first of Nietzsche’s orphans to envision the composer as a potentially unifying musical symbol for Russia. In 1908 the directorship of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society, acting on the recommendation of Margarita Morozova, had similarly sought to persuade the composer to take on a prominent role in Russian musical life as conductor of the society’s orchestra. Because of his eloquent writing style and love of music, Evgenii Trubetskoi was tasked with composing the formal address inviting Rachmaninoff to accept this honor. In his request, Trubetskoi appealed to Rachmaninoff’s patriotism, arguing that it was to a large extent because of the leadership of “conductors who were not Russian” that the society’s symphonic concerts had recently suffered from a lack of coherence and quality. He highlighted the historic role played by Nikolai Rubinstein, who, together with Trubetskoi’s father, Nikolai Petrovich Trubetskoi, had cofounded the Moscow branch of the Russian Music Society and the Moscow Conservatory, concluding that Rachmaninoff was now called to serve as the “spiritual heir” of Rubinstein: a task of great import for all Russia. Signed by a virtual who’s who of Moscow musical society, the official request was personally delivered to the composer by Morozova, together with Moscow Conservatory professors Nikolai Kashkin, Konstantin Igumnov, and Aleksandr Gol’denveizer. As Morozova later recalled, she noted with a sinking heart that Rachmaninoff listened to Kashkin’s “emotional” reading of the letter silently, “with lowered head,” and she understood that their attempts to convince him to accept the task were to no avail.44 Despite his reluctance to take on a public performance role that would have distracted from his compositional career, however, Rachmaninoff’s popularity continued to grow. In a review of a 1913 concert in Kiev, music critic Mnishek reported that while

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local audiences were “perplexed” by Scriabin’s recent performance, “Rachmaninoff’s concert proved to be a real triumph, with an unexpectedly noisy celebration of the composer. The public threw white flowers to him. Such enthusiasm, such rapture in this entire crowd, I had never before witnessed.”45 These audiences included young people such as Shaginian, whose admiration for Rachmaninoff as pianist, composer, and conductor knew few bounds. Like Shaginian, they would occasionally seek to bridge the gulf between themselves and their idol, sharing with him their own thoughts, hopes, and expectations. Unlike Shaginian, however, many of these admirers identified in Rachmaninoff’s music an affirmation of their own individual emotions and experiences. Rather than espousing the transformative, collective (and elitist) vision of musical metaphysics touted by Nietzsche’s orphans, most of Rachmaninoff’s fans tended to voice an interpretation of his music that supported their own search for individual self-­expression and emotional fulfillment. In her analysis of fan culture within the emerging middle strata of society in late imperial Russia, Anna Fishzon has argued that a melodramatic form of self-­expression emerged among opera fans, in which authenticity was linked to the expression of extreme emotion and an emphasis on the individual. This spectacular way of enacting the self, Fishzon argues, provides insight into the everyday experiences not of cultural elites but of their audiences.46 In my own research, I have found a similar emphasis on expressing individual authenticity through emotional intensity. Just as Fishzon’s opera fans found a blueprint for their own engagement with the world in the exaggerated figures of their idols (both onstage and in the press), Rachmaninoff’s music was generally interpreted as an affirmation of the importance of emotional intensity and individual feeling for authentic self-­expression, and admirers turned to him in order to find musical expression of their own experiences. Such was the case of a young cello student by the name of Danilova, who came from Sevastopol to Moscow to study in 1907. Her instructor, Mikhail Evseevich Bukinik, recalled that she “did not possess real talent” but “passionately loved music,” and despite her poverty devoted her small finances to purchasing concert tickets. Deeply moved after reading Konstantin Bal’mont’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells,” she took it upon herself to “write a letter to Rachmaninoff (with whom she was not acquainted), not naming herself or giving her address, advising him to read the poem and write music, believing that only his talent might express the strength of these poetic words.” The young woman’s excitement when the composer acted upon her anonymous advice can only be imagined.47 At the age of fifteen, Iurii Sergeevich Nikol’skii, later a noted Soviet radio and film music composer, wrote two piano preludes that he dedicated to Rachmaninoff, though he lost his courage while standing outside



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the composer’s apartment and never delivered them, thereby denying himself the desired approbation of his idol.48 Such letters and actions bear a marked similarity to Sundukov-­Holms’s letter; both before and after the 1917 Revolution, fans sought to directly participate in the musical world of their idol, finding in his works a confirmation of their own personal experiences. For some of Rachmaninoff ’s admirers, it was not enough to interact with the composer through private correspondence: they sought to participate directly in public discourse surrounding the composer’s music. In 1910 an anonymous admirer (known only as “White Lilac”) began a tradition of sending a bouquet of white lilacs to every concert or recital given by Rachmaninoff, regardless of season or location. Her tribute varied according to each specific work’s imagined character: the Moscow premiere of The Bells in February 1914 was honored by a grandiose floral arrangement of bells of all sizes, hanging from a crossbeam attached to a table.49 Similarly, two poems published in the contemporary periodical press demonstrate the range of personal meanings and responses inspired by Rachmaninoff’s music, as well as a melodramatic framing of their personal emotional experience. Elena Bugoslavskaia published a poem based on one of Rachmaninoff’s Moments musicaux (the Presto, op. 16, no. 4) in the Southern Musical Herald, in which she celebrated music’s immediate power to lift her unexpectedly out of the normal passage of daily life (and the pain associated with it) to a new level of experience:50 The wind suddenly burst into the window, And the whirlwind boiled up in the unexpecting quiet; Just as life, long slumbering, Unexpectedly is pierced by longed-­for light. The dying embers blazed up; One gust, one dream . . . A moment that reason cannot touch,–­ It is possible, that tomorrow will again be suffering. Toward the bright beam, Toward the sunny May, Ever higher, higher I fly . . . And on the summit I break!51

Inspired by the composition’s constant, restless accompaniment under a broader lyrical melody, Bugoslavskaia’s poem celebrated a moment of insight to which Rachmaninoff’s composition lifted her; for a brief if fleeting instant, she imagined herself transcending ordinary experience through musical time. In contrast, E. Gertsog’s “Verses on a Fortepiano Etude by Rachmaninoff,” which appeared

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in the newspaper The Kievan, celebrated the power of his music to express intense grief and melancholy: Quiet, my friend. We will not speak a word . . . Of my oppressed heart—Do you hear? The piano cries. And again we understand: Fate will not return our former joy. Quiet my friend . . . Let the chords of the piano Extinguish the last light in my soul. Let my heart groan from torment and sorrow. Quiet, my friend . . . we have no more words.52

For both poets, music in general (and Rachmaninoff’s music in particular) held the power to embody truths that mere words could not capture. In the latter example, the specific musical work that gave rise to these emotions remained unnamed, secondary to the expression of the emotions themselves. Both poems sought to capture a moment of temporal transcendence (or musical time), itself accessed through musical experience. In this sense, they would seem to fulfill the general requirements of musical metaphysics. However, both poems were also deeply personal, describing self-­reflective, individual responses to specific compositions. The unifying and transformative nature so central to musical metaphysics was absent in both cases, suggesting a more individualistic outlook than that espoused by Nietzsche’s orphans. While Bugoslavskaia’s poem celebrated the positive experience of being lifted beyond the realm of ordinary life and suffering, Gertsog’s poem highlighted what was, for many of Nietzsche’s orphans, the clearest attribute that Rachmaninoff’s music contained: a mood of “pessimistic passion” (pessimisticheskaia strastnost’), “gloominess” (mrachnost’), “sadness” (grust’), and “melancholy” (toska).53 It was this attribute that proved to be particularly challenging to the more elite-­minded of Nietzsche’s orphans, who awaited music’s positive transformative power in contemporary life and who were troubled by the composer’s popularity among the “musical masses,” seeing in this a cheapening of musical metaphysics. Rather than educating an idealized narod, Rachmaninoff’s music was said to fulfill the basest desires of the unruly, uneducated, and lowbrow masses who increasingly filled the concert halls.54 Such disdain for Rachmaninoff’s popularity exposes how, while embracing an idealized image of the Russian narod as a simple receptor upon whom they would act to awaken (or reawaken) a genuinely Russian collective spirit and identity, Nietzsche’s orphans tended to fear the emergence of a growing middle-­brow audience determined to co-­opt musical meaning for their own ends.



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T H E R E J E C T E D O R P HE US

Despite the moral and metaphysical interpretations proffered by Nietzsche’s orphans, the concertgoing public in late imperial Russia often turned to music, not as a means of transforming or reunifying their world but as a way through which to express their own pressing fears and anxieties. Music, it was believed, offered a way for an individual voice to find expression in the midst of changing social and cultural realities. For many, the emotions that needed expression were negative rather than positive in nature: fear, anxiety, toska, and pessimism. Scriabin’s evocation of an ecstatic Mystery was seen by his disciples as a way to transcend the fears of contemporary life, and Medtner’s music sought to express an underlying transcendent reality. But neither composer resonated with society’s darker moods (nastroenie) so effectively as Rachmaninoff. In response to a survey asking students at the Moscow People’s Conservatory to specify those works or composers they particularly valued, Rachmaninoff (and never Scriabin or Medtner) was named as a composer with whom they were acquainted and whose music they enjoyed.55 Rather than raising questions about the suitability of their vision of music as a collective force, or helping to clarify which audiences they intended this music to reach, Nietzsche’s orphans often interpreted this popularity as proof that Rachmaninoff was unsuited for the mission of Orpheus. The audiences who cheered the composer’s creative triumphs, moreover, were seen not as representative of the narod but rather as the embodiment of the individualism, degeneration, and bourgeois culture of modernity against which the orphans were struggling. Despite her embrace and passionate defense of Rachmaninoff, Shaginian herself was uneasy about the pessimistic tendency she perceived in the composer’s music. She believed that the only true way to judge music was through “the character of its action on the listener.” She argued that if music served to “cleanse, organize, lift the soul . . . finally, to unite one with all humanity,” it was “real music, leading in the vanguard of the epoch.” In contrast, if music were to unleash “lowness, sensuality” and “degenerate and destroy the soul,” then “regardless of the original clothing in which such music is garbed, it is reactionary, false, [and] harmful.”56 Concerned about Rachmaninoff ’s penchant for dark emotions, which she feared exerted negative rather than positive influences on listeners, she repeatedly encouraged the composer to turn his energy toward expressing “bright” rather than “dark” feelings. Criticizing him for claiming that “bright tones do not come to me,” she accused him of being swayed by the opinion of contemporary critics such as Iurii Sakhnovskii, who described Rachmaninoff as a “singer of the awful and the tragic.”57

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Nor was this negative view limited to those critics who preferred Scriabin’s “modernist” musical aesthetic. Although he agreed to publish Shaginian’s philosophical account of Rachmaninoff, Emilii Medtner was openly critical of the composer’s potential claim to the role of Orpheus. Emilii argued in an article that appeared directly after Shaginian’s laudatory analysis that Rachmaninoff, though a “brilliant performer,” “was not Orpheus, leading Eurydice from the Kingdom of Shadows, but Antaeus, touching his mother earth, and gaining unheard-­of inspirational strength.”58 Antaeus, a half-­giant and the son of Poseidon and Gaia, gained his strength through immediate contact with his mother, the earth. With this metaphor Medtner suggested that, rather than being a true creator, Rachmaninoff was dependent upon the existing strength embodied in the musical works he performed. Medtner admired Rachmaninoff’s choice to emulate his own rejection of “stylish” attempts to “modernize” music and so access the “eternal” in music, but he insisted that the composer could not truly fulfill the difficult task of Orpheus.59 While acknowledging the composer’s unquestionable talent, he was doubtful about Rachmaninoff’s further development, a skepticism furthered by Shaginian’s attempts to bring Rachmaninoff closer to the Medtner circle and introduce him to the metaphysical implications of music. In December 1912 Emilii wrote an assessment of the composer’s future to Viacheslav Ivanov, arguing that “in Rachmaninoff there is clearly a painful crisis happening. He suddenly matured spiritually and is going somewhere (though as yet only in the realm of the performer), but unfortunately, this crisis is connected with some sort of strange life decline.”60 Basing his analysis of the shortcomings of Rachmaninoff ’s psyche upon the emergence of his own “ego” at age thirty, Emilii Medtner concluded that Rachmaninoff ’s inability to pull himself out of a personal crisis of gloom and depression meant that the composer had proven unable to move beyond the level of the individual to the level of genius. Such fears drew upon a larger discourse of the time. As Mark Steinberg has shown, discussions of the melancholic, pessimistic moods of contemporary life in St. Petersburg were ubiquitous in the press, mirroring a deep anxiety both about Russian society and the experience of modernity more generally.61 Critiques of the pessimistic nature of Rachmaninoff’s music show a similar concern about the current public mood (nastroenie), together with an underlying assumption that the true purpose of music should be to transform negative emotions into positive ones. Rachmaninoff ’s obsession with pessimism was, for many, embodied in his new orchestral work, The Isle of the Dead, whose 1909 world premiere coincided with his return to Russia after several years abroad.62 The Isle of the Dead ’s dark imagery and evocation of human life as a struggle against the inevitability of death influenced interpretations of Rachmaninoff’s



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Example 4.1. “Dies irae” (Day of wrath) opening motive, starting on C.

Example 4.2. Sergei Rachmaninoff, The Isle of the Dead, op. 29, oboe part, rhythmically altered quotation of “Dies irae” incipit (mm. 22–26). Adapted by author from original full orchestral score (Moscow: A. Gutheil, 1910).

musical style throughout the final years of the empire. The work was inspired by a black-­and-­white reproduction of the painting by Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin, depicting a white shrouded figure in a boat approaching a mysterious island.63 While the composer had previously incorporated the Latin “Dies irae” (Day of wrath) requiem chant into his compositions, this work showcased his first extensive use of its opening motif, a fact noted by contemporary critics.64 For Rachmaninoff, the opening motif of the chant seems to have held particular attraction; his reference to the chant in this work contains only the first four-­note sequence (the setting of the words “Dies irae,” ex. 4.1). The irregular rhythm at the opening (5/8) evokes the rocking of a boat rowing across the water toward the island, and the opening motif of the “Dies irae” chant is alluded to in the underlying harmonic structure. A more direct quotation, though rhythmically displaced, appears in the oboe in mm. 38–40, clarifying the source of the earlier melodic material (ex. 4.2). A second, contrasting section, which Rachmaninoff claimed to be symbolic of life in contrast to death, is shattered by the return of the “Dies irae” chant, this time in a straightforward citation in the clarinets that is echoed in other instruments (m. 387 and after): a remembrance that human existence is fleeting (ex. 4.3). The work ends as it begins, with the rocking 5/8 meter and an echo of the life motif, this time transposed into minor: an acknowledgment of the ultimate victory of death over life.

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Example 4.3. Sergei Rachmaninoff, The Isle of the Dead, reappearance of “Dies irae” (mm. 387–397). Adapted by author from original full orchestral score (Moscow: A. Gutheil, 1910).

The subject of this major new composition, together with the general mood that audiences identified in many of his other works, meant that pessimism and melancholy, rather than ecstasy and hope, came for many to represent the predominant mood (nastroenie) of Rachmaninoff’s works as a whole. While acknowledging the compositional skill behind The Isle of the Dead in a review for the newspaper Conversation (Rech’), Viktor Val’ter complained of its “gloominess” and the fact that it did not give way to joy, as in Beethoven’s greatest works.65 Iulii Engel heard in the work a transformation from the contemplative mood of Böcklin’s original painting to a “world of Dantean torment and gnashing of teeth.”66 While stressing the “deeply human” nature of the composer, Vasilii Iakovlev also found in Rachmaninoff ’s music the expression of “some kind of stern, ancient, incomprehensible vision [that] oppresses his individuality.”67 In the harsh assessment of Leonid Sabaneev, “the sphere of [Rachmaninoff’s] emotion” was the “tragic helplessness of man,” and his compositions were the “music of an intelligent whiner [intelligentnyi nytik].”68 More than just an expression of anxiety about the modern age, this embrace of pessimistic moods was widely seen as embedded in Russian identity itself. Nietzsche’s orphans had hoped that Rachmaninoff might help to reinvigorate Russian cultural life—in a 1909 review, Engel criticized the composer for having “abandoned the world” and the “development of national [rodnoi ] musical life” at too young an age, wondering rhetorically “how much good” the composer might do if he were to return to his homeland and devote himself to developing Russian music.69 The composer’s return to Russia in 1909, however, only sparked further debate over his relationship to Russian identity. In music critic Iurii Sakhnovskii’s view, Rachmaninoff was a “clear and unique representative of his own, Slavic race.”70 A predilection for darkness, characteristic of his compositional style throughout his life, also served as a marker of his “Slavic” identity. Most of his compositions drew on minor modalities (traditionally associated with melan-



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choly rather than optimistic moods), a tendency that contemporaries also identified in Russian folk music.71 Konstantin Eiges heard in Rachmaninoff the “consecration” to “a defined moment of existence” in the “life of the Russian soul.”72 Of course, not all critics found Rachmaninoff ’s Russian “pessimism” to be a negative attribute. In her own effort to justify Rachmaninoff’s “constant remembrance of the human,” Shaginian identified The Isle of the Dead as a “symbol of introduction into the spiritual ‘tragedy of death.’” In the “tormented ‘I do not wish’ that rends the music at the start of the symphony, and the quiet, passive traveling to the island” that brings about the quiet acceptance of God’s will, she identified what she considered to be Rachmaninoff’s characteristically Slavic employment of symbols.73 For Boris Tiuneev, the “thick colors of inconsolable grief and despair” that had first sounded in The Isle of the Dead were even more perfectly expressed in his 1913 work The Bells. “In the new poem, Rachmaninoff with particular strength sounds hopelessly pessimistic passion, impetuosity, and that heightened tragedy, which is peculiar to a great artist and the noble heart of true talent.”74 Nevertheless, the predominant sense among Nietzsche’s orphans was that this pessimistic emphasis needed to be transcended rather than strengthened. Rachmaninoff’s perceived “traditional” musical style was also problematic in relation to the question of temporality. Musical metaphysics in the form embraced by admirers of both Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner promised an escape or transcendence of the present. In contrast, for many Rachmaninoff’s works seemed incapable of temporal transcendence and lost in outlived ideals of the past. To K. A. Stel’, writing for Odessa’s Southern Musical Herald, “Rachmaninoff is entirely in the past, his ideals are not ahead [of us] but behind,” while Aleksandr Gorskii and Mnishek both concluded that Rachmaninoff’s music was a “momentary distraction” and that the composer was a “completer of the past” rather than a visionary of the future.75 It was in this light that Viacheslav Karatygin, an ardent supporter of Scriabin’s modernist compositional style (though not of his philosophy), dismissed Rachmaninoff as a musician who “entertain[s] us with experiences [perezhivaniiami] long outlived.”76 Comparing Medtner and Rachmaninoff, Karatygin concluded that although Medtner was “more reactionary” in his direction than Rachmaninoff, he nevertheless continued to “develop the marvelous legacies of the old masters,” whereas “Rachmaninoff only revives the dimming colors of Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein.”77 By failing to introduce sufficiently new musical sounds into his compositional language, these critics suggested, Rachmaninoff also failed to respond to the demands of contemporary reality. He was hopelessly trapped in the past, rather than presenting a path for Russia to follow to a transformed future.

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For other critics, Rachmaninoff ’s music was too accurate an expression of the aimlessness and horror of contemporary life. In the words of Sakhnovskii, every piano piece by Rachmaninoff depicted “a defined experience [perezhivanie] of the human soul.” Acknowledging that many of the moods (nastroenie) elicited by the composer carried a “clear stamp of pessimism,” Sakhnovskii claimed that this was in fact the fault of modern life rather than of the composer, arguing that “it is impossible to expect Mozartesque joy in life in the terrible epoch that we are living through.” Grigorii Prokof’ev reversed this causality in a 1910 article, suggesting that the “tempo of our spiritual life” and “fast change of societal moods” had stunted Rachmaninoff ’s compositional talent. In such a world, he suggested, the composer’s lyrical style, however valuable in and of itself, could not reach full fruition.78 Like so many of his contemporaries, Rachmaninoff was thus framed as a victim of modernity. Trapped in the present, remembering the past, and unable to envision the future, his music could only express those emotions and experiences felt by society as a whole. For those who acknowledged the existence of absolute truth (like the Medtners) or sought to overcome the limitations of contemporary existence (like Scriabin), Rachmaninoff’s evocation of dark moods and refusal to engage in philosophical discussion directly contradicted music’s moral calling to defend humanity from the impact of modernity.79 This lack of belief in progress toward a better future, combined with fear of entrapment in an inescapable present, gave rise to a cyclical image of temporality that was reinforced by the composer’s large-­scale compositions at this time, particularly The Isle of the Dead and The Bells. While The Isle of the Dead had focused explicitly on the symbolic moment of death as a unifying feature of all human life, The Bells (a choral symphony based on Bal’mont’s aforementioned translation of a poem by Poe), evoked different types of bells to depict the different stages of an individual’s life from birth to death. This four-­movement composition begins with the sound of silver sleigh bells (symbolizing birth and youth), followed by the golden bells of marriage, the bronze bells of fire alarm (symbolizing the destruction of individual hopes and aspirations over the course of life), and ultimately the iron funeral bell.80 Even the seemingly joyful wedding bells of the second movement contain a sorrowful motif, as an echo of the opening four notes from the “Dies irae” chant once again recur throughout the top voice of the second movement’s orchestral introduction, reminding listeners that even in the most joyful chapter, the inevitability of death lingers (ex. 4.4).81 Rather than overcoming contemporary life, both The Isle of the Dead and The Bells suggested the sense of “no exit” that worried many of Rachmaninoff’s contemporaries.82 Shaginian relished the “beautiful” moments of The Bells in the bright sounds of childhood that opened the work, but she was unable or un-



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Example 4.4. Sergei Rachmaninoff, The Bells, op. 35, movt. 2, mm. 22–26. Adapted by author from piano reduction by Aleksandr Gol’denveizer of original score (Moscow and Leipzig: A. Gutheil, 1920).

willing to accept the darker moments that followed. Emilii Medtner was even harsher, both in his behavior and assessment. To make a point, he rudely walked in partway through the 1914 premiere; and in a letter to Shaginian he denounced The Bells as “either a badly sewn scrap of motley elegant material or a blood-­ soaked rag, serving as a bandage for intimate or other wounds. [It is] the bad art of a great unsuccessful musician, the labor of a man without spine, a psychological atomist.”83 For the elder Medtner, the music had disappointed by its lack of depth and failure to create unity. He reflected that “it is unpleasant to hear elegant music, written by a spiritually deep composer who is not able to say anything essential, and telling of that which many others could speak of, that many much less deep [composers] could express even better, with more natural elegance.”84 While granting the composer status as “spiritually deep,” this was nevertheless a bitter condemnation of Rachmaninoff ’s creative production. What was perhaps most concerning for Rachmaninoff’s colleagues was not his status as a composer but what his music and popularity suggested about contemporary Russia. Sabaneev mused that it was Rachmaninoff’s wallowing in negative emotions that explained the “singular recognition” of his music among the “musical masses.” In Sabaneev’s mind, Rachmaninoff (like Tchaikovsky) com-

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posed music “deprived of the will of the subject, submerged in the reflexes of contemporary helplessness.” Late imperial Russians, he suggested, heard a reflection of their own will-­less approach to modern life in Rachmaninoff’s music. “There are many such [people] in Rus,’” concluded Sabaneev darkly.85 In this way Rachmaninoff’s music offered a unified image of the Slavic people, but it was one that centered on dark rather than optimistic emotions. Similarly, Georgii Konius observed that Rachmaninoff ’s music demonstrated a tendency toward minor modalities and “mystical gloominess” (misticheski-­mrachnyi).86 Reflecting on Rachmaninoff’s music in his diary, a young Igor Glebov (Boris Asaf’ev) observed that despite the composer’s talent, “an insufficient religious character, upbringing and intellectuality” led him “sometimes to vulgar toska (emotion without ideals, without thoughts), sometimes to false divisions (scholasticism, formalism, creative anguish),” concluding that while Rachmaninoff had a strong intuitive talent, he did not invest sufficient thought for its development.87 Criticism notwithstanding, Rachmaninoff ’s music clearly touched a nerve in contemporary Russian society, and attempts to defend the “Russian” spirit of his compositions coexisted alongside condemnation of the negative emotions awakened by his work. Echoing Shaginian’s assessment, the composer’s Russianness was linked with images of “humanity” and “health” by several critics. Comparing the musical style of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff in 1909, Iulii Engel claimed that Rachmaninoff’s music, though remaining “minor,” nevertheless “becomes healthier, simpler, more balanced,” while Scriabin’s compositions, while more “major,” also grew “more encumbered, more sickly refined.”88 In 1911 Vasilii Iakovlev cited Rachmaninoff’s “deeply human” voice in contrast to Scriabin.89 Ivan Lipaev seconded this interpretation in 1913, claiming that “in his music, Rachmaninoff contemplates more than he depicts,” a tendency in which he found evidence of the composer’s central focus on the “soul of humanity,” rather than searching for something beyond the human.90 Claiming that the division between secular and religious music was a result of “the alienation of the so-­called intelligentsia from the people, which is the first sin of our existence,” Iakovlev argued that it was only in the music of Rachmaninoff (particularly the Third Piano Concerto) that the first glimpses of overcoming this division could be found.91 Underpinning such claims was a half-­acknowledged anxiety regarding the potential chaos awaiting humanity should it transgress its human boundaries (as Scria­ bin’s supporters seemed to desire), and a lingering uncertainty about the greater significance of Rachmaninoff ’s music. It was unclear whether his future path would embrace the “healthy” emotions needed to overcome the ills of modern society, or whether he would simply continue to echo the anxiety of the time. Both these hopes and fears found expression in Shaginian’s reaction to The



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Bells. Emilii Medtner shared his own misgivings with her in a bitter quarrel over the work, and perhaps to belittle her affections, he encouraged her to publish yet another philosophical exegesis to further “create a ‘legend of Rachmaninoff’” if she wished, even offering to print it in his journal Works and Days. Shaginian refused, unable to muster an adequate defense of the work as an expression of music’s deeper unifying purpose. Rachmaninoff himself was certainly aware of her dissatisfaction; together with Anna, Nikolai, and Emilii Medtner, Shaginian pointedly left the premiere of The Bells without congratulating him, despite having been invited and provided with tickets by the composer.92 Her attempts to bring Rachmaninoff into the Medtner family circle similarly met, by and large, with mutual misunderstanding.93 Awakening the composer to his “true” calling proved more difficult than Shaginian had initially expected. T H E U N W I L L I N G O R P HE US

Within this web of contradictory interpretations and impressions, Rachmaninoff’s own interpretive voice was decidedly absent. While audience members and critics alternately found deep expressions of truth and hopeless despair expressed in his work, the composer himself was markedly unwilling to discuss his compositions within the philosophical context of the time. In 1910, pursuing his goal of initiating larger cultural discussions of contemporary Russian music, Emilii Medtner had asked the composer to suggest a critic who “knows and values your work,” a request dismissed by Rachmaninoff with the comment that “I do not know such a person.”94 When, at the request of Russian Musical Newspaper editor Nikolai Findeizen, Grigorii Prokof’ev approached the composer to discuss his musical inspiration, he similarly found that Rachmaninoff “politely and categorically refused to talk.”95 This unwillingness to directly participate in the contemporary discourse about music left Rachmaninoff’s works particularly open to interpretation and placed the composer partially outside the community of Nietzsche’s orphans. Much as his music fostered discourse, it was not a conversation in which he wished to participate.96 The composer’s unwillingness to engage in philosophical discussion limited the ability of contemporaries to grant positive symbolic import to his compositions. Rachmaninoff ’s response to Shaginian’s constant admonitions similarly demonstrated his ambivalence toward her expectations that his music would serve to redefine Russian life. In response to her concerns about his music’s sometimes overly pessimistic mood, Rachmaninoff countered that critics such as Sakhnovskii were perhaps more accurate in their opinion of him than an admirer such as Shaginian. He warned her that “you search for something in me

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that is not there, and want to see me as someone whom, I think, I can never be.”97 His response to her laudatory 1912 article in Works and Days was similarly ambivalent; while thanking Shaginian for her passionate words, he nevertheless insisted that she “exaggerated” his significance.98 In 1912 Emilii Medtner sent Rachmaninoff a copy of his newly published book, Modernism and Music, in an attempt to spread his own interpretation of contemporary culture. The composer’s response was limited to a brief note of thanks. In response to Shaginian’s recriminations against this evident lack of interest, Rachmaninoff’s response was short: “I do not like the book. From almost every line the shaved face of [Emilii] Medtner looms over me, as if to say: ‘Everything there that is said about music are trifles, and that is not the point. Most important is to look at me and be amazed at how “smart” I am.’”99 Closer acquaintance between Rachmaninoff and Nikolai Medtner similarly ended in mutual frustration; according to Shaginian, at a dinner where Nikolai had hoped for deep philosophical and compositional conversation, Rachmaninoff instead waxed eloquent on the correct manner of preparing Italian pasta.100 Despite such reactions, however, it seems apparent that on some level Rachmaninoff desired to be able to embrace the Orphic role that Shaginian sought to thrust upon him, at least by lifting his spirit (on occasion) in response to her concerns. In a letter from May 1912 he sought to adopt a brighter tone, writing on a “sunny, springlike evening,” setting a lamp to burn and shed light. Even here, though, Rachmaninoff ’s tone shifted into a decidedly pessimistic voice as he described all the things of which he was afraid. He wrote: “Teach me to believe in myself, dear Re! At least [teach me to believe] half as much as you believe in me.” At the same time he claimed that his “illness” (his lack of belief in himself ), first sparked by the failure of the First Symphony, “sits on me firmly, and develops ever deeper over time.” His personal fears occasionally pressed upon him so strongly that he considered “completely giving up composition,” becoming instead a “public pianist, conductor or estate owner.” He accused Shaginian of trying to force him to become that which she already had nearby: Nikolai Medtner. In Medtner, he claimed, all the character traits that Shaginian sought in him were already clearly developed: youth, health, vigor, and strength. Drawing directly upon the Orphic myth, he claimed that Medtner possessed “the weapon of a lyre in his hands.” In contrast, Rachmaninoff argued, “I myself am spiritually sick, dear Re, and consider myself weaponless and also quite old.”101 For Rachmaninoff, it was the spiritual sickness of modernity that he felt most strongly in himself. The transformative role of Orpheus, he insisted, would be best fulfilled by another.



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C O N C L US I O N

The discourse surrounding the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff highlights the contradictory positions held by Nietzsche’s orphans. While the composer’s genuine popularity among late imperial audiences might have suggested his ability to bridge the divide between their own narrow circle and broader society (a goal that would seem to correspond with their desire to overcome the gulf between educated society and the narod ), that very popularity was often interpreted as a symptom of a musical style that lacked genuine depth and seriousness: an expression of modernity rather than an elixir to combat it. Many of Nietzsche’s orphans were troubled by the Russian identity Rachmaninoff appeared to symbolize—rather than a triumphant transcending of modern problems, the “Russianness” in the key of Rachmaninoff resounded with the melancholy, pessimism, and decline that was rampant in contemporary society. Rather than providing a transformative “mystery” that would unite Russians, Rachmaninoff seemed to give voice to all the ills of modern life, including a “tragic” worldview and a musical narrative style trapped in temporal cyclicity. Instead of providing a bridge between cultural elites and the genuine Russian narod, Rachmaninoff’s music seemed to delight the dregs of urban society, the masses who embodied the sicknesses of the modern age. Continuing to seek an idealized narod, Nietzsche’s orphans rejected the emergence of a middling class of society who interpreted music within their own, individual experiences and worldviews rather than as part of an imagined (and idealized) collective. Such responses to the composer echoed the larger misgivings about modernity itself common among elite society. In contrast, for Rachmaninoff ’s supporters, it was his ability to express a genuinely human voice in the midst of contemporary decline that gave them hope for a better future. While both Scriabin and Medtner were held up as symbols of larger trends (Scriabin as embodying human spiritual progress and neo-­Slavophile communal impulses, Medtner as resurrecting faith in absolute values), Rachmaninoff provided voice and strength to the individual spirit, tossed about by the political, social, and cultural strains of modern life. For many Russians (disinterested in musical metaphysics), he was, quite simply, the composer whose music spoke to them most immediately. Although buffeted between these mutually antagonistic camps and unwilling to engage in the philosophical musings so dear to the surrounding ranks of Nietzsche’s orphans, Rachmaninoff could not escape from the Orphic visions that were thrust upon him. In the end, it was the worldview of musical metaphysics (rather than the composer’s creative intent) that shaped the elite philosophical reception of his work. The nervous

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equating of Rachmaninoff ’s “pessimism” with the contemporary mood of Russia demonstrated the deep concern Nietzsche’s orphans felt about the fate of their country in the modern age; at the same time, their monopolization of discourse exhibited a lingering fear of both modern life and of the growing presence of the “masses,” whose attendance at concerts was due in part to the orphans’ own educational efforts. Rachmaninoff and his music thus embodied a modern Russian identity that for many was itself deeply problematic—an issue that grew even more heated with the outbreak of war in 1914.

5

Musical Metaphysics in War and Revolution

In July 1914 Europe was suddenly engulfed in the fires of war—a cataclysm that both excited and terrified composer and self-­proclaimed visionary Fedor Akimenko. “The disgusting hydra of German militarism is once again feasting upon the saintly creations of world genius,” he warned. Because of Germany, “the entire world is almost engulfed in fire—a fire that is silent, in which thousands of innocent people perish, where the greatest memorials of art disappear from the face of the earth never to return.” While only yesterday “we were given the example of the great culture of Germans, their honesty, love of order, cleanliness, education,” the current conflict had uncovered instead a militaristic nemesis. “It seems as if,” he warned, “a gloomy demon has flown on the wind from the netherworld to the surface of the planet.”1 In Akimenko’s view, the hope for the future of Europe (and the world) now lay not with Germany but with the Slavic peoples, under the guidance of Holy Rus. For Russia’s educated society, the outbreak of hostilities seemed to mark the end of one historical epoch and the start of a new one.2 Nietzsche’s orphans initially joined the fervent patriotic spirit that galvanized all levels of Russian society, hailing the war for its perceived cleansing, purifying, and unifying effect. Military conflict took on a mystical meaning, in which music, viewed as the immediate expression of the spirit of the nation, was to perform a leading role. The transformative “mystery” that would enable a transcendence of calendar time through both military and spiritual victory was breathlessly awaited by many of these fiery idealists. The problem of defining Russia’s place in the modern world seemed close to solution: it would be the holy task of Russia to “free the peoples of Europe” from the individualism and materialism of the modern age (both physically and spiritually) through the inherently spiritual nature of the “God-­

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bearers”—the Russian narod. Within this growing nationalist rhetoric, Russian military victory was inextricably linked with the embrace of Russia’s imagined messianic mission. What had previously been symbolic now seemed about to become manifest, and battle against Akimenko’s specter was enthusiastically embraced by his fellow orphans. Such visions were not to be fulfilled. Despite this conjunction of social expectation and nationalist bombast, the strain of war ultimately rendered each presumptive musical Orpheus’s form of unity obsolete, as each composer proved unable to fulfill the cherished hopes of his most prominent disciples. Aleksandr Scriabin died unexpectedly in April 1915, seemingly at the height of his creative abilities. Efforts to transform his legacy from “universalist” to “pan-­Slavist” foundered on the rocks of internal divisions among his admirers. Wartime nationalism likewise offered little space for the unifying role followers had sought in Sergei Rachmaninoff. Although the premiere of his All-­Night Vigil (Vsenoshnoe bdenie) coincided with increased rhetoric connecting “Russian” and “Orthodox” identities with the victorious path of Holy Rus, the pessimistic tones of his music, together with his own self-­doubts, failed to satisfy expectations of a mystery that would unify the Russian people in their battle against Germany. It was Nikolai Medtner, however, who arguably suffered the greatest loss of Orphic mission. The most “German” of these Orphic figures, he felt his creative potential paralyzed by anti-­German sentiment and suffered increasing alienation from even his closest friends. Conflicting (and increasingly exclusive) understandings of Russian nationalism isolated each composer both from his former supporters and from the German heritage upon which Russia’s musical metaphysics was based. As Leonid Sabaneev later reflected, it was the outbreak of war in 1914, long before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, that overwhelmed the late imperial world he had known, shattering the transcendent musical interpretation of the world he and his colleagues had so carefully constructed in previous years.3 Although the Great War initially plunged Russia into struggle with the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire, popular sentiment quickly centered upon Germany as the enemy. The popular press repeatedly described “German bestiality” and “German dominance,” uncovering the latter in a wide range of spheres, from economic to political to musical.4 Popular resentment of German success in farming, trade, and sales found expression in waves of violence perpetrated against German citizens living in Russia, Russian citizens of German descent, and anyone with suspected German heritage.5 Together with several German businesses, the German embassy in Petrograd fell victim to popular violence with the outbreak of war. Such frenzies of destruction were repeated at intervals, both on the home front and in the borderlands, culminating in the May



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1915 riots in Moscow, in which many German businesses were plundered, several people murdered, and state authority broke down for a period of days. This incident had a direct and immediate effect on musical circles; the Moscow headquarters of the music publishers Jurgenson and Gutheil were among those businesses targeted, persuading Anton Gutheil to sell his business to Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Publishing House and leave the country.6 Under pressure from the army leadership as well as popular sentiment, the Russian government gradually repressed the rights of German citizens and Russians of German descent, confiscating their property, forcing resettlement of entire communities, and eliminating their legal rights.7 For Nietzsche’s orphans, the anti-­German sentiment conflicted with a lengthy tradition of admiration and borrowing from the German intellectual and cultural tradition, shaking the very foundations of their worldview. To be Russian increasingly meant to not be German. Finding themselves embroiled in a political and military conflict along broadly national lines, Nietzsche’s orphans were caught between their selective embrace of German culture and their advocacy of a distinctively Russian identity. Feeling betrayed by the country whose cultural and intellectual achievements they had so admired, they struggled to reconcile their own cultural and intellectual heritage with the current military conflict. To be sure, Nietzschean phrasing continued to appear in the press: the war, it was argued, had “created great upheavals and calls forth a revaluation of values, a revaluation both in the material world and the spiritual world.”8 However, such adoption of Nietzschean slogans sat uneasily with a population poised to reject the entire cultural heritage of the enemy. Countless public lectures, journal and newspaper articles, and public opinion polls addressed Russia’s relationship to German cultural and philosophical creativity. Debates about the degree to which Russia could lay claim to German cultural traditions were particularly troublesome in the philosophical and musical realms, so much indebted to the Germanic heritage. While debates often focused on the musical and philosophical legacies of Nietzsche and Wagner, the role of Russian composers and musicians also figured prominently in this world of increasing national antagonism.9 This initial problem of reconciling German culture with dreams for Russia’s future was soon compounded by Russia’s military defeats in East Prussia only months after the outbreak of war. Initial optimism flagged, material conditions worsened, and increasing nationalist sentiment further confused the basis for a unified society and rent asunder the symbiotic relationship between German and Russian heritage that had underpinned musical metaphysics. Unable to provide a unifying foundation in this increasingly centrifugal world that was moving

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from war to revolution, the metaphysical concept of music’s unifying power was deemed a failure. No musical Orpheus would appear to save Russia in this time of distress. Drawing together the individual biographies of Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Nikolai Medtner with the surrounding social and intellectual climate, this chap­ ter examines the cumulative impact of the Great War and the February 1917 Revolution on musical metaphysics. It begins with an examination of the wartime rhetoric surrounding “German” and “Russian” cultures, as well as the role envisioned for music and musicians within this transformed space. Musical metaphysics shifted to incorporate a three-­fold framework for an increasingly exclusionary nationalistic interpretation of the war: differentiation between acceptable and unacceptable forms of cultural heritage (“German” versus “Prussian”); delineation of Russia’s salvific role in the current crisis (Russia’s “holy war”); and, finally, increased emphasis on the ethnic Russianness of musician-­ artists as a means of determining loyalty. Despite initial optimism and the mystical interpretations of Russia’s salvific role in the war, the realities of military conflict increasingly strained belief in music’s ability to transform society. The later sections of this chapter examine similar processes of reinterpretation and disillusionment that surrounded each composer, as formerly ardent supporters voiced growing skepticism over both the music and the personal path of their idols. One by one, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner were perceived to have failed to create unity in an empire ever more fanatically national. By the February 1917 Revolution, the search for unity had already moved in new directions that bypassed the unifying potential of each would-­be Orpheus. In this sense, rather than the end of an epoch, as exponents of musical metaphysics later claimed, 1914 inaugurated an intensification of discourse that increasingly exposed the inherent contradictions of this worldview. Disunity rather than unity was the wartime heritage of Nietzsche’s orphans. R E I N T E R P R E T I N G M US I C A L M ETA P H Y S I C S : G E R M A N Y V E RSUS P RUSS I A

“I am convinced,” argued philosopher Vladimir Ern at the November 1914 gathering of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society at Margarita Morozova’s house, “that the internal expression [transkriptsiia] of the German spirit in the philosophy of Kant naturally and fatally converges with the external expression of the same German spirit in the cannons of Krupp.”10 Given that Ern was a regular attendee of Morozova’s evening salons and a member of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society since 1906, his bitter attempt to draw a direct



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connection between the philosophical ideas of Kant and Germany’s current militarism penetrated to the very heart of the issues confronting his contemporaries: Should they retain the largely German intellectual genealogy upon which they had constructed their worldview, or should they partake in the growing nationalist, anti-­German sentiment by rejecting the ideas and the musical creations that had heretofore inspired them? Could they retain a patriotic Russian identity while embracing “foreign” German cultural products, or did patriotism require the rejection of all things German? Harshly rejecting Ern’s totalizing claim, many of his contemporaries sought a middle ground in which rejection of contemporary Germany did not imply a full rejection of all ideas and institutions associated with it. Simon Frank suggested in response to Ern that Russians had to differentiate between the German “genius” of the past and current hostile relations.11 A common solution through which this was achieved was the explicit contrasting of modern-­day “Prussia” with the sublime cultural heritage of “Germany,” a delineation with origins in the writings of Vladimir Solov’ev, but which took on new urgency in the wartime context.12 It was claimed that Prussian belligerence was of recent origin, which should be distinguished clearly from the great (and universal) achievements of past German culture. Whereas the latter could continue to serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary Russia, the former deserved only hatred. Perhaps regretting his journal’s prior coverage of “new” German music, Vladimir Derzhanovskii, the editor of Music, claimed that “only several decades ago [Prussia] transformed [Germany] into a spiritual desert, on the soil of which had grown the false empty blossoms of Strauss and Reger.”13 He declared it the duty of all true Russian artists to preserve the great German humanist traditions of the past, while struggling against the materialistic, warlike culture of modern-­day Germany. For Moscow music critic Iurii Shamurin, Prussia was a “spiritual desert” that had no art, song, religion, or ideas; in short, nothing but brute strength.14 He contrasted this image with “old Germany,” a “people of musicians, philosophers and poets.”15 Aleksandr Konstantinovich Gorskii, professor of theology at the Odessa Theological Seminary, highlighted the spiritual bankruptcy of contemporary Germany (i.e., Prussia), tracing a direct line from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s rejection of God to the present conflict.16 Nor was this discourse limited to musicians: Petr Struve similarly sought to distinguish between the “old Germany” of “Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte and Schelling” and the “creators of the 1914 war.”17 In all these cases, the rhetorical thrust was the same: through separating “cultural” Germany from the present-­day military opponent, the values of the past could be preserved while embracing Russian patriotism for the war.

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Moreover, the sickness of “Prussianism” served as a shorthand for the values and practices of modernity itself. Shamurin argued that it was not Germany alone that had fashioned “Prussia,” but that “all peoples spiritually created [Prussia].”18 While Prussia was, in Shamurin’s view, the birthplace of contemporary decay, all people and nations were equally guilty of adopting a Prussian worldview in their own lives and societies. For this reason, “in destroying Prussia, people will destroy a shameful page of their own past”: the development of materialism, individualism, capitalism, rude strength, and “all the evils and devilishness of our century.”19 This connection of Prussia with the evils of modernity found widespread acceptance: in October 1914 Sergei Bulgakov claimed to his fellow intellectuals gathered at Morozova’s salon that contemporary Germany was the most modern nation in this sense, while in a 1916 analysis dedicated to the expression of Germanness in music, Gorskii claimed that Prussia’s desire for military dominance was simply the expression of all nations in the current age.20 Thus, the problem of Prussia was viewed not merely as a military conflict but also as a confrontation with the darker forces of modernity itself, which all peoples, including Russians, were in danger of adopting. “Prussianism” was not merely a German but a universal and specifically modern concern. In contrast to “Prussia,” “Germany” symbolized a lost world of culture that had once inspired the greatest products of human creativity, and that still held potential inspiration for Russia’s spiritual mission in the current crisis. “Germany” was the world of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe, and Kant, a world to which Russian intellectuals and artists could continue to turn for inspiration, thereby differentiating themselves from their “Prussian” opponents. “The tragedy of the German nation,” argued composer Fedor Akimenko, “is that its best representatives, especially in the highest expressions of Art, served their great service, however strange it may be, more to other nations and least of all touched the Teutons.”21 The German people had proven deaf to the great humanistic message expressed by its past geniuses, and the task of correct interpretation had fallen to other nations, particularly Russia. Such views found broad expression in the general press, as in a letter from an anonymous writer in February 1915 to the newspaper Moscow Bulletin, which argued that Germany had forgotten its teaching of humanism and human rights and that their defense had fallen to Russia.22 Of course not all contemporaries adopted this approach. Bulgakov admitted in his correspondence with Emilii Medtner to a certain Germanophobia that extended not just to the current political situation but to German culture as a whole.23 Similarly, the writer Elena Koltonovskaia insisted that “in Germany no division or duality is observable. She is singularly and entirely militaristic.”24 In relation to music specifically, a certain L. I-­ov argued that all German cultural



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products should be avoided, as, in addition to the personality of their creator, the spirit of the German narod, against which Russia now fought, was inherently present in each work. This German culture was alleged to be “organically opposed to ours, opposed to our moral ideal as it developed over a thousand years.”25 Since the current battle was truly about “the place of the two races in the history of humanity and culture,” it was not military strength but rather the internal life of each narod that would decide the outcome of the war. In such a context, the author argued (building upon well-­established ideas about music’s immediate impact on listeners), hearing enemy music would make the listener take on foreign traits, thus betraying the cause of the Russian narod.26 Other public intellectuals sought to emphasize the lengthy tradition of anti-­German critique that was to be found in Russian “prophets” of the past, drawing particularly on Vladimir Solov’ev and Nikolai Fedorov.27 While such distinctions showed an important division in the way these thinkers conceived of “national spirit” (as something inherent and eternal or as part of a great historical process of development), both sides converged in their interpretation of the role that Russia was to play in the emerging conflict. Regardless of Germany’s past, Russia’s future task was clear: the overcoming of the divisive, modern spirit and the creation of a new, collective society. With the outbreak of war, images of the expected “mystery” that would transform society blurred with hopes for Russian military victory. This gave rise to the concept of a “holy war” (sviataia voina) against Germany, a spiritual struggle through which the modern world would be saved from its current downward spiral through the salvific grace of Russian culture.28 RUSS I A’ S “ HO LY WA R” : T H E M Y ST E RY NAT I O NA L I Z E D

While it was feared that the modern age had ushered in nothing but destruction and division, a new path seemed to open before Nietzsche’s orphans with the outbreak of war in 1914—the path toward a Europe transformed by Russian culture and spirituality. In order to truly defeat the contemporary plague of “Prussianism,” it was believed that Russia must not only gain military victory but also transform the spiritual basis of the world itself.29 The war was repeatedly lauded as a “holy war” by many commentators, who envisioned Russia in the role of Christ and cast Prussia in the figure of the Antichrist.30 Iurii Shamurin compared Russia’s mission with Christ’s crucifixion and envisioned the “birth of a new humanity, of a new life, of which it was impossible to even think before,” through Russian victory over German forces—accomplishments that, he suggested to readers of Music, were mysteriously connected with music.31 Through

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Slavic intervention (led by Russia), he predicted, “all [people] will become brothers. Never before on the earth has such a flame of love and communality burned.” By “throwing off its petty concerns,” all humanity would emerge from the battle “united and wonderful!”32 Adopting both Russian symbolist and Nietzschean terminology, Abraham Koral’nik similarly argued that “the life-­creating (zhivotvornoi) idea” did not exist in contemporary German culture, which possessed instead “only ‘Aleksandrianism,’ the repetition of old and foreign motifs.”33 He claimed that the contemporary German soul was old and beyond the ability to creatively transform the world. Russia, in contrast, possessed a vibrant young soul full of promise. This image of an “old Germany” in contrast to a “young Russia” was adopted by many commentators of the day, justifying the claim that Russia would emerge as the spiritual leader of Europe. This variant of Russian messianism found widespread support within the aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans.34 Morozova dedicated the October 1914 meeting of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society to discussion of the “most contemporary and passionate themes,” namely Russia’s wartime mission.35 Combining his earlier vision of imperial Russian identity with Russian messianic hopes, Evgenii Trubetskoi delivered a paper at the meeting embracing the war and arguing that the Russian people were not fighting for their own national benefit but for a “higher moral and religious task.” Russia’s distinctive relation to Christianity gave hope for the transformation of the world, a “Christian resolution of the national question,” a task once envisioned by Solov’ev and now on the verge of being realized through Russian victory.36 Trubetskoi’s emphasis on Russia’s spiritual mission was passionately supported by Morozova, who insisted that “now is the true moment for your and for our shared ideas! . . . It is so important and so joyful that the authority of contemporary Germanism has been destroyed! . . . It is wonderful to raise the banner of genuine true religious Russian culture.”37 Variants of Russia’s universal Christian mission (which provided the guiding thread for Morozova’s cultural activities throughout the war) were framed both in ostensibly liberal terms mirroring those of Trubetskoi and in more openly Slavophile interpretations. In an interview with the daily paper Voice of Moscow, Viacheslav Ivanov argued, “I think that this war in its essence is a holy and freeing war, and I consider it a great blessing,” because of the awakening of the “universal” and salvific mission of Russia that he envisioned resulting from the conflict taking place in the “spiritual” as well as the material realm.38 In his paper “The Spiritual Meaning of the War” (“Dukhovnaia smysl voiny”) presented at the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society, Ivan Il’in similarly framed the conflict in spiritual terms, arguing that “Germany comes to us despising our spiritual strength; it comes to forcibly impose the stamp of its



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own culture upon us without differentiating its sick and healthy parts; it comes to cut off living members of our spiritual Slavic unity from us; it comes to turn us into its marketplace.” Russia’s task, he concluded was that all “foreigners” must be shown the “spiritual independence” and “spiritual depth” of Russia.”39 At the same time that there was general agreement over Russia’s salvific role, however, conflicting interpretations of Russian identity sparked new divisions among Nietzsche’s orphans. Particularly telling was a disagreement over Russian nationalism that cast an ominous shadow over the passionate devotion between Morozova and Trubetskoi.40 Frustrated by her beloved’s extended absence from Moscow with his wife and children, she warmly described an evening gathering of many of the members of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society, who met with St. Petersburg–­based politician and intellectual Petr Struve at Morozova’s salon.41 On this occasion Struve’s recently discovered support for the government and his claim that “nationalism can only be justified on a religious basis” were met with universal approbation. “I was so inspired and joyfully disturbed by these impressions that I could not sleep all night,” Morozova wrote to Trubetskoi, concluding that “I think that we have to do everything possible to resurrect consciousness of the idea of Holy Rus’ in society.” Sensing the potential philosophical objections of her beloved, whose entire philosophical and political career had been devoted to overcoming the scourge of “narrow nationalism,” she argued that “insofar as [Russian nationalism] is a religious ideal, there is no danger of German nationalism here. . . . let each in his own sphere base himself on religion and connect everything with it. . . . I want to voice my love and adoration toward Russia without any [rational] judgment, and, by the way, we all agreed not on the equal rights of all peoples [narodov], but on the uncovering of the treasure and saintliness of our national [narodnaia] soul!”42 Trubetskoi was angered both by her seemingly willful misunderstanding of his own rejection of “narrow nationalism” and by what he considered the compensatory expression of exclusivist national sentiment by those he ironically dubbed “Russian Germans” and “German professors” (namely Struve, Il’in, and Ern), who, he argued, adopted excessively nationalistic views because they perceived their own place as citizens of the Russian Empire to be threatened by their non–­ethnic Russian background. “When I am not around,” he complained, “Russian national feeling rules the circle of your German professors with full companionable agreement, which I alone disturb with sharp dissonance.”43 After regaining his composure, Trubetskoi chided Morozova for her failure to understand the need for an imperial Russian rather than national Russian identity. “Let every nationality be blessed and great to us,” he insisted, adding that “nationalism demands that we should love only our own nationality, and attempts to reconcile this with

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the words of Christ are sheer insanity.”44 However, his words failed to convince Morozova, who objected in subsequent months that Trubetskoi had abandoned “that great work that you might have done for all Russian spiritual life” by accepting a mere political post.45 She called on him to abandon both his political activities and philosophical writing in order to immerse himself in the study of “ancient Rus,’” arguing that “your philosophy might give something new, concrete and national! It is so important, so needed! . . . Our poor Russia, it does not have strong-­willed people, only drunkards or people staggering about!”46 Despite the division between a “universal” image of Russia’s salvific role expressed by such figures as Trubetskoi and a more narrowly “Slavophile” image embraced by others such as Morozova, the underlying distinction between these differing forms of Russian identity had little impact in the overall analysis of the war and Russia’s role within it. Whether Russia was destined to be the savior of humanity because of its innate national characteristics or because historical circumstances had led to its present cultural identity, Nietzsche’s orphans agreed that victory in this “holy war” could be gained by Russia alone. Caught up in the spirit of the time, Trubetskoi in fact welcomed the outbreak of war in 1914, claiming that “Holy Rus’ is awakening” to its task to “free the nations,” fulfilling the “truth of God” through victory over the militaristic strains of Germany: strains that he argued were musically captured in the song “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!”47 Despite his critique of “ancient Rus” spirituality, Trubetskoi voiced the wish to undertake a pilgrimage to Lake Svetloyar, site of the legendary miracle of Kitezh, in order to inspire his philosophical talks and writings in the midst of war.48 The emphasis on Russia’s “holy war” served, more and more explicitly, to push toward an exclusive rather than inclusive image of Russianness. This process, which reverberated in cultural and artistic life, transformed music itself into a battlefield in which the Russian spirit was fated to triumph over the German enemy. M US I C A N D WA R

Within this tense atmosphere, in January 1915 the Moscow journal Music unveiled a new logo designed by Russian-­Lithuanian artist and former World of Art (Mir iskusstva) member Mstislav Dobuzhinskii: a lyre framed an upright sword, itself forming the shape of a cross (fig. 5.1). In this symbolic representation emblazoned upon one of Moscow’s most prominent music periodicals, the Orphic lyre, the sword of war, and the Christian cross melded in a single unity, eliding the task of Orpheus with the “holy war” of Russia. Music, Nietzsche’s orphans believed, expressed with particular clarity both the decline of German domi-

Figure 5.1. Cover image, Muzyka (1915). Design by Mstislav Dobuzhinskii. Courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland.

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nance and the birth of a new era, shaped by Russian creativity.49 While it continued to be alleged that Germany’s deterioration was embodied in the music of Max Reger and Richard Strauss, more striking was the troubled fate of both Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose creative output was subjected to increased scrutiny.50 Evgenii Trubetskoi framed the music of Wagner, particularly The Ring of the Nibelung, as an allegorical embodiment of “Prussianism,” and Vladimir Solov’ev’s metaphorical adoption of the character Siegfried as a symbol of contemporary Germany was revived for rhetorical effect in many musical commentaries.51 Nor was such rhetoric limited to lofty, spiritual concerns. Anatolii Kankarovich argued that Germany had lost not merely economically but also musically from the impacts of the war; in his view, the summer Wagner festival in Bayreuth had been cancelled because it operated primarily on Russian money. Moreover, he argued, most concert halls, music stores, and publishers in Germany had suffered, since Russians had formed the most supportive market.52 Underpinning such claims was the assumption that only Russians truly appreciated the spiritual importance of arts such as music, an importance lost on the Germans. While Nietzsche, like Wagner, was now a problematic source of influence, in the early days of the war many members of Russia’s musical community continued to emphasize music’s unifying, Dionysian potential: a power that melded well with Russia’s messianic, universalist pretensions. Thus, literary critic Nikolai Nikolaevich Fatov insisted passionately on the pages of the Russian Musical Newspaper, “we must not forget the final goals of this war. It must bring us closer to the future brotherhood of nations [narody], and not to their division. We must destroy everything that interferes with that brotherhood, that disunites peoples, and all the more must we value that which enables unification. And truly is there anything that might unite people more than the fruits of spiritual culture, philosophical ideas, scientific discoveries, creations of art?”53 In 1915 the editor of the newly founded Odessa-­based Southern Musical Herald announced that his paper was devoted to reuniting the “connections between cultured peoples” at a time when the entire world, shaken by the events of the war, seemed to have lost all unifying threads.54 Rather than focusing on the unification of people of various nations, the Petrograd-­based journal Musical Contemporary, also founded during the war, emphasized the role of music in overcoming the societal divisions within Russia itself, which, argued the editor, had become ever more pronounced.55 Underlying such arguments was the assumption that music, as the most widespread of arts, was an expression of “universal human genius, universal spirit,” a claim in keeping with the universalizing discourse of musical metaphysics developed in the prewar era.



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However, such espousal of music as a positive, unifying force coincided with an ever more nationalistic interpretation of its fulfillment, such that the distinction between exclusionary Russian nationalism and Russia’s claimed universal character often blurred. In a 1913 series of articles dedicated to outlining the “national particularities of Russian music,” Iurii Kurdiumov argued that it was impossible for anyone to love “Russians, Germans, and Tatars” equally, just as it was human nature to love one’s homeland (and, by extension, the art of that homeland) more. For this reason, a “universal” art was possible only upon a national basis.56 Russian composers, argued Kurdiumov, would, by their very nature, write specifically Russian music, so long as they deeply loved their country and shared its dreams, beliefs, joys, and griefs.57 Similarly, several authors sorrowfully observed that although music in Russia “currently occupies one of the first places [in the development of Russian culture], both in the range of its development, and in its content,” most works performed were of foreign origin.58 As the war progressed, musical Russianness was increasingly measured in ethnic terms. In correspondence with other boycotts of German products, by early 1915 public discussion turned to the question of banning German music from Russian concerts. Addressing this issue, the newspaper Footlights and Life (Rampa i zhizn’) posed two questions to its reading public: Would a ban on musical works of the nations battling against Russia be appropriate? If so, would such a ban harm the development of Russian music? While posing the issue as a question up for discussion, journalist M. Unigovskii made no secret of his own views, arguing that “in Rus’ we have enough of our own great purely Russian composers. . . . when we are freed from the influence of the Germans, Wagners and Beethovens in the Russian spirit will appear among us.”59 The published responses covered the full spectrum of opinions, but a general (if unofficial) boycott of German music was ultimately observed.60 German and Austrian musicians performing in Russia were replaced by musicians from “friendly” nations such as Poland and France, and in some cases German and Austrian musicians were expelled or arrested.61 Perhaps the most dramatic reversal came from Leonid Sabaneev, Scriabin’s erstwhile disciple. Despite his dismissal of exclusivist nationalist interpretations of musical creativity before the war, by December 1914 he had embraced Russian messianism, concluding that the outbreak of war and militarization of German society had been prophesied in Wagner’s music and found further development in the music of Strauss, Reger, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg. “Now after the war has started, I understand,” concluded Sabaneev with the air of one to whom true wisdom has at last been imparted. “The psychology of Germans has already moved so far from our general cultural psychology, [it has made] such a

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leap toward bestiality of feeling and bestialization of thought” that “the Germany of Schiller and Beethoven” was lost forever. Embracing the same rhetoric of decadence often employed against his idol Scriabin, Sabaneev discovered a newfound love for the great musical works of past geniuses (both German and Russian) and attacked the “cultural atavism” and “moral dead end” that contemporary Germany’s “materialistic culture” exhibited.62 In a second article published in 1915, he concluded (in tones that echoed the Pan-­Slavic pretensions of his archrival and fellow Scriabinist Aleksandr Brianchaninov) that it was the task of Russia to assume musical hegemony in Europe: “Slavic musical culture can now stand on its own—it is strong and independent. . . . it has combined an unendingly great delicacy of experience and sensation, an unendingly greater range of expression with the depth of the German spirit. . . . the old, outlived culture must now bow before the new young and mighty culture of Slavicdom.”63 Even this former “universalist” now breathlessly awaited a genius of specifically Slavic origin. Though distant from Moscow, in 1915 theological professor Aleksandr Gorskii further developed Sabaneev’s interpretation with all its internal contradictions.64 Like Sabaneev, Gorskii concluded that Nietzsche and Wagner held the key to understanding the German enemy. Wagner’s creation of Siegfried, he argued, had united Germans into a single, militaristic whole.65 Wagner had been the first to see that the “bright hopes for a wonderful, indefinably distant future” were doomed to failure due to the lack of “immediate general-­human actions in the present,” an analysis expressed symbolically by the death of the gods in Wagner’s Ring cycle. In contrast, Wagner’s Parsifal was not an “embodiment of the German spirit, like Siegfried, but only a shadowy projection. . . . the final mystery of Wagner is a dying mumble.” Caught between the two visions of the future Wagner had embodied in these works, Germany was left with only two options: “to suffer and die quickly or to suffer and die slowly.”66 The path of war reflected Germany’s embrace of the hero Siegfried, the same path that Nietzsche had prophesied in his later writings.67 However, Gorskii darkly reminded his readers, Siegfried had not been able to forestall the destruction of Valhalla and the death of the gods. While all nations were striving toward “all-­human, all-­ general confluence,” each nation offered a different basis upon which such unification would take place.68 Gorskii’s analysis left no doubt over the form unity would take under German domination. Such arguments aligned well with the Slavophile image embraced by philosophers such as Vladimir Ern, who identified the eternal oppressor and the salvation of all humanity in the innate natures of, respectively, the German and Russian narod. Nevertheless, Gorskii was far too committed to musical metaphysics to con-



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demn Nietzsche and Wagner to complete infamy. Echoing Sergei Durylin’s 1913 assessment, Gorskii contradictorily insisted that Wagner was never “truly German” and that the symbolic import of Parsifal held a second “hidden liturgy” in addition to the pessimism and embrace of death recognized by Nietzsche. This gnostic message, encrypted in Parsifal itself (as well as, Gorskii suggested, the thought of Nietzsche), could only be comprehended by the Russian narod. Through Russia, “humanity might be saved and might save the whole world.”69 Only a Russian could free music from “German dominance” and thereby simultaneously free all humanity from the militaristic path of the German narod. Most striking in Gorskii’s analysis was not what was said, but the underlying categories through which he interpreted the significance of music. Although he demonized Nietzsche as the “true” Siegfried, the figure who had led Germany on its militaristic path through his concept of the “will to power,” Gorskii continued to use Nietzschean categories in his conception of music. Music remained the irrational, elemental, unifying force envisioned in The Birth of Tragedy, able to regenerate human society and save it from the divisions of modern life.70 At the same time, confronted by the increasingly virulent expressions of exclusionary nationalism, Gorskii found himself in an unresolvable conundrum. The Russian and German intellectual traditions, which had melded in the formation of the musical metaphysics of early twentieth-­century Russia, were unable to resolve the contradictions wrought by the physical manifestation of violent warfare. Growing nationalist sentiment offered a potential solution, but this seemed to require the abandonment of the irrational musical conception of reality which had dominated late imperial discourse owing to its non-­Russian (and partially German) origins. This was the contradiction that Nietzsche’s orphans faced throughout the war. While the need for a unifying genius grew ever stronger, and the emphasis on the ethnic identity of artists increased, the definition of “Russian” musical style remained hazy. In a 1913 attempt to define a genuinely Russian music, Iurii Kurdiumov fell back on vague claims about organic wholeness: “in questions of art, including music, there are no exact criteria. . . . anyone who does not feel that the primary theme of Borodin is purely Russian cannot be helped by any kind of judgment.”71 Gorskii’s idea of a “hidden liturgy” contained in Wagner’s music framed the question around a shared communal spirit among the Russian narod rather than in terms of specific compositional techniques. However, the idea of a single, unified narod had itself been increasingly questioned in the years leading up to the war. While Shamurin continued the familiar claim that Russia’s Christian mission was led by the narod,72 other commentators, such as Evgenii Trubetskoi, argued that the spirit of the narod had to be “resurrected.”73 This im-

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plicitly suggested that the Russian narod itself had fallen prey to the disunifying and secular trends dominant in modern life, an idea that had been voiced in the musical context also. New genres of folk music such as the chastushki had, in the years before the war, been targeted as an example of the spread of urban and modern values into the Russian countryside, symbolizing the disunifying and secular trends dominant in contemporary life.74 Instead of referencing recent folk song in defining the genuine character of the narod, commentators instead tended to emphasize the internal, spiritual expression of Russian sentiment. The inability to specifically delineate the sound of genuinely “Russian” music in the modern age, however, made it simpler to rely on external markers such as ethnicity and language in defining the Russianness of a musician. Such a definition clearly excluded Nikolai Medtner from the ranks of Orphic candidates. But, given the exaggerated expectations that elided musical creativity with Russian military victory and spiritual transformation, it is scarcely surprising that no composer proved adequate to the task. Perhaps more startling, however, was the faltering of belief expressed by those who had once been the most ardent admirers. The strains of war separated all three potential Orphic figures from their disciples; it left many of Nietzsche’s orphans adrift and seeking new purpose. NAT I O NA L I S M A N D T H E D E AT H O F O R P HE US

The answer to much in Scriabin’s life and in his creative tragedy lies in Satanism. —Leonid Sabaneev, 1916

It is impossible to pinpoint the moment when the first shadows began to darken Sabaneev’s passionate devotion to his Orphic savior. During a visit to the Medtner family in March 1914, Emilii Medtner was intrigued that his typical attack on Scriabinism “as a violation of spirit” failed to trigger the usual response from Sabaneev. Gleefully celebrating his apparent victory over a former opponent, Emilii concluded in a letter to Marietta Shaginian that “Sabaneev apparently begins to be disappointed in Scriabin and betrayed him the entire time. . . . He said that the Mystery will never be created, that Scriabin writes bad verses, that Scriabin has [lost?] his talent, that Scriabin is primitive and schematic in architectonics.”75 Whether or not one accepts Emilii’s claims of victory at face value, after the outbreak of war, Sabaneev’s once daily visits to Scriabin’s house ended, as work and the events of daily life distanced him psychologically from the composer’s mystical circle.76 This growing distance, however, was not yet



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notable in Sabaneev’s reviews, in which he continued to sing the composer’s praises. Scriabin himself heralded the outbreak of war in 1914 as evidence that all nations were preparing for the next stage of human history, a joyful development in keeping with his own ongoing work on his Preparatory Act.77 At the request of his friend Aleksandr Brianchaninov (now editor of the recently founded Pan-­Slavic political journal New Link), Scriabin outlined his personal view of the war’s mystical significance.78 The physical war was, he argued, an embodiment of the need for “the masses” to be “shaken up, in order to purify the human organization and fit it for the reception of more delicate vibrations than those to which it has previously responded. . . . we are now living through just such a period of upheaval, and in my eyes it is an indication that once again an idea has matured and is eager to be incarnated.” In this current era, “people of sciences and arts” were called to unify in the “founding of new forms and the solving of new, synthetic tasks.” Audiences would be given new spiritual insights by compositions that united elements of various arts with one another and with philosophical ideas. The “educational significance of war” lay in preparing audiences for greater spiritual insight—culminating ultimately with the performance of his Mystery.79 The composer’s personal philosophy left little place for the exclusive nationalist overtones of Russian messianism; nevertheless, deteriorating political relations and the popular response to the nationalist cry to protect the motherland made Scriabin’s explicitly universalist approach to music and life problematic. His decision to have his letter published in Brianchaninov’s New Link had the further result of placing his own ideas within a passionately Pan-­Slavic political context. In the pages of New Link, it was argued that the unity of Slavic peoples was required to counteract German aggression. The collective Slavic soul was in a desperate battle for survival with Prussian individualism and militarism. While such an ideological stance would seem to have held little in common with Scria­bin’s unabashed rejection of nationalism per se, there were two main points in which Pan-­Slavic ideology and Scriabin’s philosophy coincided: the image of human history as fundamentally progressive and the idea of struggle between human “races.” These two points provided a basis upon which Scriabin’s followers increasingly sought to redefine his image as explicitly Slavic rather than universal. Ever greater hopes and fanatical messianic dreams were heaped upon the composer: even Leonid Sabaneev’s regular prophesying of the appearance of a new musical prophet began to celebrate his inherently Slavic nature.80 Music, Scriabin, and military victory by an ethnically pure Russia leading a greater Slavic union were considered three parts of a single whole.

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Even as they sought to place Scriabin and his music into a worldview colored by a sense of Russia’s messianic mission, the composer’s own views came into sharper conflict with those of his disciples. Vladimir Ern first met Scriabin in December 1914 after Ern’s paper on the inherent militarism of German culture had made considerable waves (reaching even Scriabin’s ears); now he, together with Viacheslav Ivanov, sought to reshape the composer’s worldview. Recounting his meeting with the composer at Ivanov’s house, Ern wrote to his wife that “I listened, almost silent, to his conversation with Viacheslav for a long time; but then, when he began to develop his illusionary philosophy with a sheen of Christianity, I attacked him and, supported by Viacheslav, forced him in several points to draw back and formulate his point of view more modestly.” Scriabin’s decidedly un-­ Christian philosophy clouded Ern’s view of the composer, and he noted in conclusion that although Scriabin was “not simply a musician with God’s grace, ‘singing as a bird sings,’ but a philosopher, giving to music its own philosophical tasks,” these tasks were nevertheless “not of good spiritual quality”—a skepticism echoed by Ivanov himself.81 In conversation with the painter Nikolai Ul’ianov, a fellow Scriabinist, Ivanov reflected gloomily, “Scriabin is sick! I don’t mean that he is entirely ill. No, he still works stubbornly, but he no longer has courage, genuine courage [bodrost’]. But could it be otherwise? He took upon himself a task beyond human strength. Many years would be needed in order to realize his fiery orchestra . . . and the Mysteries [sic] for which I am helping him write the text . . . will they ever be finished? We cannot agree on anything, we think differently, we disagreed from the very beginning. Something bad is happening to him, a heavy spiritual dissonance.”82 While Ern and Ivanov emphasized Scriabin’s potentially misguided obsession with non-­Christian ideas (thereby echoing a growing belief in Russian messianism), it was the disconnect between the external world of wartime trauma and suffering and the entire circle of Nietzsche’s orphans that was felt with particular vividness by Ul’ianov. Returning from serving at the front in late 1914, Ul’ianov discovered that an unbridgeable gulf now separated him from his former life. When he sought to reenter the world of Nietzsche’s orphans, Ul’ianov found himself hopelessly isolated—an isolation that the figure of Scriabin seemed to highlight with particularly vividness: I stopped to spend an evening at a place I knew, where V. Ivanov, Baltrušaitis, Bal’mont and Scriabin gathered. They wanted Scriabin to play something, but couldn’t decide [what]. Then Bal’mont began to read his verses. I thought: all the same . . . absorption in themselves and all the same fiction of “searching”! . . . What is happening in the world? Or is it to me alone that something seems



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to be happening? No, that cannot be, something is definitely happening. . . . How is it that ladies in all homes are sewing laundry for soldiers and making bandages . . . and Scriabin . . . what is he thinking about? I did not even try to talk to him. What could we have talked about? Me, a soldier of the 55th reserve battalion, who must return tomorrow to the front, to people sleeping on straw and jumping up with fright at the cry of their officer?83

Torn from this intimate circle by the experience of war, Ul’ianov now perceived a fundamental disconnect between the circle to which he had once belonged, with its mystical dreams of musical theurgy and social unity, and the real-­life experiences of many of his compatriots. For Ul’ianov this initial alienation was fleeting. On December 12, 1914, he received his release from the army and once again sought out his former friends. Stopping at a café near Moscow’s Kuznetskii Bridge, he espied symbolist poet Jurgis Baltrušaitis and Scriabin deep in conversation. Unable to find words to express his emotions, Ul’ianov stumbled over to the pair and mutely showed them his release card; the surprise was mutual, and conversation between the three men was broken and halting. Finally Scriabin inquired about the possibility of Ul’ianov’s beginning work on his portrait, adding after a moment with some embarrassment that naturally such work would begin only when Ul’ianov had forgotten “all that.” Despite Scriabin’s squeamishness over direct conversation about Ul’ianov’s wartime experience, this simple conversation lifted the gloom and isolation that the painter had been unable to escape since his return. “My meeting with Scriabin,” he later reminisced, “returned me not only to my profession [of painting], but more than that—[it] returned me to life. . . . specifically he, out of all my friends and ‘models,’ [he] alone now interested me, and called me to action.” Ul’ianov subsequently began preparatory sketches of Scriabin, but the “great and complex inner strength” of his subject made the intended portrait a difficult undertaking, one that would be left unfinished by the composer’s sudden death four months later in April 1915.84 The death of Scriabin shook the world of Nietzsche’s orphans and immediately began to inspire symbolic interpretation. Informing his wife of the composer’s death, Ern highlighted his own prophetic insight, relating that “during the last visit of Scriabin and his wife, I felt that Fate hung above him.”85 For Morozova the composer’s death seemed to appropriately fulfill “a higher logic”—a logic connected with his insane obsession with the unfinished Mystery.86 Emilii Medtner coldly dismissed Scriabin’s death: in a letter to Anna he reflected that the event “left a rather welcome impression on me. . . . a Luciferian has died.”87 Even for Emilii, however, such cheerful thoughts quickly gave way to morose re-

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flections upon his own separation from former friends and from Russian culture as a whole.88 Whether they elevated their fallen Orpheus as a messianic martyr or damned him as a conjurer of satanic forces, Scriabin’s companions were quickly gripped with an obsession to make sense of the “mystical significance” of his death. For those who highlighted the composer’s “prophetic,” “messianic,” or “Christ-­like” role, the composer was transfigured into a sacrificial lamb, whose death was required to compensate for the sins of a rationalistic and utilitarian modern society that had lost its connection with higher, spiritual values.89 The ultimate failing in this interpretation lay not with Scriabin but with contemporary society.90 For Pavel Polianov, the guiding light of Scriabin’s life and ideas (which had awakened in him the thirst for a higher, spiritual realm) gave way in 1915 to a terrifying specter: the composer had been immolated upon a fiery altar, and a “great silence” had fallen over the earth. Because Russian society had not yet been worthy of Scriabin’s message, history itself (embodied in a figure rising up from the mist that had descended over the earth) had intervened.91 Boris Schloezer was even more explicit in his use of imagery, linking the death of his brother-­in-­law with the sacrificial narrative of Christ himself.92 This image of Scriabin as a latter-­day Christ combined easily with the wartime narrative of Russia’s messianic mission against Prussia’s militaristic culture.93 Scriabin, his supporters claimed, had “seen in the creed of Germanism a reactionary strength, which had to be broken by the strength of new truths.” According to his disciples, Scriabin had identified “individualistic tendencies” that worried him in Russia’s allies, and he had concluded that Russia alone could provide the communal, unifying impulse that would lead to a successful outcome of the great spiritual battle against secular modernity.94 Scriabin had, in short, called “for the defense of the rights of the weaker nations and for Slavicism as the psychic justification of our great power,” a goal he believed could be accomplished only through “cleansing” contemporary Europe from the ills of “Prussianism.”95 Once dead, the “messianic” composer could be even more easily adapted to serve a nationalist outlook, and his unrealized Mystery could be contorted into nationalist propaganda that bore scant resemblance to his theosophically tinged dream. “In the boundlessness of his tasks, the boldness of his denials and in his spiritual independence from the commonplace,” concluded one anonymous author, “Scriabin was the most Russian of Russians.”96 To this, Odessa-­based critic Gorskii added that the unfinished Mystery had initiated a shift from German individualism to the religious communality (sobornost’) of the Russian people. “[Scriabin’s] Mystery,” he argued, “can be understood as a path from tragedy to liturgy, from division to unity, from the reedy song of a lonely hero, weakly



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standing against Fate, to a general act, gradually abolishing the ‘fatal’ battle between human and cosmic strength. The Mystery is a Tragedy already ashamed of itself and a Liturgy not yet recognizing itself.”97 Such nationalist reinterpretations of the Mystery often harmonized it with popular belief in Russia’s supposedly distinctive “Christian” path. Abandoning the skepticism related to the Mystery he had expressed to Ul’ianov, Viacheslav Ivanov concluded that at the time of Scriabin’s death, the composer had been in the process of undergoing an “internal cleansing and penitential internal experience” leading him back to Christianity.98 This hysteric pitch of devotion to a dead prophet of their own fashioning continued to be nurtured in the closed circle of the Scriabin societies of Moscow and Petrograd, formed immediately after the composer’s death.99 Parallel to such superlative fantasies, the death of Scriabin also completed the disillusion of other orphans, most scandalously when Leonid Sabaneev publically denounced his former idol with the charge of Satanism: an accusation that turned growing fissures within the aesthetic community into deep rifts. In an obituary written for the journal Music, formerly a stronghold of Scriabin’s supporters, Scriabin’s erstwhile prophet adopted a new tone, complaining that “Messiahs died and were resurrected. But where is that plan, in which the resurrection took place? . . . Scriabin, at any rate, ‘did not fulfill his promise.’”100 In his 1916 book Scriabin, Sabaneev went even further, excoriating the extant text of Scria­ bin’s Preparatory Act and denouncing Scriabin’s Mystery as a symptom of Scria­ bin’s extreme individualism and pride, values that associated the composer and his art with Satanism.101 The true role of the “new Orpheus” was to bring about renewed spiritualization and an overcoming of the material world, a task for which Scriabin had proven woefully inadequate.102 This critique of Scriabin’s individualism and self-­aggrandizement, condemned by Sabaneev as “satanic,” echoed the charges laid against contemporary Germany and also provided a fruitful interpretation of Russia’s own failures in the modern age.103 Sabaneev’s attack on Scriabin and critique of contemporary society was upheld by philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, who had also participated in early meetings of the Scriabin society, and was familiar with the “messianic narrative” taking shape among some of Scriabin’s followers.104 Echoing Sabaneev’s personal attack in a broader philosophical framework in a December 1916 article for the journal Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl’), Bulgakov found in the “Scriabin phenomenon” the failure of the present age to properly understand the function of art or its potential dangers.105 Pure art, he argued, cannot have an impact on the physical world itself; rather it creates its own parallel world of Beauty.106 For this reason, Bulgakov claimed, the true goal of art was to approach the Platonic form of pure Beauty as closely as possible, disconnected from the material world.107

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The potential danger facing the artist was that he might be seduced by the “material aspect of art,” leading him either consciously or unconsciously to seek for his art to have a definable relation to the material world. In such a case, art would take on an aspect of “artistic magic.” Bulgakov concluded that “this seduction of magic always existed for art, but it received particular meaning in the contemporary age, as the magical relation to nature itself strengthens or, more accurately, is reborn.”108 Scriabin, in this interpretation, had proven to be more “German” than “Russian” in his relation to modernity, allowing himself to be distracted by the material world rather than pursuing the higher, spiritual task of Orpheus. This scathing rejection by Bulgakov and Sabaneev prompted fierce rebuttal and accelerated attempts to remake Scriabin into an explicitly Russian messiah. In response to what he viewed as Sabaneev’s “betrayal,” Dr. Vladimir Bogorodskii wrote of the “deeply religious personality [lichnost’] of Scriabin,”109 while Vladimir Nosenkov offered a personal testimony of Scriabin’s spiritually beneficial impact on his own life, writing that “to me personally, with his words and to a certain level with his sounds, Aleksandr Nikolaevich awakened in me not a taste for a ‘Black Mass,’ but for a long-­slumbering striving toward God. He prepared the destruction of the stubborn rationalism and religious skepticism that had, it seemed, always and wholeheartedly possessed me. . . . How could a Messiah of the devil turn even one person toward God?”110 Boris Schloezer dismissed Sabaneev’s accusations of Satanism with the claim that, by its very definition, art was a “transfiguration of reality,” creative rather than destructive in nature, and therefore incapable of containing darker forces.111 For Viacheslav Ivanov the entire affair was a personal betrayal of the most despicable sort. In a letter to Brianchaninov, he concluded that “[Sabaneev] gives such a violent shape to Scria­ bin, that we who knew him had to turn away with horror and indignation from this piously drawn, unwilling caricature of one of the most fiery and most genius idealists and servants of the Spirit on the Russian earth.”112 Varvara Nikolaevna Lermontova responded with particular vitriol, writing to Sabaneev, “If you truly took Scriabin as you claim, then it becomes unclear why you maintain the image of a passionate friend and admirer. . . . What convinced you to write [this book] . . . are you yourself a convinced Satanist, an admirer and follower of the Great Sorcerer?”113 Convinced of the imminent triumph of Scriabin’s messianic worldview reinterpreted through his own Pan-­Slavic gaze, Brianchaninov heralded the forthcoming publication of the text of the Preparatory Act as a moment of truth, writing gleefully to Ivanov that “at the end of the year, the ‘Preparatory Act’ will appear in print, and then not only those having ears to hear, but those having eyes will see how far Sabaneev is from the correct understanding of Scriabin’s true meaning in the evolution of Russian mystical thought.”114

Figure 5.2. Detail from inner panel of Scriabin commemorative postcard. The text in the bottom right reads, “The essence of the creative Spirit manifests itself before us. ‘In the rays of his dreams, a magical world arises.’—The flight motif sounds in the flutes: IV.” First published by A. A. Levenson (Moscow, ca. 1915). Personal collection of Lincoln Ballard.

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This rarefied atmosphere was not amenable to all of Nietzsche’s orphans. P. Shepk complained of the “Scriabin hysteria” that had seized the composer’s admirers after his death and harangued them for the “damage” they caused both to Scriabin’s memory and to the listening public.115 D. S. Shilkin, who attended two meetings of the Petrograd Scriabin society, raised his voice in critique of this mystification of art, in which Scriabin received “more praise than the founders of religions,” while Nikolai Medtner, disgusted with the “philosophical terms poured upon a single note,” “the impure Russian language of Boris Schloezer,” and the “undefined cloudiness” of symbolist poet Baltrušaitis, abandoned the first annual meeting of the Moscow Scriabin society without staying to hear the musical portion.116 Perhaps it was a commemorative postcard published shortly after Scriabin’s death which best caricatured the conflicting mythologies taking shape around the composer. Holding a baton in his right hand and a jousting stick in the other, Scriabin soars upward on angelic wings toward a cosmos symbolized by stars, while windmills on the ground beneath him suggest the quixotic nature both of his quest and that of his contemporaries (fig. 5.2). While Scriabin’s death was a flash point in 1915 for competing visions of Russia’s path, the tide of history soon swept away both sides of the debate. Scriabin’s conflicted status as messiah or Satanist gradually faded into irrelevance after 1917.117 O R P H E US A N D O RT HO D O X Y

Visions of Russia’s “holy war” against Germany were often accompanied by renewed expressions of the need to reawaken Christian belief within Russian society and harness it in support of the war effort—a longing for which composer Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s renewed interest in Orthodox chant in the midst of ongoing hostilities potentially promised resolution. Before Scriabin’s death, his admirer Mariia Brianchaninova had offered a particularly striking melding of mystical, theosophical, and Christian imagery in her call for a communal act or “mystery” that could unite Russian society spiritually in the midst of war. In a 1915 article for her husband’s journal New Link, she cited a daily practice in England that had begun with the declaration of war. “Every day at 12 p.m.,” Brianchaninova claimed, “a bell sounds and all the British people, in one communal act, lift their brief but passionate prayer to the Tsar of Tsars, to the Father of all humanity.” How much more powerful, Brianchaninova continued, would it be if the “God-­carrying people” of Russia followed this spiritual example? Only Russians could truly understand the “mystical meaning and strength of this totality of prayerful moods.” Interpreting the significance of the war as a spiritual struggle



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between “good and evil,” “bright strength with dark,” and “Russian against German,” she called for Russian bells to “sound at 12 p.m. in all the cities and villages of our vast Motherland, uniting in a single communal prayerful act all the passionate, but as yet separate prayers, sent from millions of souls to the throne of the Highest one.”118 Underlying Brianchaninova’s call was the assumption that the enactment of a communal moment of prayer would have an immediate and visible impact on physical reality. Nor was Brianchaninova alone in her desire to create a mystical Russian unity through religious practice. In September 1914, as Melissa Stockdale has noted, the Holy Synod “decided that all churches in the empire would celebrate a weekly requiem for the duration of the war.”119 Music, envisioned as an inextricable part of religious ritual, offered a potential means through which to awaken devotion and unify society in its struggle against “Prussianism.” In an article published shortly after the start of this “unusually cruel and bloody war,” church composer Antonin Viktorovich Preobrazhenskii called for the heightening of the “religious mood” of the narod and army through the circulation of “books of saintly writing and religious-­moral content” among the masses, the “organization of conversations and sermons,” and the “creation of singing choirs and pilgrim circles.” Of greatest import, he suggested, was “the staging of old and new mysteries and ritual church processions in our capitals, cities and even in large villages.”120 In an editorial for the daily New Times (Novoe vremia), M. Ivanov similarly called for the creation of a musical “mystery” that would combine Wagner’s envisioned temple of art with Russian Orthodox spirituality.121 Building upon this appeal in an article for the Southern Musical Herald, an Orthodox priest by the name of Antonii highlighted Sergei Rachmaninoff as a potential “priest” of Russian folk spirit in the current crisis.122 Rachmaninoff indeed seemed well poised to meet these mystical expectations, as his All-­Night Vigil (Vsenoshchnoe bdenie, op. 37) was premiered in March 1915. For Rachmaninoff ’s supporters, the composer embodied several key features that would enable him to achieve this needed synthesis of Russian musical creativity and spirituality. Here was a genuinely “Slavic” composer, drawn to the strains of Orthodox music, as his 1910 Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, op. 31, demonstrated. Unlike Scriabin, Rachmaninoff’s popularity also seemed to demonstrate an ability to bridge the divide between the intelligentsia and the common narod. Moreover, his rapid composition of the All-­Night Vigil between January and February 1915 seemed a direct response to the experience of war. Even before the war, music critic Grigorii Nikolaevich Timofeev had argued that it was Rachmaninoff (rather than Scriabin) who was drawing closest to the creation of a genuine mystery. Timofeev observed that mystery plays (misterii) had first appeared in the early centuries of Christianity, when Europe was still

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close to the ancient world and its tragedies.123 In Russia, due to the ban on depicting Christ, dramatic elements had never found such a large role in religious ceremony as in western Europe. This tendency, Timofeev argued, was changing in the present day, a fact that was particularly notable in Rachmaninoff’s recent compositions. Unfortunately, he claimed, Rachmaninoff had been unable to maintain the “church style” throughout his earlier Liturgy, though the composer nevertheless was generally successful in offering a prayerful mood and even religious ecstasy.124 It might well be hoped, Timofeev concluded, that the composer’s next exploration of Orthodox music would have even greater consequences. That next attempt came in the midst of military conflict, with the appearance of the All-­Night Vigil. The All-­Night Vigil comprised a setting of texts taken from the all-­night vigil ceremony of the Orthodox Church, which combines the three canonical hours of Vespers, Matins, and First Hour and is intended to precede Sunday services or important liturgical feast days. Rachmaninoff was one of several composers who turned to this genre in the late imperial period, when a revival and reinvigoration of Russian Orthodox musical tradition dominated the work of an entire circle of composers connected with the Moscow Synodal School.125 Inspired in particular by the work of church composer Aleksandr Kastal’skii, Rachmaninoff sought in this work to master a distinctly Orthodox style of composition.126 Musically, the All-­Night Vigil was based on three types of chant melodies: Greek (drawn from the Byzantine tradition), znamennyi (drawn from the Russian chant tradition) and Kievan (drawn from the Ukrainian chant tradition).127 Each setting was based either on one of these three melodic traditions or on a melody of Rachmaninoff’s own composition, itself imitating the chromatic, stepwise movement of Orthodox chant.128 Amid the heightened tensions wrought by war, Rachmaninoff’s All-­Night Vigil was accorded a rapturous reception by audiences and critics in Moscow. Premiered on March 10, 1915, by the Synodal Choir, it was given subsequent performances on March 12 and 27 and April 3 and 9. All the performances were marked by enthusiastic audience response, and tickets were sold out several days in advance.129 In contrast to his earlier Liturgy, which had been attacked as overly “individualistic,” critics were lavish in their praise of the All-­Night Vigil. At last, it was claimed, the composer had succeeded both in capturing the necessary mood of Orthodox worship and in addressing the needs of the contemporary age. Iurii Sakhnovskii, writing the day before the premiere, argued that “it is possible that Rachmaninoff has never yet approached so close to the style and soul of the narod as in this work.” With the All-­Night Vigil, Sakhnovskii concluded, Rachmaninoff had finally broken out of the “narrow confines of lyrical pessimism, so character-



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istically reflecting the state of spirit of our intelligentsia of the last decade.”130 In this work, at long last, he had found the true voice of the narod, leaving behind the anxiety and pessimism of contemporary life. Leonid Sabaneev, once an outspoken critic of the composer, lauded Rachmaninoff in 1915 as the first composer to successfully unite artistic creativity with the expressive style of Orthodox song. Rachmaninoff, he concluded, was “joined to the soul of the nation [natsii].”131 Similarly, Grigorii Prokof’ev claimed that, unlike in the Liturgy, there was no hint of the “worldly” composer left in the All-­Night Vigil.132 Kastal’skii, with whom Rachmaninoff had corresponded on the question of church music prior to composing the work, celebrated the composer’s “careful attitude” in his use of old church napevy (chant melodies).133 While the young critic Igor Glebov (Boris Asaf’ev) believed that Rachmaninoff ’s music generally suffered from an “insufficiently religious character” and “vulgar melancholy [toska] (sensuality without ideals, without thoughts),” he discovered in the All-­Night Vigil “genuine intuition, a hint of that which is his essence.”134 Anna Medtner concluded that the work was Rachmaninoff ’s best (apart from his Second Piano Concerto) and “truly beautiful.”135 While some critics were not quite so ecstatic in their assessment of the work,136 there was nevertheless a general consensus that Orthodox spirituality and Russianness had found expression in a composition that might unite listeners in a single communal act of prayer at a particularly tumultuous historical moment. It seemed possible that Rachmaninoff’s musical mystery, envisioned by Timofeev, had at last found expression.137 Despite the success of the All-­Night Vigil, however, the perceived melancholic disposition of Rachmaninoff ’s music continued to shape listener expectations. Glebov (Asaf’ev) ended his assessment of the work with the rhetorical query, “Does [Rachmaninoff ] understand that his All-­Night Vigil will atone for his slavery?”—a slavery that he believed was embodied in the pessimism of the composer’s earlier works.138 Anna Medtner, assessing the impact of the All-­Night Vigil, concluded that the prayer to God was “miraculous”; but when the composer needed to “praise the name of God or rejoice in the resurrection, he does not have the necessary sounds.”139 Rachmaninoff’s own personal fears also poorly coincided with the salvific expectations of the time. During a concert tour to England in 1914, he had first been struck by a morbid fear of death.140 The war sank the composer into a deep depression, and after completing the All-­Night Vigil he found himself unable to compose in subsequent months.141 Rachmaninoff claimed despairingly, “I still have in me a need for creative work, but the desire to bring it out, the ability to bring it out—all this has gone forever!”142 Similarly, in a letter to Aleksandr Gol’denveizer, he wrote that “I will come to life, if my work moves forward. But

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Example 5.1. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Étude-­tableau, op. 39, no. 2, in A minor. Adapted by author from original score (Berlin: Édition Russe de Musique, 1920).

now I am only half alive.”143 His creative imagination was increasingly drawn away from liturgical music to the “dark strength” of the “Dies irae” chant and images of death and destruction: in his Étude-­tableau op. 39, no. 2, in A minor (premiered December 5, 1916), the chant opening was employed as a bass ostinato against which the entire piano composition unfolded (ex. 5.1).144 The same motif has been observed to haunt most of the works in the set.145 By mid-­1915 Marietta Shaginian was disturbed by the black mood into which the composer had sunk; she even observed tears in the composer’s eyes during conversation.146 The war likewise triggered Rachmaninoff ’s contemplative side. Seldom previously interested in the philosophical discussions of his colleagues, he now found himself directionless and often drifting to evening philosophical conversations with Anna and Nikolai Medtner, Ivan Il’in, Shaginian, and fellow musician Nikolai Struve.147 In conversations with Il’in and Medtner, Rachmaninoff argued over whether an “objective judgment of Beauty exists, that is, whether anything exists in which one can be entirely certain.” While “touched to his very depths” by Medtner’s belief in objective truth, Rachmaninoff admitted that he had “no such conviction himself,” reasoning instead that such judgments were purely subjective in nature.148 Il’in, himself overwhelmed by recent events, found himself unable to respond either to Rachmaninoff’s stubborn skepticism or Medtner’s expectation of support in his philosophical claims of the need to transcend individual despair.149 Despite Rachmaninoff’s doubts, Shaginian continued to encourage the composer to devote himself to his Orphic mission, often requesting personal meetings. As Anna Medtner recounted from an evening



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spent with Rachmaninoff, Shaginian, and Nikolai Medtner in February 1915, Shaginian lost her temper after listening to Rachmaninoff complain extensively about his loss of talent; she “abused him” and “confirmed to him that he does nothing.”150 So it was that the strain of war increasingly divided Rachmaninoff from his former acolyte. At the same time, Rachmaninoff pursued a strenuous concert schedule across European Russia, with proceeds donated to aid wartime victims.151 While such activity might have been interpreted in a positive patriotic light, for Nietzsche’s orphans the role of performer ranked below that of composer. After attending Rachmaninoff’s all-­Scriabin recital in Rostov in the fall of 1915, Shaginian expressed conflicting emotions of disappointment and hope. While acknowledging his “perfection as an artist,” she wrote to Anna Medtner that “[Rachmaninoff’s performance of Scriabin’s] Satanic Poem [op. 36] and Sonata op. 53 were in part strange to me, in part even painful, for the wonderful performance suggests love for objects, but really can an artist intentionally love that which is foreign to him? And when Rachmaninoff played these things with love (for they were also perfect) I forgot myself: one must never renounce oneself to such a degree!”152 A similar feeling was expressed by Anna Medtner after attending Rachmaninoff’s performance at the October 12, 1916, Scriabin memorial concert; she called his playing “diabolic” and his decision to continue to play Scriabin’s music “an unclean act,” given that Rachmaninoff, in Anna’s view, had no love for Scriabin.153 This insistence on spiritual authenticity and the perceived unsuitability of Rachmaninoff playing Scriabin’s music were also echoed by many of Scriabin’s admirers, who saw these memorial concerts as an insult to their lost genius.154 By 1917 it had become clear that Rachmaninoff ’s compositions and performances would not provide spiritual victory and transcendence but only deeper depression and even despair. T H E P R O B L E M O F “ G E R M A N N E SS ” All Germans are our enemy! Our countersign and slogan must be one alone: “Down with the German yoke!”

—Moscow Bulletin, May 10, 1915 Why cannot Germans and Russians be close? They might have been close.

—Anna Medtner to Emilii Medtner, October 22–25, 1914

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For both Nikolai and Emilii Medtner, wartime developments were devastating. In addition to destroying their hopes of forming a new cultural synthesis by combining German and Russian cultures, the Great War caused personal crises in the creative work of both men and drove an insurmountable wedge between them. Geographically separated by the war, Emilii and Nikolai discovered fundamental differences in their worldviews. While Emilii ever more stridently defended the strength and power of German culture and the “German race,” Nikolai, together with his wife Anna, grew increasingly critical of German atrocities committed in the war. At the same time, both brothers interpreted the war as a direct expression of their personal failure to unify human society through creative action. For the Medtners the war heralded the end of their dream of unification of cultures through the art of music, and the end of their own identity as imperial Russians. Analysis of the Medtners’ response to the war complicates our understanding of the ways in which “patriotism, citizenship, and membership in the nation” were connected during the war. Melissa Stockdale has argued that active patriotism (meaning direct participation in the war effort) served as a determinant of membership in the Russian national community.155 When applied to music, however, this argument requires further nuance. With many musicians seeking a means through which to express patriotic commitment to the Russian Empire through their artistic engagements at home, questions of the relationship between ethnic identity, music, and imperial loyalty gained greater import. In the case of Nikolai Medtner, many former colleagues found his Baltic German ethnic background sufficient cause to exclude him from a more narrowly defined patriotism based on national identity rather than citizenship or expressed loyalty to the tsarist regime. Even his supporters embraced an ethnic definition of patriotism, seeking traces of genuine “Russianness” rather than “Germanness” in his music and worldview. In the end, both brothers found themselves excluded from a community that, in the heightened tensions of war, lurched sharply toward an ethnically based definition of belonging. The outbreak of war found Emilii traveling in Germany, where he was arrested and briefly imprisoned.156 Released after giving his word to German authorities that he would not to return to Russia, he ultimately settled in Switzerland, where he underwent psychoanalysis with Carl Jung.157 Though distant from family and friends (as well as living outside both his homelands), Emilii acknowledged that such an arrangement was the best he could have hoped for. “Only in a neutral country,” he wrote to Morozova, “could I come to terms with my shock [at the war], while in Moscow I would have gone crazy. . . . for me personally this war is the most horrible event that I could possibly imagine.”158 He was unable either



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to eat or to sleep at night, granting the war cosmic significance.159 Voraciously reading any Russian-­language newspaper he could find, Emilii was enraged and disgusted by the openly anti-­German sentiment expressed in the pages of such papers as Russian Word, often expressing his distaste savagely in letters to his Russian acquaintances.160 Brooding and isolated, he allowed his tormented thoughts to dwell upon images of betrayal, both real and imagined, by his former companions in Russia.161 In Russia, news of the war’s outbreak left Nikolai creatively “paralyzed” and unable to compose, to the point that Anna feared for his physical and mental health.162 Recognizing the need to affirm his position as a Russian citizen and desiring potential grounds for a military exemption, he returned to an official teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory.163 Throughout the war, however, he awaited a call-­up for active military service with dread and experienced with full force the chimera of Russian public opinion, which turned ever more violently against Germans, both externally and internally.164 With shock and dismay, he observed repeated outbreaks of violence, targeting German business owners.165 Nikolai and Anna also found themselves caught up in the wave of anti-­German sentiment. Their personal correspondence with Emilii was regularly read by the Russian secret police (Okhrana), who placed the family under observation to gauge their level of loyalty to the Russian state.166 On a more personal level, many of Nikolai’s former intellectual colleagues embraced a neo-­Slavophile interpretation of the war, which he found difficult to fathom.167 Attending the October 1914 meeting of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society hosted by Morozova, he was deeply stricken by the anti-­German sentiments expressed, as well as by Morozova’s accusation that it was “dishonest” for him “not to go to war” and her intimation that he was secretly “for the Germans(!).” Witnessing firsthand the subsequent violence of the May 1915 Moscow riots against German business owners, Nikolai and Anna succumbed to despair—a feeling only partially alleviated by Morozova’s chastened invitation to her summer estate to escape the violence of the city. Anna wrote disconsolately to Marietta Shaginian that “our love for Russia . . . has particularly grown and become keener in the past days. . . . it is painful that we are foreigners to our own beloved mother. Kolia says that because he can only feel himself to be a Russian citizen [poddannym] and Russia does not seem to want him (or so it appears these days), then all that is left for him is to take on heavenly citizenship [nebesnoe poddanstvo].”168 In addition to such concerns, Nikolai found himself the unlikely target of his elder brother’s anger. In his correspondence with Nikolai and Anna, Emilii lashed out repeatedly against his beloved younger brother and former wife, accusing both of having abandoned the values that they had previously found in

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German culture and art. In response to a particularly virulent attack, Nikolai begged Emilii to believe that “everyone with whom we talk . . . knows with whom Russia fights and suffers deeply from it” and that “everything that I once loved, I still love now to tears. . . . events have changed nothing in me, apart from the shock which they have called forth in me and which have (momentarily, one must hope) paralyzed my compositional ability.”169 Anna seconded Nikolai’s words on multiple occasions, accusing Emilii of being unjust.170 At the same time, she attempted to soften some of the anti-­German sentiment expressed by his former friends and colleagues.171 For both Anna and Nikolai, the savagery of the war also brought into question some of the pro-­German ideals they had imbibed from Emilii. In a particularly troubled September 1914 letter to her former husband, Anna insisted that it was “necessary” for both herself and for Nikolai to discuss the events of the war openly with him. Citing the barbarity of the German military during their invasion of Belgium (in which women and children were heartlessly slaughtered), Anna wrote of her own futile struggle to understand German actions.172 Torn between her love of German culture, so deeply instilled by Emilii, and the love of her homeland, Anna “wept” in response to his description of a concert in which Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was performed. Nevertheless, she reminded Emilii of earlier conversations when, troubled by contemporary tendencies in Germany, he and Nikolai had both concluded “that Germans must be resurrected, that Germans were now in decline,” hoping thereby to spark some admission from Emilii of the mutual brutality the war had awakened in both cultures.173 Nikolai similarly tried to persuade his brother to be more balanced in his assessment of German atrocities, rather than placing full blame on Russian chauvinism.174 Either unwilling or unable to respond productively to such criticism, Emilii fell back increasingly on a pro-­German platform, insisting that “race is almost everything. And there is nothing higher than the German race.”175 No path forward was possible for any people, Emilii wrote, except through embracing the accomplishments of the German spirit. German victories on the battlefield served only to demonstrate that Germans “battle like they write symphonies.”176 Such claims, far from gaining Emilii the support of his friends and family, only prompted greater alienation from them. Nor did they offer him anything but empty consolation. Whether Germany or Russia were ultimately victorious, his hopes were lost, as both countries focused on the “destruction of the enemy,” rather than victory.177 This despair was most poignantly expressed in Emilii’s eventual rejection of music, formerly his most beloved art. Music had long been a symbol of hope for what he envisioned as a better future: the faults of the modern age would be



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overcome, and a rebirth of the human spirit would forge a pan-­European identity based on German culture (though excluding Jewish influence). War steadily extinguished his hope and spread a shadow of despair over all aspects of his existence. His turmoil was expressed with particular poignancy in a June 1915 letter, inspired by a performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis in Zurich. In a letter to Nikolai, scribbled onto the program book itself, Emilii reflected on the significance of the quartet of singers, who came from Holland, Budapest, Paris, and Basel: “The quartet is composed of two neutral countries and two ‘enemies.’ Only in Switzerland can people still live who feel themselves to be ‘Europeans,’ because here all languages are in (too) friendly harmony.”178 The harmonious “European” spirit that Emilii found in Switzerland, however, captured in grand performances such as the Missa solemnis, had lost the imminent promise of an immediate rebirth of society. This musical embodiment of a unity Emilii so desired brought little pleasure in the midst of war. Indeed, listening to music increasingly became a physical torment to him. In the same letter, he endeavored to explain this conflict, writing that “I must avoid music, and yet I am unable to forget it. . . . music seems to me the greatest suffering, because I did not study it as I should have.”179 Entwined in this statement were Emilii’s sense of guilt and responsibility at the tragic losses wrought by war and his ardent belief that music should have provided a means through which to bring about greater unity between the peoples of Europe, rather than conflict. Music became a failed future, whose impossibility made the sounds of music simultaneously precious and unbearable. Admitting defeat, Emilii lapsed into a near-­suicidal state, claiming “no kind of hope, either for recovery of health or of anything else good in life is left to me. I waited too long, it is clear that I am fated to lay my body in the grave, unmoving but alive. Of Moscow I think with the greatest horror and repulsion; all my past stands before me like the icy breath of death.”180 This despair became strongest in relation to the works of his brother, to the point that Emilii was no longer able to bear listening to Nikolai’s music, despite awkward attempts at reassurance that he valued it as much as ever. In November 1915 he wrote to his brother that “my soul always remains with your music, however difficult and confused [smutno] it is to me.”181 Emilii expressed his feelings more openly in a letter to Anna: “Kolia’s music deeply upset me, and I must tell you directly that I do not expect anything more from him, that is, nothing great. . . . it is not because he is insufficiently talented, but because of life and the dead end of his situation.”182 Nikolai’s musical failure was intimately connected, in Emilii’s view, with the war between Russia and Germany, the ultimate failure of their attempts to unite German and Russian cultures, and the victory of the divisive impulses of modernity.

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As war conditions continued to deteriorate for Russia throughout 1915, a similar sense of desperation crept into Nikolai and Anna’s lives.183 While managing to complete several short compositions, Nikolai struggled unsuccessfully to complete his first piano concerto, a work he had begun before the outbreak of war.184 In Anna’s view, Nikolai’s inability to write music was caused not by lack of creative vision but by human failing. It was not Nikolai’s inspiration that was paralyzed: melodies continued to occur to him. Thus, it was not the “internal lyre” (i.e., his creative inspiration) that had come untuned, but Nikolai himself.185 In Anna’s words, there was “a terrible battle with his own heaviness,” preventing him from using all the creative material that was within him.186 Melodies continued to pile up, unused, in his notebooks, which by 1918 would begin to haunt even him even in sleep. While Emilii and Nikolai had never envisioned Anna as part of the creative basis of their work (she served more in the guise of inspiration than creation), she too suffered from a sense of creative paralysis from the effects of the war. She complained of being seized by “melancholy” (toska) and bemoaned her failure to accomplish anything in her own life.187 In the months that followed his avowal of Nikolai’s failure, Emilii wavered between hope and despair. “I already expect nothing from life,” he wrote to Nikolai in 1916.188 In a final attempt to resurrect his failing mission, he emphasized throughout late 1915 and early 1916 that salvation from the present age would come through the creation of myth.189 This task, as Nietzsche had claimed, was fundamentally Dionysian in nature. Emilii pushed Nikolai to complete the piano concerto on which he was working, stressing that the content of the work should be “theurgic.”190 He further argued that Nikolai should turn his attention to the writing of an opera and insisted through early 1917 that Nikolai must keep composing at all costs, regardless of external distractions, even if he had to do so at night and with the use of stimulants.191 “If you do not now throw yourself into the embrace of Dionysus,” Emilii intimated to his brother, “you are doomed to fail, despite all your ‘genius.’” Perhaps most telling, he advised Nikolai to abandon the fugues, sonatas, and other pianism—in short, the formal, Germanic basis—of his early works.192 Instead, he advised Nikolai in another letter scribbled out the same day, “it is time for you to turn to myth, because a fairy tale [skazka] is only a weakened moralized and rationalized myth, fit for childish souls in the period of the decline of Christianity.”193 Emilii’s meaning was evident: Nikolai’s continued focus on composing small-­scale piano compositions, many of which were entitled “Fairy Tale” (Skazka), was insufficient to the task at hand. Rather than skazki, a large-­scale composition with theurgic, mythic force was required in the current age.194 Nikolai’s procrastination with his concerto while continuing to write skazki was indicative (to Emilii) of his refusal to accept his true calling. The



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figures of Wagner and Nietzsche hovered clearly in the background, the symbol of the path that Nikolai must take. Emilii’s emphasis on opera was connected to his vision of the end of the war. At this time, he believed, “very great artists, thinkers, and heroes will appear.”195 He envisioned Nikolai as one of these artist-­geniuses, whose work would transform the basis of society itself. These people would, of necessity, have an intimate connection with the narod (and thus, in keeping with Nietzsche’s conception, the Dionysian basis) from which they sprang and upon this basis would create a new, pan-­European identity. Emilii’s momentary rebirth of enthusiasm was connected with a rediscovery of the power of folk songs, specifically Swiss ones, and the universal, supranational identity that he imagined was embodied in such music.196 Tormented by the hatred awakened by war in both of his homelands, he saw Switzerland as the truest expression of his vision of the Europe of the future, in which different peoples would live together in concord as pure and exquisite as the musical harmonies that sounded in such folk songs. Fixated on his own vision, Emilii was dismissive of one of Nikolai’s most cherished dreams: the creation of a cycle of piano works that would be based on those melodies that he had collected in his notebook over the course of many years. Emilii’s offhand rejection of this plan sparked an unusually passionate response from his younger brother, who snapped back that “as far as musical drama is concerned, unfortunately I was born with only one head and therefore do not intend to imitate the two-­headed Wagner.”197 Emilii’s embittered response was to send Nikolai a postcard with an image of Wagner, in which he critiqued Nikolai’s inability to recognize the German composer’s true import. He ended with the conclusion that their differing viewpoints demonstrated that the two of them now “looked at things from opposing sides,” making the brief yet pointed observation that “you are closer to Tolstoy now than to Goethe.”198 For Emilii, Tolstoy’s greatest downfall was his strictly moralistic approach to art, disallowing any possibility of “life-­creation” or transformation outside of a strict, moral viewpoint. Emilii’s accusation thus framed his brother as a tendentious moralizer rather than as a theurgic genius able to transform life. This comparison between German and Russian literary figures also highlighted a deeper conflict that haunted the world of all Nietzsche’s orphans: the conflict between German and Russian cultural inspiration. The image of Russia as inherently more spiritual than contemporary Germany had predated the hostilities of 1914.199 The war served to provide a more specifically nationalist gloss to this dichotomy, linking the amoral, materialistic, modernizing, and divisive impulses of contemporary society with a militaristic, “Prussian” identity, while the ideals of universalism, morality, and community came increasingly to underpin the

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mythical idea of the “Russian soul.” Two separate nationalist discourses mutually reinforced each other. Thus, Emilii’s embrace of Wagner—without rejecting the Prussian identity that, it was believed, was an inherent part of the composer’s nationalist works (such as the Ring cycle)—was equivalent in the heightened wartime context to rejecting Russianness itself. In a country at war, this was tantamount to treason. The same exclusionary nationalist logic Emilii had previously employed against the Jews now worked to shatter the German-­Russian synthesis he had once sought. Similarly, Nikolai’s identity as a “German” composer could scarcely withstand the reinterpretation of these identities along increasingly exclusive, nationalistic lines. As a “Russian imperial” identity gave way to an exclusivist “Russian national” model, both brothers found themselves trapped within discursive categories that became ever more polarized.200 As the full scale of the war became evident, Emilii’s distress, embodied in his response to music, continued to expand. He increasingly noted that public discussion, both in Germany and in Russia, did not center on “victory” over the enemy but on “destruction.” This was not the harmony in unity that he had envisioned. While Emilii’s ears continued to pain him, he argued that the fundamental problem was not physiological; rather it was the judgment of “reason, which is just in its protest against music: not in general, but for me. I cannot write anymore about music.”201 By March 1917 Emilii declared that “there is but one alternative left to me—to abandon music (and especially Kolia’s music) entirely; otherwise I will lose my mind,” while by June 1917 he stated simply, “I hate music with all my heart.”202 He had, he claimed in a letter to Nikolai, moved from “music” to “antimusic” and now found himself in the “final act”: the fragmentation rather than the unification of Europe.203 By 1919 he would complain that there were “no musical impressions” at all.204 The war and its demands had silenced music, both spiritually and physically. His cultural quest had failed. Anna and Nikolai Medtner similarly found themselves increasingly isolated, unwilling to accept the salvific nationalist narrative that Russian educated society now embraced. Reacting negatively to a reading by a “shameless poetess in monastic dress” whose poems were full of images of “Holy Rus,’” Anna concluded that it was this obsession with Russian messianism among their colleagues that triggered many of the problems they faced.205 At a talk associated with the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society in October 1916, the Medtners once again found themselves disappointed in most of the papers offered.206 The difficult situation in which the Medtner brothers found themselves did not pass unnoticed by their intellectual colleagues. The reason for the Medtners’ “dead end,” reflected philosopher Grigorii Rachinskii to Morozova, was their inability to reconcile the German and Russian aspects of their identity within an



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increasingly exclusionary nationalist discourse. As Rachinskii concluded, “an unabashed Russian [Emilii] cannot and does not wish to be, but he cannot be made German either. He was nurtured by the Russian land and grew up in a Russian atmosphere.” For Nikolai, Rachinskii held out more hope, observing that “Nikolai Karlovich also has a great storm in his soul, but his nature is more independent and less infected by the German school of thought and the philosophical culture of Germany of the last years. Moreover, he is an artist and has his own great, free task.” In conclusion, he echoed a general discourse that disparaged German culture as militaristic: “In such tragedies and crises, like we are now experiencing,” he argued, “there is only one escape—deep belief in a universal beginning.” Unfortunately for Emilii, concluded Rachinskii, “the notorious ‘culture’ upon which Musaget was to be built will not save you now!”207 The war also shifted interpretations of the import of Nikolai’s music, a development that had already been hinted at in the prewar years. As anti-­German sentiment became ever greater, the composer’s acknowledged Germanic traits were open to greater criticism. As his “German blood” became ever more a hindrance, his music was championed more and more for its “Russian” nature.208 By early 1914 Ivan Il’in had come to view the Germanness of both brothers as a hindrance rather than a benefit. In Emilii’s absence during the war, Nikolai spent ever more time with Il’in, turning to him for guidance in the midst of his creative paralysis, though their natures did not allow for an easy personal relationship.209 Nevertheless, Il’in became a devoted advocate of Nikolai, seeing him as the purest embodiment of a specifically “Russian creative genius,” one that “seeks the world’s healing.”210 In Sergei Durylin’s mind, the messianic mission of the Russian narod and Nikolai’s life-­creating art became increasingly entwined as the war progressed.211 Such admiration generally was accompanied by a redefinition of the composer as embodying Russian (or Slavic) rather than German attributes, a shift that would continue after the war.212 This growing embrace of a neo-­Slavophile interpretation of Russia did not, however, overcome the existing divisions among Nietzsche’s orphans. At the same time that Il’in sought to persuade Nikolai of his significance as a purely Russian rather than German artist, he desperately sought to shield the composer from the influence of other intellectuals. In particular, Il’in’s own understanding of the destructive influence of “modernism” in contemporary art echoed that expressed by the Medtner brothers, seeing in it the weakening of the religious essence of humanity.213 He identified such destructive modernist tendencies in both the musical works of Scriabin and the writings of Viacheslav Ivanov.214 For this reason, he witnessed with particular concern a chance meeting between Nikolai and Ivanov at an orchestral concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.

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Fearing the potential influence of Ivanov over his chosen Orpheus, Il’in forged a letter, purportedly from Ivanov, in which he suggested that the latter, having lost his chosen Orpheus with Scriabin’s death, now wished to dedicate himself to Nikolai. With intentionally exaggerated language, Il’in (writing in Ivanov’s name) begged Medtner to fill the empty space left by Scriabin’s departure, hoping thereby to put an end to any closer friendship between the two: “Orphaned by his departing flight, I vainly wait, like a bride of the fiery rose, again to have my spirit scorched with the sweetness of divine passion. May the bonds of co-­creation fasten together Your life and mine! I long to see You, because Your most-­rare sounds sweetly wound and call to the secret recesses of divine temptation.”215 Il’in was similarly jealous of Emilii’s influence over his younger brother, and he attempted on numerous occasions to take over the role of philosophical guide in Nikolai’s choice and interpretation of reading material.216 Despite the disparate national allegiances attributed to Nikolai by his admirers, the composer himself sank ever deeper into depression. All too aware that Emilii’s former admiration had now turned to bitter disappointment, he begged Il’in not to pin the title of “genius” upon him. “I am not at all a genius, not a real person,” he wrote to Il’in. “Real people are life-­persistent. . . . I never considered myself to be [a genius], but it seemed to me sometimes that there were some people who compared me to one. My words are only something of a challenge to these people. Geniuses are the most real, and untalented people are always phantoms. I am deeply a phantom. . . . I myself am not yet fully created because every person must create himself, and I have not yet done this and probably will not do it. . . . I am filled only with the shadows of unfinished creations.”217 Nikolai’s disappointment at his own inability to fulfill the role of “genius” others had foisted upon him was palpable. Even more striking was his ultimate rejection of the very idea of geniuses, or “real people,” as central forces in shaping the world. “Down with ‘real people,’” he wrote to Il’in. “Everything must be accepted, forgiven and loved! We are all guilty and devilishly equally guilty! Let the devil take none of us! Only one party must exist, the party of guilty people, devilishly, equally guilty people, and the entire world must belong to this party.”218 Exhausted by the divisions wrought by war, tired of being claimed both as a German and as a Russian genius, Nikolai espoused the abandonment of all such divisions: a claim ill-­suited to the nationalistic hubris of the day. As Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner each failed in their mission to transform reality through art, contemporaries struggled to find a new idol. Gorskii’s choice fell upon Vladimir Rebikov, in whose “musical-­psychological dramas” and concept of music’s direct impact on human emotion he saw the “conscious recognition” of the Christian mission of Russian art in the modern age.219 Gor-



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skii’s vision was expressed without taking into account the impact of the war on Rebikov himself, however.220 While Rebikov had envisioned the coming of Orpheus (a figure he elided with Christ) as an event of the near future in 1910, he too was disenchanted by the impact of the war. Reflecting in the midst of the Great War upon the significance of Christ’s birth, Rebikov defined the present age as the “victory of the material [realm].” While hoping that at some future time humanity would once again remember Christ’s teachings, he observed that such a moment would come to pass perhaps only after another twenty thousand years.221 The reason for this, he hinted in a 1916 article for the Russian Musical Newspaper, was that the “song of the spirit” had grown weak in the modern age, becoming increasingly infected by the “song of the blood.”222 Rather than the spiritual realm transfiguring the material realm, the material world had invaded and polluted the spiritual. Shocked by the barbarity of the war, Rebikov held out little hope for a return to Christian spirituality in the near future.223 In a letter to Nikolai Findeizen, he wrote that “other, great times will come” but added disconsolately, “I will not live to see them. Orpheus has not come yet, but he will come.”224 Rebikov had ceased to believe both in his own creative mission and in the imminent transformation of the world into a better place. Orpheus’s lyre would not soon be found. F E B RUA RY 19 1 7

While the years of war gradually silenced the Orphic claims of Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, and even Rebikov, the February Revolution of 1917 was greeted with music both by educated society and by the larger population. As Boris Kolonitskii has demonstrated, the singing of revolutionary songs was a key way in which crowds in Petrograd and elsewhere celebrated the end of the tsarist regime.225 Nietzsche’s orphans, by and large, also responded with enthusiasm to the new political system. In a March 20 letter from Perm, music critic Boris Popov rejoiced at the abdication of the tsar and the birth of a new, free Russia.226 Writing from Rostov on March 22, 1917, the pianist Matvei Presman declaimed, “Long live Free, Mighty Russia!” and enthusiastically greeted the new political system as a time when one could finally “breathe deeply and freely.”227 Inspired by the events of February, Presman quickly founded a new music conservatory in Rostov, which boasted an enrollment of almost five hundred students after only a few months of existence.228 Morozova reflected to Evgenii Trubetskoi that the developing events were “wonderful,” and she expressed the hope that Russia would not turn back on its path, as had happened in 1905.229 The conceptual language of musical metaphysics continued to be employed

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in the aftermath of February 1917, though adapted to the emerging political situation. Writing for the Southern Musical Herald, one I. An. argued that music might help prepare the Russian people for democratic self-­governance. In order to introduce the Russian population to their new responsibilities (which they were not yet historically prepared to undertake), he argued that art in general and music in particular must be spread to all levels of society. Echoing earlier ideals of musical metaphysics in a republican vein, he argued that “art is the language of the soul, the voice of feeling, and as such it is eternal and necessary for all of us.”230 Similarly, Nikolai Martsenko argued that it was the “old bureaucratic order” that had “torn from the narod their music” and led music education in Russia along a mistaken path; such errors could now, in a democratic Russia, be corrected and art truly brought to the people.231 These visions of a more equitable musical culture were not fully met with an increase in compositional activity or skill; however, in an article devoted to “the new songs and hymns devoted to freedom,” the anonymous critic “L.” complained that most of the employed anthems showed dismally low quality, targeting in particular the “Internationale” as reminiscent of a German beer hall song.232 The search for a new Russian anthem relied on the more exclusionary understanding of Russian national identity already widespread among Nietzsche’s orphans. While the Provisional Government recognized the need for a new anthem to replace “God Save the Tsar,” no practical measures were taken to accomplish this.233 Russian musical society quickly sought to take measures into its own hands: in early March members of the Mariinsky Theatre in Petrograd approached composer Aleksandr Glazunov with a request to “quickly compose” a new anthem for performance on March 13. While Glazunov rejected this request, he emphasized the need for a new anthem that would represent the Russian narod as a whole. In early March the Russian Musical Newspaper requested proposals for a temporary anthem; while declaring itself committed to finding a “patriotic and nonpartisan” text, the newspaper expressly forbade lyrics that touched upon the form of government the new state should take.234 However, from the outset the Russian Musical Newspaper gave a nationalist slant to the competition by nullifying the composition of new music for the anthem, insisting that submitted texts should fit some existing melody that was “popular in Rus’.” The editors also forbade the use of the old anthem by Aleksei L’vov, which, the paper declared, was a “German chorale” in form and therefore unsuitable for a Russian anthem.235 Over the coming months, the newspaper published a number of suggested texts, most of which continued to voice a messianic vision of Russia’s future, combined with a strong emphasis on the narod’s inherent spirituality. Vsevolod Cheshikhin celebrated Russia’s coming victory



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“over the whole world,” together with its status as “the third and final Rome,” the “final earthly shepherd,” “Messiah,” and “Russian Rome-­Zion,” to be sung to the tune of Dmitrii Bortniansky’s “Kol’ slaven nash Gospod v Sione.”236 While acknowledging that Cheshikhin’s choice of melody “thank God, was written by a Russian composer,” a certain Petronii argued for an even more strongly Russian nationalist anthem, insisting that one of the various “Slava” choruses (by Glazunov, Rubinstein, or Rimsky-­Korsakov) would be preferable to Bortniansky’s music. Rimsky-­Korsakov’s “Hymn of Berendeev” from Snegurochka was also raised as a good candidate as it was, in Petronii’s assessment, a “truly Russian hero’s song.”237 After briefly toying with the idea of submitting an anthem for consideration, composer Sergei Prokofiev similarly concluded that the most fitting work would be Glinka’s “Slava” chorus, which “only needs new words.”238 P. E. Matraev from Irkutsk authored a text that, while celebrating the imperial power of Russia, failed to acknowledge the existence of any group apart from the Russian narod.239 As a slightly more ethnically inclusive (though historically problematic) choice, Boris Popov proposed the use of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Slava” chorus from Boris Godunov; while acknowledging the opera’s unflattering historical context, he composed new words glorifying Russia’s transformed political situation. His lyrics, he argued, reflected the legal formulation of the new state, with themes of territory (“Holy Russian Land”), people (“all the peoples of a free, brotherly Russia!”) and state power (“power protected by God”).240 Only Vsevolod Bagadurov offered what could be considered a genuinely liberal political text, which emphasized the “brotherhood, equality, and freedom” that the “new life” of Russia would grant to the “peoples of different nations” (raznoplemennye narody).241 Nevertheless, such debates had limited impact on Russian society as a whole. In the end, the Provisional Government’s unofficial anthem (the “Workers’ Marseillaise”) was selected by popular usage rather than by educated society.242 Even after the October Revolution, critics such as Sergei Bulich continued to complain about the lack of a unifying anthem.243 The search for Orpheus similarly continued amid the dramatic upheavals after February 1917, though Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner were increasingly cited as figures of Russia’s past rather than its future. In an article penned in the summer of 1917, as well as in his more general musings, Igor Glebov (Boris Asaf’ev) espoused a strongly nationalist form of musical metaphysics. After arguing that in its relationship to the West (and particularly to Germany) “the sphere of Russian music is in essence a provincial sphere,” he concluded that Russia’s musical “provincialism” could only be overcome through developing the “national uniqueness of the Russian musical idea.” Mourning the absence of a “musical Pushkin,” Glebov summarized the failures of Medtner, Scriabin, and

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Rachmaninoff. Rejecting simplistic arguments that had reframed Medtner as a “German,” Glebov instead found in Medtner’s foreignness “to the elements of Russian music” the very embodiment of Russia’s musical failures. Medtner, in Glebov’s assessment, most strongly embodied the current problem of Russian music, whose compositions would remain “provincial in relation to the metropole [Germany]” so long as “Russian composers do not recognize the true nature of Russian music.” In this sense, Medtner was simply “an expression in the strongest degree of that which we also have in Rimsky-­Korsakov and Glazunov and Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.”244 In conclusion, Glebov mourned the failure of any composer to have found a truly original Russian voice and to have brought about the religious transcendence of current reality. Giving way to his own desire to act as a musical visionary, he concluded prophetically that the search for Orpheus would continue nevertheless. On the night of October 24, 1917, Viacheslav Ivanov gave a speech in Moscow devoted to the question of “Scriabin and the Spirit of Revolution.”245 Refuting the accusations of “individualism” and “Satanism” leveled against the composer, Ivanov claimed that Scriabin was in fact a true embodiment of the “Russian idea” and had sought consciously to create conditions for its triumph. In conclusion, he noted, “if the revolution we are living through is truly the great Russian Revolution, the much-­suffering and painful birth of the ‘independent Russian idea,’ the future historian will recognize in Scriabin one of its spiritual perpetrators and [will recognize] in the revolution itself the first measures of his unfinished Mystery.” He warned that such an assessment would only be possible if the future historian would “truly be able to say not only that ‘the earth was formless and empty and darkness lay over the abyss,’ but also to add: ‘and the Spirit of God moved over the waters’ of that [revolutionary time], which appears to us, his contemporaries, to be the turbid gaze of formless chaos.”246 Even as Ivanov concluded his speech, Vladimir Lenin was setting in motion a series of events that culminated, in the early hours of October 25, 1917, with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. As subsequent events would demonstrate, the Russian Empire had indeed entered a time of dramatic transformation, though not of the type envisioned by most of Nietzsche’s orphans.

Epilogue: Reverberations

Amid blizzard winds and snow-­packed roads on the night of December 23, 1917, Sergei Rachmaninoff fled into exile with his wife and children on a sledge across the Finnish frontier. Just days before, the Finnish parliament had declared Finland an independent country; now it served as the first stop on Rachmaninoff’s journey to Sweden. Already in June, upheavals after the February Revolution had left the composer uneasy and contemplating the possibility of taking his family abroad—a desire that intensified after the October Revolution. Three weeks after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he accepted an offer for a series of concert engagements in Sweden. Carrying the barest necessities, including only two thousand rubles and a briefcase (containing the first act of his never-­ completed opera Monna Vanna, a musical sketchbook, and the score to Rimsky-­ Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel ), he set off with his family for a new, unknown life far from his homeland. Rachmaninoff would never set foot on Russian soil again.1 But musical metaphysics did not leave Russia with the departure of Shaginian’s failed Orpheus. Nor did it depart in 1921, when Nikolai Medtner, frustrated by the direction of musical life in the revolutionary state and his difficult living conditions, followed Rachmaninoff and an increasing number of their compatriots abroad.2 Although émigrés carried the ideals of musical metaphysics with them into exile, the worldview that had shaped their aesthetic community remained firmly rooted in Russia, where it was adapted with surprising ease to the demands and expectations of the fledgling Marxist state. The revolution of October 1917 splintered musical metaphysics into several new directions. Rather than a conclusion, this epilogue highlights how musical

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208 Epilogue metaphysics continued to develop in three main directions after 1917: utopianism, memory, and disillusion. Nietzsche’s orphans espoused shifting and often contradictory beliefs in the tumultuous postrevolutionary years. To bring some order to what might otherwise appear as chaos, I demonstrate how each of these three trends found expression (sometimes by the same individuals at different moments) both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Although war and revolution ripped asunder many of the personal connections upon which the aesthetic community of Nietzsche’s orphans was built, the aims of musical metaphysics continued to find resonance, gradually modulating into new conceptual frameworks, as former participants struggled to redefine their places in contemporary society, both in the emerging Soviet Union and in exile. M US I C A L M E TA P H Y S I C S A N D U T O P I A N I S M A F T E R 19 1 7

Soviet Utopianism “The natural destiny of music,” wrote composer Arthur Lourié in 1919, “is to bring about a bright renewal in ordering the lives of the peoples.”3 Inspired by conversations with symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, who had embraced the Bolshevik Revolution as the embodiment of the “spirit of music” in the modern age, Lourié was an avant-­garde composer who had frequented the Stray Dog nightclub in St. Petersburg before the war and had already established a name for himself as a radical musical futurist through his experimentation with atonality and quarter-­ tones.4 He now employed his newfound public status as the head of MUZO (the music division of the Commissariat of Education or Narkompros) to propagate Blok’s particular interpretation of musical metaphysics.5 Caught up in the revolutionary ferment of 1918, Blok had heralded Nietzsche’s “spirit of music” as a symbol of the rising power of the revolutionary masses, whose awakening would transform the very basis of society. In this light, Blok had chided his fellow intellectuals who “understand music they hear on the piano, but not the spirit of music.”6 The language adopted in MUZO’s first declaration, echoing Blok, remained deeply enmeshed in the concepts of musical metaphysics even while celebrating the dawn of a new era. “In these heroic times, the spirit of music reveals itself in the seething rhythms of the world uprising: avenging, casting into oblivion and melting the layers of dead formations, which have been erected by cowering humanity in its deafness, stubbornly and blindly fettering the life-­ giving force of music,” Lourié claimed.7 Blok’s image of the revolution as the embodiment of musical time, sweeping away the decayed world of imperial Russia, was molded by Lourié into a statement of music’s continued relevance for con-



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temporary revolutionary society: through musical daring, a new society and a new humanity would be constructed. Blok’s embrace of the “spirit of music” in the revolutionary movement similarly inspired Marietta Shaginian: stranded in southern Russia with the outbreak of the Civil War, she found in Blok’s poem The Twelve (copies of which had been smuggled into her town) the spiritual transcendence that she had previously sought in Rachmaninoff. The Twelve, she concluded, was a prophetic work—a belief that Blok’s own disillusion with the revolution by 1921 could not influence her to change. “You are the only Russian poet now who described the moment [of revolution] as it truly was. For me, The Twelve is a symbol of belief, an artistic formula of the most treasured religious experience, which only a few of us ‘intelligents’ and almost all ‘simple folk’ souls experienced in the October Revolution,” she wrote to him. Perhaps overlooking the inner contradiction of such a claim for a self-­proclaimed Marxist, she affirmed to Blok that she had “prayed to God” in thanks for his insight. Contradictory or not, the transformed future for which she had long sought was finally in the process of creation. The future was bright with promise. Shaginian later reflected that her prerevolutionary admiration of Rachmaninoff and his music was most likely caused by “the unrecognized revolutionary upsurge” of the time: the development of her political consciousness under Soviet rule enabled her to recognize the naïveté of her youth.8 Although the Marxist theory of class struggle and the apparent relegation of music and the arts to the “superstructure” of society might seem to hold little in common with the utopian dreams of Nietzsche’s orphans, in actual fact the collectivist and utopian strains of musical metaphysics merged relatively easily with the utopian elements in Bolshevik thought. This gave rise to a creative atmosphere in which members of Russia’s prerevolutionary cultural elite sought to enact their cherished dreams of collectivism, despite—or even because of—the changed political reality. New government organizations devoted to popular education supported enlightenment programs for workers in the early revolutionary years, and concert programs, choral studios, and a wide network of “proletarian culture” organizations quickly sprang up.9 Under the new auspices of revolutionizing society, the utopian vision of musical metaphysics found direct application in mass spectacles, theatrical experiments, mass song pageants, and other attempts to emphasize collective participation and forge a unified identity for the new workers’ state. Often masterminded in the early revolutionary period by members of the prerevolutionary cultural elite, these practical embodiments of unity were in fact translations of older ideas already voiced in the imperial era. The participation of members of the old cultural elite was eased by the influence of Narkompros head Anatoly Lunacharskii, a former “God-­builder” with pre-

210 Epilogue revolutionary links to cultural circles, who willingly appointed members from their ranks to government positions.10 Now, however, “mysteries” were garbed in new, appropriately class-­conscious philosophy. Viacheslav Ivanov (who took a post in the theater division of Narkompros after the Bolshevik Revolution) melded old and new in a 1919 lecture preceding a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bolshoi. Admitting that there was no “liberated, self-­conscious humanity” depicted in the opera, he concluded that “we now await different acts, not acts of promise, but acts of fulfillment, acts of choral multitudes, a many-­mouthed human voice, and a real, rather than magical and symbolic human heroism. We await these, and we will, I know, live to see them.”11 Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold offered a Soviet form of mystery in their collaborative work on Mystery-­Bouffe, performed in Petrograd to celebrate the first anniversary of the October Revolution. First envisioned before the October Revolution, its plot (loosely based on the biblical story of the flood) injected class warfare into earlier dreams of a liturgical mystery: here the envisioned mystery was proletarian progress toward the gates of paradise through the overthrow of the old order.12 Rather than spiritual transcendence, it was the practical transcendence of the proletarian class over the bourgeoisie that was enacted onstage. Composer Arsenii Avraamov offered perhaps the most dramatic attempt to unite music, social unity and revolutionary fervor with his Symphony of Sirens. Performed in Baku in 1922 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, it combined the entire Caspian Sea fleet, all available steam engines, infantry, and city residents in a massive open-­ air public performance of revolutionary songs (including the “Warszawianka,” “Internationale,” and “Marseillaise”): a feat of collective performance beyond the wildest hopes of the imperial era.13 For Nadezhda Briusova, the transition to a collective culture was relatively easy. The revolution had ushered in the opportunity to put into practice the same treasured ideas she had previously sought to fulfill in the People’s Conservatory, but now with the additional sheen of political legitimacy and state support. Emerging as a leading figure in MUZO, Briusova presented her vision of “popular music education” to Narkompros in 1918. She repeated virtually word for word the same ideas she had once argued for under the auspices of the People’s Conservatory, now foregrounded by an opening nod to the “consciousness of thought” expressed by the revolutionary narod. Newfound consciousness notwithstanding, it was impossible, Briusova argued, for the narod to “build a new life” without first experiencing “new and unaccustomed” feelings—which music was uniquely qualified to awaken.14 Social divisions would be overcome as the narod and its teachers—musical experts such as Briusova—united in the



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study of folk song. This work would culminate in the founding of a people’s opera in which “we, the leaders, will link together all the creations of various authors, and will be, as it were, conductors of their musical creation.”15 Briusova’s arguments met with success, and by 1920, seven schools of general music education for the narod had been established in Moscow alone, with an additional twenty-­ five in other cities.16 Her star now in ascendance, Briusova continued to enjoy influence as a founding member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and member of the Red Professor faction at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1920s.17 Successfully negotiating the fraught political and social context of revolutionary Russia, she emerged as a formative figure in Soviet music education. While the link between social activism, music, and the revolution was most apparent in the communal education visions of Briusova, idealist rhetoric was broadly employed through the early 1920s among artists, educators, and critics such as Vladimir Derzhanovskii, Igor Glebov (Boris Asaf’ev), and others previously active in imperial Russia, who sought to meld older ideas from musical metaphysics with the new Marxist rhetoric.18 The role of Orpheus also maintained a central place in these utopian Soviet visions, though with new focus on class consciousness. In 1922 Leonid Sabaneev, still residing in Soviet Russia and participating in several state music institutions, hoped for the “creation of a monumental art,” stating that “we cannot realize [this art] without a genius who will capture the essence of the moment and express it through sound.”19 In a 1921 speech regarding Scriabin’s musical significance for the new Soviet state, Lunacharskii himself sought to reclaim Scriabin for the revolution. While admitting that the composer had been absorbed in idealistic visions out of keeping with Marxist thought, he nevertheless found in Scriabin’s intellectual evolution from Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean-­inspired individuality toward a collective vision of the Mystery a sign that Scriabin had, at the end, recognized his genuine task for the true, dialectical direction of history. Because of his continued intellectual development, Lunacharskii concluded, Scriabin became “a prophet and herald who stands at the doors of a genuine mystery, one to which the whole history of mankind has been only a prelude.” The collective vision Scriabin had foreseen (though he had tragically died before its realization) was, Lunacharskii hinted, the victorious Bolshevik revolution.20 While such utopian collaboration between the prerevolutionary cultural elite and the new Soviet state spent itself over the course of the 1920s, musical metaphysics lingered on in other ways. By adopting the terms of revolutionary discourse (whether as true believers or skeptics seeking personal gains), many of those who remained active in musical life gradually wrote themselves into the

212 Epilogue new state system.21 Lunacharskii’s enthusiastic reinterpretation of Scriabin as a genuine revolutionary was relatively short-­lived; nevertheless, the larger quest for Orpheus that had been a central tenet of musical metaphysics sustained deep reverberations. Composers such as Dmitrii Shostakovich attained near-­ mythological status in the Soviet Union—a development that is difficult to fully understand without the larger context of the Orphic search of his imperial predecessors. Embraced by the Communist Party as a loyal supporter and figurehead for Soviet cultural success, Shostakovich was claimed at the same time by members of the Soviet intelligentsia as a unifying figure who sparked a cathartic release of sorrow or secret fellowship against an oppressive regime.22 Thus the utopian image of a musician-­prophet continued to find support both in official and unofficial discourse. Just as Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Medtner had had limited control over the myths woven around their names, so these competing myths of Shostakovich far outstripped any specific actions or even intentions of the composer. The shadow cast by Orpheus was long indeed. Utopianism in the Émigré Community Musical metaphysics also accompanied the cultural elite who fled or were forced out of the Soviet Union, providing a basis through which they sought to imagine their role in a fundamentally transformed world. Perhaps the most spectacular example of utopianism among the émigré community was the Eurasianist movement, which emerged in 1921 with the publication of the almanac Iskhod k vostoku (Exodus to the East), with articles by émigrés Nikolai S. Trubetskoi (son of Sergei Trubetskoi and nephew of Evgenii Trubetskoi), Petr N. Savitskii, Petr P. Suvchinskii, and Georgii V. Florovskii. As a political and cultural worldview, Eurasianism drew upon similar sources and shared many of the same stereotypes as prerevolutionary debates over Russian identity. The illnesses of modernity (secularism, individualism) were once again associated with western European culture, a culture that had been imposed on Russia with the reforms of Peter the Great. Russia had thereafter been split into two separate cultures: peasant and intelligentsia. Despite this misfortune, the Eurasianists argued in an explicitly racialized twist to an old perspective, Russia was uniquely qualified to synthesize East and West through its dual European and Asian identity. Because of this “affinity of souls” shared by all those dwelling in the vast lands of the former empire, it was Russia alone that could usher in a new spiritual age, striking a balance between the “spiritual” and “material” sides of human development (or, to employ Nietzschean language, the synthesis of the Apollonian, rational West with the Dionysian, irrational East). This affinity was in turn imagined to be predicated upon a shared Russian Orthodox worldview. While rejecting the Bol-



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shevik revolution per se as overly materialistic, the Eurasianists tended to argue that the shock of the revolution had been necessary in order to free Russia from the domination of European influence.23 Derived from earlier forms of Slavophile thought and prerevolutionary musical metaphysics, Eurasianism interpreted music and culture through a postrevolutionary prism. Petr Suvchinskii (1892–1985), one of the founders of the Eurasianist movement, also had a close connection to late imperial Russian musical circles. A former founder/editor and financier of the Petrograd-­based journals Musical Contemporary and Melos, he fled Soviet Russia after the nationalization of his Petrograd apartment. After passing through Kiev, Sofia, and Berlin, he settled in Paris in 1925. There he came in contact with former MUZO head Arthur Lourié, who had seized the opportunity of a trip to Berlin to permanently emigrate from Russia after having been relieved of his government post in 1921.24 Flush with the excitement of recent events, disillusioned with the 1917 Revolution, and harboring a continued admiration for musical metaphysics, both men found their latest incarnation of Orpheus not in Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, or Medtner, but in the figure of Igor Stravinsky. Here at last, opined Suvchinskii, was an artist who would eliminate the boundaries between Russian and European in his music.25 Through transcending “historical time” and evoking instead “musical time,” Stravinsky’s music offered a space within which a new human character could form. For Lourié, who published two articles on Stravinsky in the Eurasianist journal Milestones (Versty) in 1926 and 1928, Stravinsky’s recent discovery of neoclassicism pointed the path to a new “religious synthesis” that could challenge the harmful effects of modernity.26 Eurasianism was relatively short-­lived as a political movement: undermined by internal conflicts over the question of political engagement as well as infiltration by Soviet agents, the movement divided in 1928, and many of the most political members perished in Gulag camps. But while the specific aims of Eurasianism faded, the narrative of musical metaphysics continued to echo in interpretations both of music generally and Stravinsky specifically. Stravinsky transported Suvchinskii’s ideas about musical time into the American context, employing them in his 1939–40 Harvard lecture series “The Poetics of Music,” which reiterated some of the most cherished ideas of musical metaphysics, namely that the “profound meaning of music and its essential aim” was “to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow-­man and with the Supreme Being.”27 The search for unity and transcendence through music continued. Common to Soviet and émigré utopian visions was a continued emphasis on music as a form through which to transcend historical time, a messianic image of Russia’s role as leader of a bright new world, and an apocalyptic vision of his-

214 Epilogue tory itself. Music, it was hoped, could help to usher in a fresh utopian future. Such desires for cultural and spiritual revolution were built on earlier claims in musical metaphysics that music possessed a unique ability to carry humankind to a higher state of consciousness or being. M US I C A L M E TA P H Y S I C S A S I D E A L I Z E D M E M O RY

In the turmoil of late 1917, Evgenii Trubetskoi’s thoughts were drawn to happy memories of his family’s country estate of Akhtyrka. For Trubetskoi, who had once awaited the “music of the future,” these memories were not just visual but aural. “When, with closed eyes, I remember [Akhtyrka],” he wrote, “it seems to me that I not only see it, but hear it. Literally every path in the park sounds, every grove, lawn or bend in the river; every place is connected with a particular motif, has its own unique musical form, inseparable from the visual form.”28 Fearing the potential disappearance of what he held to be most precious in Russian culture, he sought in his memoirs to textually capture and preserve for posterity the conceptual and the aural reality of what he feared would soon be “the forever vanished poetry of past Russia.” His memoirs, he hoped, would offer a final “spiritual testament to the Russia of the future” of the “spiritual beauty of past Russia.”29 In 1920 he died of typhus in Novorossisk after actively opposing Bolshevik power, but the 1921 publication of his memoirs enabled them to enter the realm of collective rather than personal memory, capturing an idealized image of old Russia for the émigré community. Margarita Morozova similarly entwined her personal memories with the construction of an idealized Russian past. Having lost her fortune in the nationalization campaign of the Bolshevik government, she ended her long life in relative obscurity in Moscow. Encouraged and supported by her old friend Sergei Durylin, in April 1950 Morozova resolved to put her own memories into words, preserving for future generations a snapshot of a world full of many sparkling ideas, hopes, and dreams, but cleansed of the human failings of many of the actors.30 In writing her memoirs, she found the inner strength to withstand the personal tragedies that marred her final years, including the deaths of a daughter and son and her ongoing struggle to receive a pension from the Soviet state.31 Nikolai Medtner’s memories of old Russia found expression in his final compositions prior to his departure: three sets of Forgotten Melodies (Zabytie motivy, Vergessene Weisen, op. 38–40). The title was a play on words: based on the motifs that had haunted him since 1916, the images of memory and forgetting are most strongly evoked in the first cycle, op. 38. The opening sonata of this set,



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“Sonata reminiscenza,” pre­sents a simple opening melody in A minor that recurs both throughout the sonata and more generally through the entire cycle of Forgotten Melodies. It appears in multiple incarnations (particularly in “Canzona serenata” and “Alla reminiscenza”), serving both as a reflective commentary on the surrounding musical material and as a hearkening back to the initial idea of the cycle as a whole, underlining the need for remembrance (ex. 6.1a). The final work of the cycle, “Alla reminiscenza,” offers an apotheosis of the theme: from its initial key of A minor, it shifts at last into the parallel key of A major (ex. 6.1b). The major incarnation of the melody is set against cross-­rhythms that obscure the rhythmic clarity of the closing, lifting it out of linear harmonic development into a shimmering transcendence of time itself: here, however, temporal transcendence is linked to an idealized past preserved in memory rather than the transfigured future that musical metaphysics had once envisioned. Alternately playful, wistful, and nostalgic, the Forgotten Melodies offer a glimpse into Medtner’s own idealized memory of a Russia already vanished. He personally premiered the works in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in January 1921: his last performance of his own compositions in Russia before his final de‑ parture in September of that year. Trubetskoi, Morozova, and Medtner all sought to put their thoughts into what were essentially intended as public forms in an attempt to link personal memory with collective memory. The desire to define “Russianness” and to memorialize “old Russia” as an idealized past, suspended outside historical time, a shift from a future-­oriented to a past-­oriented experience of temporality, was a trait that emerged among many Russian émigrés, and music served as a key way through which to achieve this. Klára Móricz has argued that “[Russian] emigrants seemed to have remained trapped in the vanished time between January 31, 1918, of the old Julian calendar and the next day, February 14, 1918, of the Gregorian calendar adopted by the new state.”32 She finds evidence of this process (which Andrew Demshuk, in his study of post–­World War II German expellees, has termed “residing in memory”) in the later career of Lourié, who by 1941 explicitly concluded that “music is very rarely concerned with the present. Its fundamental emotion is produced by the voice of memory.”33 Such a shift in the temporal imaginary of the Russian émigré community is also evident in the founding of the Russian Conservatory in Paris. Established on July 15, 1926, the conservatory was intended to “give Russian émigrés the possibility to receive musical instruction under the direction of professors from their own country” and to “allow the French (and foreigners in general) to study systematically and completely the Russian art of music, which has developed considerably in recent years.”34 Rather

Example 6.1a. Nikolai Medtner, opening from “Sonata Reminiscenza,” Forgotten Melodies, op. 38, no. 1. Adapted by author from original score (Leipzig: Zimmermann, 1922).

Example 6.1b. Nikolai Medtner, opening from “Alla Reminiscenza,” Forgotten Melodies, op. 38, no. 8. Adapted by author from original score (Leipzig: Zimmermann, 1922).



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than encouraging avant-­garde innovation or a new artistic synthesis, the primary task of the Russian Conservatory was to preserve and perpetuate the “tradition of Russian music” for future generations raised outside their homeland.35 It was in the figure of Sergei Rachmaninoff, however, that many Russians disillusioned by the revolution, and often suffering poverty (either in exile or in the Soviet Union), found the most perfect embodiment of an idealized Russian past. Rachmaninoff ’s personal desire to preserve the social customs and traditions of imperial Russia at the estate Villa Senar that he had built in Switzerland coincided with the broader role assigned to him, both by Russian émigrés and by former colleagues left behind in the Soviet Union.36 Voluntarily embracing the role of benefactor for an entire generation of Russian exiles, he emerged as a quintessential symbol of a lost Russian world. Much of the composer’s personal profit was spent to aid impoverished émigrés in the West and starving musicians, professors, and friends in the East.37 The image of Rachmaninoff as a tragic embodiment of Russia’s loss fed into interpretations of his life and work. Rather than a consequence of his grueling concert schedule, his failure to continue composing after his self-­imposed exile was often blamed upon the loss of his homeland and the inspiration he drew from it. Hundreds of letters to the composer from grateful Russian and Soviet admirers affirmed that Rachmaninoff was the “heart and soul” of Russia, the most “Russian” of Russians, a “symbol” of Russian culture, a “link to Old Russia.”38 The composer’s music, once critiqued as too “pessimistic,” was now embraced as the very essence of Russia itself. For some of Nietzsche’s orphans, musical time steadily became a collective space in which to evoke, reimagine, experience, and mourn the lost Russia of memory: an idealized space without tension, violence, or strife; in short, a more perfect world than that in which Nietzsche’s orphans now found themselves or, in fact, than had ever existed in reality.39 Expressed in memoir accounts and musical performances, this variant of musical metaphysics focused not on transforming the world but on mourning an imagined past that was never to return. D I S I L L US I O N, O R T H E FA D I N G O F M US I C A L M E TA P H Y S I C S

By May 1927 life in Soviet Moscow had become intolerable for the musician Volodia N. He had sunk into a deep depression, losing himself “both morally and materially.” Unable to pay his debts, he no longer saw any way of—or purpose for—continuing his existence. The few rubles he was able to scrape together were soon squandered on alcohol, a temporary balm of forgetfulness with which to blot out the misery of his life. But as he stood pondering the futility of existence

218 Epilogue one afternoon on Moscow’s Arbat Street, the sight of an individual in a passing carriage flooded him with a wealth of contradictory impressions: it was Nikolai Medtner, who had returned to Soviet Russia in 1927 for a series of concert engagements—his first (and, as it turned out, his last) return to his homeland. Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Volodia was struck by a sudden insight: “I understood at that moment that the thoughts I had just been having of my life were only some sort of useless part, that my life [existed] at the same time as his life, that he was going somewhere now, while I was also standing here and thinking of myself, just as he, perhaps, was now thinking of some sort of new, great work of his, the notes of which he picked out with his fingers. And suddenly in a moment, something became clear within me: ‘Everything is one, everything is unity!’”40 Embodied in this vision of Medtner was the contrast between Volodia’s previous hope-­filled life and his present purposeless existence. Volodia’s belief in musical metaphysics, with its promise of unity, transformation, and salvation, was reawakened: “It was Nikolai Karlovich Medtner who traveled in that carriage, dreaming perhaps of his new, great musical themes, not suspecting that nearby stood a man entirely submerged in the shadow of his life’s ordinariness. Medtner had, with his appearance alone, carried [him] away to the realm of his thoughts and, at least for a moment, lightened his life almost to ecstasy.”41 Medtner’s unexpected appearance in the streets of Moscow momentarily reawakened in Volodia a vision of a higher, spiritual purpose for his life. But by 1927 Volodia’s belief in musical metaphysics was fleeting. Ten long years had passed since the revolutions of 1917 had swept away the old regime. For Volodia, reality intervened, preventing him from following his first, wild impulse to cry out to Medtner, to run after his carriage to somehow express to this Orpheus the power he still held. Afraid to seem a madman yelling after strangers in the street, Volodia instead stood frozen in place, missing his streetcar as his eyes followed after Medtner’s carriage, which vanished into an alley. Haunted by memories of a former, brighter life, Volodia found himself unable to sleep that night. He sought solace in writing to a friend and colleague, with whom he had once shared dreams of music’s transformative and salvific power. “Medtner, music, Sergei Ivanovich [Taneev], our youth—where are they all?” he mused sorrowfully. “Are they really always with us? Oh, I have completely lost myself in my own life and already believe in almost nothing. I want to say a lot, but to whom? Isn’t it all the same? Only the death of a person says something to those around him.”42 Running out of words and realizing the entire night had passed as he wrote his impassioned letter, Volodia ended with a cry of alienation and despair as he pleaded for his friend to visit him. Along with utopian dreams and bucolic memories, disillusion was the third



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fate of musical metaphysics after 1917. For some, it was a natural development out of the failure of their utopian dreams. Whereas the Great War and the subsequent revolutions had initially proffered the imminent transformation of the world through the spirit of music, some saw in their aftermath that modernization, fragmentation, and mechanization (the very ills of modernity), rather than spiritual regeneration, had proven victorious. Revolutionary writer Evgenii Zamiatin embodied his own increasing disillusion with Bolshevism and the path of the revolution in his 1922 short story “The Cave,” set in the midst of the Russian Civil War. The main character, Martin Martinych, once a refined and educated admirer of Scriabin, is reduced to stealing firewood from his neighbor in order to heat his bitterly cold apartment in Petrograd. Over the course of the story, Scria‑ bin’s final masterpiece (the op. 74 preludes) are stripped of their metaphysical significance and turned into scraps of fuel for the insatiable stove, whose heat nonetheless fails to postpone the suicide of Martin’s partner, Masha. In an ironic twisting of the composer’s dreams of mystical transcendence through art, music is here reduced to its mere physical traces: scraps of paper that burn more quickly than wood.43 Similarly disillusioned with the early Soviet state, in 1926 Leonid Sabaneev departed for France, never to return. This departure abroad was accompanied by what was perhaps an even more surprising rejection of his own past life. After receiving an unexpected letter in 1928 from fellow Scriabinist Vladimir Bogorodskii, he mused upon the former associates he had once met almost daily. “In general, I must admit that all of them are ‘strange’ somehow, and they appear not old, but extraordinarily antiquated,” he wrote to his friend Aleksandr Krein, who had remained in the Soviet Union. In conclusion, he reflected, “in my opinion, if I met Scriabin himself, he would also seem old-­fashioned.”44 While Sabaneev had once lauded the concept of musical progress as part of broader human development, from exile he suggested that progress had in fact destroyed the very essence of human creativity. Modernity had wiped away all possibility of stepping outside the ever-­accelerating historical flow of time. Rather than “musical time” transcending “calendar time,” he found himself trapped in a linear historical narrative in which music itself had become obsolete.45 Believing that the modern world “strives for simplification and for the destruction of feelings and sensations, for the hygiene and sanitation of ordinary life” rather than genuine artistic creation, he concluded that “the life of the future will be hygienic, not artistic. There will be comfort—wonderful water closets and wash basins, good cars and airplanes—but [the future] will be weak in music and artistic work: it will not be needed. It might very well be that music in general will be forbidden, as a destruction of quiet and hygiene, and really that is not

220 Epilogue so bad, if you consider.” He concluded that in order to adapt to this new world, one was required to “give up music” and adopt instead “more contemporary and timely work.” Rather than musicians, the modern world demanded “engineers, pyrotechnicians, pilots, and designers.” There was, in short, no longer any hope of salvation from historical time through musical experience. Or, as Sabaneev himself concluded, “music is an antiquated world, old-­fashioned in itself, like poetry (which, it is apparent, has already ended ).”46 Like Sabaneev and Zamiatin, both Pavel Florenskii and Aleksandr Blok suffered the loss of belief in music itself as a transformative power. For Florenskii disillusion came not because music per se had lost its power but because the music he had once heard internally, the music that had always underpinned experience, had fallen silent. Writing in 1933 to his mother from the Solovki prison camp, where he had been imprisoned for purported anti-­Soviet activities, he mused that “it is very difficult to explain why nothing has resonance, why there is no music of things or of life. I don’t understand it myself, but nevertheless there is no music.”47 The “music” that had inspired Blok’s creativity fell silent even earlier: after composing his final two poems (The Twelve and The Scythians, seen by some as propaganda for the new regime), the physical loss of his hearing paralleled the loss of ability to hear the internal “spirit of music” that had once guided his creativity. “There are no sounds!” he cried in despair just before his death in 1921.48 For those of Nietzsche’s orphans who remained in the Soviet Union, disillusionment often came not through the explicit rejection of music but in the guise of appropriation, hunger, arrest, exile, and prison. Orphic visionary Vladimir Rebikov was reported to have starved to death in the midst of the Russian Civil War.49 Tatiana Schloezer, having already suffered the loss of her messiah in 1915, was devastated a second time by the drowning of her son Julian, in whom she had placed great hopes as Scriabin’s successor. She returned to Moscow from Kiev, where she had fled the advancing Bolsheviks, only to die of typhus.50 Andrei Bely, after an unsuccessful attempt to adapt to émigré life, also returned to Moscow, where he died a half-­hearted Marxist in 1934. Sergei Durylin, Aleksandr Gorskii, and Pavel Florenskii all faced a series of arrests and exiles from 1927 onward: of the three, only Durylin survived.51 Disillusion with musical metaphysics also prompted a search for a new sort of Orpheus. Though no longer on speaking terms with one another, both Ivan Il’in and Emilii Medtner discovered an infectious excitement in the early speeches of Adolf Hitler, which Emilii in particular sought to transfer to Anna and Nikolai. His impassioned interpretations of the historical significance of Germany elicited sympathy: in response to Emilii’s analysis of recent political



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developments in 1933, Anna asserted that she and Nikolai also hoped for “the curing of the entire world, if only Germany holds to its path.” In response to the same letter, Nikolai claimed that Emilii’s excerpts from speeches by Paul von Hindenburg and Hitler awakened “such an image of heroic risoluto in striving for Regeneration, that even my soul was seized.”52 Ever more cautious than his brother, Nikolai nonetheless also voiced some reservation in his enthusiasm for Germany’s new Orpheus, noting that the policies of the Nazi Party had already raised cries of protest, particularly against their anti-­Semitism.53 Emilii remained fanatically devoted to the emerging Führer, describing Hitler’s speech at the funeral of Hindenburg in Wagnerian-­inspired terminology reminiscent of his prerevolutionary articles.54 In contrast to his earlier Orphic dreams, however, his younger brother was now granted a mere supporting role; while he encouraged Nikolai to compose a symphonic poem Caesar, based on the novel by Austrian writer (and fascist sympathizer) Mirko Jelusich, it was Hitler and the National Socialists who now took center stage in Emilii’s visions for the future.55 Emilii’s sudden death in 1936 prevented him from witnessing the full horror wrought by Hitler, but Nikolai and Anna observed the devastation with growing despair from their abode in England. Nikolai ultimately identified the source of the evils of both Bolshevism and Nazism not simply in the explosion of class and national hatred, but in the loss of “genuine” culture throughout Europe, reflected in the abandonment of the eternal laws governing musical creativity.56 By the end of the war, Nikolai wondered despairingly whether the creation of the atomic bomb might not finally bring about the end of the world.57 For Sabaneev, however, the belief that any Orphic figure could transform the world had vanished long before the rise of Nazi power. Reflecting on his earlier life in a 1928 letter to his former colleague Aleksandr Krein, Sabaneev commented, “I remember our ‘old, other’ specialties. Truly the sun rose and set in a single composition. Only here [in emigration] did I understand that this was only hypnosis and delusion, that our musical slavery was a small dead end in a large world. For this reason, I now have a skeptical and angry relationship to the musical sphere. . . . What good are these universal perspectives which never offer any sort of happiness, but only a thrashing of nerves and a spoiling of life?”58 Sabaneev here voiced a resentment and bitterness at the failure of musical metaphysics that was shared by many. In Russia’s hour of need, Orpheus had not returned. Perhaps even more than the search for Orpheus, the vision of a life-­transforming mystery, a quasi-­religious eschatological act that would bring the current stage of history to an end, proved chimerical from the outset. Fervently embraced in the musical world, the idea of a mystery inspired a generation of artists and musi-

222 Epilogue cians, but ultimately it proved unattainable. Whether in the Soviet Union or in the West, the mid-­twentieth century did not provide an amenable space for such utopian imaginings. In the early revolutionary period, mass spectacles had sought to redefine the divide between performers and audience in the Soviet Union; by the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP) these were increasingly marginalized, and with the elucidation of Socialist Realism as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union, traditional forms of performance once more dominated stages, concert halls, and screens.59 In the West the utopian drive to transform the world through collective musical experience dissipated in an environment focused on individual rather than communal expression. Sabaneev’s concept of the mystery morphed from Scriabin’s apocalyptic dream to end the world, unify all peoples of Europe, and resurrect humanity, into a composition that Sabaneev worked on “for himself ” in his spare time. Unable to completely give up his “monastic” vision of his “duty to humanity” to complete his own large-­scale mystery (his Apocalypse), he nevertheless admitted that his attempts were “untimely” and of no use to the contemporary age. The unfinished sketches for Sabaneev’s Apocalypse were ultimately abandoned in an archive after his death, uncatalogued and forgotten, a yellowing remnant from a world that had long ago ceased to exist.60 War and revolution wrought a continuum of violence, trauma, and dramatic change from which it was impossible to emerge unscathed. Picking up Emilii Medtner’s Modernism and Music in 1932, Rachmaninoff found himself captivated by the work that he had disparaged so many years before, taken with his erstwhile compatriot’s passionate attack on the ills of modernity.61 But the moment for intellectual exchange between the two men, if it had ever been possible, had passed long ago. Reflecting on his previous life in response to Rachmaninoff’s request to republish the book, Emilii captured the immeasurable gulf between his past and present worlds, claiming that “from the time I abandoned Russia [June 1914], I began to distance myself from music both internally and externally.” Thus, he concluded, “while Vol’fing still lives in Modernism and Music . . . he no longer actively exists in me.”62 Though conceptual traces of musical metaphysics lingered both in and outside the Soviet Union, it had failed as a theurgic worldview destined to transform reality in the near future. Music had neither transformed nor reunited the world. C O N C L US I O N

In Hendon Cemetery in North London one can visit Nikolai Medtner’s final resting place. Planned by Anna Medtner together with Ivan Il’in and his wife, and designed by Mstislav Dobuzhinskii (who had once designed the sword and lyre



Epilogue 223

Figure 6.1. Tombstone, Nikolai Medtner. Hendon Cemetery (March 2010). Author’s photograph.

that adorned Music in 1915), it was intended not to be “gloomy.” The tombstone is inscribed with an Orthodox cross and a scriptural quotation from John 15:5: “Without me, you can do nothing,” a phrase that Anna claimed was particularly dear to Nikolai throughout his life.63 The composer’s name, in both Russian and German, is carved above the cross, with his birth date appearing below the Russian rendition and his date of death below the German (fig. 6.1).64 The spelling of “Nicolas” rather than “Nikolaus” or “Nikolai” is, however, French rather than German or Russian. In death, as in life, Medtner was caught between multiple worlds. His self-­imposed exile took him from Russia first to Germany and then, amid the growing tensions preceding the Second World War, to England. This obscure site of commemoration symbolizes the multiethnic dimension of European imperial identity, rather than the violence and hatred that marked much of the twentieth century. In a small pot at the base of the tombstone, a few flowers struggle to survive. Closer inspection reveals an inscription on the side, once

224 Epilogue

Figure 6.2. Tombstone, Emilii Medtner. Hendon Cemetery (March 2010). Author’s photograph.

again in Russian and German spelling: “E. K. Medtner” (fig. 6.2). Absent any consoling scriptural reference or images, Emilii’s birth and death dates (1872– 1936) stand in stark contrast to Nikolai’s grave. In this quiet corner of London, the irony of Nietzsche’s orphans finds full expression. Once, they imagined that they possessed the power to transfigure society itself. Ultimately, they were swept up, powerless, in a maelstrom generated by all the forces of their day. The identities they had sought to carve out for themselves were overwritten by history, as the world itself transformed into something very distant from what they had once envisioned. The twentieth century heralded unprecedented ethnic violence, hatred, and discord—not unity. In vain would one search for Anna Medtner’s final resting place in this London cemetery. After the deaths of both Emilii and Nikolai, she was encouraged by news that her second husband’s music was once more performed and loved in Soviet Russia, and that there was an interest to collect “everything” that pertained to his life and work. Risking a return to Moscow, she devoted her final years to promoting the legacy of Nikolai’s creative work in their former homeland.65 Despite her initial reservations, the Soviet music community made good



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on their promise to honor Medtner: the composer’s collected works (in twelve volumes) were published by the State Music Publishing House from 1959 to 1963. In this and subsequent works, Medtner was reinterpreted by Soviet musicologists as “deeply Russian” and part of a usable Soviet heritage.66 Only his op. 19 and op. 19a songs were excluded from the Soviet publication. As settings of poems by Friedrich Nietzsche, they did not fit the refurbished image of Medtner in a state that associated Nietzsche with the most negative legacies of Germany. This particular “orphan” was thus cleansed of Nietzsche.67 Indeed, post-­Soviet Russia has expanded upon the Soviet rediscovery and reinterpretation not just of Medtner but of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin as well. Alongside conferences and documentaries devoted to the Medtner family’s distinctive place in Russian culture, Rachmaninoff’s former estate house of Ivanovka (destroyed in the Civil War) was rebuilt and ceremonially opened in 1995: a pilgrimage site for any Russian seeking identity in a troubled post-­Soviet world. Scriabin has been rediscovered along with other Silver Age cultural figures: Sabaneev’s Reminiscences of Scriabin was reissued in 2000 and 2014, and a paper delivered at the Nikolai Fedorov Museum and Library in Moscow in 2008 argued that the composer’s philosophical writings had immediate relevance for contemporary Russia.68 The 2015 centenary of Scriabin’s death has provided the opportunity to reconsider the place of this unorthodox composer and philosopher within Russia’s cultural identity; it is to be hoped that the event stimulates a nuanced reassessment of the complex nature of his musical and philosophical testament. Such activities are part of a broader effort by contemporary Russians to rediscover their prerevolutionary past, an effort in which many of Nietzsche’s orphans hold an important place. In 2005 the Russian Culture Fund of the Russian Ministry of Culture spearheaded the exhumation of the body of philosopher Ivan Il’in from his resting place in Switzerland and a ceremonious reburial in Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery; in 2006 his personal archive was transferred from Michigan State University to Moscow State University.69 Such ongoing efforts demonstrate that culture in general and music in particular remain spaces in which Russian identity is actively being negotiated in the present. Although musical metaphysics failed to transcend the troubles and divisions it was intended to overcome, nationalism remains a spirit of our age, interpreting music in ways that the composers themselves could never have foreseen.

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Glossary of Names

AKIMENKO, FEDOR STEPANOVICH (1876–1945)

Composer and mystically inclined musical philosopher born in Kharkov region, trained in St. Petersburg. Director of the Kharkov branch of the Russian Musical Society. After 1917, professor at Petrograd Conservatory. Emigrated to France in 1923; from 1932 taught at the Russian Conservatory in Paris. Died in Paris. BALTRUŠAITIS, JURGIS (1873–1944)

Symbolist poet, wrote in Russian and Lithuanian. Close friend of Scriabin. From 1920 to 1939 served as Lithuanian ambassador to the Soviet Union. Died in Paris. BELY, ANDREI (BORIS NIKOLAEVICH BUGAEV) (1880–1934)

Symbolist poet, writer, memoirist, and cultural critic. Close collaborator with Emilii Medtner. Their friendship was ultimately undermined by Bely’s mystical inclinations and interest in anthroposophy. Sympathizer of the 1917 Revolution, active in Bolshevik-­ era Moscow Proletkult and Narkompros. After brief sojourn abroad in 1919–1923, returned to Moscow. Died in Moscow. BERDIAEV, NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH (1874–1947)

Religious philosopher dedicated to idea of artistic theurgy. Occasional visitor to Scria­ bin’s evening gatherings. Expelled from Soviet Russia on the “philosophers’ ship” in 1922. Died near Paris. BLOK, ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH (1880–1921)

Symbolist poet and theorist with mystical inclinations, close associate of Andrei Bely. Interpreted the October Revolution of 1917 as the embodiment of the “spirit of music” and the beginning of a spiritual as well as social revolution. Offered messianic interpretation of Russia’s future in final poems The Twelve (1918) and The Scythians (1918). Increasingly disillusioned by 1920. Died in Petrograd.

227

228

Glossary of Names

BRAUDO, EVGENII MAKSIMOVICH (1882–1939)

Music critic and Wagnerian, born in Riga. Active in the revolutionary movement from 1900. After 1917 participated in activities of Narkompros. In later Soviet era worked as a music critic for newspaper Pravda. Died in Moscow. BRIANCHANINOV, ALEKSANDR NIKOLAEVICH (1874–1956)

Governmental bureaucrat, journalist, Pan-­Slavist, close friend of Scriabin. Founded the journal The New Link, devoted to Slav interests (1913–16). Married to fellow Scriabinist Mariia Brianchaninova (née Gorchakova). Spent final years in emigration in France. BRIUSOVA, NADEZHDA IAKOVLEVNA (1881–1951)

Music scholar and educator, founding member of the Moscow People’s Conservatory, sister of symbolist poet Valerii Briusov. Devoted to music education of the narod both before and after 1917. After 1917, professor at the Moscow Conservatory, co-­worker of the Music Division of the People’s Commissariat of Education (MUZO), and member of various organizations devoted to proletarian culture, including Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM). Died in Moscow. BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (1871–1944)

Religious philosopher and disaffected Marxist. Occasional guest at Scriabin’s evening gatherings. Ordained as a priest in 1918. Opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power; expelled on the “philosophers’ ship” of 1922. Died in Nazi-­occupied Paris. DERZHANOVSKII, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH (1881–1942)

Born in Tiflis. Moscow music critic, cofounder of the Evenings of Contemporary Music (1909), and editor of the journal Music. Participant in 1905 Revolution; active in organizing city music concerts after 1905. After 1917, member of the Music Division of the People’s Commissariat of Education (MUZO) and one of the founders of the Association for Contemporary Music (ASM). Died near Moscow. DOBUZHINSKII, MSTISLAV VALERIANOVICH (1875–1957)

Painter and member of the World of Art group (Mir iskusstva). Designer of the 1915 cover logo of the journal Music. Emigrated in 1924. Friend of the Medtners; at the request of Anna Medtner, designed tombstone for Nikolai Medtner. Died in New York. DURYLIN, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (1886–1954)

Poet, writer, religious philosopher. From 1912, secretary of the Moscow Religious-­ Philosophical Society. Studied archaeology and devoted himself to researching Russian legend of Kitezh. In 1919 took religious orders. Multiple arrests by Soviet authorities (1922, 1927, 1933). Achieved fame in later years as a cultural scholar. Received PhD in 1943; after 1945, professor at the Russian University of Theatrical Art (Moscow). Died in Moscow.



Glossary of Names

229

EIGES, KONSTANTIN ROMANOVICH (1875–1950)

Music philosopher, aesthetician, and composer, born in Kharkov region. Sought to translate mystical ideas of Vladimir Solov’ev into philosophical interpretation of music. After 1918, active in Soviet musical and music educational institutions, including the Music Division of the People’s Commissariat of Education (MUZO) and the State Institute of Musical Science (GIMN). Died in Moscow. ELLIS (LEV L’VOVICH KOBYLINSKII) (1879–1947)

Symbolist poet, cofounded publishing house Musaget with Emilii Medtner and Andrei Bely. Emigrated after 1917. Died in Switzerland. ENGEL, IULII DMITRIEVICH (1868–1927)

Moscow composer, music critic, teacher, and ethnographer. Chief critic for daily paper the Russian Herald. Cofounder of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1924. ERN, VLADIMIR FRANTZEVICH (1882–1917)

Religious philosopher, founder of and regular participant in the Moscow Religious-­ Philosophical Society. Close friend of Viacheslav Ivanov. Rejected both nihilism and German idealist philosophy as harmful to Russian culture and embraced a messianic image of Russia’s role in the modern world. Died in Moscow in May 1917. FICHTE, JOHANN GOTTLIEB (1762–1814)

Founding figure in development of German idealist philosophy. Concerned with questions of subjectivity and consciousness, his philosophy is often considered to have formed a bridge between Kant and Hegel. Inspired the philosophical musings of Scria­ bin. FINDEIZEN, NIKOLAI FEDOROVICH (1868–1928)

Extremely prolific music critic, historian, and founder and editor of the Russian Musical Newspaper. Specialist in early Russian music. After 1917, member of the Music Division of the People’s Commissariat of Education (MUZO) and head of the music bibliographic division of the State Museum of Music History. Died in Leningrad. FLORENSKII, PAVEL ALEKSANDROVICH (1882–1937)

Religious philosopher, mystic, mathematician, physicist, and occasional visitor to Scria­ bin’s home. Arrested and exiled in 1928; rearrested in 1933. Sentenced to death by extrajudicial People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) troika in 1937. GAGARINA, MARINA NIKOLAEVNA (NÉE TRUBETSKAIA) (1877–1924)

Scriabinist and younger sister of Sergei and Evgenii Trubetskoi. Founding member of the Scriabin Society after the composer’s death. Emigrated to France after 1917. Died in Nice.

230

Glossary of Names

GLEBOV, IGOR (BORIS VLADIMIROVICH ASAF’EV) (1884–1949)

Music critic, musicologist, and composer educated in St. Petersburg. Began his writing career in the final years of the Russian Empire with publications in Music and the Musical Contemporary, offering strongly idealist interpretations. Often considered one of the founders of Soviet musicology, he provided a central intellectual model for interpreting music. Held several influential musical, organizational, and editorial posts in the Soviet Union. Died in Moscow. GORSKII (GORSKII-­GORNOSTAEV), ALEKSANDR KONSTANTINOVICH (1886–1943)

Poet, writer, music critic, Orthodox priest, and admirer of Vladimir Solov’ev’s philosophy. Graduated from the Moscow Spiritual Academy in 1910. Transported his love of mystically inclined music (especially by Rebikov and Scriabin) to Odessa, where he taught at the Spiritual Academy (1912–18) and served as a regular commentator in the Southern Musical Herald. In 1918 he organized a religious-­philosophical society in Odessa. Returned to Moscow in 1922 and worked as a writer. Series of arrests and exiles began in 1927. Died in prison hospital in 1943. GUNST, EVGENII OTTOVICH (1877–1938)

Moscow composer and music critic. Regular contributor to Music, Theatre and Art, and other journals. Emigrated after 1917 to France. Died in Paris. HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770–1831)

Philosopher and central figure in German idealist philosophy. Sought to elaborate a complex and systematic ontology of human existence; introduced the concept of human history as teleological progress into philosophical development. Extremely popular among Russian intellectuals in the mid-­nineteenth century. Though seldom explicitly acknowledged, his theories (or the rejection of them) continued to underpin philosophical thought in late imperial Russia. IL’IN, IVAN ALEKSANDROVICH (1883–1954)

Religious philosopher with strong Slavophile leanings, close friend of the Medtner family. Expelled from Russia on the “philosophers’ ship” in 1922, after which he emerged as a leading philosopher for the White émigré movement. Died in Switzerland. IVANOV, VIACHESLAV IVANOVICH (1866–1949)

Philosopher, symbolist poet, cultural critic, religious seeker, and scholar of ancient Greek culture. Envisioned the revival of a theater of mass participation in Russia, modeled on ancient religious ritual. Friend and admirer of Scriabin, in whom he identified a fellow seeker of Christian truths. Emigrated to Rome in 1924, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. Died in Rome. KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804)

German idealist philosopher who argued that human experience of the phenomenal world is structured by underlying concepts (such as space and time) imposed by the



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231

active mind. His ideas served as an important basis for late imperial Russian critiques of positivism, though his thinking was often misinterpreted as having introduced a subject-­ object dichotomy into philosophy that needed to be overcome. KARATYGIN, VIACHESLAV GAVRILOVICH (1875–1925)

Composer and music critic, admirer of modernist musical style. While generally disinterested in the metaphysical views of many of his contemporaries, he embraced a progressive view of Russian music history that celebrated Scriabin and connected Nikolai Medtner and Rachmaninoff with outlived expressive forms. Died in Leningrad. KOPTIAEV, ALEKSANDR PETROVICH (1868–1941)

Composer, music critic, scholar, educator, and translator. Sought to propagate Nietzsche’s philosophy of music to a Russian audience. After 1917, active as music teacher in workers’ clubs. Died in Leningrad. KOUSSEVITZKY, SERGE ALEKSANDROVICH (1874–1951)

Conductor, composer, and double bass player. With financial support from his wife, Natalia Ushkova (daughter of a wealthy Moscow tea merchant), in 1909 founded the Russian Music Publishing House (Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo), as well as a permanent Moscow-­based orchestra and concert series. Published compositions by Scria­ bin, Medtner, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky. Emigrated in 1920 and served as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. Died in Boston. LERMONTOVA, VARVARA NIKOLAEVNA (NÉE TRUBETSKAIA) (1870–1933)

Scriabinist and younger sister of Sergei and Evgenii Trubetskoi. Founding member of the Scriabin Society after the composer’s death. Emigrated to France after 1917. LUNACHARSKII, ANATOLII VASIL’EVICH (1875–1933)

Soviet commissar of education. Studied philosophy in Switzerland and had connections both in revolutionary and cultural circles of late imperial Russia. Advocated a relatively lenient policy toward non-­Bolshevik artists willing to work with the regime. Demoted from his position as policy shifted toward more active control of the arts in 1929. Died in France, where he served as a Soviet diplomat in his final years. MASLOV, ALEKSANDR LEONTEVICH (1876–1914)

Moscow-­based ethnographer, music critic, and editor of the journal Music and Life. Particularly interested in the study of folk music, he envisioned music as a means of achieving social unity. Active in the Moscow People’s Conservatory. Died in the Great War. MEDTNER, ANNA MIKHAILOVNA (NÉE BRATENSKAIA) (1877–1965)

Violinist, wife of Emilii and later Nikolai Medtner. Devoted her life to supporting the creative work of her second husband. Returned to the Soviet Union after Nikolai’s death to promote his music. Died in Moscow.

232

Glossary of Names

MEDTNER, EMILII KARLOVICH (1872–1936)

Symbolist theorist, cultural and music critic, founder and editor of the publishing house Musaget. Elder brother of Nikolai Medtner. Devoted to introducing classical German culture to his Russian contemporaries. After 1914, resident in Switzerland. Died in Germany. MEDTNER, NIKOLAI KARLOVICH (1879–1951)

Moscow composer of German descent. Late Romantic compositional style. Through his elder brother Emilii, enjoyed a close connection with symbolist literary circles. Occasionally attended meetings of the Moscow Religious-­Philosophical Society. Emigrated in 1921, settling in Germany, France, and ultimately England. Died in London. MOROZOVA, MARGARITA KIRILLOVNA (NÉE MAMONTOVA) (1873–1958)

Wealthy artistic patron, philanthropist, publisher, cofounder of the Moscow Religious-­ Philosophical Society (1905–18), member of the directorship of the Moscow branch of the Russian Music Society, piano student of Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner. Financial supporter of the periodical Moscow Weekly and the religious-­philosophical publishing house The Way (Put’). Cultivated an idealized love affair with Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi. Personal wealth nationalized by Bolsheviks in 1918. Died in Moscow. NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900)

German philosopher, cultural critic, and philologist. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he associated the underlying unity of all existence with “Dionysus” and the “spirit of music”: ideas that found deep resonance in late imperial Russia, even while his rejection of Christianity and traditional moral values was considered deeply problematic. OLENINA D’ALHEIM, MARIA (1869–1970)

Singer and musical activist. Founder of the House of Song (Dom Pesni) in Moscow (1908). Propagandized the vocal works of Russian composers (particularly Mussorgsky), as well as other “national” schools of song. In 1918 emigrated to Paris and later joined the French Communist Party. Returned to the USSR in 1959. Died in Moscow. PASTERNAK, LEONID OSIPOVICH (1862–1945)

Born in Odessa. Post-­impressionist painter and friend of Scriabin. Father of Soviet writer Boris Pasternak. POPOV, BORIS MIKHAILOVICH (1883–1941)

Lawyer and music critic with mystical and Pan-­Slavic leanings. After 1908, active as organizer and conductor of the Perm Philharmonic Society. After 1917, participated in music education in Irkutsk. Died in Batumi. PROKOF’EV, GRIGORII PETROVICH (1883–1962)

Music critic and professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory. Regular Moscow cor-



Glossary of Names

233

respondent for the Russian Musical Newspaper (1910–16). After 1917, active in the State Institute of Musical Science (GIMN). Died in Moscow. RACHMANINOFF, SERGEI VASIL’EVICH (1873–1943)

Composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist. Late Romantic compositional style, often labeled “traditional” in comparison to works by Scriabin. Emigrated in December 1917, remained a financial and moral support for many Russian émigrés. Died in Los Angeles. REBIKOV, VLADIMIR IVANOVICH (1866–1920)

Modernist composer, music publicist, and teacher. Embraced a mystical interpretation of music. Influenced by the aesthetic theories of Lev Tolstoy, he sought to create an “Orphic” musical style that would have an immediate emotional impact on listeners. Died in Yalta. SABANEEV, LEONID LEONIDOVICH (1881–1968)

Composer, mathematician, music critic, memoirist, and close friend of Scriabin. Supporter of compositional innovation and musical “progress.” After 1917, active in GIMN, president of ASM, and involved in other state-­supported musical initiatives. Emigrated to France in 1926 and was subsequently blacklisted by the Soviet musical establishment. Died in Nice. SAKHNOVSKII, IURII SERGEEVICH (1866–1930)

Composer, conductor, and music critic. Opposed Scriabin’s musical style as decadent. After 1917, active in the Music Division of the People’s Commissariat of Education (MUZO). Died in Moscow. SCHLOEZER, BORIS FEDOROVICH (1881–1969)

Philosopher and music critic. Brother of Scriabin’s second (common-­law) wife, Tatiana Schloezer, and close friend of the composer. Encouraged Scriabin’s philosophical explorations. After 1917, emigrated to France. Died in Paris. SCHLOEZER, TATIANA FEDOROVNA (1883–1922)

Second (common-­law) wife of Scriabin and sister of Boris Schloezer. Gave up her own musical career to devote herself to supporting her husband’s. Initially fled to Kiev after October 1917 Revolution but returned to Moscow after the death of her young son Julian. Died in Moscow. SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788–1860)

German philosopher, famous for his division of the world into dissatisfied will and the phenomenal world in his book The World as Will and Representation (1818/1844). His interpretation of music as the immediate expression of will, existing outside the phenomenal world, had great appeal in late imperial Russia.

234

Glossary of Names

SCRIABIN, ALEKSANDR NIKOLAEVICH (1871–1915)

Moscow composer, philosopher, and mystic. Envisioned bringing about the end of the physical world through the composition of his Mystery. Died of blood poisoning in Moscow. SHAGINIAN, MARIETTA SERGEEVNA (1882–1982)

Poet and passionate promoter of the music of Rachmaninoff. From 1911, an intimate friend of the Medtners, romantically involved with Emilii Medtner. After 1917, an ardent Bolshevik and supporter of Lenin and later Stalin. Died in 1982 after a successful writing career in the USSR. SOLOV’EV, VLADIMIR SERGEEVICH (1853–1900)

Russian religious philosopher, poet, and mystic. His ideas of artistic theurgy and vseedinstvo (all-­unity) as well as his critique of Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity deeply influenced many of the ideas that became popular in the Russian Silver Age. TRUBETSKOI, EVGENII NIKOLAEVICH (1863–1920)

Russian religious philosopher, publicist, and political actor of noble background. Sought to incorporate the rights of the individual into philosophical and political discussion. Greatly influenced by personal friendship with Vladimir Solov’ev. Founding member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) but then quickly became disillusioned with political parties. Sustained an idealized love affair with Margarita Morozova, with whose financial support he founded the Moscow Weekly (1906–10) and the religious-­ philosophical publishing house The Way (Put’). Died in Novorossiisk. TRUBETSKOI, NIKOLAI SERGEEVICH (1890–1938)

Russian linguist and historian, son of Sergei Trubetskoi, and nephew of Evgenii Trubetskoi. Founding thinker of the émigré Eurasianist movement. Died in Vienna. TRUBETSKOI, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (1862–1905)

Religious philosopher, friend of Scriabin and Vladimir Solov’ev, and brother of Evgenii Trubetskoi. Edited the journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. Professor of philosophy at Moscow University from 1890. Introduced Scriabin to the Moscow Psychological Society, the main philosophical circle of the day. Supporter of liberal movement in 1905 Revolution. Died in Moscow. UL’IANOV, NIKOLAI PAVLOVICH (1877–1949)

Russian and later Soviet painter. Acquaintance of Scriabin, Baltrušaitis, and other symbolist figures. Died in Moscow.

Notes

Short-­form names and titles are used for those works included in the bibliography.

Abbreviations BAR d. ed. khr. f. GARF GM GT GTsMMK IMV IRLI LC l., ll. LRA ME MS MV MZ NZ op. RGALI

Bakhmeteff Archive delo (Russian for “file”) edinitsa khraneniia (Russian for “storage unit”) fond (Russian for “collection”) Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) Golos Moskvy (Voice of Moscow) Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) Gosudarstvennyi tsentral’nyi muzei muzykal’noi kul’tury (State Central Museum of Musical Culture) Iuzhnyi muzykal’nyi vestnik (Southern Musical Herald ) Institut russkoi literatury, Pushkinskii Dom (Institute of Russian Literature, Pushkin House) Library of Congress list, listy (Russian for “page” and “pages”) Leeds Russian Archive Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik (Moscow Weekly) Muzykal’nyi sovremennik (Musical Contemporary) Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow Bulletin) Muzyka i zhizn’ (Music and Life) Novoe zveno (New Link) opis (Russian for “inventory”) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art)

235

236 RGB RGIA RMG RMO RNB RV TD TsIAM ZR

Notes to Pages 1–3 Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka: Otdel rukopisei (Russian State Library: Manuscript Division) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Russian State Historical Archive) Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta (Russian Musical Newspaper) Russkoe muzykal’noe obshchestvo (Russian Musical Society) Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka: Otdel rukopisei (Russian National Library: Manuscript Division) Russkie vedomosti (Russian Bulletin) Trudy i dni (Work and Days) Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (Central Historical Archive of Moscow) Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece)

Introduction 1. Vladimir Rebikov, “Orfei i vakkhanki: Rasskaz,” RMG no. 1 (January 3, 1910): 6–15, here 13. 2. See Vladimir Rebikov to A. K. Gorskii, RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 1; idem, “V.I. Rebikov o sebe,” RMG no. 43 (October 25, 1909): 945–951; idem, “Muzykal’nye zapisi chuvstva,” RMG no. 48 (December 1, 1913): 1097–1100. 3. On the figure of Orpheus in late imperial Russian culture, see Marchenkov, “Orpheus Myth,” esp. 126–203; idem, Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music; Mitchell, “In Search of Orpheus.” 4. Koptiaev, “Kompozitor-­rabochii,” Evterpe, 8–9. First published in Teatr i iskusstvo (June 25, 1906). 5. N. Suvorovskii, “Chaikovskii i muzyka budushchego,” Vesy no. 8 (August 1904): 10– 20. 6. Boris Bugaev, “Protiv muzyki,” Vesy no. 3 (March 1907): 57–60. For an earlier, more positive assessment of music as the ultimate symbolist art, see Andrei Belyi [Boris Bugaev], “Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie,” Mir iskusstva no. 4 (1904): 173–196. 7. Marietta Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o S. V. Rakhmaninove,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove II, 100–174, here 100. 8. Matlaw, “Scriabin and Russian Symbolism,” 1. On Scriabin’s cultural significance, see also A. Losev, “Mirovozzreniie Skriabina,” in Strast’ k dialektike; I. I. Lapshin, Zavetnye dumy Skriabina; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, 270–271; Berdiaev, Smysl tvorchestva, 220; Gasparov, Five Operas and a Symphony, vii–­viii. 9. I use the term “classical music” to refer to music that draws upon the western European tradition. 10. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 468–544; Caute, Dancer Defects, esp. 379–414. 11. Krutov, Mir Rakhmaninova, vol. 2, 5–20; “O ville ‘Senar’ v Shveitsarii,” Posol’stvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii v shveitsarskoi konfederatsii, http://www.switzerland.mid.ru/ru /press_2013_15.html, accessed September 6, 2014; Sophia Kishkovsky, “Russia May Seek to Reclaim Rachmaninoff Estate,” New York Times (November 25, 2013), http://



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artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/russia-­may-­seek-­t o-­reclaim-­rachmaninoff-­ estate/?ref=music&_r=0#h[PVVPVV], accessed September 6, 2014. 12. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the richness of musical life prior to the career of Mikhail Glinka, often celebrated as the “father of Russian music.” See, for instance, Jensen, Musical Cultures in Seventeenth-­ Century Russia; Ritzarev, Eighteenth-­ Century Russian Music. Music did not emerge, however, as an acceptable profession for members of educated Russian society prior to the groundbreaking career of Anton Rubinstein in the mid-­nineteenth century. See Loeffler, Most Musical Nation, esp. 15–55. 13. The term was suggested by an article in the periodical Muzyka. See Ziegfried Ashkenazi, “Muzyka i Metafizika,” Muzyka no. 75 (May 5, 1912): 396–402; Muzyka no. 76 (May 12, 1912): 412–416; Muzyka no. 78 (May 23, 1912): 462–465. In his analysis of the connection between Russian opera and the symbolist literary movement, Simon Morrison employs a similar term. See Morrison, Russian Opera, 48. 14. Musical metaphysics is discussed in greater detail in chapter 1. 15. Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity. On the connection between national identity and music, see also Fulcher, Composer as Intellectual; Loeffler, Most Musical Nation. 16. A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Liudmila (1842) were operas by Mikhail Glinka, often pointed to as marking the beginning of Russian national musical style. See, for instance, Taruskin, Defining Russian Musically, 25–47; Frolova-­Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism, esp. 74–139. On Evgenii Trubetskoi as a liberal philosopher, see Poole, “Religion, War, and Revolution.” 17. Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Staryi i novyi natsional’nyi messianizm,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 3 (March 1912): 82–102, here 82. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (1888). 19. Nadezhda Briusova, “Lektsii po muzykal’nomu obrazovaniiu,” RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 82, l. 342. 20. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia; idem, Nietzsche and Soviet Culture; idem, New Myth, New World; Clowes, Revolution of Moral Culture; Grillaert, What the God-­ seekers Found in Nietzsche. 21. A. P. Koptiaev, “Muzykal’noe mirosozertsanie Nitsshe,” RMG no. 18 (1900): 504–507; RMG no. 19–20 (1900): 538–539. This publication was based on a lecture given by Aleksandr Koptiaev to the Society of Musical Teachers in St. Petersburg, and had previously appeared in the journal Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia no. 2–3 (April 1900): 165–193. RMG editor Nikolai Findeizen hired Koptiaev to prepare translations of Wagner essays in 1898, which inspired Koptiaev’s philosophical interests in this direction. See N. F. Findeizen to A. P. Koptiaev (June 3, 1898), IRLI f. 566, no. 10; A.P. Koptiaev to N.F. Findeizen, “Muzykal’noe mirosozertsanie Nitsshe,” RNB op. 4, ed. khr. 3188. 22. Tolstoi, What Is Art; N. Gusev and A. Gol’denveizer, Lev Tolstoi i muzyka (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1953), 5, 16; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Rossii, 122.

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23. Belyi to Blok (January 6, 1903) in Orlova, ed., Aleksandr Blok i Andrei Belyi: Perepiska, 9. 24. Konstantin Eiges, “Muzyka, kak odna iz vyshikh misticheskikh perezhivanii,” ZR no. 6 (1907): 54–57; Eiges, “Osnovnye voprosy muzykal’noi estetiki,” in Stat’i po filosofii muzyki, 65–94, esp. 90–94; Rebecca Mitchell, “In Search of Orpheus.” 25. Emilii Medtner, “Dnevnik, 1901–1905,” RGB f. 167.23.10, l. 3. 26. Rebikov, “Orfei i vakkhanki”; A. K. Gorskii, “Poiasnenie k pis’mam kompozitora Rebikova,” RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 2; Rebikov to Gorskii (December 14, 1915), RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 1, ll. 1–2ob. 27. Nietzsche, GT, 105. 28. For a study of the German roots of the Russian musical conservatories and the contemporary debate surrounding their creation, see Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry; Olkhovsky, Vladimir Stasov and Russian National Culture. On the cult of Wagner in Russia, see Bartlett, Wagner in Russia; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” in Large and Weber, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics; Gozenpud, Rikhard Vagner i russkaia kultura; Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?” 29. On nineteenth-­century critiques of Russian “imitation” of European cultural production, see Rabow-­Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism. 30. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (1909), RGB f. 171.3.2, ll. 19–28ob, esp. 25–25ob; 42–42ob; 59–60ob. 31. Sargeant, “High Anxiety”; Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 295–299. 32. E. Trubetskoi, “Gde zhe, nakonets, Rossiia?” ME no. 24 (September 2, 1906): 1–9. 33. E. Trubetskoi, “Staryi i novyi natsional’nyi messianizm,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 3 (March 1912): 82–102, here 82–83; idem, “Minornye i mazhornye noty,” ME no. 4 (January 23, 1910): 10–15, here 14. 34. Evtukhov, Cross and the Sickle, 8–9. 35. Kaufman Shelemay, “Musical Communities.” 36. Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity. 37. Fishzon, “Confessions of a Psikhopatka”; idem, “Operatics of Everyday Life”; idem, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera. 38. Lotman and Uspenskii, Semiotics of Russian Culture. 39. Richard Taruskin, “Turania Revisited, with Lourié My Guide,” in Móricz and Morrison, eds., Funeral Games, 63–120, here 83. 40. Margarita Morozova, “Vospominaniia Morozovoi: Chast’ III,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 36. According to widely circulating rumors at the time, Morozova’s marriage was far from happy; nevertheless, the death of her husband was a shock that ultimately transformed her life. See Dumova, Moskovskie metsenaty, esp. 97–107. 41. On Morozova’s dwellings, see Natal’ia Semenova, “Chetyre ‘epokhi’ odnoi zhizni,” Nashe nasledie no. 6 (1991): 110–111. Morozova’s house on the corner of Smolenskii Boulevard and Glazovskii Alley was sold in 1910 to Konstantin Ushkov, who in turn sold it to Natalia and Serge Koussevitzky. It continued to be used to host musical and cultural events until it was nationalized after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Yuzefovich, Sergei Kusevitskii, 123–124.



Notes to Pages 12–16

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42. Morozova, “Vospominaniia Morozovoi: Chast’ III,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 36. 43. “Godovye otchety spisok chlenov ‘Obshchestva svobodnoi estetiki,’” RGALI f. 464, op. 2, ed. khr. 9; Viacheslav Karatygin, “Muzyka v Peterburge,” Apollon no. 6 (March 1910): 14–20, here 20; Evtuhov, Cross and the Sickle, 3; Tumanov, Ona i muzyka, i slovo; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, 276; Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 218– 245; Iliukhina and Shumanova, “Kollektsionery obshchestva ‘svobodnaia estetika’”; Burchardi, Moskauer “Religiös-­Philosophische Vladimir-­Solov’ev-­Gesellschaft.” 44. Leonid Sabaneev, “V nedrakh muzykal’nogo mira,” GM no. 4 (January 6, 1911): 4. 45. Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 4. 46. Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera; West and Petrov, eds., Merchant Moscow; Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia; Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia. 47. Margarita Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 12; idem, “Vospominaniia o Metnere,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 11; Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 19; Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera; Dumova, Moskovskie metsenaty; Yuzefovich, Sergei Kusevitskii, 123–124; Levidou, “Eurasianism in Perspective”; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Rossii, esp. 101–104, 132–171, 175–181. 48. See, for instance, Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900–1920; idem, “The Moscow Art Market,” in Clowes, Kassow, and West, eds., Between Tsar and People, 108–130. 49. Anna Medtner to Eric Pren (May 25, 1958), LRA ms. 1377/73. 50. Bowlt, “Moscow Art Market,” esp. 116–120. 51. On the “new religious consciousness,” see, for instance, Florovskii, Ways of Russian Theology; Zernov, Russian Religious Renaissance; Rosenthal and Bohachevsky-­ Chomiak, Revolution of the Spirit; Rosenthal, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age; on symbolism, see Pyman, History of Russian Symbolism; on the relationship between symbolism and music, see Morrison, Russian Opera; on the new philosophical idealism, see Poole, “Neo-­Idealist Reception of Kant,” 319–343. 52. On the disconnect between Belyi and Scriabin, see Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 317–318. 53. Emilii to Anna Medtner (January 30–31, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.38. 54. On the range of social backgrounds among the late imperial Russian cultural elite, see, for instance, Evtuhov, Cross and the Sickle, 12–14; Yuzefovich and Kostalevsky, “Chronicle of a Non-­Friendship: Letters of Stravinsky and Koussevitsky,” 750–752. 55. Iulii Engel’, “Muzyka,” RV no. 1 (January 1, 1909): 7. 56. On the gendered aspect of musical life in the Russian empire, see Sargeant, Harmony and Discord, esp. 141–154. 57. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 112–114. 58. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated letter, 1909), RGB f. 171.3.2, l. 49ob. 59. Tumanov, Ona i muzyka, i slovo. 60. Emilii to Anna Medtner (January 15, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.38, l. 4ob. 61. V. F. Ern to E. D. Ern (March 15, 1915), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 625– 626. 62. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 115–117.

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Notes to Pages 16–18

63. Jakim, Kornblatt, and Magnus, eds., Divine Sophia; Carlson, “Gnostic Elements in the Cosmogony of Vladimir Solov’ev,” in Kornblatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought, 49–67. 64. West, Russian Symbolism, 64–65. 65. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 198–199. 66. Loeffler, Most Musical Nation; Sargeant, Harmony and Discord; Lomtev, Nemetskie muzykanty v Rossii. 67. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord. 68. Sargeant, “New Class of People”; idem, Harmony and Discord, esp. 85–91, 175–217. 69. On Koussevitzky’s early career, see Yuzefovich, Sergei Kusevitskii, esp. 7–120. 70. Loeffler, Most Musical Nation; Sargeant, Harmony and Discord. 71. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord, 22–52. 72. “Programmy kontsertov,” RGALI f. 727, op. 1, ed. khr. 38. 73. See for instance V[iacheslav] Karatygin, “Muzykal’naia khronika Peterburga,” ZR no. 5 (May 1906): 65–68; Vol’fing [Emilii Medtner], “Muzykal’naia vesna,” ZR no. 5 (May 1906): 69–72; Evgenii Braudo, “Muzyka posle Vagnera,” Apollon no. 1 (October 1909): 54–69; Vl. Derzhanovskii, “Muzyka v Moskve,” Apollon no. 6 (March 1910): 9–12; B. Ianovskii, “Muzyka v Kieve,” Apollon no. 6 (March 1910): 12–13; V. Karatygin, “Muzyka v Peterburge,” Apollon no. 6 (March 1910): 14–20; N[adezhda] Briusova, “Nauka o muzyke, ee istoricheskie puti i sovremennoe sostoianie,” Vesy no. 10–11 (1909): 185–211; Vol’fing [Emilii Medtner], “Invektivy na muzykal’nuiu sovremennost,” TD no. 2 (March–­April 1912): 29–45. 74. RMG, published in St. Petersburg, appeared from 1894 to 1918. The new journals included Muzyka, Muzykal’nyi truzhenik, Orkestr, Muzyka i zhizn’, Muzykal’nyi sovremennik, Iuzhnyi muzykal’nyi vestnik, Tserkovnoe penie, and Baian. Muzykal’nyi truzhenik (Moscow, 1906–10) and its later incarnation Orkestr (1910–12) sought to represent the interests of the average orchestral musician; Muzyka (Moscow, 1910– 16) and Muzykal’nyi sovremennik (Petrograd, 1915–17) emerged as champions of new music; Muzyka i zhizn’ (Moscow, 1908–12) approached music from a populist viewpoint; Tserkovnoe penie (Kiev, 1909; renamed Staroobriadcheskaia mysl’, 1910–16) sought to reinvigorate Orthodox znamennyi chant tradition. 75. Matvei Presman to Nikolai Findeizen (1899–1914), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1740; Boris Popov to Nikolai Findeizen (1897–1917), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1722; Vladimir Derzhanovskii to Nikolai Findeizen (1901–10), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1344. 76. “Otvety na opublikovannye v RMG voprosy obrashchennye ‘K uchiteliam peniia i muzyki,’” RNB f. 816, op. 1, ed. khr. 155–168. The journal most often cited in these responses was Muzyka i penie, a journal with a strong pedagogical rather than philosophical orientation. 77. “Ankety slushchatelei kursov s otvetami ob ikh znaniiakh v oblasti muzyki,” RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 83, ll. 18–32. 78. Music critic Leonid Sabaneev estimated that the entire “musical world” of late imperial Russia, including both active and “passive” musicians (i.e., audience members) consisted of “less than 10,000.” While this number can hardly be accepted uncriti-



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cally, it demonstrates an awareness of the intimate nature of musical life at this time. See Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Rossii, 103. 79. Rieber, “Sedimentary Society,” 353–376; Ascher, Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray; idem, Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored; Frank and Steinberg, eds., Cultures in Flux. 80. Kornblatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought; Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 371–405; Gaidenko, Vladimir Solov’ev i filosofiia Serebrianogo veka; Evtuhov, Cross and the Sickle. 81. In Kant’s mature critical philosophy, experience was in fact the product of synthesis. In late imperial Russia, however, Kantian philosophy was often blamed for introducing this division. See Meerson, “Put’ against Logos.” 82. Aleksandr Blok, “The Decline of Humanism,” in Spirit of Music, 56–70, here 62–63. 83. For discussion of the term “middling groups,” see Clowes, Kassow, and James West, eds., Between Tsar and People, 3–14. 84. For scholarship on the close connection between artistic phenomena, philosophical ideas, politics, and social life, see McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria; Schorske, Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna; Shattuck, Banquet Years; Eksteins, Rites of Spring; Kern, Culture of Time and Space. 85. Evtuhov, Cross and the Sickle, esp. 1–20. 86. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. 87. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 268. 88. Ibid., 3; Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-­Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1982). 89. On the binary aspect of late imperial Russian thought and culture, see Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle. 90. Adamenko, Neo-­Mythologism in Music. 91. This connection between musical harmony and social harmony can be traced back to ancient Greece. See Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens, 11–12, 140–196. 92. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism. 93. This emphasis on experience rather than logical argumentation has a lengthy history in Eastern Orthodox thought, which stressed the “experience of Christocentric communion with God.” See Sergey Horujy, “Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the Birth of Russian Philosophical Humanism,” in Hamburg and Poole, eds., History of Russian Philosophy, 27–51, here 28–30. Though Husserl’s writings found less resonance in Russia than Nietzsche’s, he was nevertheless reinterpreted through a similarly religious philosophical lens. See Steve Cassedy, “Gustav Shpet and Phenomenology in an Orthodox Key,” Studies in East European Thought, 49, no. 2 (June 1997): 81–108. 94. Leonid Sabaneev, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Opiat ob evolutsii,” Muzyka no. 98 (Octo­ ber 6, 1912): 846–850, here 850. 95. Leonid Sabaneev, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Opiat ob evoliutsii, emotsii i prochem,” Muzyka no. 101 (October 27, 1912): 898–901, here 899. 96. Steinberg, “Melancholy and Modernity,” 815–816.

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Notes to Pages 21–23

97. See, for instance, Richardson, Zolotoe Runo and Russian Modernism; Sargeant, Harmony and Discord; Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia; Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically; Morrison, Russian Opera; Frolova-­Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism; Bird, Russian Prospero; West, Russian Symbolism; Wachtel, Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition. 98. Celia Applegate, “Introduction: Music among the Historians,” 332. Applegate borrows the term from Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), but the application to music’s role in history is her own. 99. Iu. V. Keldysh, “Muzykal’naia polemika,” in Alekseev, Barabash, Ginzburg, Kalashnikov, Sidorov, Sternin, and Shvidkovskii, eds., Russkaia khudozhestvennaia kul’tura, 288–309. The only time period rivaling this (in Keldysh’s view) was the 1860s and the discourse surrounding the founding of the conservatories. Until recently, this latter time period has received greater attention in scholarly literature. 100. A complete listing of sources used appears in the bibliography. 101. Fulcher, Composer as Intellectual; Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera; Loeffler, Most Musical Nation; Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity; Sargeant, Harmony and Discord. 102. In 1908 Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta charged twenty kopecks per weekly issue; Muzyka charged fifteen kopecks in 1911. While such prices would theoretically have placed these publications within the reach of workers, there is little evidence that this happened in practice. Symbolist journals, in which many of the music articles mentioned here appeared, also demonstrated a low readership, and a much higher cost per issue. In 1906 Zolotoe runo had 934 subscribers and charged fifteen rubles for an annual subscription, while Vesy recorded 845 subscribers. See Read, Religion and Revolution in Russia, 7. 103. A 1913 survey of readers of the Moscow-­based “professors’ newspaper” Russkie vedomosti suggested that, while 53 percent of respondents claimed to read the paper from start to finish, for those who admitted to omitting certain sections of the paper, entries on music and theater were among the most commonly ignored. See Balmuth, Russian Bulletin, 1863–1917, 324. Such data suggest that the larger reading population interacted with the musical press in only a limited manner; only those actively involved in musical or artistic life tended to read newspaper coverage. 104. V. G. Karatygin, “Skriabin i molodye moskovskie kompozitory,” Apollon no. 5 (May 1912): 25–38; Iulii Engel’, “Avtorskii kontsert N. Metnera,” RV no. 274 (November 9, 1906); idem, “Rakhmaninov i Skriabin,” RV no. 90 (April 21, 1909); idem, “Taneev, Rakhmaninov, Skriabin,” RV no. 276 (November 30, 1910); idem, “Muzyka N. Metnera,” RV no. 57 (March 11, 1911); idem, “Kontsert A. N. Skriabina,” RV no. 41 (February 19, 1913); Andrei Belyi, “Nikolai Metner,” in Arabeski, 372–375. For an earlier scholarly comparison of Medtner and Scriabin within the context of late imperial Russia, see Levaia, “Paradoksy okhranitel’stva v russkom simvolizme,” in Skriabin i khudozhestvennye iskaniia XX veka, 63–77.



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Chapter 1. Musi cal Metaphysics in Late Imperial Russia 1. Ivan Abramushkin to Nikolai Findeizen (January 11, 1913), RNB f. 816, op. 1, ed. khr. 155, l. 8. Abramushkin’s quote is taken directly from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. See Nietzsche, GT, 22. 2. “Okolo dumy: Preniia o muzyke,” RV no. 43 (February 21, 1914): 3. 3. Fulcher, “Introduction: Defining the New Cultural History of Music, Its Origins, Methodologies, and Lines of Inquiry,” in Fulcher, ed., Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, 3–16. 4. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia; idem, Nietzsche and Soviet Culture; idem, New Myth, New World; Clowes, Revolution of Moral Culture; Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically; Morrison, Russian Opera; Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera, 107. 5. On the different ways in which ideas were read and interpreted in imperial Russia, see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read. 6. Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche in Russia, 3–48, here 9–10, 38. 7. My understanding of the term “translation” is based on recent scholarship on cultural translation, which examines the adaptation of a foreign text to new contexts. See Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992); Peter Burke and R. Po-­chia Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds., Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-­Cultural Texts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). 8. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, I:262. 9. Ibid., I:257. 10. For earlier interpretations of music that Schopenhauer was responding to, see Kant, Critique of Judgement, 189–195; Hegel, Fine Art, 394. 11. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, I:262. 12. Dolson, “Influence of Schopenhauer upon Friedrich Nietzsche.” For a discussion of the triumph of music as the “ultimate” art form in German thought, see Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity; Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, 19–39, here 33–37. 13. This metaphysical view of music based on German Romanticism was later rejected by Nietzsche and served as a central theme in his writings from Human, All Too Human through The Gay Science. See Liébert, Nietzsche and Music, 156–163. 14. Nietzsche, GT, 19–25. 15. Nietzsche, GT, 37; Benson, Pious Nietzsche, 170; Higgins, “Nietzsche on Music,” 663–672; Sarah Kofman, “Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphoses,” in Allison, ed., New Nietzsche, 201–206. 16. Nietzsche, GT, 76–77. 17. Ibid., 78. 18. Ibid., 79; 95–98. 19. On Schopenhauer’s reception in particular, see, for instance, Saminsky, Physics and Metaphysics of Music, 1; Prokof’ev, Dnevnik, 1907–1918, 639; Gol’denveizer, Dnevnik: Pervaia tetrad, 55.

244

Notes to Pages 29–32

20. V. Solov’ev, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva,” in Filosofiia iskusstva i literaturnaia kritika, 73–89, here 84. 21. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Simvolika esteticheskikh nachal,” in Po zvezdam, 21–32, here 31; idem, “Poet i chern,’” in Po zvezdam, 33–42, here 34. For Nietzche’s influence on Ivanov, see Bartlett, Wagner in Russia, 118, 121; Morrison, Russian Opera, 5. For broader examinations of their aesthetic views, see West, Russian Symbolism; Wachtel, Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition. 22. Ivanov, “Nitsshe i dionis,” in Po zvezdam, 1–20, here 5. On this reference to Socrates being called to be a musician, see also Blok, Spirit of Music. The reference is to Plato’s Apology, in which Socrates describes a dream bidding him to study music shortly before his death. 23. Ivanov, “Simvoliki esteticheskikh nachal,” 31; idem, “Nitsshe i dionis,” 5. 24. Belyi, “Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie”; Levaia, “Skriabin i simvolizm: vzgliad na iskusstvo,” in Skriabin i khudozhestvennye iskaniia XX veka, 9. 25. Belyi, “Simvolizm kak miroponimaniia,” 176. 26. Blok composed the letter after reading Bely’s 1903 article “Formy iskusstva,” in which music is described in almost religious terminology. See Orlova, ed., Aleksandr Blok i Andrei Belyi: Perepiska, 3–4. 27. Koptiaev, “Muzykal’noe mirosozertsanie Nitsshe,” 103, 106; idem, “Skriabin (iz svobodnykh muzykal’nykh besed),” Evterpe, 100–109, here 103; idem, “Kniga ob ‘intimnoi muzyki,’” Evterpe, 1–8, here 1. 28. Eiges, “Muzyka i estetika,” ZR no. 5 (May 1906): 60–62; idem, “Osnovnye voprosy muzykal’noi estetiki,” 68–69. 29. Eiges, “Osnovnye antonomiia muzykal’noi estetiki,” ZR no. 11–12 (November–­ December 1906): 122–125, here 125. 30. Eiges, “Muzyka i estetika,” 60–62. 31. Eiges, “Krasota v iskusstve,” in Stat’i po filosofii muzyki, 45–64, here 59. 32. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, 40. 33. Belyi, “Realiora,” Vesy no. 5 (May 1908): 59–62. For a comparison between this concept and Scriabin’s Preparatory Act, see Morrison, Russian Opera, 197. 34. On the Russian emphasis on Nietzsche’s unifying message in The Birth of Tragedy, see Rosenthal, “Losev’s Development of Themes from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy,” 187–191. 35. Nietzsche, GT, 19–22. 36. Ibid., 63–69. 37. Ibid., 52. 38. Ibid., 43. 39. Ibid., 107. 40. Solov’ev, “Krasota v prirode,” 38; Irina Paperno, “The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories,” in Paperno, ed., Creating Life, 13–23, here 13. 41. Paperno, “Meaning of Art,” 14. The citation is from Solov’ev, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva.” 42. Solov’ev, “Sud’ba Pushkina,” in Filosofiia iskusstva i literaturnaia kritika, 271–300, here 282.



Notes to Pages 32–36

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43. Gaidenko, Vladimir Solov’ev i filosofiia serebrianogo veka, 80. 44. On Solov’ev’s concept of bogochelovechestvo, see Richard Gustafson, “Soloviev’s Doctrine of Salvation,” in Kornbatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought. 45. See, for instance, Solov’ev, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva,” 79. 46. Paperno, “Meaning of Art,” 17. 47. Solov’ev, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva,” 89; Morrison, Russian Opera, 2; Ivanov, “Kop’e afiny,” in Po zvezdam, 43–53. 48. Berdiaev, Smysl tvorchestva, 219. 49. Fedor Akimenko, “Aforizmy khudozhnika,” RMG no. 47 (November 27, 1909): 1091– 1094, here 1093; idem, “Zhizn’ v iskusstve,” RMG no. 44 (October 31, 1910): 961–964, here 961. 50. Paperno, “Meaning of Art,” 17. Citation from Belyi, “Bal’mont,” in Lug zelenyi (Moscow: Al’tsiona, 1910), 230. 51. B. B. Asaf’ev, “Dnevnik, 1915–1922,” RGALI f. 2658, op. 1, ed. khr. 439, l. 22. 52. B. B. Asaf’ev, V. V. Gippus, and P. P. Suvchinskii, “Prospekt izdaniia zhurnala ‘Muzykal’naia mysl’” (April 28, 1917), RGALI f. 2658, op. 1, ed. khr. 220. 53. Ivanov, “Simvolika esteticheskikh nachal,” 27; Paperno, “Meaning of Art,” 17–18. 54. Robert Bird, “Introduction,” in Jakim and Bird, eds., On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader, 7–25, here 15; Sergey Horujy, “Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the Birth of Russian Philosophical Humanism,” in Hamburg and Poole, eds., History of Russian Philosophy, 27–51, here 47–48. 55. Bird, “Introduction,” 7–8, 15. 56. Horujy, “Birth of Russian Philosophical Humanism,” 46–48; Bird, “Introduction,” 15; Zernov, Moscow, the Third Rome. 57. Quoted in Peter K. Christoff, K. S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 368. 58. Gaidenko, Vladimir Solov’ev i filosofiia serebrianogo veka, 82. 59. A. A. Gritsanov, ed., Noveishii filosofskii slovar (Minsk: Knizhnyi Dom, 2001); Margarita Morozova, “Vypiski iz raznykh knig i zapisi,” RGB f. 171.3.15, l. 12. 60. Mannherz, Modern Occultism, 98–102, esp. 101. 61. “Homophonic” refers to a single melodic line, “polyphonic” to multiple melodic lines. “Heterophonic,” in contrast, describes a style in which multiple voices sing a single basic melodic line but introduce variations into their own part. Heterophonic singing is a typical attribute of many kinds of folk singing. 62. Pavel Florenskii, “U vodorazdelov mysli,” in Imena, 7–313, here 18–19. 63. Ibid., 19. 64. Rosenthal, “Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905,” 608–627. 65. Belyi, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Pereval no. 10 (August 1907): 58–60, here 59. 66. Ivanov, Po zvezdam; Blok, Spirit of Music. 67. Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens; Baker, Imposing Harmony. 68. A. Maslov, “Narodnaia konservatoriia: Muzykal’no-­teoreticheskii obshcheobrazovatel’nyi kurs. Stat’i i lektsiia,” attachment to MZ no. 1 (January 9, 1909): 3. 69. “Zhizn’ i muzykal’noe iskusstvo,” MZ no. 1 (February 10, 1908): 1–2, here 1.

246

Notes to Pages 36–39

70. Ibid.; A. Maslov, “Zadachi narodnykh konservatorii,” Muzykal’nyi truzhenik no. 17 (May 1, 1907): 3–5; Pr. Neelov, “Rasprostranenie muzyki,” Muzykal’nyi truzhenik no. 19 (1908): 4–5; Fr. V. Lebedev, [untitled], Baian no. 1 (January 28, 1907): 2–4; Neelov, “Penie svetskogo kharaktera, kak odna iz funktsii deiatel’nosti narodykh khorov,” Baian no. 4–5 (1907): 7–10; N. Ianchuk, “Muzyka i zhizn,’” MZ no. 1 (February 10, 1908), 2–5; Koptiaev, “Muzykal’nyi biurokratizm i kompozitory,” in Evterpe, 13–17. 71. Koptiaev, “Kompozitor-­rabochii,” 8–12; idem, “Russkii krest’ianskii orkestr,” Evterpe, 45–48, first published in Sankt Peterburgskie vedomosti (September 2, 1905); idem, “Sud’ba khora,” K muzykal’nomu idealu, 210–211, first published in Khorovoe i regentskoe delo (October 1909). 72. Otzyvy eparkhial’nykh arkhiereev po voprosam o tserkovnoi reforme, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1906), 20. 73. “Izvestiia i zametki: Iz eparkhial’noi pechati,” Tserkovnye vedomosti no. 5 (1905): 201– 202; Freeze, “Pious Folk,” 337. On the exclusion of Russian Orthodox congregations from singing, see Norden, “Brief Study of the Russian Liturgy and Its Music,” 426– 450. 74. E. Trubetskoi, “Minornye i mazhornye noty,” ME no. 4 (January 23, 1910): 10–15, here 14. For Trubetskoi’s discussion of patriotism and “narrow nationalism” in contemporary Russian political life, see, for instance, “Gde zhe, nakonets, Rossiia?,” ME no. 24 (September 2, 1906): 1–9; idem, “K voprosu o ravnopravii,” ME no. 35 (November 18, 1906): 5–8; idem, “Patriotizm i soiuz 17 oktiabra,” ME no. 38 (December 9, 1906): 7–13; idem, “Ideiniia osnovy partii ‘mirnogo obnovleniia,’” ME no. 41 (December 30, 1906): 5–9. 75. V. Petrovo-­Solovovo, “Muzyka v ee obshchestvennom znachenii (Iubileinaia rech na prazdnovanii 25-­letiia Tambovskogo otdeleniia IRMO),” ME no. 11 (March 17, 1907): 23–36, here 27–28. 76. S. Kotliarevskii, “Shopin,” ME no. 9 (February 27, 1910): 5–8, here 7–8. 77. Tumanov, Ona i muzyka, i slovo. 78. “Dom pesni,” Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 1 (1912–13): 3–5, here 5. 79. Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 1 (1912–13), 7. 80. “K nashem slushateliam,” Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 2 (1912–13): 3–5. 81. Ibid. Approximately 250 people who wished to attend the 1912 season were without tickets. 82. “Dom pesni,” Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 1, 5. 83. See the membership lists included in Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 1 (1912–13): 39; no. 7 (1912–13): 26–28. 84. Boris Popov, “Pis’ma o muzyke: Noiabr’skiia rozy,” Pereval no. 2 (December 1906): 58–61. 85. Vol’fing [Emilii Medtner], Modernizm i muzyka, esp. 87–122. 86. Loeffler, Most Musical Nation, esp. 104–110. 87. “Po povodu kontserta 18-­go dekabria: Narodnosti,” Biulleten ‘Doma pesni’ no. 14 (1914): 7–9. 88. Hoy, Time of Our Lives, 93.



Notes to Pages 39–43

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89. Koselleck, Futures Past, esp. 93–114. See also Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, esp. 5–6. 90. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, esp. 10–35; Williams, “Russian Revolution and the End of Time.” 91. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 21–27. 92. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 3–8; Levidou, “Artist-­Genius in Petr Suvchinskii’s Eurasianist Philosophy of History,” 615; Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100; idem, Creative Evolution, 67; Curtis, “Bergson and Russian Formalism,” 109–121. 93. See S. Volkov and R. Redko, “A. Blok i nekotorye muzykal’no-­esteticheskie problemy ego vremeni,” in Elik, ed., Blok i muzyka, 85–114; Rosenthal, “The Spirit of Music in Russian Symbolism”; Blok, “Decline of Humanism,” in Spirit of Music, 56–70; Medvedova, ed., Zapisnye knizhki Aleksandra Bloka, 162. 94. Blok, “Decline of Humanism,” 61. 95. Levidou, “Artist-­Genius,” 616; Trubetskoi, Smysl zhizni, 13–15; Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, esp. 27–41. 96. Nadezhda Briusova, “Dva puti muzykal’noi mysli: Shopen i Skriabin,” in Igor Glebov and P. P. Suvchinskii, eds., Melos: Kniga pervaia (St. Petersburg, 1917), 73–77. 97. This bears certain similarities to the “messianic time” discussed by Walter Benjamin. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin contrasted “historicism” (based upon the Enlightenment idea of progress and undifferentiated, homogenous time) and “messianic time” (the “here and now,” an objective break with the linear, progressive image of time in favor of the experience of historical significance in the moment). See Benjamin, Illuminations, 253–264; Löwy, Fire Alarm. On conflicting visions of “messianic time” in the Russian context, see Williams, “Russian Revolution and the End of Time.” 98. Matich, Erotic Utopia; Sargeant, Harmony and Discord; Beer, Renovating Russia; Pick, Faces of Degeneration; Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera. For a primary source concerned with this potential “decline,” see Tolstoy, Chto takoe iskusstvo. 99. Evgenii Braudo, “Muzyka posle Vagnera,” Apollon no. 1 (October 1909): 54–69, here 54. See also Koptiaev, “Kompozitor-­rabochii,” 8. Similar interpretations were offered of the impact of the actress Vera Kommissarzhevskaia, who expressed the “new moods” of “modern life.” See Steinberg, “Melancholy and Modernity,” 818. 100. Boris Shletser, “Konsonans i dissonans,” Apollon no. 1 (January 1911): 54–61, here 57– 60. See also Leonid Sabaneev, “Novye puti muzykal’nogo tvorchestva,” Muzyka no. 54 (December 12, 1911): 1210–1214; idem, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Modernizm,” Muzyka no. 72 (April 14, 1912): 334–337; idem, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Opiat ob evoliutsii, emotsii i prochem,” Muzyka no. 101 (October 27, 1912): 898–901; idem, “Evoliutsiia garmonicheskogo sozertsaniia,” MS no. 2 (1915): 18–30. 101. Briusova, “Shopen i Skriabin,” 76. 102. M. N. Lobanova, “‘Ekstaz i bezumie’: Osobennosti dionisiiskogo mirovospriiatiia A. N. Skriabina,” in Isupov, ed., Filosofiia, Literatura, Muzyka, 398–417, here 410– 411; Uspenskii, Vnutrennii krug. For Uspenskii’s thoughts on Scriabin, see “Mistiko-­ filosofskii otdel: Po povodu smerti A. N. Skriabina,” Novoe zveno no. 18 (May 9, 1915): 10–12.

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Notes to Pages 43–46

103. See, for instance, Viacheslav Karatygin, “Molodye russkie kompozitory,” Apollon no. 12 (December 1910): 37–48; idem, “Skriabin i molodye moskovskie kompozitory,” Apollon no. 5 (May 1912): 25–38. 104. “Zhizn’ i muzykal’noe iskusstvo,” MZ no. 1 (February 10, 1908): 1–2, here 1. 105. Aleksandr Maslov to Nikolai Findeizen (January 9, 1906), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1589, l. 34. 106. On Emilii Medtner’s philosophical interpretation of music, see chapter 3. 107. The term “genius” has been problematized by music scholars in recent years. See DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius; Kivy, Possessor and the Possessed. 108. Nietzsche, GT, 34. 109. Ibid., 72. 110. Ibid., 37. 111. Ibid., 33–34. It was on this point that he challenged Schopenhauer, who argued that the lyrist or singer inevitably combined will-­less knowing and subjective desire in their song. Ibid., 31–33. 112. Ibid., 34. 113. The quote is from Ivanov’s diary. See Wachtel, Russian Symbolism, 149; Belyi, “Pesn’ zhizni,” in Arabeski, 58. 114. For an overview of the reception of the figure of Orpheus in Russia, see Gerver, Muzyka i muzykal’naia mifologiia, 30–52; Marchenko, “Orpheus Myth,” esp. 126–203. While the authors discuss the image of Orpheus primarily in relation to Scriabin and Rimsky-­Korsakov, this figure was much more widely used. On the Greek concept of mousike, see Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens, 10, 13–102. 115. Koptiaev, “Muzykal’noe mirosozertsanie Nitsshe,” 104; Koptiaev, “‘Skriabin’ (iz svobodnykh muzykal’nykh besed),” 108. 116. Braudo, “Muzyka posle Vagnera.” 117. Ivanov, “Sporady,” in Po zvezdam, 338. 118. Ivanov, “Poet i chern,’” 37. See also Bartlett, Wagner in Russia, 125. 119. Ivanov, “O Dionise orficheskim,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 11 (November 1913): 70–98. 120. Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (January 11, 1911), RGB f. 109.29.97, l. 2. 121. [Unnamed sketch], RMG no. 1 (January 1, 1906): 8; Rebikov, “Orfei i vakkhanki,” 6. For a sampling of other appearances of the image in 1906, see also RMG no. 13 (March 26, 1906): 333; no. 16 (April 16, 1906): 393; no. 38 (September 17, 1906): 801; no. 40 (October 1, 1906): 1; no. 43 (October 23, 1906): 974; no. 49 (December 3, 1906): 1153. 122. Quoted in Marchenkov, “Orpheus Myth,” 163. 123. Belyi, “Simvolizm, kak miroponimanie,” 236. 124. Quoted in Rosenthal, New Myth, New World, 60–63. Berdiaev’s central work dealing with creativity and genius was The Meaning of the Creative Act (Smysl tvorchestva: Opyt opravdaniie cheloveka), written 1911–14. 125. Rebikov, “Zametki na religioznye temy, vypiski,” GTsMMK f. 68, no. 101; S. A. Naidenov, “Vospominaniia o kompozitore V. I. Rebikove,” RGALI f. 1117, op. 1, ed. khr. 17, ll. 1–2; Vladimir Rebikov to Aleksandr Gorskii (undated, fall 1916), RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 1, l. 23.



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126. Vladimir Rebikov to Stepan Smolenskii (undated, 1898–1902), RGIA f. 1119, op. 1, no. 158, l. 22. 127. See, for instance, Muzyka no. 220 (April 26, 1915). 128. Solov’ev, “Sud’ba Pushkina,” 275–276. 129. Tolstoy, Chto takoe iskusstvo; N. Gusev and A. Gol’denveizer, Lev Tolstoi i muzyka, 19. 130. On the influence of Solov’ev, see Eiges, “Krasota v iskusstve,” 61–63; idem, “Muzyka, kak odno iz vyshikh misticheskikh perezhivanii,” 54; idem, “Muzyka i estetika,” 60. 131. Eiges, “Muzyka, kak odna iz vyshikh misticheskikh perezhivanii,” 54; idem, “Osnovnye voprosy muzykal’noi estetiki,” 91–94; idem, “Muzyka i estetika,” 60–62. 132. Eiges, “Osnovnye voprosy muzykal’noi estetiki,” 91–92; idem, “Muzyka i estetika,” 60–62; idem, “Krasota v iskusstve,” 59; idem, “Muzyka, kak odna iz vyshikh misticheskikh perezhivanii,” 57. 133. Ivanov, “Vagner i dionisovo deistvo,” in Po zvezdam, 65–69, here 65. 134. Ivanov, “Nitsshe i Dionis,” 6–7; Rosenthal, “Losev’s Development of Themes from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy,” 190. 135. See, for instance, Mizgir [Boris Popov], “Pis’ma o muzyke: ‘O komicheskoi opery,’” Pereval no. 1 (1906): 42–46; Popov, “Vechernye ogni: Pis’mo o muzyke,” Pereval no. 10 (August 1907): 48–50; Vol’fing, “Muzykal’naia vesna,” 69; Braudo, “Muzyka posle Vagnera,” 54–69. 136. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (August 20, 1909), RGB f. 171.3.2, ll. 19– 28, 42. 137. For an analysis of Wagner’s symbolic role in the final years of the Russian Empire, see Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?” 138. Mizgir, “Pis’ma o muzyke.” 139. Boris Popov, “V. Rebikov: Novye sochineniia dlia fortepiano v 2 ruki, op. 35 ‘Sredi nikh,’ op. 36 ‘Skazka o printsesse i korole liagushek,’ Pereval no. 8–9 (June–­July 1907): 106–107. 140. Ibid. 141. Boris Popov, “Vechernye ogni: Pis’ma o muzyke,” Pereval no. 10 (August 1907): 48– 50. Several years later, Aleksandr Gorskii once again overturned Popov’s analysis, arguing that it was Scriabin, rather than Rebikov, who had proven to be trapped in his own individualistic dreams. A. Gorskii, “Okonchatel’noe deistvie,” IMV no. 7–8 (April 1916): 35–38; idem, “Rebikov,” IMV no. 15–16 (November 1916): 100–104. 142. Though English-­language scholarship has traditionally rendered Scriabin’s Misteriia as Mysterium, I prefer to use Mystery, which demonstrates its links to broader social trends of the time. Scriabin’s relationship to musical metaphysics is explored in depth in chapter 2. 143. Ivanov, Dionis i pradionisiistvo. 144. Bird, Prospero, esp. 91–92; Morrison, Russian Opera, 193. 145. Belyi, “Misteriia,” in Arabeski, 141–142. 146. Benjamin, Illuminations, 77–78. See also Bird, Prospero, 92; Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, esp. 47–48. 147. This was a departure from traditional Orthodox ritual, which banned instruments

250

Notes to Pages 52–56

from worship, but it was a natural extension of the cult surrounding the art of music that emerged in Russia at this time. 148. Vladimir Botsianovskii, “U geniev,” Teatr i iskusstvo no. 22 (1909): 389–392. 149. “Zaniatiia v ‘Dome Pesni,’” Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 1 (1912–13): 37–41; “Rama,” Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 2 (1912–13): 23–24. The French text employed had been published in a small run in 1903 in Paris. 150. “Rama,” 23–24. 151. Biulleten ‘Doma pesni’ no. 3 (1912–13): 45. 152. “Prepodavanie v ‘Dome Pesni,’” Biulleten ‘Doma Pesni’ no. 15 (1914–15): 16. 153. Belyi, “Misteriia,” 142; Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?” 154. Durylin, Vagner i Rossiia, 16. 155. Ibid., 25. 156. See, for instance, Sergei Bulgakov to Sergei Durylin (May 23, 1913), RGALI f. 2980, op. 1, ed. khr. 452, ll. 9–10ob; B. P. [Boris Popov], review of Durylin’s Vagner i Rossiia, Muzyka no. 187 (June 21, 1914): 417–418; Morrison, Russian Opera, 115–183; Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated, 1916–1917), RGB 171.3.8, ll. 41–42. 157. Vladimir Rebikov to Aleksandr Gorskii (December 14, 1915), RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 1, ll. 1ob-­2. See also “Pis’mo kompozitora Vl. Rebikova o ‘drame dukha,’” IMV no. 1–2 (1916): 10. 158. Rebikov to Gorskii (December 14, 1915), l. 2. 159. A. Gorskii, “Rebikov,” IMV no. 15–16 (November 1916): 100–104; idem, “Rebikov,” IMV no. 17–18 (December 1916): 115–120. 160. Rebikov’s insistence on music’s Orphic ability to directly awaken specific emotions in an audience was thus connected with mystical insight—by awakening new emotions, an audience would be transfigured by previously unimagined experiences and ultimately lifted to a new level of spiritual understanding. See, for instance, Rebikov, “V. I. Rebikov o sebe,” RMG no. 43 (October 25, 1909): 945–951; Gr[igorii] Prokof’ev, “Muzyka chistoi emotsii (Po povodu ‘vechera nastroenii’ iz proizvedenii V. Rebikova),” RMG no. 5 (January 31, 1910): 136–141. 161. RGALI f. 2099, op. 1, ed. khr. 323, l. 1; RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, l. 3. 162. RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, l.  5, 7; RGALI f. 2099, op. 1, ed. khr. 323, l.  1; RGALI f. 2099, op. 1, ed. khr. 323; TsIAM f. 179, op. 21, ed. khr. 3397, ll. 59, 118–120; TsIAM f. 179, op. 21, ed. khr.2798; Iulii Engel’, “Narodnaia konservatoriia,” RV no. 122 (May 7, 1906), in Kunina, ed., Iu. D. Engel’: Glazami sovremennika, 166–168; Ivenina, Kul’turno-­prosvetitel’nye organizatsii, 168–170. Central figures in the People’s Conservatory movement included A. A. Krein, Aleksandr Medtner, A. Gol’denveizer, A. Maslov, N. Briusova, B. Iavorskii, F. Akimenko, Iu. Engel, N. Ianchuk, E. Lineva, S. Smolenskii, and P. Karasev. 163. N. Ia. Briusova, “Muzyka dlia naroda,” “Nasha narodnaia konservatoriia,” RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 86, ll. 20–83. See also Koptiaev, “Kniga ob ‘intimnoi muzyki,’” Evterpe, 1–8, here 8. 164. RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, l. 93. 165. Briusova, “Muzyka dlia naroda,” l. 38. 166. Briusova, “Nasha narodnaia konservatoriia,” l. 57.



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167. Briusova, “Muzyka dlia naroda,” l. 38. 168. RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, l. 50. All three years of courses were offered in the Nikitskii region, only the first two in the Sukharevskii district. 169. Ivenina, Kul’turno-­prosvetitel’nye organizatsii, 171. 170. RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, ll. 41–42; RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, l. 96; Ivan Lipaev to Iulii Engel’ (undated), RGALI f. 795 op. 1, ed. khr. 40. 171. RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 150, ll. 41–42. In contrast to 627 students in regular courses in 1906, only 56 students were registered in special courses. TsIAM f. 179, op. 21, ed. khr. 3397, l. 60ob. 172. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 295–352. 173. RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 17, l. 18ob, l. 43ob., l. 50, 51ob, 56, l. 29ob, l. 26ob, l. 44ob, l. 18ob. 174. Ibid., l. 18ob; l. 43ob. 175. Ibid., l. 44ob. 176. Ibid., l. 34ob. 177. Ibid., l. 40ob. 178. Ibid., l. 44. 179. Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera, 15–16, 39–40; Clowes, “Social Discourse in the Moscow Art Theater,” in Between Tsar and People, 271–287, here 287. 180. TsIAM f. 179, op. 21, ed. khr. 3397, l. 60 (1906 report). 181. Rosenthal, “Spirit of Music in Russian Symbolism,” 76.

Chapter 2 . Aleksandr Scriabin 1. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 307–312. 2. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Rossii, 154–157, here 156–157; idem, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 312; idem, “Pavel Florensky: Priest, Scientist and Mystic.” On Florenskii’s place within late imperial Russian culture and thought, see Kornblatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought; Pyman, Pavel Florensky. 3. Peyton Engel, “Florensky: Background,” in Russian Religious Thought, 91–93; Pyman, Pavel Florensky, 181–182. 4. Kunina, ed., Iu. D. Engel’: Glazami sovremennika, 253–254; Del’son, Skriabin. For examples of scrapbooks partially or entirely devoted to Scriabin clippings, see RGALI f. 1720, op. 1, ed. khr. 563; RGALI f. 2954, op. 1, ed. khr. 1014. 5. Entry ticket sent to M. O. Gershenzon, RGB f. 746.38.39, l. 1. 6. Leonid Sabaneev, “Pamiati A. N. Skriabina,” GM no. 86 (April 15, 1915): 5; “Pokhorony A. N. Skriabina,” GM no. 88 (April 17, 1915): 5; Viacheslav Karatygin, “Pamiati A. N. Skriabina,” Rech no. 102 (April 15, 1915): 3; idem [Chernogorskii, pseud.], “A. N. Skriabin,” Teatr i iskusstvo no. 16 (April 19, 1915): 271; “Stat’i o smerti A. N. Skriabina, vyrezki iz gazet,” RGALI f. 2954, op. 1, ed. khr. 1014, l. 15; “Stat’i o smerti A. N. Skriabina,” RGALI f. 2319, op. 2, ed. khr. 103. 7. Muzyka no. 220 (April 26, 1915); Viacheslav Ivanov, “Skriabin: Sbornik statei,” RGALI f. 225, op. 1, ed. khr. 38; Sabaneev, Skriabin. The abbreviated form “agnts” suggests the form that would appear on Russian Orthodox icons.

252

Notes to Pages 62–68

8. Sergei Bulgakov, “Iskusstvo i teurgiia: Fragment,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 12 (December 1916): 1–24, here 24; Nikolai Medtner to Georgii Serikov (June 2–11, 1951), in Metner, Pis’ma, 521–23, here 522. 9. Fediakin, Skriabin, 132. 10. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 20. The phrase “not to a little mouse or frog, but to some sort of unknown creature” (Ne myshonka, ne liagushku / A nevedomu zverushku) is borrowed from Pushkin’s 1831 poem The Tale of Tsar Saltan (Skazka o tsare Saltane). I am grateful to Polina Dimova for pointing out this reference to me. 11. Margarita Morozova,“Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 12, ll. 52–54, 75–76. Selections from this text were published as M. K. Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” Nashe Nasledie no. 6 (1991): 89–109. 12. The composer returned to Russia for a series of concerts in 1909; his permanent return followed in 1910. 13. For a later description of this mystical mood, see Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine. 14. Central works include Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 308–359; Morrison, Russian Opera, 184–241; Gawboy, “Alexander Scriabin’s Theurgy in Blue”; A. Al’shvang, “O filosofskoi sisteme Skriabina,” in Aleksandr Nikolaevich Skriabin, 1915–1940, 145– 187; Stanislav Markus, “Ob osobennostiakh i istochnikakh filosofii i estetiki Skriabina,” in Aleksandr Nikolaevich Skriabin, 1915–1940, 188–210; Del’son, Skriabin; idem, Garmoniia Skriabina; Brown, “Skriabin and Russian ‘Mystic’ Symbolism,” 42–51; Matlaw, “Scriabin and Russian Symbolism,” 1–23; Fediakin, Skriabin; B. Fokht, “Filosofiia muzyki A. N. Skriabina,” in Belza, ed., Skriabin: Chelovek. Khudozhnik. Myslitel’, 202; “Vypiski iz knig po filosofii s pometkami A. N. Skriabina,” in Belza, ed., Skriabin: Chelovek. Khudozhnik. Myslitel’, 173–200; Natal’ia Andreeva, “A. N. Skriabin i XX vek,” Uchenye zapiski 5 (2005): 44–81. 15. See, for instance, Fokht, “Filosofiia muzyki A. N. Skriabina,” 224–225; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 115; BAR Sabaneev Collection, Box 1, ll. 1–2. 16. “Zapisi A. N. Skriabina,” in M. Gershenzon, ed., Russkie propilei, 97–247, here 132. For translations of Scriabin’s philosophical notebooks, see Reisemann, Alexandr Skrjabin: Prometheische Phantasien; Scriabine, Alexandre Scriabine. Partial (and somewhat inaccurate) translations appear in Bowers, Scriabin. An English translation of the text of the Preparatory Act appears in Morrison, Russian Opera, 313–347. 17. On their relationship, see Scriabin’s letters to Morozova in Kashperov, ed., A. K. Skriabin: Pis’ma. After the death of his first supporter (the publisher Mitrofan Beliaev) in 1903, Morozova provided the composer with a pension of two hundred rubles per month from 1903 until the end of 1908, while also underwriting costs for concerts in Paris (in 1905) and Moscow (in 1909). 18. Margarita Morozova, “Vospominaniia Chast III (1898–1906),” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 46, partially published as Morozova, “Moi vospominaniia,” Nashe nasledie no. 6 (1991): 89–109. See also idem, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine.” 19. Shletser, Skriabin, 17–18; Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” ll. 49–51; Brown, “Skriabin and Russian ‘Mystic’ Symbolism,” 43. Scriabin continued to attend gatherings of the Moscow Psychological Society after his return to Russia. See “Izveshchenie



Notes to Pages 68–71

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o zasedanii Moskovskogo Psikhologicheskogo Obshchestva,” (February 6, 1915), GTsMMK f. 31, no. 714. 20. Markus, “Ob osobennostiakh i istochnikakh filosofii i estetiki Skriabina,” 194–196; Fokht, “Filosofiia muzyki A. N. Skriabina,” 202. The congress took place in Geneva in September 1904. 21. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 122–132; Shletser, Skriabin, 155–167; Morrison, Russian Symbolist Opera, 184–189; Bowers, Scriabin, 187, 309–315. 22. Sergei Trubetskoi, “O prirode chelovecheskogo soznaniia,” in Gaidenko, ed., Trubetskoi: Sochineniia, 483–593, here 492. See also Poole, “Neo-­Idealist Reception of Kant,” 319–343, esp. 320, 329–330, and 333–338. 23. Trubetskoi, “O prirode chelovocheskogo soznaniia,” 518. 24. Poole, “Neo-­Idealist Reception of Kant”; Shein, “S. N. Trubetskoi’s Weltanschauung,” 128–137; P. P. Gaidenko, “‘Konkretnyi idealizm’ S. N. Trubetskogo,” in Gaidenko, ed., Trubetskoi: Sochineniia, 3–41; Bohachevsky-­Chomiak, Trubetskoi. 25. On Scriabin’s interest in Kantian ideas (if not necessarily in Kant’s own writings), see, for instance, Aleksandr Scriabin to Margarita Morozova (April 3/16, 1904) in Skriabin, Pis’ma, 307–308; Fokht, “Vypiski iz knig po filosofii s pometkami A. N. Skriabina,” 182–199. 26. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 133. Scriabin’s complete collapsing here of external reality into the creative act of the individual “I” is at best a creative misreading of Fichte’s philosophy. On Fichte’s discussion of the relationship between the individual “I” and the “not-­I,” see, for instance, Fichte, Introductions to the “Wissenschaftslehre,” esp. 38–51. Scriabin’s understanding of Fichte was based in part on the Russian translation of Wilhelm Windelband’s History of New Philosophy. See Fokht, “Vypiski iz knig po filosofii s pometkami A. N. Skriabina,” 199–200. For an account of Scriabin’s later views of Fichte, in which he rejected defining the philosopher as a subjective idealist, see Fokht, “Filosofiia muzyki A. N. Skriabina.” 27. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 160. 28. See, for instance, Bowers, Scriabin, esp. 47–71. 29. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 139, 140–143. 30. On this unlikely friendship, see R. M. Plekhanova, “Vospominaniia,” in Aleksandr Nikolaevich Skriabin, 1915–1940, 65–75; Plekhanov, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” in Literatura i estetika 2:493–495. 31. Plekhanov, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” 117. A similar view is given by Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 165. 32. Plekhanova, “Vospominaniia,” 69. 33. Tatiana Schloezer to M. S. Nemenova-­Lunts (February 19, 1906), in Skriabin, Pis’ma, 408. At the composer’s death, his personal library included several of Plekhanov’s published works. 34. Plekhanov, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” 119; R. M. Plekhanova, “Vospominaniia,” 74. 35. Trubetskoi, “O prirode chelovecheskogo soznaniia,” 578. 36. Trubetskoi, “Osnovaniia idealizma,” in Gaidenko, ed., Trubetskoi: Sochineniia, 594– 717, here 696–697.

254

Notes to Pages 71–78

37. Trubetskoi, “O prirode chelovecheskogo soznaniia,” 495. 38. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 159. 39. Ibid., 165–166, italics added. 40. Ibid., 166. 41. Quoted in Poole, “Neo-­Idealist Reception of Kant,” 330. 42. Poole, “Neo-­Idealist Reception of Kant,” esp. 323–331. 43. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 167. 44. Ibid., 146. 45. Ibid., 191. 46. Ibid., 147. 47. Ibid., 170. A sketch by the composer entitled “Schema of Evolution” demonstrates the composer’s interest in dialectical development, while his very choice of words in the sketch (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) demonstrate the influence of Fichte’s dialectical philosophy. See Markus, “Ob osobennostiakh i istochnikakh filosofii i estetiki Skriabina,” 209. For a somewhat altered English version, see Bowers, Scriabin, 67. 48. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 140. This image is reminiscent of gnostic thought, the descent of Sophia into matter, and the creation of the physical universe. See Jakim, Kornblatt, and Magnus, eds., Divine Sophia, 62–63; Maria Carlson, “Gnostic Elements in Soloviev’s Cosmogony,” in Kornblatt and Gustafson, eds., Russian Religious Thought, 49–67, here 55–57; Gawboy, “Scriabin’s Theurgy in Blue,” 99–159. In Scriabin’s interpretation, however, the dualistic division into divine and earthly is absent. 49. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 169–170. 50. Ibid., 143, 155. 51. Ibid., 163–164. 52. Ibid., 163. 53. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 59; 121–122. 54. Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin, “Tetrad’ s zapisami vospominanii ob A. N. Skriabine,” RGALI f. 2954, op. 1, ed. khr. 204, l. 99. See also Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 44, 116. 55. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 163. 56. Morozova, “Vospominaniia Skriabina,” l. 76. 57. Ibid.; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 79; Gnesin, “Tetrad’ s zapisami vospominanii,” ll. 102–103. 58. “Zapisi Skriabina,” 189. 59. Matich, Erotic Utopia. See also Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, for a discussion of sexuality in imperial Russian society more broadly. 60. Matich, Erotic Utopia; Susanna Garcia, “Scriabin’s Symbolist Plot Archetype in the Late Piano Sonatas,” 101–122. 61. Scriabin initially imagined the final world cataclysm as a great fire enveloping the world, but in later years he moved away from this image, claiming that it was impossible to foresee how the end of space and time would come about. See Shletser, Skriabin, 305–306; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 143. 62. Sabaneev, “‘Prometei’ Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 13 (February 26, 1911): 286–294, here 292.



Notes to Pages 78–81

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63. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 103. See also Shletser, Skriabin, 277, 279–284. 64. “A. Skriabin i I. Gofman o Shopene,” RMG no. 13 (March 28, 1910): 353–354. Scria­ bin claimed that in his youth he would sleep with Chopin’s music under his pillow, a memory that was now peculiar to him. 65. Carlson, “No Religion Higher than Truth.” 66. A. N. Skriabin to T. F. Shletser (April 22/May 5, 1905), in Skriabin, Pis’ma, 367. 67. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 50–55; Shletser, Skriabin, 20–24, 175, 192–197, 217, 324. 68. Mannherz, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia, 79–110. 69. Shletser, Skriabin, 20–23, 226–229. 70. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 82–83; Gawboy, “Scriabin’s Theurgy in Blue,” esp. 35–98; Ronald Kenneth Butler, “The Influence of Theosophy on the Tradition of Speculative and Esoteric Theories of Music,” 68–83. 71. Shletser, Skriabin, 229, 297–299; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 80–84; 148– 154. 72. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 82; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Rossii, 64–70. 73. Shletser, Skriabin, 299; Morrison, Russian Opera, 204; Gawboy, “Scriabin’s Theurgy in Blue,” 35–98. 74. Gnesin, “Tetrad’ s zapisami vospominanii,” l. 99. 75. Shletser, Skriabin, 301. Such an interpretation of the need to speed up historical development echoes ideas of “permanent revolution” emerging in Marxist circles at the same time. I am grateful to Leah Goldman for making this observation. 76. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 42, 50. 77. Ibid., 48, 288. See also Shletser, Skriabin, 304–305; Shletser, “Ot individualizma k vseedinstvu,” Apollon no. 4–5 (April–­May 1916): 48–63. 78. Gawboy argues that Prometheus represents Scriabin’s first attempt at a theurgic work, citing the continued development of his ideas concerning color. Gawboy, “Scriabin’s Theurgy in Blue,” esp. 35–44. 79. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 68–69; Yuzefovich, Kusevitskii, 137. On Delville’s connection with theosophy, see Gawboy, “Scriabin’s Theurgy in Blue,” 165–171. 80. This “absence of text” is specifically discussed in Sabaneev, “Prometei,” Muzyka no. 1 (November 27, 1910): 6–10, here 9. Lobanova argues that the text is drawn from the word “Oeaohoo” that appears in Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. See Lobanova, Mystiker, Magier, Theosoph, Theurg, 292–294; Butler, “Influence of Theosophy,” 79–80. Regardless, the absence of text strips one of the defining characteristics of national musical style from the music, and Sabaneev’s 1910 analysis demonstrates that this theosophical connection was not commonly recognized by contemporaries. 81. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 47. 82. Ibid. The term “mystic” chord was coined by Arthur Eaglefield Hull in 1916, while the “Prometheus” chord was first described by Sabaneev. See Roy J. Guenther, “Varvara Dernova’s System of Analysis of the Music of Scriabin,” in McQuere, ed., Russian Theoretical Thought in Music, 171, 214–15. 83. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 349. Taruskin also discusses similarities between Scriabin’s Prometheus chord and Wagner’s Tristan chord.

256

Notes to Pages 81–86

84. Morrison, Russian Opera, 219. 85. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 329–349. 86. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 47. 87. This aspect suggests another reason for Scriabin’s preference of the octatonic and whole-­tone scales. While major and minor tonalities contain within them one tritone, the whole-­tone and octatonic scales contain, respectively, three and four tritones. Musical sketches show that Scriabin was experimenting with various transpositions and combinations incorporating tritone intervals. See GTsMMK f. 31, no. 106. For more extensive analysis of the Prometheus chord, see Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 308–359; Morrison, Russian Opera, 184–241; Dernova, Garmoniia Skriabina; Gawboy, “Theurgy in Blue.” 88. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 47; Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 329– 349. 89. Fokht, “Filosofiia muzyki A. N. Skriabina,” 206. 90. Shletser, Skriabin, 252–254. 91. “Ot redaktsii,” Muzyka no. 1 (November 27, 1910): 6. 92. Sabaneev, “Prometei,” Muzyka no. 1 (November 27, 1910): 6–10; idem, “Sovremennie techeniia v muzykal’nom iskusstve,” Muzyka no. 4–5 (December 22, 1910): 85–88; “Prometei Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 13 (February 26, 1911): 286–294. At the behest of Koussevitzky, Sabaneev also prepared program notes for The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus. See Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 77–84. 93. G. Prokof’ev, “Skriabinskaia nedelia,” RMG no. 10 (1909): 275–277; Iu. Engel’, “Zavershenie ‘Skriabinskoi nedeli,’” RV no. 47 (February 27, 1909), repr. in Kunina, ed., Iu. D. Engel’: Glazami sovremennika, 253. There were at least fifteen performances and two open rehearsals dedicated in whole or in part to Scriabin’s music in Moscow and Petersburg. See Priashnikova and Tompakova, eds., Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. N. Skriabina, 165–171. 94. “Teatr i muzyka,” RV no. 43 (February 23, 1909): 5. See also l. F. Rybnikova, “O rabote v kontsertnoi organizatsii S. A. Kusevitskogo: Iz vospominanii” (1959), RGALI f. 2005, op. 2, ed. khr. 20, l. 5; Olga Monigetti, “Vospominaniia,” in Belza, ed., Skriabin: Chelovek. Khudozhnik. Myslitel’, 23–62. 95. Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” ll. 52–53; Shletser, Skriabin, 1–2; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 167–169; M. Matsulevich, “O Skriabine,” in Belza, ed., Skriabin: Chelovek. Khudozhnik. Myslitel’, 63–69, here 67. On Boris Schloezer’s intellectual development, see Kohler, Boris de Schloezer (1881–1969). 96. Boris Shletzer, “A. N. Skriabin,” RMG no. 5 (February 3, 1908): 114–120; idem, RMG no. 6 (February 10, 1908): 146–157; idem, “A. N. Skriabin i ego muzyka,” RV no. 42 (February 21, 1909): 4–5; idem, “Kontsertnaia programma (February 21, 1909),” RGALI f. 993, op. 1, ed. khr. 81, ll. 54–57. In 1908 Schloezer first approached Nikolai Findeizen, editor of RMG, with the suggestion of an article devoted to Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy. Two articles subsequently appeared in RMG, followed by an article in RV in February 1909 that coincided with Scriabin’s first scheduled concert in Moscow. See Shletser to Findeizen (January 11/24, 1908), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 2028.



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97. Shletser, “Skriabin i ego muzyka,” 4. 98. Shletser, “Kontsertnaia programma,” l. 55. 99. On the translation of Bergson’s ideas into the Russian context, see Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism; Levidou, “Artist-­Genius.” 100. Shletser, “Skriabin i ego muzyka,” 4–5. 101. For Schloezer’s interpretation of Scriabin’s views on theosophy, see Shletser, Skriabin, esp. 20–28. 102. Sabaneev, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Modernizm,” Muzyka no. 72 (April 14, 1912): 334– 337, here 334, 337. 103. Sabaneev, “Nikolai Metner,” Muzyka no. 63 (February 11, 1912): 169–172. 104. Sabaneev, “K voprosu ob akusticheskikh osnovakh garmonii Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 20 (April 16, 1911): 452–457. 105. Sabaneev, “Prometei,” Muzyka no. 1 (November 27, 1910): 6–10, here 9; idem, “Sovremennie techeniia v muzykal’nom iskusstve,” Muzyka no. 4–5 (December 22, 1910): 85–88, esp. 87; idem, “‘Prometei’ Skriabina,” 289. While Maria Lobanova argues that Scriabin’s sketches for Prometheus demonstrate that this was Scriabin’s approach, Sabaneev claimed that Scriabin was unaware of this connection until he drew the composer’s attention to it. See Lobanova, “Zahlen, Mystik, Magie,” 8; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 114. Of greater importance to my analysis is the larger significance of such an interpretation for Sabaneev’s general worldview. 106. I have followed Sabaneev’s method of numbering the overtones, starting with the fundamental. According to this system, the chord was built out of the 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 14 overtones. Parentheses around a note in example 2.2 indicate its imperfect tuning within the tempered system. 107. Sabaneev, “‘Prometei’ Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 13 (February 26, 1911): 286–294, here 289–290. 108. Sabaneev, “Sovremennie techeniia v muzykal’nom iskusstve,” 88. 109. P. Karasev, “K voprosu ob akusticheskikh osnovakh garmonii Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 16 (March 19, 1911): 369–370; idem, “K voprosu,” Muzyka no. 20 (April 16, 1911): 452– 457. 110. Sabaneev, “O Prometee Skriabina,” GM (March 2, 1911), RGALI f. 1720, op. 1, ed. khr. 563, ll. 79–84. 111. For the full debate from which Sabaneev’s conception of progress and Scriabin’s music emerged, see Arsenii Avraamov, “Smychkovyi polikhord,” MS no. 3 (November 1915): 44–52; Avraamov, “‘Ul’trakhromatizm’ ili ‘omnitonal’nost’: Glava o Skriabine,” MS no. 4–5 (December 1915–­January 1916): 157–168; Sabaneev, “Pis’ma o muzyke,” MS no. 6 (February 1916): 99–108. 112. Sabaneev, “Pis’ma o muzyke,” 106. 113. Ibid., 99. 114. Koptiaev, Skriabin: Kharakteristiki, 6–8. 115. Iu[lii] Engel’, “Muzyka,” RV no. 1 (January 1, 1910): 14–15; Viacheslav Karatygin, “Molodye russkie kompozitory”; Karatygin, “Skriabin i molodye moskovskie kompozitory.” 116. Sabaneev, “Russkaia muzykal’naia molodezh,” GM no. 8 (January 12, 1911): 2.

258

Notes to Pages 91–94

117. Sabaneev, “Skriabin i Rakhmaninov,” Muzyka no. 75 (May 5, 1912): 390–395. 118. Articles by Koptiaev lauding Scriabin as the answer to Nietzsche’s call were published in both 1908 and 1910. After Scriabin’s 1909 trip to Moscow, Koptiaev entered into correspondence with the composer, requesting photographs for publication in the paper Birzhevye vedomosti. See Skriabin, Pis’ma, 523–524, 534–535, 541–542. 119. Koptiaev, Skriabin: Kharakteristiki, 59–60. 120. Koptiaev, “‘Skriabin’ (iz svobodnykh muzykal’nykh besed),” in Evterpe, 100–109, here 101. 121. Ibid., 101–102. See also Koptiaev, “Pevets ekstaza: A. Skriabin,” in K muzykal’nomu idealu, 195. This idea was based on a family legend (believed by Nietzsche) that claimed descent from Polish nobility. See R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6–7. 122. Mizgir [Boris Popov], “Frederik Shopen i russkaia muzyka,” GM (February 15, 1909): 3. 123. Ibid. 124. Koptiaev, “Pevets ekstaza,” 206. See also idem, “‘Skriabin’ (iz svobodnykh muzykal’nykh besed),” 102. 125. Mizgir, “Frederik Shopen,” 3. 126. Koptiaev, “‘Skriabin’ (iz svobodnykh muzykal’nykh besed),” 107–108. 127. Feodor M. Dostoevsky, “Pushkin: A Sketch,” in Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 288–300, here 300. On the cultural politics surrounding this event, see Martin, “Pushkin Celebrations of 1880,” 505–525. 128. Editorial note to Shletser, “A. N. Skriabin i ego muzyka,” RV no. 42 (February 21, 1909): 4. 129. Leonid Sabaneev to Aleksandr Scriabin (June 19–20, 1912), GTsMMK f. 31, no. 745, l. 2ob. 130. Koptiaev, Skriabin: Kharakteristiki, 3. 131. G. Prokof’ev, “Skriabinskaia nedelia”; A. Maslov, “Noveishee tvorchestvo A. N. Skriabina,” MZ no. 3 (March 7, 1909): 2–4. The phrase is a reference to Wagner’s 1860 essay “La musique de l’avenir,” intended to introduce French-­speaking audiences to his operas. It was published in German the following year. 132. “Zhizn’ i muzykal’noe iskusstvo,” MZ no. 1 (February 10, 1908): 1–2; N. Ianchuk, “Muzyka i zhizn’,” MZ no. 1 (February 10, 1908): 2–5 133. Maslov, “Noveishee tvorchestvo A. N. Skriabina,” 3. This reference to “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as equivalent to musical modernism was previously used in Vol’fing [Emilii Medtner], “Modernizm i muzyka,” ZR no. 3 (1907): 63–70, here 69. 134. Maslov, “Noveishee tvorchestvo A. N. Skriabina,” 2. 135. Ibid., 3. 136. Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Velikaia Rossiia,” ME no. 11 (March 11, 1908): 3–13; S. Kotliarevskii, “Dva mirosozertsaniia,” ME no. 11 (March 11, 1908): 42–46. 137. D[mitrii] Arakchiev, concert review, MZ no. 3 (March 12, 1910). See also “Skriabin, publika i kritika,” MZ no. 11 (November 11, 1910): 16–17. 138. V. Karatygin, “Muzyka v Peterburge,” Apollon no. 6 (1910): 14–20, here 20; anon.,



Notes to Pages 95–98

259

“Kontsert Skriabina,” Rannee Utro no. 289 (December 15, 1910); Sabaneev, “Kontsert Skriabina,” GM no. 289 (December 15, 1910); G. Konius, “Kontsert Skriabina,” Utro Rossii no. 326 (December 15, 1910): 29–32; Karatygin, “Peterburgskie kontserty,” Apollon no. 1 (January 1913): 61–62; anon., “Opera i kontserty v Moskve,” RMG no. 10 (March 10, 1913): 253; Cherkas, Skriabin, kak pianist i fortepiannyi kompozitor, 24; P. Shepk, “A. N. Skriabin,” RGALI f. 2012 op. 5, ed. khr. 69, l. 49. 139. G. Prokof’ev, “Skriabinskie nedeli,” RMG no. 10 (1909): 275–278, here 276. 140. Viktor Val’ter, “Muzyka,” Rech no. 1 (January 1, 1911): 13. 141. “O ‘vrede’ muzyki,” Muzyka no. 118 (February 23, 1913): 140–143. 142. GTsMMK no. 31, no. 717. 143. “Muzykal’naia kritika o Prometee,” Muzyka no. 23 (May 7, 1911): 496–508; “Posle Prometeia,” Muzyka no. 14 (March 5, 1911): 334–336; Sabaneev, “Kontsert Kusevitskogo,” GM no. 51 (March 4, 1911): 4. The reviewers of RV and Novoe vremia both noted (the former regretfully, the latter with glee) that loud whistles as well as feverish applause greeted Scriabin’s newest composition. 144. “Prometei A. Skriabina,” MZ no. 4 (April 1911): 2–4, here 4. 145. N. Kurov, “Prometei,” Teatr (March 6, 1911), preserved in RGALI f. 1720, op. 1, ed. khr. 563, ll. 65–68. 146. Among those who gathered around the composer in these years were Ivan Alchevskii, Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Konstantin Bal’mont, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii, Marina Gagarina (née Trubetskaia), Mikhail Gershenzon, Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Krein, Lev Konius, Serge Koussevitzky, Varvara Lermontova (née Trubetskaia), Mark Meichik, Aleksandr Mogilevskii, Margarita Morozova, Mariia Nemenova-­ Lunts, Leonid Pasternak, Aleksei Podgaetskii, Leonid Sabaneev, Boris Schloezer, Nikolai Shperling, and Nikolai Zhiliaev. 147. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 72–73; Fedor Akimenko, “Zhizn’ v iskusstve,” RMG no. 44 (October 31, 1910): 961–964. 148. Leonid Sabaneev to Aleksandr Krein [1914], RGALI f. 2435, op. 2, ed. khr. 183. This is a play of words on Russian formal address, in which the first name and patronymic (second name, derived from the father’s name) are used. 149. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 48. 150. Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” ll. 44–46. 151. Ibid., ll. 60–61. 152. Ibid., l. 49. 153. Quoted in Fediakin, Skriabin, 173. 154. Fokht, “Filosofiia muzyki A. N. Skriabina,” 209. 155. Vladimir Vasil’evich Bogorodskii to Aleksandr Scriabin [after 1910], GTsMMK f. 31, no. 648, l. 1ob–­2. 156. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vzgliad Skriabina na iskusstvo,” in “Skriabin: Sbornik statei,” RGALI f. 225, op. 1, ed. khr. 38, l. 27. A facsimile edition of this document (including handwritten additions) was published by the Scriabin Museum in Moscow as Ivanov, Skriabin. 157. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 162–164; 190–91. 158. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Pis’mo chlena soveta M. S. O. Ivanova predsedateliu Petrograd-

260

Notes to Pages 98–104

skogo Skriabinskogo Obshchestva [A. N. Brianchaninovu] po povodu knigi l. L. Sabaneev Skriabin (May 12, 1916),” Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2 (Petrograd, 1917), 16–21, here 20. Emphasis added. 159. Ivanov, “Vzgliad Skriabina na iskusstvo,” ll. 36ob. 160. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 192–193. 161. Ibid., 180. For more on the society, see Burchardi, Die Moskauer “Religiös-­ Philosophische Vladimir-­Solov’ev-­Gesellschaft.” 162. V. Lermontova, “Pis’mo chlena soveta M. S. O.,” Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2 (Petrograd, 1917): 6–9, here 7. 163. Nina Serpinskaia, “Memuary intelligentsii dvukh epokh,” RGALI f. 1463, op. 1, d. 9 (1939), l. 105. 164. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 193–197. 165. Aleksandr Brianchaninov to Aleksandr Scriabin (July 21, 1912), GTsMMK f. 31, no. 649; idem, (May 14, 1914), GTsMMK f. 31, no. 650. 166. [A. N. Brianchaninov], “Ot izdatelia,” NZ no. 1 (December 14, 1913): 2–3. 167. Eduard Stark, “Teatr-­khram,” NZ no. 3 (January 4, 1914): 90–91. 168. A. N. B[rianchaninov], “Zven’ia zhizni,” NZ no. 43 (October 18, 1914): 1119–1123. See also Iu. Osberg, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” NZ no. 34 (1914): 939–940. 169. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated, 1909), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 188–189. 170. Trubetskoi to Morozova (August 22, 1909), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 204–205. 171. Morozova to Trubetskoi (1909), RGB f. 171.3.2, l. 42. 172. Morozova to Trubetskoi (August 20, 1909), RGB f. 171.3.2, ll. 28ob. 173. Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” ll. 82–86. 174. Koptiaev, “Pevets ekstaza,” 204. This analysis of the cadence is repeated almost word for word in Koptiaev’s 1916 biography, A. N. Skriabin: Kharakteristiki, 45, though Koptiaev here admitted that his nationalist reading was contrary to Scriabin’s own views. 175. “Muzykal’naia kritika o ‘Prometee,’” Muzyka no. 23 (May 7, 1911): 496–508, here 504. 176. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 163–164. 177. G. Prokof’ev, “Skriabinskaia nedelia,” 275–278; Iulii Engel’, “Muzyka Skriabina,” RV no. 44 (February 24, 1909): 7; Maslov, “Noveishee tvorchestvo A. N. Skriabina,” 2–4. Criticism of this assumption emerged in the early Soviet period and continued in the post-­Soviet era. See O. Tompakova, “A. N. Skriabin i B.F. Shletser,” in Memorial’nyi muzei A. N. Skriabina, Uchenie zapiski, vol. 3, 180–192. 178. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 34. See also Aleksandr Brianchaninov, “Neskol’ko slov o zadaniiakh skriabinskikh obshchestv,” Petrogradskoe Skriabinskoe Obshchestvo Izvestiia no. 1 (Petrograd, 1916): 1–9, here 7.

Chapter 3. The Medtner Brothers 1. Anna Medtner, “O Nikolae Karloviche Metnere,” in Apetian, ed., N. K. Metner: Vospominaniia, stat’i, materialy, 36–45, here 41. For an account of the ancestry of



Notes to Pages 104–108

261

the Medtner family, see Emilii Metner, “Pis’mo k P. D. Ettingeru,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 290–300. 2. Medtner believed that this transformation was the purpose of composition and argued that no composer should call forth chaos if he did not have the power to calm it. See A. N. Aleksandrov, “Nezabyvaemye vstrechi,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 94–104, here 99; Anna Medtner, “Dnevniki-­pis’ma A. M. Metnera,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 213–239, here 218–219. 3. Nikolai Medtner to Ivan Il’in (July 12, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4735, l. 1ob. 4. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (June 7/20, 1920), in Metner, Pis’ma, 185–187, here 186. 5. Andrei Belyi, “O teurgii,” Novyi put’ (September 1903): 100–123, esp.114–119. 6. See Jeremy King’s approach to a similar shift in the Habsburg Empire: “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Becur and Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past, 112–152. On the phases of Russian musical nationalism, see Frolova-­Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism. 7. Henriksson, Vassals and Citizens. 8. Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, 91–92. For examples of Medtner’s reinterpretation as “fundamentally Russian,” see, for instance, Apetian, “Vstupitel’naia stat’ia,” in Apetian, ed., N. K. Metner: Vospominaniia, 3–20, esp. 4; Iu. N. Tiulin, “Vstrechi s N. K. Metnerom,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 110–117, esp. 115; I. S. Iasser, “Iskusstvo Nikolaia Metnera,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 198–212, esp. 204–210; Ivan Ilyin, “A Study of Medtner,” in Holt, ed. Nicolas Medtner, 163–174. 9. On the construction of “German music” as inherently universal, see, for instance, Bernd Sponheuer, “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in Music,” in Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity, 36–57. 10. Belyi, Nachalo veka, 89. Bely attributed this statement to his friend A. Petrovskii. 11. The dispute between the two men ran its course in a series of polemical book publications, in which each author attacked the other’s personal worldview and scholarly reputation, as well as in ongoing philosophical and personal debates that extended beyond the two men to the broader educated circles in which they moved. See Emilii Metner, Razmyshleniia o Gete; Belyi, Rudol’f Shteiner i Gete v mirovozzrenii sovremennosti; Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto; Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely, 38–40; N. V. Shtember, “Iz vospominanii o N. K. Metner,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 82–93. 12. Andrei Belyi, “O teurgii,” 114; Andrei Belyi to Emilii Medtner (November 17, 1902), RGB f. 167, p. 1, l. 2; (April 9, 1903), RGB f. 167, p. 1, l. 13; Metner, Pis’ma, 40, 42–43, 46–47, 52. Bely originally proposed to write an article on Nikolai’s songs for Mir iskusstva. While such an article was not forthcoming, he published articles in Novyi put’ and Zolotoe runo dedicated to Nikolai’s music. 13. Sergei Durylin to Nikolai Medtner (February 5 [no year]), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 1942– 43, l. 1–1ob; (April 21 [no year]), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 1942–43, l. 7. 14. Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 12. 15. Andrei Belyi, Nachalo veka; Emilii Medtner to Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 1932), LC Medtner correspondence.

262

Notes to Pages 109–112

16. Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto. 17. For a thorough account of Nikolai Medtner’s life and work, see Flamm, Der russische Komponist Nikolaj Metner. 18. Martyn, Medtner, 14. A third sister, Elena, married Nikolai and Emilii’s brother Karl. 19. At this time, Nikolai had become engaged to someone else. Martyn, Medtner, 14–15. 20. On the relationship between Emilii and Anna, see Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Metnere,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 11, ll. 15–17; Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto. For Nikolai Medtner’s response to his brother’s marriage to Anna, see Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (November 11, 1902), in Metner, Pis’ma, 39–40. The continuing emotional intimacy between Anna and Emilii is testified to by their voluminous correspondence, held at RGB and LC. 21. Emilii and Nikolai Medtner’s parents became aware of the existing situation in 1910. See Metner, Pis’ma, 40–41. 22. Nikolai Medtner to Emilii Medtner (June 7/20, 1920), in Metner, Pis’ma, 185–187. 23. Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Metnere,” ll. 15–17. 24. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (November 29, 1908), RGB f. 167.24.23, l. 4; Emilii Medtner to Morozova (sketch) (November 1912), RGB f. 167.24.23, l. 28. 25. Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 10; Emil Medtner, “Bildnis der Personlichkeit im Ramen des gegenseitigen Sich Kennenlernens,” in Die kulturelle Bedeutung der komplexen Psychologie (Berlin: J. Springer, 1935), 560. These symptoms were particularly acute from 1913 to 1914. 26. Emilii Medtner to Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 1932), LC Medtner correspondence; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (July 18, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.23, ll. 12–13, here l. 13. 27. Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 15; Belyi, Nachalo veka, 92. 28. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (June 14/1, 1915), RGB f. 167.13.12, l. 13. 29. Vol’fing [Emilii Medtner] (henceforth Vol’fing/Medtner), Modernizm i muzyka, 182– 183. 30. Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Metnere,” ll. 15–17. 31. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (July 18, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.23, ll. 12–13, here l. 13; Emilii Medtner to Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 1932), LC Medtner correspondence. 32. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka. 33. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda. On the relationship between Nikolai’s 1935 work and the ideas expressed by Emilii Medtner in his 1912 work Modernizm i muzyka, see Sabaneev, “Medtner,” 313–314; Emilii Medtner to Sergei Rachmaninoff (November 2, 1931, and April 1932), LC Medtner correspondence; A. M. Metner, “K istorii izdaniia Muza i moda,” GTsMMK f. 132, no. 1789. 34. Emilii Medtner to Ellis (January 25–27, 1907), RGB f. 167.6.1, l. 1–1ob. 35. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka, 84; Emilii Medtner to Ellis (January 25–27, 1907), RGB f. 167.6.1, l. 1–1ob. 36. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka, ii. For this reason, Emilii was disappointed at the lack of published reviews of his book. See Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (December 25/12, 1912), RGB f. 109.29.97, l. 19ob.



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37. Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (1914), RGB f. 167.25.28, l. 51. 38. Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (1912), RGB f. 167.24.11, ll. 1–2. 39. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka. 40. Emilii Metner, “Muzyka: Listiki iz zapisnykh knizhek,” RGB f. 167.19.28, l. 21. 41. Leonid Sabaneev to Aleksandr Scriabin (June 19–20, 1912), GTsMMK f. 31, no. 745. In Scriabin’s copy of the book, Emilii Medtner included the dedication “To the great artist Aleksandr Nikolaevich Scriabin with a feeling of love and delight and in the name of that higher truth that unites us who think differently.” GTsMMK f. 31, no. 615. 42. Emilii Metner, “Mif, misteriia, simvolizm i mistitsizm,” RGB f. 167.19.24, esp. ll. 7ob–12. 43. Emilii Metner, “Wagneriana: Nabroski k kommentariiu,” TD no. 4–5 (July–­October 1912): 23–37, here 30; Emilii Metner, “Mif, misteriia, simvolizm i mistitsizm,” l. 11. 44. Emilii Metner, “Zametki o kul’ture,” RGB f. 167.18.14, l. 29. 45. Emilii Metner, “Mif, misteriia, simvolizm i mistitsizm,” l. 10ob. 46. Nikolai Metner, “O sushchestvuiushchem i sushchestvennom,” GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4602, l. 12ob. 47. On the Platonic basis of his musical aesthetics, see Nikolai Metner, “Zapisi o muzyke,” GTsMMK, f. 132, no. 4602, l.  1ob; Boyd, “Metner and the Muse,” 22–25; Martyn, Medtner. On his devotion to Christianity, see Nikolai Metner, “Zapisi o muzyke,” GTsMMK, f. 132, no. 4602, l. 1ob. 48. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda, 23. 49. On Solov’ev’s concept of logos, see Jakim, Kornblatt, and Magnus, eds., Divine Sophia, esp. 43–49. 50. Löwith has argued that a similar type of conceptualization of an initial, perfect form formed the basis of nineteenth-­century Christian bourgeois thought, in which the modern age was indicative of the degeneration of culture from an initially purer state. For more on this concept, see Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche. 51. Nikolai Metner, “Zapisnaia knizhka: Zapisi o muzyke,” GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4602, l. 23ob. 52. Ibid., l. 1ob. 53. Ibid., l. 1ob. 54. Nikolai Metner to Ivan Il’in (April 19, 1924), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 791, ll. 9–10. 55. Metner, “Zapisnaia knizhka,” l.1ob. 56. Nikolai Metner, “K ‘muze i mode’: Otryvki i raznye mysli,” GTsMMK f. 132 no. 4603, l. 1ob. 57. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda, 14. 58. Ibid., 24. 59. Nikolai Metner, “Prologue,” in Acht Stimmungsbilder, op. 1 (Moscow: Iurgenson, 1903); republished as “Vosem’ kartin nastroenii,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, ed. by S. E. Pavchinskii (Moscow: Gos. Muzykal’noe Izd-­vo, 1959), 17; On Plato’s concept of “remembrance,” see McPherran, ed., Recognition, Remembrance and Reality. 60. Martyn, Medtner, 17; Nikolai Metner, “Angel,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, ed. by A. B. Gol’denveizer (Moscow: Gos. Muzykal’noe Izd-­vo, 1961), 125–131, here 125; G[rigorii] P[rokof’ev], “Moskovskie kontserty,” RMG no. 4 (January 25, 1909): 112– 114. The work appears in his oeuvre as op. 1a.

264

Notes to Pages 118–124

61. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda, 8. 62. Martyn, Medtner, 17. 63. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda, 47–50; Nikolai Medtner to Emilii Medtner (June 9, 1933), in Metner, Pis’ma, 449–450. 64. Emilii Metner, “Zametki o filosofii iskusstva i psikhologii tvorchestva,” RGB f. 167.13.1, l. 38. 65. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka, 111, 159–160. 66. Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 238–239. 67. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Marginalia,” TD no. 4–5 (July–­October 1912): 38–45; Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (September 29, 1912), RGB f. 109.29.97, l. 14ob–­15. 68. The most extensive critique appears in Emilii Metner, Razmyshleniia o Gete. 69. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda, 46. 70. Emilii Metner, “Sixtus Beckmesser Redivivus: Etiud o ‘novoi muzyke,’” ZR no. 2 (1907): 65–69, here 65. 71. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka; Metner, Muza i moda, 150–153; idem, “Zapisi k Muze i mode,” GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4603. 72. Emilii Metner, “Apollon. Dionis. Sokrat,” RGB f. 167.17.10, l. 17. 73. Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (1911–13, b. d.), RGB f. 109.29.97, ll. 20–20ob; Emilii to Anna Medtner (March 1915), RGB 167.24.50, l. 2; Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (November 17/30, 1913), RGB f. 167.25.27, ll. 24–25. 74. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (July 4, 1913/June 21, 1913), RGB f. 167.13.12, ll. 1–2ob. 75. Emilii Metner, “Dnevnik, 1901–1905,” RGB f. 167.23.10, l. 216. 76. Emilii Metner, “Zametki o filosofii iskusstva i psikhologii tvorchestva” (1915–16), RGB f. 167.13.1, l. 15. 77. Emilii seems to have felt a certain animosity toward the concept of “life-­creation,” preferring to use the terms of “culture creation” and the “power of art over life.” See Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka, 160, 164. 78. Metner, “Mif, misteriia, simvolizm i mistitsizm,” l. 10ob; idem, “Wagneriana: Nabroski k kommentariiu,” 33. 79. Metner, “Mif, misteriia, simvolizm i mistitsizm,” l. 7ob; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (September 8, 1912), RGB f. 171.1.52b, ll. 41–42. 80. Rosenthal, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” in Large and Weber, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 198–245, here 214. This voyage was popular among the Russian educated classes by the early 1900s, with guidebooks and travel accounts of the Bayreuth experience published for general readership. See, for instance, Lipaev, Vagneriana: Sputnik oper i muzykal’nykh dram Rikharda Vagnera. 81. Emilii’s choice of words referred specifically to the receiving of the Eucharist during Mass. 82. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (September 8, 1912), ll. 41–42. Asia Turgeneva was Andrei Bely’s current romantic interest. The two first met at the House of Song in 1909; Maria Olenina-­d’Alheim, the House of Song founder, was a cousin of Asia’s mother. On Bely and Turgeneva’s relationship, see Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto.



Notes to Pages 124–129

265

83. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (July 4, 1913/June 21, 1913) RGB f. 167.31.12, l. 2 84. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (December 4, 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 335, l. 1ob. 85. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Marginalia,” TD no. 4–5 (July–­October 1912): 38–45. 86. Ibid., 38–39. 87. Ibid., 43. 88. Nietzsche, GT, 105. Nietzsche himself would later reject this emphasis on nationalism, seeking instead to identify himself as a “European.” 89. Emilii Metner, “Zametki o kul’ture,” RGB f. 167.18.14, l. 29. 90. Vol’fing/Medtner, “Kaliustra v iskusstve: Etiud o ‘novoi’ muzyke,” ZR no. 4 (April 1907): 64–72, here 72. 91. See Emilii Metner, “Muzyka,” RGB f. 167.19.28, l. 6; Emilii Metner, “Apollon. Dionis. Sokrat,” RGB f. 167.17.10, ll. 2–2ob, 24. 92. This demonstrates a movement away from earlier nineteenth-­century nationalism, which emphasized language rather than music. For an assessment of the evolution of nationalism from language to music in German culture, see Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity. 93. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka, 173. 94. Ibid., 154, 158, 156, 157, 173–174, 249; Emilii Metner, “Mif, misteriia, simvolizm i mistitsizm,” l.  12ob; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (June 1/14, 1915), RGB f. 167.13.12, l. 13. 95. Emilii Metner, “Invektivy na muzykal’nuiu sovremennost’,” TD no. 2 (March–­April 1912): 29–45, here 29. 96. Emilii Medtner became enthralled with the writings of Chamberlain while residing in Weimar. See Emilii Metner, “Dnevnik, 1908–1910,” RGB f. 167.22.13. 97. Vol’fing/Medtner, “Estrada,” in Modernizm i muzyka, 87–122, here 96. 98. Ibid., 104, 108, 110. 99. Emilii to Anna Medtner (January 12, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.38, l. 4 100. Vol’fing/Medtner, “Estrada,” 119. 101. Emilii to Anna Medtner (January 1, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.38, l. 1ob. Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) was a renowned violinist of Hungarian Jewish origin and a close associate of Johannes Brahms. Anna’s family had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and she was raised Russian Orthodox; nevertheless, this awareness of her “Jewish” background highlights an increasingly racialized view of identity. 102. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (August 4, 1903), in Metner, Pis’ma, 48–51, here 48. 103. Ibid., 48; G[rigorii] Prokof’ev, “Moskovskie kontserty,” RMG no. 4 (January 25, 1909): 112–114, here 113–114. 104. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda; Nikolai Metner, “K rabote,” GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4606; Michael Jones to Ira Prehn (January 23, 1990), LRA ms. 1377/89, ll. 1–1ob. 105. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (August 4–5, 1903), in Metner, Pis’ma, 48–51, here 50. Despite this comment about the “Orthodox faith,” the Medtner family were, according to official state documents, adherents of the Lutheran faith. See GARF f. 102, O. O. 1915 g., op. 245, d. 165, T. 3, ll. 65–66. Nikolai converted to Orthodoxy shortly before his death. See T. Serikov, “Angel’ sobornoi muzyki,” GTsMMK f. 132, no. 5000.

266

Notes to Pages 129–132

106. Nikolai Metner, Muza i moda, 4. For a later account of Nikolai and Anna Medtner’s disapproval of Emilii’s anti-­Semitism, see Marietta Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o S. V. Rakhmaninove,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove II, 100–174, here 123. 107. N. Metner, “Otkrytoe pis’mo,” Muzyka no. 3 (December 11, 1910): 71–72. Emphasis added. 108. Leonid Sabaneev, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Muzyka i patriotizm,” Muzyka no. 107 (December 8, 1912): 1044–1051, here 1047. 109. Ibid., 1049. 110. Ibid., 1051. 111. Ibid., 1047. 112. Belyi, “O teurgii,” 100–123. 113. Andrei Belyi, “Nikolai Metner,” in Arabeski, 372–375. 114. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (July 18, 1909), RGB f. 167.24.23, ll. 12–13, here l. 12. 115. Quoted in ibid., l. 12–12ob. 116. “Genii chistoi krasoty.” See Durylin, V svoem uglu, 303. 117. Sergei Durylin to Nikolai Medtner (April [19—]), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 1942–1943, l. 7–7ob. 118. Sergei Durylin to Nikolai Medtner (February 5, [19—]), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 1942– 1943, l. 1–1ob. 119. Ivan Il’in to Emilii Medtner (April 28, 1913), RGB f. 167.16.14. See also Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated, 1913–14), RGB f. 171.3.6b, ll. 34ob–­36ob. 120. Ivan Il’in to Emilii Medtner (April 3, 1913), RGB f. 167.16, ll. 1; Magnus Iungren, “Ivan Il’in pishet Nikolaiu Metneru,” in Takho-­Godi and Takho-­Godi, eds., Vladimir Solov’ev i kul’tura Serebrianogo veka, 606–613. 121. Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (May 14/27, 1913), RGB f. 167.25.26, l. 14. Emphasis added. On Il’in’s evolving aesthetic philosophy, see Bychkov, Russkaia teurgicheskaia estetika, 355–394; Il’in, Osnovy khudozhestva. 122. Ivan Il’in to Emilii Medtner (1913–14), RGB f. 167.16.14; Emilii Medtner to Ivan Il’in (1913), RGB f. 167.24.12. 123. Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (March 1/14, 1914), RGB 167.25.28, ll. 14–17. 124. Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (November 17/30, 1913), RGB f. 167.25.27, ll. 22–23. 125. Anna to Emilii Medtner (August 6, 1915); Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (October 19, 1922), LC Medtner Collection. For Il’in’s later interpretation of Medtner’s music, in which the “Russian spiritual” aspect is fully developed, see Ivan Ilyin, “Medtner’s Fairy Tales,” and “Sonata Form in Medtner,” in Holt, ed., Nicolas Medtner, 163–179. 126. Moskovskaia muzykal’naia-­etnograficheskaia komissiia, O sobiranii narodnykh pesen; Frolova-­Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism, 226–300. 127. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated, 1913–14), RGB f. 171.3.6b, ll. 48–53, here 52. 128. Sabaneev, “Nikolai Metner,” Muzyka no. 63 (February 11, 1912): 169–172, here 170, 172.



Notes to Pages 133–139

267

129. Iu[lii] E[ngel’], “Kontsert N. Metnera,” RV no. 35 (February 12, 1913): 4. 130. K[onstantin] E[iges], “Review of Metner ‘Sonata-­skazka’ Sochinenie 25, No. 1,” Muzyka no. 49 (November 5, 1911): 1084–1085, here 1085. 131. G[rigorii] Prokof’ev, “Muzykal’nye profili,” ME no. 18 (May 8, 1910): 43–52, here 46. 132. Gr[igorii] Prokof’ev, “O Metnere,” RMG no. 3 (January 20, 1913): 65–70. The works that Prokof’ev noted for their unusually successful balance of “German strictness” and “Slavic lyricism” were op. 8 (Skazki ), Difiramby (op. 10), and the Sonata-­Triad (Sonata in D Minor). 133. Boris Popov, “Pis’ma o muzyke: Noiabr’skaiia rozy,” Pereval no. 2 (December 1906): 58–61, here 61. 134. Karatygin, Izbrannye stat’i, 68. 135. Emilii Medtner to L. L. Kobylinskii (Ellis), RGB f. 167.6.1 (January 27, 1907), l. 2. 136. Vol’fing/Medtner, Modernizm i muzyka, 252. 137. Ibid., 182–183. 138. See, for instance, Vol’fing/Medtner, “Sixtus Beckmesser Redivivus: Etiud o ‘novoi muzyke,’” ZR no. 2 (February 1907): 65–69; “Modernizm i muzyka,” ZR no. 3 (March 1907): 63–70; “Kaliustro v iskusstve: Etiud o ‘novoi’ muzyke,” ZR no. 4 (April 1907): 64–72; “Boris Bugaev protiv muzyki,” ZR no. 6 (June 1907): 56–62, here 60; “Vagnerovskie festivali 1907 g. v Miunkhene: zametki nevagnerista,” ZR no. 10 (October 1907): 50–57; no. 1 (January 1908); no. 2 (February 1908); no. 3–4 (March–­April 1908); “Modernizm i muzyka,” ZR no. 5 (May 1908); “Estrada,” ZR no. 12 (December 1908). 139. Matich, Erotic Utopia; Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle; Beer, Renovating Russia; Engelstein, Keys to Happiness; Nordau, Degeneration. 140. Beer, Renovating Russia; Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle.

Chapter 4 . Sergei Rachmaninoff 1. For a discussion of the Russian term toska in late imperial society, see Steinberg, “Melancholy and Modernity,” esp. 819–820. 2. Sergei Sundukov-­Holms to Sergei Rachmaninoff (January 2, 1933), LC Rachmaninoff correspondence. On March 13, 1921, Rachmaninoff performed his Third Piano Concerto, op. 30, with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Willem Mengelberg. See Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie III, 448. 3. E. Medvedova to Sergei Rachmaninoff (January 29, 1935), LC Rachmaninoff correspondence. 4. Konstantin Bal’mont to Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 15, 1922), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie III, 399–400. 5. Demshuk, Lost German East, 13. 6. “S. V. Rakhmaninov: K 25-­letiiu so dnia konchiny,” Novyi zhurnal no. 91 (1968): 125– 127; “Trudnye momenty moei deiatel’nosti,” Musical Times (June 1, 1930): 557–558; “Kartinka iz proshlogo,” Etude (May 1931): 326; “U S. V. Rakhmaninova,” Poslednie novosti (April 30, 1933); “Kompozitor kak interpretator,” Monthly Musical Record

268

Notes to Pages 139–144

(November 1934): 201, all republished in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie I, 51–61, 105–106, 124–131; Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections. 7. A particularly evocative description of this rebirth of interest is Vladimir Krutov, “Posviashchenie,” in Mir Rakhmaninova: Temy i variatsii, vol. 2, 5–20. 8. Reisemann noted a sharp change in the tone of Russian critical reviews of Rachmaninoff’s music around 1909, the time in which Scriabin’s popularity was growing. Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, 168–170. 9. For earlier discussions of Shaginian and Rachmaninoff, see Simpson, “Dear Re: A Glimpse into the Six Songs of Rachmaninoff ’s Opus 38”; Seroff, Rachmaninoff, esp. 135–153. For Rachmaninoff ’s letters to Shaginian and her later analysis of them, see Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, esp.42–50, 56–61, 66–67, 77, 83, 89, and 91; Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove II, 100–174; Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 462–529. 10. K. E., review of N. Medtner’s “Sonata-­ skazka,” op. 25, no. 1, Muzyka no. 49 (November 5, 1911): 1084–1085, here 1085; Muzyka no. 159 (December 7, 1913): 840. 11. V. G. Karatygin, “Skriabin i molodye moskovskie kompozitory,” Apollon no. 5 (May 1912): 25–38, here 27; “Po kontsertam,” Teatr i iskusstvo no. 44 (1913): 883–884; Vol’fing, “Skupoi rytsar i Francheska da Rimini, opery Rakhmaninova, na tsene Bol’shogo Moskovskogo teatra,” ZR no. 1 (January 1906): 122–123. 12. Novoselov was publisher and editor of the “Moral-­Religious Library” and professor of classical philology in Moscow University. In 1912 he was named an honorary member of the Moscow Theological Academy. 13. Shaginian, “Avtobiografiia,” RGALI f. 1200, op. 2, ed. khr. 1; idem, Chelovek i vremia, 217–301. 14. Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 208–301. On Dmitrii Merezhkovsky’s ideas within the context of the Russian Silver Age, see Rosenthal, Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age. 15. Khodasevich, Nekropol, 336–342; Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 301–444. 16. Shaginian, “Avtobiografiia,” RGALI f. 1200, op. 2, ed. khr. 1; idem, Chelovek i vremia, 538–547. 17. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” esp. 105. For more on her philosophical understanding of music, see Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 462–467; on her loss of hearing, see Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 108–112; Anna to Emilii Medtner (February 28, 1915); idem, (October 26–31, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. By 1915 Shaginian carried a hearing aid in order to hear music when attending concerts. 18. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 107, 113–114. 19. The picture was taken at Ivanovka and depicts the composer looking over the proofs of his Third Piano Concerto, written in 1909. This additional information would likely not have been apparent to a consumer of the postcard, however. 20. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 111–113; idem, Chelovek i vremia, 489– 500. These friends were l. F. Rzhevskaia, E. P. Vel’iasheva (later a music pedagogue), and L. K. Lepin’ (later a professor of chemistry in Riga), all of whom studied music at the Moscow Conservatory and, in Shaginian’s account, were “excellent pianists.”



Notes to Pages 144–149

269

21. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (February 14, 1912), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 42–43. 22. Ibid. 23. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 115–116, 124. 24. See Rachmaninoff to Shaginian (March 15 and 29, 1912), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 43–45; Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 250. 25. Shaginian, Orientalia. 26. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 119–122; idem, Chelovek i vremia, 522–528. For Emilii Medtner’s earlier, negative assessment of Rachmaninoff’s compositional work, see Vol’fing/Medtner, “Skupoi rytsar’ i Francheska da Rimini: Opery Rakhmaninova na tsene Bol’shogo Moskovskogo teatra,” ZR no. 1 (1906): 122–123. 27. Marietta Shaginian, “S. V. Rakhmaninov (Muzykal’no-­psikhologicheskii etiud),” TD no. 4–5 (July–­October 1912): 97–114, here 100–103. 28. Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (December 25/12, 1912), RGB f. 109.29.97, ll. 18–20. Medtner read Shaginian’s article on Rachmaninoff on September 1/14, 1912. See E. K. Metner, “Dnevnik,” RGB f. 167.22.17, l. 31ob. 29. For a discussion of Shaginian’s troubled romantic relationship with Emilii Medtner, see Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 52–53, 57–97, 105–118, 126–127. 30. Shaginian, “Rakhmaninov,” 100–103. 31. Shaginian, “Rakhmaninov,” 103. 32. Derek Offord, “Lichnost’: Notions of Individual Identity,” in Kelly and Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 13–25. 33. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 152. 34. Lohr, Russian Citizenship. 35. Lohr, “Ideal Citizen and Real Subject,” 194. 36. Shaginian, “Rakhmaninov,” 104. On the question of individual identity in relation to civil rights, see Hamburg and Poole, eds., History of Russian Philosophy. On the conflicting question of “self ” among proletarian writers of the time, see Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination. 37. Shaginian, “Rakhmaninov,” 104–107. 38. Ibid., 108–110. 39. Clowes, Kassow, and West, eds., Between Tsar and People; Read, Religion and Revolution in Russia, 1900–1912, 23–24. 40. Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Izgoev, Kistiakovskii, Struve, and Frank, Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii. 41. D. Arakchiev, “Kontsert Kusevitskogo,” MZ no. 3 (March 1910): 12. 42. Shaginian, “Rakhmaninov,” 112. 43. Ibid. 44. Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Pis’ma k Rakhmaninovu ot litsa chlenov russkogo muzykal’nogo obshchestva,” undated draft, RGB f. 171.9.7; Margarita Morozova, “Otryvki iz vospominanii,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 9, ll. 7–11. In 1909 Rachmaninoff did accept the request from Princess Helene of Saxe-­Altenburg to serve as vice president of the Russian Musical Society, a post he held until his resignation in 1912. See Bertensson

270

Notes to Pages 150–153

and Leyda, Rachmaninoff, 157, 172, 179. Similarly, he was one of the inspirations behind Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Publishing House and served (together with Scriabin, Medtner, Sabaneev, and Aleksandr Gedike) on its advisory board at its founding in 1909. See Yuzefovich, Kusevitskii, 129–141. 45. Mnishek, “Pis’mo iz Kieva: Pervaia polovina muzykal’nogo sezona,” Apollon no. 1–2 (January–­February 1914): 147–150, here 148. 46. Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera, esp. 1–18, 149–184. For a firsthand observation of the repetitive emotionalism in fan letters, see Andrei Bely to Marietta Shaginian (December 17, 1908) in Shaginian, Chelovek i vremia, 304–305. 47. M[ikhail] E[vseevich] Bukinik, “Molodoi Rakhmaninov,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove I, 231–245, here 244–245. Bukinik was a personal friend of Rachmaninoff ’s and performed the cello part at the premiere of the composer’s Elegiac Trio No. 2, dedicated to the memory of Tchaikovsky. In Oskar von Riesemann’s memoir of the composer, he cites the composer’s claim that “the inspiration for The Bells came from an unusual source. . . . I received an anonymous letter from one of these people who constantly pursue artists with their more or less welcome attentions. The sender begged me to read Balmont’s wonderful translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Bells, saying that the verses were ideally suited for a musical setting and would particularly appeal to me. I read the enclosed verses, and decided at once to use them for a Choral Symphony.” Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, 171. 48. Iu[rii] S[ergeevich] Nikol’skii, “Iz vospominanii,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove II, 50–58, here 56–57. 49. Bertensson and Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff, 166–167, 188. 50. Elena Bugoslavskaia published a book of poems in Kiev in 1915. See Elena Alekseevna Bugoslavskaia, Stikhi (Kiev: Tipografiia Aktsionernogo obshchestva N. T. Korchak-­ Novitskogo, 1915). 51. Elena Bugoslavskaia, “Poema,” IMV no. 3–4 (March–­April 1917): 39. 52. E. Gertsog, “Stikhi na fortepiano etiud Rakhmaninova,” RMG no. 1 (January 1, 1917): 19. First published, Kievlianin no. 351. 53. Gr. Prokof’ev, “Pevets intimnykh nastroenii (S. V. Rakhmaninov): Opyt kharakteristiki,” RMG no. 26–27 (June 27–­July 4, 1910): 588–593, here 589; V. Val’ter, untitled review, Rech’ no. 44 (February 14, 1911): 3. 54. On Rachmaninoff ’s popularity, see “Vecher kruzhka liubiteli russkoi muzyki,” GM no. 41 (February 1907): 3–4; “Khronika,” RMG no. 7 (February 7, 1910): 201; Gr. Prokof’ev, “Moskovskie kontserty,” RMG no. 8 (February 8, 1910): 226; L. Sabaneev, “Skriabin i Rakhmaninov,” Muzyka no. 75 (May 5, 1912): 390–395, esp. 390; Gr. Pr[okof’ev], “Kontserty v Moskve,” RMG no. 51–52 (1913): 1204–1205; Mnishek, “Pis’mo iz Kieva,” Apollon no. 1–2 (January–­February 1914): 147–150, here 148; Mnishek, “Korespondentsii iz Kieva,” IMV no. 2 (April 1915): 13–14; Iu. D. Engel’, “Rakhmaninovskii kontsert,” in Kunina, ed., Iu. D. Engel’: Glazami sovremennika, 330–332, here 332. 55. “Ankety slushatelei s otvetami ob ikh znaniiakh v oblasti muzyki,” RGALI f. 2009, op. 1, ed. khr. 17, ll. 23, 26, 54. The most frequently cited composers were Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Rubinstein. 56. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 115.



Notes to Pages 153–157

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57. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (March 29, 1912) in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 44–45. 58. Vol’fing [Emilii Metner], “Iz muzykal’nogo dnevnika,” TD no. 4–5 (July–­October 1912): 115–120, here 118. Antaeus was killed by Heracles, who held him aloft and crushed him in a bearhug, preventing him from healing through his connection with the earth. 59. Ibid., 118. This analysis was based on a recent performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor (K. 550). 60. Emilii Medtner to Viacheslav Ivanov (December 25/12, 1912), RGB f. 109.29.97, ll. 18–20. 61. Steinberg, “Melancholy and Modernity”; idem, Petersburg Fin de Siècle. 62. The Isle of the Dead was premiered immediately upon Rachmaninoff’s return to Moscow in April 1909 and performed three additional times in rapid succession. Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 209. A four-­hand piano reduction of the work was also published in 1910. 63. Rachmaninoff claimed that he first saw a black-­and-­white copy of the painting in Dresden and that “the massive architecture and mystic message of the painting made a marked impression on me.” When he later saw the original in Berlin, he was unimpressed by the color version. See Basanta Koomar Roy, “Rachmaninoff Is Reminiscent,” Musical Observer 26 (May 1927): 16. 64. V. Val’ter, “Teatr i muzyka,” Rech’ no. 44 (February 14, 1911): 3. On the scholarly debate about Rachmaninoff’s intentional or unintentional use of the opening motif as a reference to the “Dies irae” chant, see Woodard, “Dies irae as used by Sergei Rachmaninoff.” 65. Val’ter, “Teatr i muzyka,” 3. 66. Iulii Engel’, “Teatr i muzyka,” RV no. 7 (January 10, 1917): 4. 67. Iakovlev, S. V. Rakhmaninov, 8. 68. L. Sabaneev, “Skriabin i Rakhmaninov,” Muzyka no. 75 (May 5, 1912): 390–395, here 390–391. 69. Iu[lii] E[ngel’], “Teatr i muzyka,” RV no. 4 (January 6, 1909): 4. 70. Iur. Sakhnovskii, “Clavier-­Abend S. Rakhmaninova” in GTsMMK f. 18 no. 597, l. 3. 71. This sorrowful mood was particularly connected with the style of folksinging known as protiazhnaia. See Frolova-­Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism, 29–42. 72. K[onstantin] E[iges], “Metner Sonata-­skazka’ Sochinenie 25, no. 1,” Muzyka no. 49 (November 5, 1911): 1084–1085. 73. Shaginian, “Rakhmaninov,” 112. 74. B[oris] Tiuneev, “Khronika,” RMG no. 49 (December 8, 1913): 1140–1142, here 1141– 1142. 75. Mnishek, “Korespondentsii iz Kieva,” IMV no. 2 (April 1915): 13–14; A. Gorskii, “Rebikov,” IMV no. 15–16 (November 1916): 100–104, here 100; K. A. Stel’, “O Rakhmaninove,” IMV no. 6 (June 1915): 1–3, here 3. 76. Viacheslav Karatygin, “Skriabin i molodye moskovskie kompozitory,” Apollon no. 5 (May 1912): 25–38, here 26–27. 77. Karatygin, “Skriabin i molodye moskovskie kompozitory,” 38.

272

Notes to Pages 158–162

78. Gr. Prokof’ev, “Pevets intimnykh nastroenii (S. V. Rakhmaninov): Opyt kharakteristiki,” RMG no. 38 (September 19, 1910): 782–785, here 783. 79. On the contemporary critiques of journalists who encouraged rather than counteracted the ubiquity of such negative moods in Russian public life between 1905 and 1914, see Steinberg, “Melancholy and Modernity,” 819–820. 80. This analysis is partially based on Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 242–248. 81. Rakhmaninov, Kolokola. 82. For an analysis of this concept of “no exit,” see Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle. 83. Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (February 11/24, 1914), RGB f. 167.25.28, ll. 8–10. 84. Medtner to Shaginian (January 25–­February 10, 1914), RGB f. 167.25.28, ll. 1–14; Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 126, 139–140. 85. Sabaneev, “Skriabin i Rakhmaninov,” 390–391. 86. Georgii Konius, GTsMMK f. 18 no. 597, l. 3 87. B. B. Asaf’ev, “Dnevnik, 1915–1922,” RGALI f. 2658, op. 1, ed. khr. 439, l. 27. 88. Iulii Engel’, “Rakhmaninov i Skriabin,” RV no. 90 (April 21, 1909), in Kunina, ed., Iu. D. Engel’: Glazami sovremennika, 261–263, here 261. 89. Iakovlev, Rakhmaninov, 7. 90. Lipaev, S. V. Rakhmaninov, 1, 12. 91. Iakovlev emphasized that this was a peculiarity of Russian development, in contrast to the West. Iakovlev, S. V. Rakhmaninov, 1. 92. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 138–140; Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (February 11/24, 1914), RGB f. 167.25.28, ll. 8–10. 93. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 126–130; Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (May 8, 1912, and July 29, 1913), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II (Moscow, 1980), 47–49, 61; Anna to Emilii Medtner (November 17, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence. 94. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Emilii Medtner (January 1/14, 1910), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 7. The composer similarly refused to provide any copies of his personal correspondence for publication. 95. Grigorii Prokof’ev to Nikolai Findeizen (October 13, 1915), RNB f. 816, op. 2, no. 1749, l. 52. Prokof’ev had expected this result, already being acquainted with the composer. 96. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (March 29, 1912), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 44–45; Apetian, “Vvedenie,” in S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie I, 7–47, esp. 10–12. 97. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (May 8, 1912), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 47. 98. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (November 12, 1912), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 56–57. 99. Ibid., 56–57. 100. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 128–129. Regardless of the accuracy of this particular account (recorded many years later), the disconnect between the expectations of the Medtners and Rachmaninoff is clear from other sources. For in-



Notes to Pages 162–169

273

stance, Emilii Medtner referred to Rachmaninoff ’s “empty-­headed conversation” in a 1914 letter to Shaginian. See Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (March 31, 1914), RGB f. 167.25.28, l. 36. 101. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Marietta Shaginian (May 8, 1912), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 47–49.

Chapter 5. Musi cal Metaphysi cs in War and Revolution 1. Fedor Akimenko, “Iskusstvo i voina,” RMG no. 46 (November 16, 1914): 835–837. 2. Sergei Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 108–115, here 108–109; Leonid Sabaneev, “Zhurnalizm i rabota v gazetakh,” BAR Sabaneev Collection, Box 1, ll. 1–2. 3. Sabaneev, “Zhurnalizm i rabota v gazetakh,” 1; idem, Vospominaniia o Rossii, 15–19. 4. Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 11–30; Beyrau, “Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians,” 428–429. 5. See, for instance, “Vopros o nashikh ‘vnutrennikh nemtsakh,’” MV no. 27 (February 4–17, 1915); “Mery protiv nemetskogo zemlevladeniia,” MV no. 29 (February 6–19, 1915): 1; “Nemetskie i evreiskie ‘gumanisty,’” MV no. 44 (February 24, 1915): 2; “Ne‑ metskaia psikhologiia v Rossii,” MV no. 179 (August 4–17, 1915): 1. 6. Apollon no. 6–7 (August–­September 1915): 101; Yuzefovich, Kusevitskii, 140–141. 7. For a detailed analysis of this process, see Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. 8. Iv. Tuchkov, “Velikoe v malom,” Chashka chaiu no. 1 (November 1916): 1–2, emphasis added. See also Pavel Polianov, “Nekotorye motivy tvorchestva A. Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 214 (March 14, 1915): 169–172, here 171; Gorskii, “Etapy dukhosoznaniia,” IMV no. 4 (May 1915), 3. 9. Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?”; idem, “Russian Music in War and Revolution.” 10. Vladimir Ern, “Ot Kanta k Kruppu,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 116–124. Friedrich Krupp AG was the largest company in Europe in the early twentieth century, famous for its steel production and manufacture of armaments, and provided most of the artillery for the Imperial German Army during the Great War. 11. Simon Frank, “O poiskakh smysla voiny,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 125–132. See also Nikolai Berdiaev, “K sporam o germanskoi filosofii,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 5 (May 1915): 115–121. 12. See, for instance, Akimenko, “Iskusstvo i voina,” 835–836; A. Koral’nik, “Germanskaia ideia,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 42–60; Grigorii Rachinskii, “Bratstvo i svoboda,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 83–87; V. Buzeskul, “Sovremennaia Germaniia i nemetskaia istoricheskaia nauka XIX stoletiia,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 2 (February 1915): 24–55; A. Moshchanskii, “Materialy po istorii russkoi literatury i kul’tury,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 140–145; Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?”; idem, “Russian Music in War and Revolution.” 13. V. Derzhanovskii, “V buriu, vo grozu,” Muzyka no. 192 (July 26, 1914): 453–455, here 455. For earlier articles that included discussion of Strauss and Reger, see, for in-

274

Notes to Pages 169–171

stance, L. Sabaneev, “Sovremennie techeniia v muzykal’nom iskusstve,” Muzyka no. 2 (December 4, 1910): 38–42; idem, “Muzykal’nye besedy: Genii ili sharlatany,” Muzyka no. 95 (September 15, 1912): 780–783. 14. Iu. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” Muzyka no. 193 (August 2, 1914): 462–472, here 468. 15. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 467. 16. A. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 5–6 (1916): 23–25, here 23–24. For a similar argument, see also N. N. Fatov, “Iskusstvo vragov,” RMG no. 38–39 (September 21–28, 1914): 728–729, here 729. 17. Petr Struve, “Sud’ istorii,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 11 (November 1914): 158–168, here 167. 18. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina.” A similar claim about the problem of “I and us” being a universal challenge facing all humanity is expressed in Koral’nik, “Germanskaia ideia,” 46. 19. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 466–467, 468. 20. Sergei Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 108–115, here 111; Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 5–6 (1916), 24. 21. Akimenko, “Iskusstvo i voina,” 836. 22. Nabliudatel’, “Otvet na vozzvanie ‘k kul’turnomu miru’ predstavitelei germanskoi nauki i iskusstva,” MV no. 26 (February 1–14, 1915): 1. The main ideas presented in public papers by leading intellectuals were reported in abbreviated form in the daily press, giving them a broader circulation than the specialized readership of a journal such as Russkaia mysl’. See, for instance, “V religiozno-­filosofskom obshchestve,” Rech’ no. 36 (February 7, 1915): 5; “Lektsiia kn. E. N. Trubetskogo,” Rech’ no. 71 (March 14, 1915): 5; S. I. Gessen, “V religiozno-­filisofskom obshchestve,” Rech’ no. 36 (February 7, 1915): 5. 23. Sergei Bulgakov to Emilii Medtner (May 19, 1915), RGB f. 167.13.21, l. 1ob. 24. E[lena] Koltonovskaia, “Paralleli: O germantsakh,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 1 (January 1915): 165–173, here 172. See also V. Buzeskul, “Sovremennaia Germaniia i nemetskaia istoricheskaia nauka XIX stoletiia,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 2 (February 1915): 24–25. 25. L. I-­ov, “Po povodu stat’i ‘Ob iskusstve vragov,’” RMG no. 44 (November 2, 1914): 782–785, here 784. I-­ov was responding to N. N. Fatov’s article “On the Art of the Enemy,” in which Fatov argued for the embrace of past German culture. See N. Fatov, “Eshche po povodu ‘Iskusstvo vragov,’” RMG no. 46 (November 16, 1914): 843–845. 26. L. I-­ov, “Po povodu stat’i ‘Ob iskusstve vragov,’” 783. 27. Vasilii Sakhnovskii, “Russkaia intelligentsiia i natsional’naia ideiia,” GM no. 290 (December 17, 1914): 2; Ol. L-­v, “Predskazaniia N. F. Fedorova,” GM no. 2 (January 3, 1915): 6; Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?,” esp. 52–54. 28. On interpretations of 1914 as Russia’s “holy war,” see Mannherz, Modern Occultism, 166–167. 29. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 465–466; Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 5–6 (1916), 24–25. 30. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 470; Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” 115; Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vselenskoe delo,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 97–107, here 104; Christopher Stroop, “Nationalist War Commentary,” 94–115. 31. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 463.



Notes to Pages 172–176

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32. Ibid., 466. 33. Koral’nik, “Germanskaia ideia,” 58–59. This use of “Alexandrianism” was borrowed from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, while “life-­creation” was a common term used by Russian symbolist writers. 34. For a thoughtful recent overview of the impact of the war on Russia’s religious intelligentsia, see Stroop, “Nationalist War Commentary”; idem, “Providential Empire.” 35. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated, fall 1914), RGB f. 171.3.6b, ll. 110–112, here 110 ob. This meeting included the delivery of papers by Viacheslav Ivanov, Simon Frank, Sergei Bulgakov, and Trubetskoi. Several papers were published in the December 1914 edition of Russkaia mysl ’, including Trubetskoi, “Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii,” Ivanov, “Vselenskoe delo,” Grigorii Rachinskii, “Bratstvo i svoboda,” and Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy.” 36. “Lektsiia kn. E. N. Trubetskogo,” Rech’ no. 71 (March 14, 1915): 5. 37. Morozova to Trubetskoi (undated, fall 1914), RGB f. 171.3.6b, ll. 110–112, here 112– 112ob. 38. I. M., “Voina i pisateli: U Viacheslava Ivanova,” GM no. 277 (December 2, 1914): 4. 39. For a transcript of this paper, together with Anna Medtner’s comments on it, see Anna to Emilii Medtner (November 8, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 1–8ob. 40. On the personal relationship between Morozova and Trubetskoi, see Nosov, ed., “‘Nasha liubov’ nuzhna Rossii . . .’ Perepiska E. N. Trubetskogo i M. K. Morozovoi.” 41. The attendees included Grigorii Rachinskii, Sergei Bulgakov, Viacheslav Ern, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sergei Kotliarevskii, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Ivan Il’in, and Mikhail Gershenzon. 42. Morozova to Trubetskoi ([March 16], 1915), RGB f. 171.3.7, ll. 81–84ob, here ll. 83– 84ob; Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 626–628. For another account of the evening, see V. F. Ern to E. D. Ern (March 15, 1915), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 625–626. 43. Trubetskoi to Morozova (Tuesday [March 24], 1915), RGB f. 171.8.3., ll. 5–6ob, here l. 5; Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 633–634. 44. Trubetskoi to Morozova (March 19, 1915), RGB f. 171.8.3, ll. 3–4ob, here l. 4. 45. Morozova to Trubetskoi (undated, 1916), RGB f. 171.3.8, ll. 15–17ob. On his election as representative from the Kaluga region, see Trubetskoi to Morozova [September 18, 1915], in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 650–651. 46. Morozova to Trubetskoi (undated, 1916), RGB f. 171.3.8, ll. 15–17. 47. Trubetskoi to Morozova (August 24, 1914), RGB f. 161.8.25, ll. 25–27. 48. Morozova to Trubetskoi (undated, 1916), RGB f. 171.3.8, ll. 41–42. 49. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 6 (June 1915): 6–9, here 8; Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 463. 50. See, for instance, Ivanov, “Natsional’noe i vselenskoe,” RGALI f. 225, op. 1, d. 38, ll. 46–49. 51. Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1914): 88–96, here 91; Mikhael Baliasnyi, “Nibelungov shchit,” NZ no. 2 (December 1913): 63; Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” 109; A. Smirnov (Kutacheskii), “Pochemu nam dorog Konstantinopol?,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 4 (April 1915): 20–22, here 20.

276

Notes to Pages 176–180

52. A. Kankarovich, “Chto poteriala muzykal’naia Germaniia ot voiny s Rossiei: Vpechatleniia pobyvshego v plenu u nemtsov muzykanta,” Rampa i zhizn’ no. 8 (1915): 5. 53. N. Fatov, “Eshche po povodu ‘Iskusstvo vragov,’” RMG no. 46 (November 16, 1914): 843–845, here 844–845. 54. [N. Martsenko], “Ot redaktsii,” IMV no. 1 (March 1915): 2. 55. “Ot redaktora,” MS no. 1 (September 1915): 1–21. 56. Iu. Kurdiumov, “O natsional’nikh osobennostiakh russkoi muzyki,” RMG no. 13 (March 31, 1913): 322–326, here 323; ibid., RMG no. 14 (April 7, 1913): 359–362; no. 40 (October 6, 1913): 856–858; RMG no. 41 (October 13, 1913): 884–887; no. 43 (October 27, 1913): 953–960. 57. Kurdiumov, “O natsional’nikh osobennostiakh russkoi muzyki,” 323. 58. Ia. Karklin, “Chto nuzhno provintsii dlia uspeshnego propagandirovaniia russkoi simfonicheskoi muzyki,” Bibliograficheskii listok Russkoi muzykal’noi gazety no. 1 (1914): 1–3; Manfred, “Letopis’ provintsii,” Muzyka no. 223 (September 12, 1915): 338–341. 59. M. Unigovskii, “Voina i nemetskaia muzyka,” Rampa i zhizn’ no. 4 (1915): 7. 60. Ibid., 7; Unigovskii, “Voina i nemetskaia muzyka,” Rampa i zhizn’ no. 5 (1915): 5–6. 61. The ban seems to have started voluntarily and later culminated with government policy supporting the expulsion of enemy musicians. See Zritel, “Muzykal’nyi mir,” Muzyka no. 194 (October 25, 1914): 492–493; “Muzyka i voina,” RMG no. 2 (January 11, 1915): 44–46. This process parallels broader trends noted in Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. 62. L[eonid] Sabaneev, “Muzykal’nyi militarizm v Germanii,” GM no. 286 (December 12, 1914): 7. 63. L[eonid] Sabaneev, “Gegemoniia v muzyke,” GM no. 65 (March 19, 1915): 4. 64. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzika,” IMV no. 6 (June 1915): 6–9; no. 7 (July 1915): 9–12; no. 12–13 (October 1915): 3–4; no. 14–15 (November 1915): 1–3; no. 5–6 (1916): 23–25. On his creation of these articles, see RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 2 (A. K. Gorskii, “Poiasnenie k pis’mam kompozitora V. I. Rebikova”). 65. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 12–13 (1915), 3–4; no. 5–6 (1916), 23. 66. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 5–6 (1916), 24–25. 67. According to Gorskii, the “hero” figure of Siegfried was not Wilhelm II (as Vladimir Solov’ev had claimed) but Nietzsche himself. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 12–13 (1915), 4. The reference is to Solov’ev’s poem “Drakon,” which was dedicated to “Siegfried” (Wilhelm II). See Mitchell, “How Russian Was Wagner?,” 53–54. 68. Gorskii, “Germanizm i muzyka,” IMV no. 5–6 (1916), 24. 69. Ibid., 25–26. 70. Gorskii made this claim evident in other articles. See Gorskii, “Okonchatel’noe deistvie,” IMV no. 7–8 (April 1916): 35–38; idem, “Rebikov,” IMV no. 15–16 (November 1916): 100–104; no. 17–18 (December 1916): 115–120. 71. Iu. Kurdiumov, “O natsional’nykh osobennostiakh russkoi muzyki,” RMG no. 14 (April 7, 1913): 359–362, here 360. 72. Shamurin, “Sviataia voina,” 469. 73. Trubetskoi, “Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii,” 96. 74. Sargeant, “High Anxiety,” 93–114.



Notes to Pages 180–184

277

75. Emilii Medtner to Marietta Shaginian (April 24–26/May 7–9, 1914), RGB f. 167.25.28, l. 49. 76. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 296–299. 77. On Scriabin’s initial embrace of the war, see Nikolai Medtner to Emilii Medtner (November 8, 1914), in Metner, Pis’ma, 157; Sabaneev, Skriabin, 56. Theosophists and symbolist writers such as Ivanov, Baltrushaitis, and Bal’mont also initially embraced the war as a unifying moment for Russian society. See Carlson, “No Religion Higher Than Truth”; Hellman, Poets of Hope and Despair. 78. Skriabin, “O sviazi politiki s iskusstvom (pis’mo k izdateliu kompozitora-­mistika A. N. Skriabina),” NZ no. 49 (November 29, 1914): 1294. The letter, dated Moscow, November 24, 1914, was picked up and reprinted in numerous other publications, receiving much wider circulation than NZ itself enjoyed. See, for instance, Muzyka no. 204 (January 3, 1915): 9; RMG no. 14 (April 5, 1915): 252. My translation here is partially based on that by Hull, Great Russian Tone-­Poet, 70–72. 79. Skriabin, “O sviazi politiki s iskusstvom, 1305. 80. See, for instance, A. N. B[rianchaninov], “Zven’ia zhizni,” NZ no. 43 (October 18, 1914): 1119–1123; Iu. Osberg, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” NZ no. 34 (1914): 939–940; Pavel Polianov, “Nekotorye motivy tvorchestva A. Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 214 (March 14, 1915): 169–172. Leonid Sabaneev, “Iz dnevnika muzykanta,” GM no. 15 (January 20, 1915): 5; idem, “Gegemoniia v muzyke.” 81. V. F. Ern to E. D. Ern (December 10, 1914), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 603–604. 82. N. Ul’ianov, “Vospominaniia ob A. N. Skriabina,” RGALI f. 2022, op. 1, ed. khr. 90. Slightly different versions were published in Ul’ianov, Moi vstrechi; idem, Liudi epokhi sumerek, 320–338. 83. Ul’ianov, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” RGALI f. 2022, op. 1, d. 90, ll. 25–26. 84. Ul’ianov, “Vospominaniia o Skriabine,” ll. 26–27. Ul’ianov’s unfinished pencil sketch of Scriabin is printed in Uchenie zapiski, vol. 4, 149. 85. V. F. Ern to E. D. Ern (April 14, 1915), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 637. 86. Morozova, “Vospominaniia,” l. 85. 87. Emilii Medtner to Anna Medtner (May 16/3, 1915), RGB f. 167.25.1, ll. 1–4, here l. 1. 88. Ibid., l. 2. 89. Gorskii, “Etapy dukhosoznaniia,” IMV no. 4 (May 1915): 2–6, here 6; Muzyka no. 220 (April 26, 1915). This entire issue was devoted to Scriabin’s memory and filled with commemorative articles, poems, and speeches. 90. See, for instance, Aleksandr Brianchaninov, “Neskol’ko slov o zadaniiakh skriabinskikh obshchestv,” Petrogradskoe Skriabinskoe Obshchestvo Izvestiia no. 1 (Petrograd, 1916): 4–5. 91. Pavel Polianov, “Agnts,” Muzyka no. 220 (April 26, 1915): 270–271, here 271. See also Aleksandr Brianchaninov, “Pod penie Khristos Voskrese!,” Novoe zveno no. 15 (April 18, 1915): 2–3, here 2. 92. Shletser, “Ot individualizma k vseedinstvu,” Apollon no. 4–5 (April–­May 1916): 48– 63, here 62–63. 93. Brianchaninov, “Neskol’ko slov,” 5.

278

Notes to Pages 184–186

94. Shletser, “Ot individualizma k vseedinstvu,” 62; anon., “Skriabin kak simvol,” IRLI f. 289, op. 7, no. 69, l. 15; Viacheslav Ivanov, “Natsional’noe i vselenskoe v tvorchestve Skriabina” (April 14, 1916), RGALI f. 225, op. 1, d. 38, ll. 38–62. 95. “Skriabin kak simvol,” l. 15. See also Shletser, “Ot individualizma k vseedinstvu,” 62. 96. “Skriabin, kak simvol,” l. 10. See also Ivanov, “Skriabin: Sbornik statei,” RGALI f. 225, op. 1, ed. khr. 38. 97. Gorskii, “Etapy dukhosoznaniia,” 4–5. See also B. Ianovskii, “O Skriabine,” IMV no. 8–9 (August 1915): 3–5, here 3. 98. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Pis’mo chlena soveta M. S. O. Ivanova predsedateliu Petrogradskogo Skriabinskogo Obshchestva [A. N. Brianchaninovu] po povodu knigi l. L. Sabaneev Skriabin (May 12, 1916),” Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2 (Petrograd, 1917), 16–21, here 20. 99. For a description of these societies, see Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, esp. 308–318; Ustav Petrogradskogo Skriabinskogo Obshchestva (Petrograd: Tovarishchestvo Galike i Vil’borkh, 1916); Petrogradskoe Skriabinskoe Obshchestvo, Izvestiia no. 1. 100. Sabaneev, “Pamiati A. N. Skriabina,” Muzyka no. 220 (April 26, 1915): 266–269, here 269. Emphasis added. 101. Sabaneev, Skriabin, 63–67, 72–73, 75, 81, 83–84. 102. Ibid., 42–47, 57. 103. For a slightly later interpretation following these same lines, see Losev, “Mirovozzrenie Skriabina,” in Strast’ k dialektike, 256–301. 104. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine, 314. Also in attendance at the meeting (held at M. Gagarina’s house) were V. Ivanov, N. Berdiaev, J. Baltrušaitis, B. Schloezer, V. Bogorodskii, V. Briusov. See RGB f. 746.38.39. 105. Bulgakov, “Iskusstvo i teurgiia: Fragment,” Russkaia mysl’ no. 12 (December 1916): 1–24, here 24. 106. Ibid., 3. Bulgakov defined actions that have a physical impact on the world in terms of “economic materialism,” linking this to “craft” rather than “art.” A synthesis between the two only existed, according to Bulgakov, before the fall from the Garden of Eden. Ibid., 6. 107. Ibid., 7. 108. Ibid., 4–5. 109. V. V. Bogorodskii, “Nechto o knige Sabaneev,” in Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2, 10. 110. Vladimir Nosenkov, “Otchet,” in Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2, 10. 111. Shletser, “Orficheskii put’: Rech’, proiznesennaia chlenom soveta M. S. O. B. F. Shletserom na sobranii M. S. O. posviashchennom razboru knigi L .L. Sabaneeva Skriabin,” in Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2, 25–29. 112. Viacheslav Ivanov to Aleksandr Brianchaninov (May 12, 1916), in Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2, 18. 113. V. N. Lermontova, “Pis’mo Sabaneevu,” 6. Her sister M. Gagarina undersigned the entire letter. Ibid., 9. See also “From an Admirer of the Memory of A. N. Scriabin,” Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2, 15.



Notes to Pages 186–191

279

114. Brianchaninov to Ivanov (May 12, 1916), Izvestiia Skriabinskogo obshchestva no. 2, 22. 115. P. Shepk, “A. N. Skriabin,” undocumented clipping, RGALI f. 2012, op. 5, ed. khr. 69, l. 49. 116. Shilkin, Iskusstvo i mistika, 4, 12; Anna to Emilii Medtner (April 7–14, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 2–2ob. 117. Ballard, “Postcards from the Edge,” 7–19. While discourse on Scriabin as “Satanist” continued in the immediate post-­1917 era (see for instance Losev, “Mirovozzrenie Skriabina”), this framing of the Scriabin debate quickly lost validity within the Soviet context. 118. M. Brianchaninova, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” NZ no. 43 (October 18, 1914): 1128–1129. In his editorial comments, Brianchaninov drew attention to the inherent value of such a mystical call, arguing that “such positive-­psychological currents will offer, through unseen but sensed paths, great help to our heroes in the decisive minutes of their heroic acts for the good of humanity.” See A. Brianchaninov, “Zvenia zhizni,” NZ no. 43 (October 18, 1914): 1119–1123, here 1120. 119. Stockdale, “United in Gratitude,” 465. 120. A. P[reobrazhenskii], “Religioznye misterii,” undocumented clipping, preserved in RGIA f. 1109, no. 12, ll. 2ob–­3. 121. M. Ivanov, “Eshche o misteriiakh,” Novoe vremia no. 14263 (November 16/29, 1915): 4. 122. Antonii Ieromonakh, “Misterii v ikh proshlom,” IMV no. 1–2 (1916): 3–4. 123. G. N. Timofeev, “Liturgiia S. V. Rakhmaninova” [1913], RNB f. 773, op. 1, ed. khr. 52, l. 1. 124. Timofeev, “Liturgiia S. V. Rakhmaninova,” l. 7; G. N. Timofeev, “Rakhmaninov v tserkovnoi muzyke: Stat’ia,” (unpublished by Rech’, 1914), RNB f. 773, op. 1, ed. khr. 228, l. 3. 125. This rediscovery of Orthodox chant built upon the work by Stepan Smolenskii and Aleksandr Kastal’skii, who sought to reinvigorate Russian orthodox music through the study of folk music and older chant traditions. As professor of church song at the Moscow Conservatory, Smolenskii extended influence across the liturgical divide to composers of secular music, including Nikolai Findeizen, Vladimir Rebikov, Iulii Engel, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Kunina, ed., Iu. D. Engel’: Glazami sovremennika, 6; Zvereva, Alexander Kastalsky, 6–97. 126. See Sergei Rachmaninoff to Aleksandr Kastal’skii (June 19 and July 6, 1910), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 14–16. 127. Eight of the fifteen prayer settings are based on original themes by Rachmaninoff, while the remaining seven draw from various chant traditions. See Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 254. 128. Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 255. This technique is common to most Russian Orthodox church music, as well as Russian folk music practice. 129. A. Kastal’skii, “Vsenoshchnoe bdenie S. V. Rakhmaninova”; anon., Russkoe slovo no. 78 (April 7, 1915): 6; S. A. Satina, “Zapiska o S. V. Rakhmaninove,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove I, 11–141, here 47. 130. Iur. Sakhnovskii, “Vsenoshchnoe bdenie S. V. Rakhmaninova,” clipping from Russkoe slovo, GTsMMK f. 18 no. 597, l. 8.

280

Notes to Pages 191–192

131. Leonid Sabaneev, “Vsenoshchnoe bdenie Rakhmaninova,” GM no. 58 (March 11, 1915): 5. 132. G. Prokof’ev, “Vsenoshchnoe bdenie,” clipping from RV no. 60 (March 14, 1915), GTsMMK f. 18, no. 597, l. 8. 133. A. Kastal’skii, “Vsenoshchnoe bdenie S. V. Rakhmaninova,” Russkoe slovo no. 54 (March 7, 1915): 6. 134. B. B. Asaf’ev, “Dnevnik, 1915–1922,” RGALI f. 2658, op. 1, ed. khr. 439, l. 27. 135. Anna to Emilii Medtner (March 12, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. 136. One G. Ch., writing for MV, argued that, while the composition was a fine concert work, it did not capture the prayer and “otherworldliness” of church music. G. Ch., “‘Vsenoshchnoe bdenie S. V. Rakhmaninova,” MV no. 62 (March 17, 1915): 2. 137. Other composers followed Rachmaninoff ’s example in writing religious music. Aleksandr Kastal’skii’s “Bratskoe pominovenie geroev,” which combined Orthodox chant with nonliturgical songs of allied nations, was performed in Petrograd in January 1917, while Vladimir Rebikov wrote a requiem at this time. See Iu[lii] E[ngel’], “Teatr i muzyka,” RV no. 13 (January 17, 1917): 4. 138. B. B. Asaf’ev, “Dnevnik, 1915–1922,” RGALI f. 2658, op. 1, ed. khr. 439, l. 27. 139. Anna to Emilii Medtner (March 11–17, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. 140. S.A. Satina, “Zapiska o S. V. Rakhmaninove,” 11–141; Rachmaninoff to Shaginian (undated, 1914), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 77. On Rachmaninoff’s negative mood after the outbreak of war, see Rachmaninoff to Z. A. Pribytkovyi (January 8, 1915), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 78. 141. Nikitin, Sergei Rakhmaninov: Dve zhizni, 95. Rachmaninoff’s next compositions (six Romances, op. 38, nine Études-­tableaux, op. 39) were completed in 1916. 142. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 166–167. 143. Rachmaninoff to Gol’denveizer (June 22, 1915), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 81–82. 144. “Kontsertnaia programma Rakhmaninova” (December 5, 1916), RGALI f. 2985 op. 1, ed. khr. 624, ll. 30–32. 145. See, for instance, Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 271–272. 146. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” in Apetian, ed., Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove II, 166. 147. On January 11, 1915 (in the midst of composing the All-­Night Vigil ), Rachmaninoff attended an evening dinner at the Struves’, where conversation focused almost exclusively upon the war and the German people. See Anna to Emilii Medtner (January 11, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. For accounts of similar evenings that Rachmaninoff attended at this time, see Anna to Emilii Medtner (February 1–2, February 25–27, and May 7, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. 148. Anna to Emilii Medtner (March 24, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence, l. 2ob. See also Rachmaninoff to A. B. Gol’denveizer (June 22, 1915), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 81–82; Anna to Emilii Medtner (1914–1915), LC Medtner correspondence. 149. Anna to Emilii Medtner (May 12, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence ll. 3–3ob.



Notes to Pages 193–195

281

150. Anna to Emilii Medtner (February 25–27, 1915), l. 1ob. 151. In fall 1915, for example, Rachmaninoff appeared in twenty-­eight different concerts (both orchestral and solo piano), including performances in Moscow, Petrograd, Kharkov, Rostov, Kiev, Baku, Tiflis, Saratov, and Yalta. Among other charities, he also donated money from his Scriabin concerts to the family of the deceased. Satina concludes that he donated at least 50 percent of all proceeds to various charities. See Satina, “Zapiska o Rakhmaninove,” 46–48. 152. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 26–31, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. 153. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 3–18, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence. 154. See, for instance, “Stat’i i retsenzii o S. V. Rakhmaninove v dorevoliutsionnoi presse (1907–1917),” GTsMMK f. 18 no. 597, ll. 9–13. 155. Stockdale, “United in Gratitude,” 484–485. 156. See Anna to Emilii Medtner (undated [before August 18], 1914), LC Medtner correspondence. 157. Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 117–127, 197–221. 158. Margarita Morozova, “Vospominaniia o Metnere,” RGALI f. 1956, op. 2, ed. khr. 11, l. 42; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova, RGB f. 167.13.12, ll. 7–12. See also Emilii to Anna Medtner (July 20–­August 2, 1914), in Metner, Pis’ma, 159. 159. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (June 8, 1915), GTsMMK, no. 326, l. 12ob; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (June 14/1, 1915), RGB f. 167.13.12, ll. 11–12. 160. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 29–31, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 1–1ob; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (November 13, 1914), RGB f. 167.13.12, ll. 7–9. 161. These included Ivanov, Nikolai Zhiliaev, Grigorii Rachinskii, Bulgakov, Bely, Morozova, and Shaginian. Sergei Bulgakov to Emilii Medtner (May 19, 1915), RGB f. 167.13.21; Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (November 13, 1914), RGB f. 167.13.12, ll. 7–8; Emilii to Anna Medtner (September 21/8, 1915), RGB f. 167.25.10, ll. 24–25; Emilii to Anna Medtner (May 16/3, 1915), RGB f. 167.25.1, l.2. 162. Anna to Emilii Medtner (August 24–26, September 25–28, and October 15–17, 1914, January 9 and October 29–30, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence; Metner, Pis’ma, 159. 163. Martyn, Medtner, 112. 164. Nikolai was officially freed from all military service in the fall of 1916. For the history of Nikolai’s military assignments (and fears), see Anna to Emilii Medtner (undated [before August 18], August 22, undated [before September 4–5], and September 28–­October 3, 1914, January 11 and September 10–21, 1915, and September 13, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence. 165. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 13–14, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence. 166. GARF f. 102, O. O. 1915 g., op. 245, d. 165, T. 3, ll. 65–66. The report was dated July 25, 1915. Emilii’s continued presence in Switzerland increased suspicion. Anna repeatedly expressed concern that his letters were being read by the censor. See Anna to Emilii Medtner (September 28–­October 3 and November 21–22, 1914, and May 29 and June 20–24, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence.

282

Notes to Pages 195–198

167. Metner, Pis’ma, 156–159. 168. Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 148–149; Nikolai Medtner to Ivan Il’in (May 30, 1915), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4730; Martyn, Medtner, 112. 169. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner [November 8, 1914], in Metner, Pis’ma, 156–159; Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (February 2, 1915), in Metner, Pis’ma, 160–161; Anna to Emilii Medtner (November 8, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence. 170. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 22–25 and 29–31, December 7–9 and 12, 1914, and June 10–12, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence. 171. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 22–25 and November 1–2 and 4–7, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence. 172. Anna to Emilii Medtner (September 25–28, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 1ob–­2. 173. Anna to Emilii Medtner (September 28–­October 3, 1914), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 2–2ob. See also Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 3–18, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence, l. 1ob. 174. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (February 2, 1915), in Metner, Pis’ma, 160–161. 175. Emilii to Anna Medtner (September 21/8, 1915), RGB f. 167.25.10, l. 11. 176. Emilii Medtner to Margarita Morozova (June 20/7, 1915), RGB f. 171.1.52b, ll. 58–59. 177. Emilii’s critique of anti-­German sentiment expressed in the Russian press had focused on the fact that discussion centered on “‘destruction’ of Germany and Austria and not of victory over them.” See Emilii to Anna Medtner (September 21/8, 1915), RGB f. 167.25.10, l. 26. He later noted the same tendency in the German press. 178. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (June 8, 1915), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 326, l. 3. 179. Ibid., ll. 11ob–­12ob, emphasis added. For further discussion of Emilii’s fear of music, see Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 83, 112. 180. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (June 8, 1915), ll. 12–12ob. 181. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (November 13, 1915), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 328. 182. Emilii to Anna Medtner (1915), RGB f. 167.25.10, l. 25 (1915). 183. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (November 10, 1915), in Metner, Pis’ma, 165. 184. Over the course of the war, Medtner completed his op. 30 (Sonata in A Minor), op. 31 (Three Pieces), op. 32 (Six Poems by Pushkin), op. 34 (four Skazki), and op. 35 (four Skazki ), and worked extensively on his First Piano Concerto in C Minor, op. 33, which was completed in February 1918. See Martyn, Medtner, 108–127. 185. The term rasstroennyi was used by Anna Medtner in reference to Nikolai’s state of mind. See Anna to Emilii Medtner (June 7–8, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence, l. 2ob. 186. Ibid. 187. Anna to Emilii Medtner (February 20–22, May 22–26, and June 2, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence. 188. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (September [14] 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 333, l. 2 189. Emilii Metner, “Zametki o filosofii iskusstva i psikhologii tvorchestva,” RGB f. 167.13.1 (November 30, 1915—February 16, 1916, Zurich), ll. 4, 15. 190. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (December 22/9, 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 336, l. 2ob; Emilii to Anna Medtner (November 18/5, 1916), RGB f. 167.25.20, ll. 15–16. The con-



Notes to Pages 198–201

283

certo in question was also Nikolai’s first work with orchestra. Begun in 1914, it was not finished until 1918, and it premiered that spring. See Metner, Pis’ma, 173. 191. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (January 1–7, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 337. 192. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (January 1–7, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 338. 193. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (January 1/14, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 339, ll. 2–2ob. 194. Emilii to Anna Medtner (November 11, 1916), ll. 13–13ob, (November 18/5, 1916), RGB f. 167.25.20, ll. 15–16. 195. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (December 4, 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 335, l. 1ob. 196. In 1916 Emilii attended a club (apparently in Zurich), where German Swiss and Italian Swiss folk songs were sung. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (September 24/11, 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 332, ll. 1–2ob. Nikolai found these comments “extremely interesting.” See Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (December 4, 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 335, l. 1ob. 197. Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (June 13, 1916), in Metner, Pis’ma, 167–169. 198. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (b. d. [1916]), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 348. Emilii began his critique semantically, arguing that Wagner is not “an artist [ein Kunstler], but THE artist [der Kunstler].” 199. For Tolstoy, this moral code was not specifically connected with the Russian Orthodox Church (his conflict with institutionalized religion is well-­known). For many educated Russians at this time, however, the image of a pure, Orthodox, Russian peasant identity remained strong. 200. For the claim that German music in the nineteenth century was assigned a “universalist” identity that began to shift increasingly toward an “exclusivist” model, see Bernd Sponheuer, “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in Music,” in Applegate and Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity. 201. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (July 22/9, August 3 and 8, September 27/14, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 345, l. 6ob. 202. Emilii to Anna Medtner (June 30, 1917), RGB f. 167.1.25. Cited in Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 126. 203. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (July 22/9, August 3 and 8, September 27/14, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 345, l. 7. 204. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (January 14, 1919), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4795, l. 2. 205. Anna to Emilii Medtner (August 9, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence. 206. Anna to Emilii Medtner (October 3–18, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 1ob–­ 2ob. Of the papers presented (including by Ivanov and Ern), they found value only in Trubetskoi’s, in which he spoke of the tragedy of Germany. 207. Grigorii Rachinskii to Margarita Morozova (July 24, 1915), in Keidan, ed., Vzyskuiushchie grada, 646–647. 208. The phrase “German blood” is Boris Popov’s. See Popov, “Noiabr’skiia rozy,” Pereval no. 2 (December 1906): 58–61. 209. Anna to Emilii Medtner (July 9–10, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence. On Ivan Il’in’s relationship with Nikolai Medtner, see Magnus Iunggren, “Ivan Il’in pishet Nikolaiu Metneru,” in Takho-­Godi and Takho-­Godi, eds., Vladimir Solov’ev i kul’tura Serebrianogo veka, 606–613; Il’in and Medtner correspondence, GTsMMK f. 132.

284

Notes to Pages 201–203

210. Ivan Ilyin, “Study of Medtner,” in Holt, ed., Medtner, 163–174, here 167. Emphasis added. On Il’in’s admiration of Nikolai Medtner, see also Bychkov, Russkaia teurgicheskaia estetika, 385. 211. Sergei Durylin to Margarita Morozova (1915), RGB f. 171.1.18, ll. 1–4. 212. This shift from emphasizing Medtner’s “German nature” to his “Russian nature” was noted by Soviet scholars, who criticized prerevolutionary critics for failing to recognize the use of Russian folk melody in his works. See esp. Apetian, “Vstupitel’naia stat’ia,” in Apetian, ed., N. K. Metner: Vospominaniia, 3–20, esp. 4; Iu. N. Tiulin, “Vstrechi s N. K. Metnerom,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 110–117; I. S. Iasser, “Iskusstvo Nikolaia Metnera,” in Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia, 198– 212. Apetian locates this shift in critical interpretation of Medtner in the late 1920s. 213. Bychkov, Russkaia teurgicheskaia estetika, 358–359. 214. See, for instance, Il’in, Osnovy khudozhestva: O sovershennom v iskusstve, 67. Though this work was only published in 1937, it reflected ideas that Il’in had developed in earlier years and served, in the assessment of V. V. Bychkov, as a “resume of an aesthetic, in the course of which many representatives (artists, writers, philosophers) of the Silver Age of Russian culture participated and thought.” Bychkov, Russkaia teurgicheskaia estetika, 373–374. 215. Anna to Emilii Medtner (November 3, 1915), LC Medtner correspondence; Iunggren, “Ivan Il’in pishet Nikolaiu Metneru.” While initially confused and embarrassed by the letter, Nikolai and Anna soon determined the true author of the text; see Anna to Emilii Medtner (November 3, 1915). 216. See, for instance, Anna to Emilii Medtner (July 9–10, 1916), LC Medtner correspondence; Nikolai Medtner to Il’in (January 7, 1916), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4732. 217. Nikolai Medtner to Il’in (July 12, 1917), GTsMMK f. 132, no. 4735, ll. 1–1ob. 218. Ibid., l. 2. 219. See also the image of Rebikov expressed in the journal Svoboda i zhizn’: Iuzhnyi organ svobodnoi tvorcheskoi mysli no. 9 (May 28, 1917). Preserved in RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1766, ll. 86–89. 220. Gorskii’s interview with the composer dated from 1914. See Gorskii, “Rebikov,” IMV no. 17–18 (1914), 116. By 1916 Rebikov was far less positive in his outlook. 221. Rebikov, “1915 let tomu nazad rodilsia chelovek” (December 25, 1915), GTsMMK f. 68, no. 102, l. 2ob. 222. Rebikov, “Penie v khram,” RMG no. 20–21 (May 15–22, 1916): 441–444. 223. This development was building prior to the war. In a 1914 letter to Vitelad Iodko, Rebikov wrote, “What have [people] done with the teachings of Christ? . . . Life is in darkness.” See Rebikov to Iodko (January 27, 1914), RGALI f. 2954, op. 1, ed. khr. 1031. 224. Vladimir Rebikov to Nikolai Findeizen (May 26, 1916), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed.kh. 1766, ll. 80–81, here l.81ob. 225. The “Marseillaise” was particularly popular. See Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti i bor’ba za vlast’, 14–37. 226. Boris Popov to Nikolai Findeizen (March 20, 1917), RNB f. 816, op. 2, n. 1722, ll. 65– 69.



Notes to Pages 203–206

285

227. Matvei Presman to Nikolai Findeizen (March 22, 1917), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1741, l. 32. 228. Matvei Presman to Nikolai Findeizen (May 14, 1926), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1741, ll. 33–38. 229. Margarita Morozova to Evgenii Trubetskoi (undated letters, after February 1917), RGB f. 171.3.8, ll. 69–70, 73–74, 75–76. 230. I. An., “Svobodnoe iskusstvo,” IMV no. 3–4 (March–­April 1917): 35. 231. Nikolai Martsenko, “Na grany novoi ery,” IMV no. 3–4 (March–­April 1917): 36. 232. L., “Novye gimny i pesni ‘svobody,’” RMG Bibliograficheskii listok no. 2 (1917): 9–11. 233. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti, 285–286; Znamenskii, Intelligentsiia nakanune, 183–185. 234. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti, 286, Znamenskii, Intelligentsiia nakanune, 183–184. 235. Redaktsii, “Anketa o novom narodnom gimne,” RMG no. 10 (March 12, 1917): 227– 228. 236. “‘Ty pobedish ves’ mir, Rossiia’: Vserossiiskii gimn,” RMG no. 10 (March 12, 1917): 228. 237. Petronii, “Po povodu ankety o narodnom gimne,” RMG no. 11–12 (March 19–26, 1917): 259–261. Emphasis added. Ironically, Bortniansky, who was born in contemporary Ukraine but spent most of his musical career in St. Petersburg and wrote in an Italianate style, is claimed as both a “Russian” and a “Ukrainian” composer today. See, for instance, Richard Taruskin, “For Ukraine, He’s a Native Son, Regardless,” in On Russian Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 53–57; Yuriy Tarnawsky, “Dmitri Bortniansky: The Ukrainian in Him,” New York Times (July 18, 1999), http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/18/arts/l- ­d mitri-­b ortniansky-­t he-­u krainian-­in -­him-­616559.html, accessed February 28, 2015. 238. Prokof’ev, Dnevnik, 1907–1918, 645. 239. P. E. Matraev, “Gimn svobodnoi Rossii,” RMG no. 17–18 (April 30–­May 7, 1917): 347. 240. Redaktor, “Slava!,” RMG no. 15–16 (April 16–23, 1917): 313–314; Boris Popov to Nikolai Findeizen (March 20, 1917), RNB f. 816, op. 2, ed. khr. 1722, ll. 65–66ob. In presenting the new hymn to the reading audience, the editor removed any mention of the ill-­fated tsar, citing the musical melody as “the popular folk song ‘Slava.’” Redaktor, “Slava,” 313. 241. V. Bagadurov, “Gimn,” RMG no. 19–20 (1917): 375. 242. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti, 287. 243. S. Bulich, “Habent sua fata . . . melodia,” RMG no. 11–12 (1918): 161–163; anon., “Proekty novykh russkikh narodnykh gimnov,” RMG no. 11–12 (1918): 190. 244. Igor Glebov [Boris Asaf’ev], “Dnevnik, 1915–1922,” RGALI f. 2658, op. 1, ed. khr. 439, l. 27. 245. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Skriabin i dukh revolutsii” (October 24, 1917), RGALI 63–72; the handwritten draft is preserved in IRLI f. 607, n. 179. A copy of the evening’s program is preserved in RGB f. 746.38.39, l. 4. 246. Ivanov, “Skriabin i dukh revolutsii.”

286

Notes to Pages 207–212 Epilogue

1. Bertensson and Leyda, Rachmaninoff, esp. 203–207; Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, 185–189. His friend Nikolai Struve accompanied the family. 2. Martyn, Medtner, 128–146. On Medtner’s increasing frustration, see GTsMMK f. 132, nos. 215–220. 3. “Deklaratsiia muzykal’nogo otdela NKP,” Lad 1 (Petrograd, 1919): 2–5. Republished in English translation in Frolova-­Walker and Walker, eds., Music and Soviet Power, 29–31. 4. Klára Móricz, “Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism,” in Levitz, ed., Stravinsky and His World, 105–126, here 106–107; Levidou, “Arthur Lourié and His Conception of Revolution,” 84; Olesya Bobrik, “Arthur Lourié: A Biographical Sketch,” in Móricz and Morrison, Funeral Games, 28–62. 5. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, 121–122 6. Blok, “Decline of Humanism,” in Spirit of Music, 63. 7. “Deklaratsiia muzykal’nogo otdela NKP.” 8. Marietta Shaginian to Aleksandr Blok (May 24, 1921), RGALI f. 55, op. 1, ed. khr. 458, ll. 4–6; Shaginian, “Avtobiografii,” RGALI f. 1200, op. 2, ed. khr. 1; Shaginian, “Vospominaniia o Rakhmaninove,” 110–111. 9. Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 23–26. 10. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment. 11. Viacheslav Ivanov, “On Wagner,” trans. by Frolova-­Walker and Walker in Music and Soviet Power, 34–36, here 36. 12. Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 62–71. 13. Arseny Avraamov, “The Symphony of Sirens,” in Frolova-­Walker and Walker, eds., Music and Soviet Power, 81–84 14. Briusova, Zadachi narodnogo muzykal’nogo obrazovaniia, 5; Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 22. 15. Briusova, Zadachi narodnogo muzykal’nogo obrazovaniia, esp. 5–9, 15. 16. Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 22–23. 17. Frolova-­Walker and Walker, eds., Music and Soviet Power, 110–112, 118–119, 230–231, 288; Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 22–23, 26, 30, 125–154, 163–183. 18. See Frolova-­Walker and Walker, eds., Music and Soviet Power for an excellent collection of sources tracing the development of official language related to music criticism from 1917 to 1932. 19. Leonid Sabaneev, “Gody revoliutsii v muzyke,” Kul’tura i zhizn no. 1 (February 1, 1922): 51–55; trans. by Frolova-­Walker and Walker in Music and Soviet Power, 75–80. 20. Lunacharskii, “O Skriabine,” in V mire muzyki, 91–97; Ballard, “Defining Moments: Vicissitudes in Alexander Scriabin’s Twentieth-­Century Reception,” esp. 49–67. 21. Frolova-­Walker and Walker, “Preface,” in Music and Soviet Power, ix–­xix, esp. xvii–­ xviii. 22. While the literature on Shostakovich is vast, a key starting point that touches on Shostakovich reception is Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 468–544.



Notes to Pages 213–217

287

23. On Eurasianism see, for instance, Glebov, “Science, Culture, and Empire”; idem, “Wither Eurasia?”; Martin Beisswenger, “Eurasianism: Affirming the Person in an Era of Faith,” in Hamburg and Poole, eds., History of Russian Philosophy, 363–380; Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 393–409; idem, “Turania Revisited, with Lourie My Guide,” in Móricz and Morrison, Funeral Games, 63–120; Levidou, “Eurasianism in Perspective.” 24. Levidou, “Artist-­Genius”; Móricz, “Arthur Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-­Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art,” in Levitz, ed., Stravinsky and His World, 127–131. 25. Levidou, “Artist-­Genius,” esp. 619–621. 26. Levidou, “Artist-­Genius”; idem, “Eurasianism in Perspective.” Lourié’s articles were “Muzyka Stravinskogo,” Versty 1 (1926): 119–135, and “Dve opery Stravinskogo,” Versty 3 (1928): 109–126. On Lourié’s ideas about a new religious synthesis to be embodied in music and his troubled relationship with Stravinsky, see Móricz, “Symphonies and Funeral Games.” Due to a mixture of personal rivalry and personality clashes, Lourié’s embrace of Stravinsky was short-­lived, and he later sought to garb himself in the robes of Orpheus. 27. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, 18. 28. Trubetskoi, Iz proshlogo, 48. 29. Evgenii Trubetskoi to Margarita Morozova (March 6, 1917), RGB f. 171.9.2, ll. 5–6. 30. Margarita Morozova to Sergei Durylin (April 1, 1950), RGALI f. 2980, op. 1, ed. khr. 662, ll. 6–6ob. 31. Morozova to Durylin (March 15, April 19, and June 20, 1952), RGALI f. 2980, op. 1, ed. khr. 662, ll. 4–6ob. Another son had died in 1917. 32. Klára Móricz, “Introduction,” in Móricz and Morrison, Funeral Games, 1–27, here 18. 33. Arthur Lourié, “Musings on Music,” Musical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (April 1941): 242. Quoted in Móricz, “Introduction,” Funeral Games, 20; Demshuk, Lost German East, 14–20, 122–160. 34. “Statuts de la société dénommée Institut Musical Russe à Paris (conservatoire Russe),” Université Populaire Russe: Section Musicale Conservatoire, BAR Evgenii Gunst Collection. 35. Sedova, “Russkaia muzykal’naia kul’tura.” 36. Rachmaninoff’s willingness to provide material and financial assistance to émigrés of differing political persuasions, as well as those still living in the Soviet Union, angered some politically inclined individuals and groups. See, for instance, Boris Brazol to Sergei Rachmaninoff (August 19, 1921), LC Rachmaninoff correspondence. 37. Rachmaninoff hired a personal secretary to ensure proper dispensation of aid, though he sometimes expressed concern that his gifts were so substantive that they endangered the well-­being of his own family. See LC Rachmaninoff correspondence. 38. These are common themes that recur in many of the Russian-­language letters sent to Rachmaninoff after his emigration, both from Soviet and émigré correspondents. Examples are taken from my examination of letters C, D, G, P, R, S from Russian-­ language correspondence. See LC Rachmaninoff correspondence. 39. On the role of memory in constructing an idealized past, see Peter Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in Confino and Fritzsche, eds., Work of Memory,

288

Notes to Pages 218–221

62–85; Demshuk, Lost German East. On the memory of the Great War throughout Europe, see Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. On the Russian émigré obsession with defining Russian identity, see Mjør, Reformulating Russia. 40. Anonymous letter, included in Serge Conus to Nikolai Medtner (May 7, 1927), LC Medtner correspondence, ll. 1–3. The author of the letter only gives his first name. Despite extensive searching, I have been unable to definitively confirm his identity. The letter is a typed copy of the original, suggesting that Conus forwarded a copy of a letter in his possession to Nikolai Medtner. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Evgenii Zamiatin, “The Cave,” trans. D. S. Mirsky, Slavonic Review (January 1, 1923): 145–153; Dimova, “Frozen Desert and the Crystal City.” 44. Leonid Sabaneev to Aleksandr Krein (May 25, 1929), RGALI f. 2435, op. 2, ed. khr. 183. 45. Many of these same ideas were expressed by Sabaneev to a British audience in 1928. See Sabaneev, “Destinies of Music,” 502–506. 46. Sabaneev to Krein (May 25, 1929). 47. P. A. Florenskii to Ol’ga Pavlovna, quoted in Pyman, Pavel Florensky, 179–180. 48. Erlich, Modernism and Revolution, 26. Blok’s statement is quoted from Chukovskii’s memoir. 49. P. M. Ustimovich, “Pamiati V. I. Rebikova,” IRLI f. 440, no. 31, l.  7; A. K. Gorskii, “Poiasnenie k pis’mam kompozitora V. I. Rebikova k A. K. Gorskomu,” RGALI f. 742, op. 1, ed. khr. 2, l. 6. 50. Lev Shestov to Sergei Rachmaninoff (July 23, 1923), LC Rachmaninoff correspondence. 51. Reznichenko, ed., S. N. Durylin i ego vremia, esp. 1–84. See Makarov, “Arkhivnye tainy: Filosofy i vlast.” Both Durylin and Gorskii were first arrested in 1927, while Florenskii’s first arrest occurred in 1928. In all cases, it seems to have been connected with their continued adherence to Christianity. 52. Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 150–151, 192–193; Anna to Emilii Medtner (undated, Saturday, March 1933), LC Medtner correspondence; Nikolai to Emilii Medtner (undated, March 1933), LC Medtner correspondence. “Regeneration” is written in English and capitalized. 53. Ibid. See also Anna to Emilii Medtner (March 20, 1933), LC Medtner correspondence. 54. Emilii to Anna Medtner (August 29, 1934), LC Medtner correspondence. For a detailed assessment of Emilii’s embrace of Hitler, see Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 140–160. 55. Emilii to Nikolai Medtner (September 24, 1934), LC Medtner correspondence. 56. Nikolai Medtner to Eric Pren (November 30, 1940), LRA ms. 1377/4. On Nikolai’s hatred of the Nazis and fear for his “homeland” of Russia, see also LRA ms. 1377/5; ms. 1377/14; ms. 1377/15; ms. 1377/16. Ivan Il’in also became disillusioned with Nazism and left Germany for Switzerland in 1938. See Ljunggren, Russian Mephisto, 193.



Notes to Pages 221–225

289

57. Nikolai Medtner to Eric Prehn (September 19, 1945), LRA ms. 1377/40. 58. Leonid Sabaneev to Aleksandr Krein (January 5, 1928), RGALI f. 2435, op. 2, ed. khr. 183. 59. Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals. 60. Leonid Sabaneev to Aleksandr Krein (January 5, 1928, and May 25, 1929), RGALI f. 2435, op. 2, ed. khr. 183. The manuscript of Sabaneev’s Apocalypse is stored in the LC Sabaneev collection. None of the materials in the Sabaneev collection had been catalogued as of my 2009 research trip. 61. Sergei Rachmaninoff to Emilii Medtner (January 23, 1932), in Apetian, ed., S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie II, 322. 62. Emilii Medtner to Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 1932), LC Medtner correspondence. 63. LRA ms. 1377/61 (November 15, 1952), l. 1ob; LRA ms. 1377/64 (January 15, 1953), l. 3. 64. The Russian script itself is prerevolutionary rather than the revised orthography introduced by the Bolshevik regime. 65. Anna Medtner to Eric Pren, LRA ms. 1377/69 (November 17, 1956); ms. 1377/71–78 (November 1957 to June 4, 1962). 66. P. Vasil’ev, “N. K. Metner,” in Gedike, ed., Nikolai Metner: Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 2–14, here 11. See also Apetian, ed., Metner: Vospominaniia. 67. Gedike, ed., Metner: Sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols. 68. Leonid Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine (Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2000, reissued 2014). The international conference “The Medtner Family in Russian and World Culture” was held October 28–30, 2013, in Moscow, where the documentary film Zagadka Metnera was premiered. See http://www.gnesin-­academy.ru/node/7751, accessed September 23, 2014. On the rebuilding of Rachmaninoff’s estate house, see Krutov, Mir Rakhmaninova, vol. 2, 5–20. In his public paper “Skriabin i Fedorov” (Fedorov Museum, spring 2008), Iurii Linnik argued for the applicability of Scriabin’s Mystery for the present day. 69. On the posthumous fate of Ivan Il’in and his archive, see Steven Lee Myers, “For a New Russia, New Relics,” New York Times (October 9, 2005), http://www.nytimes .com/2005/10/09/weekinreview/09myers.html, accessed February 27, 2015; “Istoriia peredachi arkhiva: Arkhiv I. A. Il’ina v MGU,” http://www.nasledie-­iljina.srcc.msu.ru, accessed February 27, 2015.

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Bibliography

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292 Bibliography f. 993 (Kollektsiia programm) f. 1117 (S. A. Naidenov) f. 1200 (M. S. Shaginian) f. 1463 (N. I. Serpinskaia) f. 1720 (V. K. Zviashytseva) f. 1956 (Sobranie rukopisi deiatelei iskusstv) f. 2005 (A. A. Rybnikov) f. 2009 (N. Ia. Briusova) f. 2012 (V. I. Shebalin) f. 2022 (N. P. Ul’ianov) f. 2099 (Moskovskaia konservatoriia, 1866–1917) f. 2319 (M. M. Bagrinovskii) f. 2435 (A. A. Krein) f. 2658 (B. V. Asaf’ev) f. 2954 (M. A. Gnesin) f. 2980 (S. I. Durylin) f. 2985 (V. A. Kiselev) Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka: Otdel rukopisei, RGB (Moscow) f. 109 (V. I. Ivanov) f. 161 (E. N. Trubetskoi) f. 167 (E. K. Metner) f. 171 (M. K. Morozova) f. 746 (M. O. Gershenzon) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, RGIA (St. Petersburg) f. 1119 (S. V. Smolenskii) Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka: Otdel rukopisei, RNB (St. Petersburg) f. 816 (N. Findeizen) Tsentral’nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy, TsIAM (Moscow) f. 179 (Moskovskie gorodskie duma i uprava)

Newspapers and Journals Apollon (Apollo) Golos Moskvy (Voice of Moscow) Iuzhnyi muzykal’nyi vestnik (Southern Musical Herald ) Mir iskusstva (World of Art) Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik (Moscow Weekly) Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow Bulletin) Muzyka (Music) Muzyka i zhizn’ (Music and Life) Muzykal’nyi sovremennik (Musical Contemporary) Muzykal’nyi truzhenik (Musical Worker) Novoe vremia (New Times) Novoe zveno (New Link)



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Index

Absolute (philosophical concept), 40, 41, 43; and Medtners, 106, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 133, 136, 140; and Scriabin, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 85 aesthetic community, 9–11. See also Nietzsche’s orphans Akimenko, Fedor Stepanovich, 14, 33, 96, 165, 170, 227, 250n162 Aksakov, Konstantin Sergeevich, 34 All-Night Vigil (op. 37). See under Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasil’evich, music of anti-Semitism, 4, 128, 129, 130, 221 Apollo (journal), 12 Apollo/Dionysus, 10, 20, 44, 45–48, 50, 212; and Great War, 176, 198–199; and Medtners, 12, 98, 105, 108, 110–111, 117, 121–122, 124–125, 127, 132–133; and national characteristics, 91, 110–111, 127, 132, 212; and Nietzsche, 4, 6, 26, 28–29, 31–33, 43–44, 52, 59; and Scriabin, 78, 91–92, 93, 101 Applegate, Celia, 9, 21 Asaf’ev, Boris Vladimirovich (Igor Glebov), 33, 160, 191, 205–206, 211, 230 Avraamov, Arsenii Mikhailovich, 210 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 7, 88, 89, 132, 170 Bagadurov, Vsevolod Alaverdovich, 205 Balakirev, Mily Alekseevich, 3, 4, 127

Ballets Russes, 3 Bal’mont, Konstantin Dmitrievich, 138, 150, 158, 182, 259n146 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, 62, 182, 183, 188, 227, 234, 259n146, 277n77, 278n104 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 6, 118, 129; interpretations in Great War, 170, 177, 178, 197; symbol of universal culture, 7, 48, 124, 130, 132, 156, 170, 177–178 Bely, Andrei (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), 11, 12, 35, 46, 50, 68, 220, 227; and Medtners, 107–108, 109, 110, 121, 123, 124, 130–131, 261n12, 281n161; and music, 2, 6, 13, 25, 30, 33, 125, 244n26; and Scria­ bin, 14; and Shaginian, 141, 145 Benjamin, Walter, 50, 247n97 Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 33, 46, 148, 227, 248n124, 278n104 Bergson, Henri, 20, 40, 42, 87. See also musical time Bhavabhuti, 52 Blavatsky, Helena, 68, 78–79, 124. See also theosophy Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 68, 227; and Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 208– 209, 220; division from narod, 35; and Medtners, 108, 125, 244n26; and music, 1, 6, 13, 19, 30, 244n26; and musical time, 40–41

313

314 Index bogochelovechestvo (Godmanhood), 32, 245 Bogorodskii, Vladimir Vasil’evich, 97–98, 101, 186, 219, 278n104. See also Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Borodin, Aleksandr Porfir’evich, 3, 127, 179 Bortniansky, Dmitrii Stepanovich, 205, 285n237 Brahms, Johannes, 118, 129, 133, 265n101 Braudo, Evgenii Maksimovich, 42, 45, 228 Brianchaninov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 61, 99–100, 101–102, 178, 181, 186, 228, 279n118. See also Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Brianchaninova, Mariia, 99, 188–189, 228 Briusov, Valerii Iakovlevich, 228, 278n104 Briusova, Nadezhda Iakovlevna, 5, 40–41, 42, 121, 228; and Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 210–211; and Moscow People’s Conservatory (MPC), 55–56, 57, 250n162 Bugaev, Boris Nikolaevich. See Bely, Andrei Bugoslavskaia, Elena Alekseevna, 151–152 Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich, 141, 148, 228, 278n106; and Great War, 275n35, 275n41, 281n161; Moscow ReligiousPhilosophical Society, 99, 110, 170; and Scriabin, 62, 185–186, 259n146 Bulich, Sergei Konstantinovich, 205 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 128, 265n96 Cheshikhin, Vsevolod Evgrafovich, 204– 205 Chopin, Frédéric, 37, 78, 91–92, 255n64 chuvstvo. See emotion citizenship: in the Great War, 166–167, 173, 194–195; imperial, 36, 107, 126, 129, 131, 146–147 Clowes, Edith, 5, 58 consonance/dissonance, 20, 35, 42; and Medtners, 114, 117, 118, 121, 125; and

Rachmaninoff, 147–148; and Scriabin, 83–84, 87–89, 93, 95, 101 Cui, César Antonovich, 3, 127 Dahlhaus, Carl, 106 decadence, 26, 41, 178; and Scriabin, 63, 64, 86, 95, 96, 99, 102, 103. See also degeneration degeneration, 20, 41, 58, 263n50; and Medtners, 107, 134, 135; and Rachmaninoff, 153; and Scriabin, 86, 93. See also decadence Demshuk, Andrew, 138–139, 215 Derzhanovskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 85, 169, 211, 228 Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 64. See also Ballets Russes dissonance. See consonance/dissonance Dobuzhinskii, Mstislav Valerianovich, 174, 175, 222–223, 228 Dom pesni. See House of Song Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 93 Duma, 25 Durylin, Sergei Nikolaevich, 12, 13, 141, 214, 220, 228, 288n51; interpretation of Wagner, 48–49, 53, 91, 179; and Medtners, 108, 131–132, 201 edinstvo. See unity educated society (obshchestvennost’), 2, 10, 11, 13, 22, 34–35, 50; division from narod, 14–15, 35, 54, 58–59; and February Revolution (1917), 203, 205; and Great War, 165; and Medtners, 107, 126–127, 135; and music, 2, 10, 13, 22, 34–35; and Rachmaninoff, 140, 163; and Scriabin, 66, 70, 86, 95–96 Eiges, Konstantin Romanovich, 6, 31, 46– 48, 49, 133, 157, 229 Ellis. See Kobylinskii, Lev L’vovich emotion (chuvstvo), 4, 6, 9, 21, 41–42, 46, 53–54, 55, 57–58; and Great War, 193, 202; and Medtners, 112–114, 123; and Rachmaninoff, 140, 150–153, 158–160;



Index 315

and Scriabin, 88, 91. See also nastroenie (mood); toska Engel, Iulii Dmitrievich, 14, 97, 133, 156, 160, 229 Ern, Vladimir Frantzevich, 16, 99, 141, 168–169, 173, 178, 182–183, 229 Eurasianism, 11, 212–213 Evtuhov, Catherine, 9 February Revolution (1917). See Revolution, February (1917) Fedorov, Nikolai, 77, 171, 225 Fet, Afanasii, 129 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 68, 69, 74, 169, 229, 253n26 Findeizen, Nikolai Fedorovich, 14, 161, 203, 229, 237n21, 256n96, 279n125 Fishzon, Anna, 9, 58, 150 Florenskii, Pavel Aleksandrovich, 34–35, 62, 110, 141, 220, 229, 259n146, 288n51 Florovskii, Georgii Vasil’evich, 212 Fokht, Boris Aleksandrovich, 97 Frank, Simon Liudvigovich, 40, 169, 275n35 Fulcher, Jane, 26 Gagarina, Marina Nikolaevna, 98–99, 101, 229, 259n146, 278n104. See also Scria­ bin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Gershenzon, Mikhail Osipovich, 148, 259n146, 275n41 Gertsog, E., 151–152 Gippius, Zinaida Nikolaevna, 141 Glazunov, Aleksandr Konstantinovich, 95, 204, 205, 206 Glebov, Igor. See Asaf’ev, Boris Vladimirovich Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich, 205; Life for the Tsar, 5; Ruslan and Liudmila, 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 108, 123, 127, 129, 133, 169, 170, 199 Golden Fleece, The (journal), 17, 30, 108, 112

Gol’denveizer, Aleksandr, 149, 191 Gorskii (Gorskii-Gornostaev), Aleksandr Konstantinovich, 53, 157, 169, 170, 178–179, 184–185, 202–203, 220, 230, 249n141, 288n51 Great War, 62, 66, 105, 165–174; and music, 174–180. See also Medtners (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai); musical metaphysics; Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasil’evich; Scria­ bin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Gunst, Evgenii Ottovich, 230 Gutheil (music publishing house), 167 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, 28, 41, 74, 115, 131–132, 136, 230 Hitler, Adolf, 220–221 House of Song (Dom pesni), 12, 15, 23, 37– 38, 52, 129, 264n82 Husserl, Edmund, 21, 39–40, 241n93. See also musical time Iakovlev, Vasilii Vasilevich, 156, 160, identity, Russian, 3–6, 8, 13, 17, 26, 38–39, 204, 212, 225; contrasted with German identity, 49–50, 52, 53, 59, 167–174, 177– 180; and Medtners, 105–107, 126–135, 199–200; and Rachmaninoff, 138–139, 156, 163–164; and Scriabin, 88–91, 93, 100–101. See also nationalism; rossiiskii/ russkii identity Il’in, Ivan Aleksandrovich, 12, 13, 104, 131– 132, 172, 173, 220, 230; and Medtners, 201–202, 222, 225; and Rachmaninoff, 192 individuality. See lichnost’ Isle of the Dead (op. 29). See under Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasil’evich, music of Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich, 12, 13, 16, 230; and Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 210; and Medtners, 109, 112, 121, 124–125, 145, 154, 201–202, 283n206; and musical metaphysics, 30, 33, 35, 44–46, 48, 50, 146, 172, 281n161; and Scriabin, 61, 68, 98–99, 101–102, 146, 182, 185, 186, 206,

316 Index Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich (continued) 259n146, 278n104; wartime views, 172, 275n35, 275n41 Jung, Carl Gustav, 109, 194 Jurgenson (music publishing house), 167 Kandinsky, Wassily Wasilyevich, 31 Kankarovich, Anatolii Isaevich, 176 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 28, 40, 69, 73–74, 108, 230–231; and neo-Kantianism, 34, 72, 146–147; wartime interpretations of, 168–169, 170 Karatygin, Viacheslav Gavrilovich, 43, 134, 157, 231 Kastal’skii, Aleksandr Dmitrievich, 190– 191, 279n125, 280n137 Khomiakov, Aleksei Stepanovich, 7, 34 Kireevsky, Ivan Vasil’evich, 7, 34 Kobylinskii, Lev L’vovich (Ellis), 12, 112, 121, 123, 131, 229 Koptiaev, Aleksandr Petrovich, 2, 30–31, 36, 45, 231, 237n21; and Scriabin, 91–92, 101, 102, 258n118 Koussevitzky, Serge Aleksandrovich, 13, 17, 62, 86, 167, 201, 231, 256n92, 259n146. See also Russian Music Publishing House (Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo) Krein, Aleksandr Abramovich, 97, 219, 221, 250n162, 259n146 Kurdiumov, Iurii Vladimirovich, 177 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, 206 Lermontov, Mikhail Iur’evich, 117–118, 130 Lermontova, Varvara Nikolaevna, 98–99, 186, 231, 259n146. See also Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Levidou, Katerina, 40 lichnost’, 139, 141, 146–149 Lipaev, Ivan Vasil’evich, 160 Loeffler, James, 16, 38 Lohr, Eric, 146 Lotman, Iurii, 10

Lourié, Arthur, 208, 213, 215 Lunacharskii, Anotolii Vasil’evich, 209, 211, 212, 231 L’vov, Aleksei Fedorovich, 204 Mahler, Gustav, 177 Marxism, 3, 33, 68, 70–71, 148, 207, 209, 211, 220, 255n75 Maslov, Aleksandr Leont’evich, 35, 36, 43, 94, 231, 250n162 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 210 Medtner, Nikolai Karlovich, music of: Acht Stimmungsbilder (op. 1), 117–119; First Piano Concerto (op. 33), 198, 282n184, 282n190; Forgotten Melodies (op. 38), 214–216; Goethe Lieder (op. 6), 130; skazki, 198 Medtners (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai), 12, 13, 14; and anti-Semitism, 38, 128–130, 135, 221; after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 207, 214–216, 218, 220–221, 222–224; burial site, 222–225; after February Revolution (1917), 205–206; interpersonal relations (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai), 15, 107–113; interpretation of music, 6, 45, 104–106, 110, 112–126; Modernism and Music (Emilii Medtner), 93, 112, 114, 124–125, 131, 134, 162, 222, 263n4; and Morozova, 12, 109–110, 111, 123–124; Musaget, 13, 45, 53, 108–109, 124, 131, 144, 201; Muse and Fashion (Nikolai Medtner), 112, 117, 118; post-1917 memory of, 217–218; and Rachmaninoff, 134, 145, 154, 157, 159, 161, 162; response to Great War, 166, 170, 180, 183–184, 188, 191–203; rossiiskii/russkii identity, 4, 38, 106–107, 126–136; and Scriabin, 62, 93, 183; and Shaginian, 12, 142, 144–146, 149, 154, 159, 161, 162; and Vol’fing, 108, 124–125, 222 Meichik, Mark, 259n146 memory, 24, 116–117, 138–139, 214–217 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii Sergeevich, 94, 141 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emil’evich, 210



Index 317

Mighty Five, 3, 127 Mnishek (music critic), 149, 157 Modernism and Music. See under Medtners (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai) modernity, 3, 93, 158, 162, 163; after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 212–213, 219– 220, 222; divisive nature of, 2, 9, 14, 15, 39, 53–55, 57, 67, 130–131, 180; interpretations during Great War, 170–171, 197, 201–202, 203; and Medtners, 105, 110, 111–114, 117, 121–124, 127, 134–136; modernist musical styles, 42–43, 122; music as means of overcoming problems of, 9, 15, 20–22, 26, 29–31, 35, 41, 130–131; and Rachmaninoff, 139–140, 145–146, 148, 153–154, 158, 162–164; and Scriabin, 63, 86, 93–96, 98, 102–103 Móricz, Klára, 215 Morozov, Mikhail Abramovich, 11 Morozova, Margarita Kirillovna, 7, 11–12, 15, 30, 48, 232, 238n40; after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 214; and February Revolution (1917), 203; and Great War, 168, 170, 172, 281n161; and Medtners, 109–110, 111, 123, 132, 194–195, 200–201; and Rachmaninoff, 149; and Scriabin, 64, 68, 77, 97, 100–102, 183, 259n146; and Evgenii Trubetskoi, 12, 48, 100–101, 132, 173–174, 203. See also Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Morrison, Simon, 81, 237n13 Moscow: as center of aesthetic community, 11–14 Moscow Conservatory, 38, 63, 109, 133, 149, 195, 215 Moscow People’s Conservatory (MPC), 23, 27, 55–59, 94, 121, 153, 210 Moscow Psychological Society, 68, 69, 252n19 Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society, 12, 48, 98, 110, 168, 172, 173, 195, 200 Moscow Weekly, The (journal), 11, 37 Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik. See Moscow Weekly, The

Musaget. See under Medtners (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai) Muse and Fashion. See under Medtners (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai) Music (journal), 22, 85–86, 88, 129, 169, 171, 174–175, 185, 223 Music and Life (journal), 22, 35, 43, 93–94 Musical Contemporary, The (journal), 176, 213 musical metaphysics: after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 207–222; definition of, 3–5, 27–54; and gender, 15–16, 77–78; and Great War, 168–180; limitations of, 59–60; and Medtners, 105, 114, 125, 136; and modernity, 20; and Rachmaninoff, 139–141, 145, 147, 150, 152, 157, 163; and Scriabin, 67, 68, 84–85, 87, 90, 102; social context, 14, 18, 19, 24. See also musical time; mystery; Orpheus; sobornost’; unity musical time (temporality), 3, 4, 39–43, 44, 54; and Medtners, 107, 114, 135; after October Revolution (1917), 208, 213, 215–217, 219–220; and Rachmaninoff, 151–152, 157; and Scriabin, 73–74, 76, 77, 84. See also musical metaphysics Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich, 3, 127, 205 mystery, 22, 27, 31, 50–54, 165; and Great War, 165–166, 171, 178, 180–185, 188– 189, 191; Greek mystery cults, 30; and Medtners, 114–115, 123–124; after 1917, 210, 211, 221–222; and Rachmaninoff, 163; and Scriabin, 42, 50, 61–62, 64, 67, 78–80, 84, 87, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102. See also musical metaphysics narod, 26, 35–36, 42, 53; disconnect with educated society, 7–8, 14, 45, 54–55, 59; after February Revolution (1917), 204–205; and Great War, 166, 171, 173, 176, 178, 179–180, 189, 190–191, 199; and Medtners, 127, 134, 135, 201; and Moscow People’s Conservatory (MPC), 54–59; after October Revolution (1917),

318 Index narod (continued) 210–211; and Rachmaninoff, 144, 152, 153, 163, 190–191; and Scriabin, 91, 93–94, 100 nastroenie (mood), 4, 140, 152–154, 156, 158. See also emotion; toska nationalism, 36, 78, 91, 105, 126, 127, 130, 166, 173, 177 Nemenova-Lunts, Mariia Solomonovna, 259n146 neo-Slavophile. See Slavophiles New Link, The (journal), 100, 181, 188 new religious consciousness, 13, 130 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Birth of Tragedy, 2, 28, 43, 44, 52, 68, 91, 126, 179; and Greek tragedy, 32, 43, 50; interpretation of music, 1, 2, 5–7, 10, 22–23, 25–33, 43– 45, 48, 59, 167; and Medtners, 105, 108, 110–111, 121, 126–127, 129; and Scriabin, 68, 91–92, 98, 101; wartime interpretations of, 165, 167, 169, 172, 176, 178–179, 198–199, 276n67. See also Nietzsche’s orphans Nietzsche’s orphans: after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 203–206, 222–225; definition of, 5–19, 22; internal divisions, 49, 59–60; and narod, 14, 27, 54, 58–60; response to Great War, 165–180, 202–203; understanding of music, 13–15. See also musical metaphysics Nikol’skii, Iurii Sergeevich, 150–151 Nordau, Max, 41, 135. See also degeneration Novoselov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 141, 268n12 obshchestvennost’. See educated society October Manifesto (1905), 8 October Revolution (1917). See Revolution, Bolshevik (1917) Okhrana (tsarist secret police), 195 Olenina d’Alheim, Maria, 15, 37–38, 232, 264n82. See also House of Song (Dom pesni)

Order of Universal Genius Brotherhood, 50–52 Orpheus: after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 211–213, 218, 220–221; gender, 16; legend of, 1–2; Nikolai Medtner as, 106, 111, 122, 124, 136; Rachmaninoff as, 139–141, 147, 153–154, 161–162; Scriabin as, 61, 63, 67, 76, 85, 90, 92, 103; search for, 4, 15, 20–23, 31, 43–49, 61–62 (in Great War, 166, 168, 174, 180, 184–186, 202–203, 205–206) Orthodox theology, 34, 129, 212, 241n93; and Nikolai Medtner, 223, 265n101; and music, 3, 36, 43, 132, 188–191 oshchushchenie, 4, 76. See also emotion; nastroenie (mood) Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 2, 66 Pasternak, Leonid Osipovich, 85–86, 232, 259n146 patriotism, 36, 130, 135, 149, 169, 194 perezhivanie, 4, 20–21, 26, 54, 76, 80, 115, 157, 158. See also emotion; nastroenie (mood) pessimism. See toska Plato, metaphysics of, 106, 115, 116, 117, 185, 244n22 Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich, 68, 70–71 police, tsarist secret. See Okhrana Poole, Randall, 72 Popov, Boris Mikhailovich, 14, 38, 49, 91– 92, 133, 134, 203, 205 Potter, Pamela, 9 preobrazhenie (transfiguration), 32, 33, 41. See also musical metaphysics Preobrazhensky, Antonin Viktorovich, 189 Preparatory Act. See under Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, music of Presman, Matvei Leont’evich, 203 progress, 20, 39, 41, 210, 219; and Medtners, 105–106, 112, 114, 130, 132, 135–136; and Rachmaninoff, 158; and Scriabin,



Index 319

43, 66–67, 76, 85, 88–90, 93, 96, 102, 181. See also degeneration Prokof’ev, Grigorii Petrovich, 95, 133, 158, 161, 191, 232 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeevich, 205 Prometheus (op. 60). See under Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, music of Prussia (and “Prussian”), 167, 168–171, 176, 181, 184, 189, 199–200 Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 46, 63, 93, 131, 144, 205 Rachinskii, Grigorii Alekseevich, 200–201, 275n41, 281n161 Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasil’evich, 94, 109, 130, 134; after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 207, 217, 222, 225; Ivanovka (family estate), 3, 139, 142, 268n19; and lichnost’ (individuality), 73, 94, 139, 146–148, 150–152; and Medtners, 134, 145, 154, 157, 159, 161, 162; and memory, 137–139, 217; and negative moods (pessimism, toska), 140, 152–158, 161–162, 163–164; “outlived” musical style, 43, 157; rejection of philosophical discourse, 161–162; response to Great War, 188–193; and Russian identity, 139, 149, 156–157, 159–160; and Shaginian, 15–16, 139–145, 161–162, 192–193; Villa Senar (family estate), 3, 217; and “White Lilac”, 151 Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasil’evich, music of: All-Night Vigil (op. 37), 166, 189– 191; Bells, The (op. 35), 140, 150, 151, 157, 158–159, 161; Étude-tableau (op. 39, no. 2), 192; First Symphony (op. 13), 142, 162; Isle of the Dead, (op. 29), 140, 154–157, 158, 271n62; Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom (op. 31), 147, 189, 190, 191; Second Piano Concerto (op. 18), 15, 142, 191; Third Piano Concerto (op. 30), 160, 267n2, 268n19 Rebikov, Vladimir Ivanovich, 14, 20, 49, 53–54, 122, 220, 233; and Orpheus, 1–2,

6, 44, 46; response to Great War, 202– 203, 280n137, 284n223 Reger, Max, 110, 121, 122, 135, 169, 176, 177 Revolution, Bolshevik (1917), 22, 105, 166, 206, 207–217 Revolution, February (1917), 22, 105, 168, 203–206 Revolution of 1905, 2, 8, 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 22, 33, 35–36, 38, 41–42, 44–45, 54, 59, 70, 91, 135, 146, 203 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreevich, 3, 38, 53, 64, 127, 138, 205, 206, 207 Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, 5, 59 rossiiskii/russkii identity, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 16– 17, 39, 105–106, 126, 144. See also identity, Russian; nationalism Rozanov, Vasilii Vasil’evich, 77 Rubinstein brothers, (Nikolai and Anton), 4, 17, 149, 157, 205 Russian Conservatory (Paris), 215–216 Russian Music Publishing House (Rossiiskoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo), 13, 64– 65, 80–81, 119–120, 142–143, 167 Russian Musical Newspaper, The (newspaper), 1, 17, 18, 45, 86, 161, 176, 203, 204 Russian Musical Society (RMO), 12, 16–17, 37, 149 Russian Thought (journal), 185 russkii identity. See rossiiskii/russkii identity Sabaneev, Leonid Leonidovich, 12, 14, 21, 166, 211, 233; disillusion after 1917, 219–220, 221–222; friendship with Scriabin, 61–64, 81, 83, 85, 96–97, 99, 103, 177–178, 180–181, 185–186; interpretation of music, 21, 85, 88–91, 95, 102; and Medtners, 112, 114, 124, 130, 132; and Rachmaninoff, 156, 159–160, 191. See also Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Safonov, Vasilii Il’ich, 95 Sakhnovskii, Iurii Sergeevich, 153, 156, 158, 161, 190, 233

320 Index Sargeant, Lynn, 16 Savitskii, Petr Nikolaevich, 212 Scales, The (journal), 2, 17, 108 Schloezer, Boris Fedorovich, 14, 42, 68, 233; friendship with Scriabin, 86–88, 90, 93, 101, 102, 112, 147, 184, 186, 188. See also Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich: and Scriabinists Schloezer, Tatiana Fedorovna, 15, 63, 68, 220, 233 Schoenberg, Arnold, 177 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 5–6, 26, 27–29, 31, 42, 47, 169, 233; and Scriabin, 68, 92 Schumann, Robert, 129, 130–131 Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 16, 49; death of, 61–63, 183–188; and ecstasy, 61, 64, 76–78, 80, 85, 87, 91, 95, 102 (critiques of, 95, 100–101, 114, 124, 148); response to Great War, 181–183; interpretations of, 85–96 (see also Sabaneev, Leonid Leonidovich; Schloezer, Boris Fedorovich); Medtners’ view of, 110, 112, 121, 122, 125, 127, 134; Mystery, 42, 50, 61–62, 64, 67, 78–80, 84, 87, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102 (interpretations of Mystery during Great War, 180–185); philosophy of, 67–85; and Scriabinists, 96–102 Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, music of: First Symphony (op. 26), 68; Poem of Ecstasy, The (op. 54), 62, 64, 86–87, 94, 95, 99, 102; Preparatory Act, 61, 81, 181, 185, 186; Prometheus (op.60), 62, 80–84, 85, 88–90, 93, 95–96, 101, 102; Second Symphony (op. 29), 63; Third Symphony (op. 43), 86 Scriabin, Julian Aleksandrovich, 220 Serpinskaia, Nina Iakovlevna, 99 Shaginian, Marietta Sergeevna, 2, 12, 73, 234; and Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 209; friendship with Rachmaninoff, 15–16, 139–145, 161–162, 192–193; interpretation of Rachmaninoff ’s music, 145–149, 153, 157, 158–161; relationship

with Medtners, 144–145, 154, 159–161, 180, 195, 281n161 Shamurin, Iurii, 169, 170, 171, 179 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, 9 Shore, Marci, 13 Shostakovich, Dmitrii Dmitrievich, 212 Signposts (Vekhi), 7, 148 Silver Age, 12, 13, 21, 225 Slavophiles, 7, 34–35, 59, 91, 92, 213; and neo-Slavophile ideas, 132, 135, 149, 163, 172, 174, 178, 195, 201 Smolenskii, Stepan Vasil’evich, 46, 279n125 sobornost’, 10, 25, 32, 54, 59; and collective consciousness, 71–72; and collective creation, 37–38, 50–52; definition of, 33–34; and Orthodox song, 36; and peasant song, 34–35; and Scriabin, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 79, 87, 98, 184. See also unity (edinstvo) Society for Free Aesthetics, 12, 30, 121 Solov’ev, Vladimir Sergeevich, 15, 16, 23, 53, 54, 69, 100, 234; on gender, 16; on genius, 46; interpretations during Great War, 169, 171, 172, 176; and Medtners, 116; on theurgy, 6, 29–35 Southern Musical Herald, The, 151, 157, 176, 189, 204 Stark, Eduard, 100 Steinberg, Mark, 20–21, 154 Strauss, Richard, 95, 110, 121, 122, 135, 169, 176, 177 Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovich, 85, 213 Struve, Nikolai Gustavovich, 192, 280n147, 286n1 Struve, Petr Berngardovich, 148, 169, 173 Sundukov-Holms, Sergei Alekseevich, 137–138, 151 Suvchinskii, Petr Petrovich, 212, 213 Suvorovskii, Nikolai Pavlovich, 2 Taneev, Sergei Ivanovich, 218 Taruskin, Richard, 11, 81–83



Index 321

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il’ich, 5, 134, 138, 157, 159 temporality. See musical time theosophy, 78, 80, 84, 87–88, 121, 123, 124, 144. See also Blavatsky, Helena theurgy, 32–34, 40, 108, 115, 124, 130, 183, 198; theurgic genius, 44, 46, 48, 199 Timofeev, Grigorii Nikolaevich, 189–190, 191 Tiuneev, Boris Dmitrievich, 157 Tiutchev, Fedor Ivanovich, 129, 131 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich, 6, 46, 199, 283n199 toska, 137, 140, 152, 153, 160, 191, 198. See also nastroenie (mood) Trubetskoi, Evgenii Nikolaevich, 12, 13, 34, 40, 99, 110, 132, 212, 234; after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 214; and Great War, 172–174, 176, 275n35, 283n206; and Morozova, 12, 48, 100–101, 132, 173–174, 203; and Rachmaninoff, 149; and Russian identity, 4–5, 8, 36–37, 146–147; and Scriabin, 100–101 Trubetskoi, Nikolai Sergeevich, 212, 234 Trubetskoi, Sergei Nikolaevich, 34, 68–73, 98, 212, 234 Trudy i dni. See Works and Days Turgeneva, Asia, 124, 264n82 Ul’ianov, Nikolai Pavlovich, 182–183, 234 Unigovskii, M., 177 unity (edinstvo), 2, 3–4, 19, 21, 28–29, 59– 60; after Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 209, 210, 218, 224; and Great War, 166, 168, 173, 178, 181, 183, 184, 189, 197,

200; and Medtners, 104–106, 114–117, 122–123, 125, 126–127, 135; and music, 25, 31–39; and musical time, 40; and narod, 7–8, 45; and Orpheus, 43–45; and Rachmaninoff, 138, 159; and Russian identity, 8; and Scriabin, 64, 66, 67–85, 87–89, 92, 94, 96–98, 102–103. See also sobornost’ Uspenskii, Boris, 10 Uspenskii, Piotr Demianovich, 42–43, 247n102 Val’tor, Viktor Grigor’evich, 95 Vekhi. See Signposts Vol’fing. See under Medtners (Anna, Emilii, Nikolai) Wagner, Richard, 7, 12, 30–31, 78, 95, 108, 210, 221; interpretations in Great War, 167, 176–179, 189, 196, 199, 200, 283n198; and Medtners, 108, 123–124, 128; and Nietzsche, 28, 52; Parsifal, 53, 100, 123–124, 178, 179; Ring of the Nibelung, 48, 178, 210; as “Russian” composer, 48–49, 53, 91, 141; and Scriabin, 78, 91; Tristan und Isolde, 196 Word, The (journal), 13, 109 Works and Days (journal), 109, 145, 161, 162 World of Art (Mir iskusstva), 13, 174 World War I. See Great War Zamiatin, Evgenii Ivanovich, 219 zhiznetvorchestvo (life-creation), 32, 108, 123, 131, 172, 199