The Russian Artist

THE casual listener who at some time has found himself wondering what really prompted the abject but also shiveringly delightful accents of melancholy which pour from Tchaikowsky’s ‘Pathetic’ Symphony, the seasoned musician who has wondered precisely the same thing and come not a bit nearer to divining it — these people will find some enlightenment in the new Tchaikowsky book, Beloved Friend, by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck (Random House, $3.00). They will not find a direct answer to that riddle (there is no direct answer), nor an attempt at musical interpretations, which are always lame at best and which Mrs. Bowen has wisely avoided. The book does provide the necessary circuitous route of a closer acquaintance with the composer, his personal cosmos of hopes, fears, motives, affections, and the place which music filled in this scheme.

The writer has been enabled to draw a more complete portrait of Tchaikowsky than has heretofore been accessible to non-Russian readers. The recent publication in Soviet Russia of the Tchaikowsky-von Meek correspondence in three volumes (the third, which has just appeared, is not drawn upon in this book) has enabled Mrs. Bowen, with the assistance of Barbara von Meck (the widow of Madame Nadejda von Meek’s grandson) to present much important matter for the first time in the English language. Mrs. Bowen has been content to let the letters carry the burden of discourse with no excess of narrative or ‘reconstruction’ to connect them. The method bespeaks its own success, for the romance in the words of its participants is far more engrossing than could be any imaginary flights evolved in the year 1937. The comments are largely in the way of interpretation of motives, remarks which by their penetrating insight offer an important study of the composer’s character. The narrative is made to span Tchaikowsky’s life. Its insistence upon the period of his friendship with Madame von Meck is not unfortunate, for these were the most vital years. In 1877, when the correspondence began, the composer started upon Eugene Oniegin and the Fourth Symphony, his first important works. He wrote continually of his musical doubts, hopes, achievements, until 1890, when, within three years of his death, the lady brought the correspondence suddenly and inexplicably to an end.

The letters of the two were filled with protestations of endearment even when their friendship was no more than a few months old. There was a closer rapport as time passed, but, it is interesting to note, when she suggested the form of address in the second person singular, the composer was compelled to answer with an embarrassed refusal. The curious fact that these two confined their relationship to one of correspondence, taking elaborate care never to confront each other, has been looked upon as an amusing bit of eccentricity. The circumstances now more fully divulged give the arrangement a basis of sound reason. Madame von Meck was forty-five when the acquaintance began, and nine years older than Tchaikowsky. She was a wealthy widow with eleven children and grandchildren in near prospect, the imperious and exemplary head of a formal household. The ardent music of Tchaikowsky had a sensuous appeal to which her reasoned judgment yielded. Under such impulses she made more than one hint in the direction of a closer intimacy — hints which Tchaikowsky met with delicate evasion. Indeed, there was in Tchaikowsky’s anxiety to maintain a safe distance between them a more cogent reason, which has hitherto been unknown or undemonstrable, and which is considered with due candor in this book. Tchaikowsky was sexually abnormal. The disaster of his unconsummated marriage with Anna Miliukov, a plain attempt to save his face before the world, left him wary of an alliance which would threaten a precious friendship. He took every pains to conceal his dark secret from the one he loved.

Many theories have been advanced why Madame von Meck broke off the correspondence. The decisions of her descendant and Mrs. Bowen leave the matter without a conclusive answer. The whole relationship can be looked upon as a sublimation of personal sentiment into music, a saving refuge and sustenance of the composer in times of stress. The widow took huge joy in her privilege to nurture the creative flame, lavished her money and her sympathy upon its protection. When he told her that she had saved his sanity and made his music possible, he may well have spoken the truth.

The hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death has brought us the first full-length biography in English, Pushkin,by Ernest J. Simmons (Harvard University Press, $4.00). Some of us who are unfamiliar with the language of the Russian poet of poets are willing to take on faith this statement of Professor Simmons: ‘If we except Goethe, it is not an exaggeration to say that during the first forty years of the nineteenth century no poet of Western Europe surpassed Pushkin in sheer genius or in sustained quality of literary accomplishment.’ We may further accept, this sober and reliable guide as he recounts a tale of high and reckless living, brilliant writing, political danger, popular adoration. ‘He felt life deeply,’ writes Professor Simmons, introducing his subject, ‘and he gave to it all his passion, all his genius. He approached it directly and fearlessly, yet he found it no unmixed blessing. Life beat him down, persecuted him, and rarely cheered him with moments of happiness.’ The biographer adds, ‘It is not necessary to idealize him,’ and he has kept clear accordingly of Pushkin’s century-old halo of idealization, and the ‘special pleadings’ which have cluttered the Pushkin literature in Russia. This is a narrative colorful by its very nature, and it is not the writer’s least accomplishment that from it the essential Pushkin is clearly realized.

Pushkin is shown as a homely and rebellious child, huddled unnoticed in a corner at the literary evenings in his father’s Moscow house, intently absorbing the declamations of some prominent poet; as a student at the imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, taking full advantage of a lenient length of rein; as a carousing youth — the ‘Cricket,’ as his friends in St. Petersburg circles called him—already famed for his verses. Here begins the catalogue of his philanderings, a list which, it must be admitted, bewilders by its very length in the setting forth. Sometimes he was fulfilling the rôle of the romantic, basking in the beauties of the sisters Raevskaya, or transferring his attentions from a comely landowner’s wife to her adolescent daughter; sometimes he was the frank libertine, in pursuit of gypsies in Besserabia, serf girls on his mother’s estate at Mikhailovskoe, or such experienced types as the ‘Babylonian harlot,’ Anna Kern. This Don Juan was not inclined to linger over the sweetness of a single flower — unless it was denied him. Yet he was capable of deep affection, as for the love whom he never named, or the beauty Natasha Goncharova, who became his wife at seventeen and, cold to his passion as she was flirtatious with others, was the cause of his death in his thirty-eighth year — in defense of that most important of all considerations at the time, a gentleman’s honor.

Some have reproached Pushkin with having stood passively by while his friends organized the December Revolution, were hanged or exiled for their part in it. Professor Simmons points out that those friends kept him in ignorance of their plot, knowing that he would as likely as not bawl it to the world in his cups. He fearlessly admitted to his Czar (Nicholas I) that he would have taken part in the fatal demonstration if he had been there. Surely the man is not lacking in physical courage who will give a challenge for the merest imagined grievance, and stand calmly eating cherries while his opponent takes his shot. In truth Pushkin’s political usefulness was at his desk. His hatred of tyranny found its true vent in sharp-edged verse, which, circulated anonymously and in manuscript, could set all Russia seething and put the government in a tremble. Confronted with these verses, Pushkin had no choice but to deny them. His spirit never submitted to the grudging patronage of the Czar, the exile and the surveillance which were constantly put upon him. The subject loyal by compulsion, the wastrel, the sensualist, the finicky aristocrat, never lost his ability to look himself in his study and, forgetting meals, write poetry of untarnished and undying beauty.

JOHN N. BURK