II
In 1868 he writes from Baden to Ambroise Thomas about a sketch made by Viardot for the libretto of an opera. Nothing, however, came of the matter. But only in the new letters translated by Rosa Newmarch, do we catch Turgénieff’s opinion of the neo-Russian school of music. For the most part it is rather a contemptuous opinion and not pleasant reading for his contemporaries. He hated humbug, and the cry of young Russia, with its hatred of the sources whence it derived its inspiration, angered the writer. In correspondence with Vladimir Vassilievich Stassov we catch glimpses of the tempest brewing in the Slavic samovar.
“Have faith in your nationality,” preaches Stassov, “and you shall have works also.” “Russian individuality!” cries the contemptuous voice of Turgénieff. “What humbug, what blindness and crass ignorance, what willful disregard of all that Europe has done!”
He loved Schumann, naturally enough, this Schumann, himself a dreamer of dreams. But Balakirew, Glinka, “a rough diamond,” and the rest he would not have. He believed in the genius of the sculptor Antokolsky and in Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. I wonder if Tschaïkowsky and Turgénieff ever met? Probably they did, although I can find no reference in the correspondence. He listened to Dargomijsky, to Cui, to Moussorgsky, but could find nothing but “Slavonic barbarism” and “undisguised Nihilism.” He loved the playing of Anton Rubinstein, but his operas—! He writes Stassov in 1872:—
You are quite wrong in fancying that I “dislike” Glinka: he was a very great and original man. But come, now, it is quite different with the others—with your M. Dargomijsky and his Stone Guest. It will always remain one of the greatest mysteries of my life how such intelligent people as you and Cui, for example, can possibly find in these limp, colorless, feeble,—I beg your pardon,—senile recitatives, interwoven now and then with a few howls, to lend color and imagination—how you can find in this feeble piping not only music, but a new, genial, and epoch-making music. Can it be unconscious patriotism, I wonder? I confess that, except a sacrilegious attempt on one of Poushkin’s best poems, I find nothing in it. And now cut off my head, if you like!
Of all these young Russian musicians, only two have decided talent—Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. All the rest, for what they are worth, may be put in a sack and thrown into the water! Not, of course, as men—as men they are charming—but as artists. The Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses XXIX is not more utterly forgotten than these men will be fifteen or twenty years hence. This is my one consolation.
This prophecy is accomplished. A new generation has arisen in Russia.
Speaking of some piano pieces of Stcherbatchev he confesses to Stassov:—
Stcherbatchev, as a man, produces an unfavorable impression; but this need not imply that he is destitute of talent, and I should be very much obliged to you if you would send me his compositions as soon as they appear. By the way, you have no ground for fancying that Rubinstein will treat them with contempt; to me, at least, he spoke of Stcherbatchev as a very talented young man.... The day before yesterday I received a parcel containing two copies of the Zigzags. I have listened with the utmost attention to two consecutive performances of them, and the interpretation was excellent. To my great regret I have not been able to discover in them the merits about which you wrote to me. I cannot say whether in time original talent will show itself in Stcherbatchev, but at present I can see nothing in him but the “clamor of captive thoughts.” All this has been written under the influence of Schumann’s Carnaval, with a mixture of Liszt’s bizarreries dragged in without motive. It is altogether lacking in ideas; is tedious, strained, and wanting in life. The first page pleased me most; the theme is commonplace, but the working out is interesting.
For this you may chop off my head, if you please. I thank you, all the same, for your kindness in sending the music....
In short, pray believe that if I find Mozart’s Don Juan a work of genius, and Dargomijsky’s Don Juan formless and absurd, it is not because Mozart is an authority and others think so, or because Dargomijsky is unknown outside his little circle, but simply because Mozart pleases me, and Dargomijsky does not. Neither do the Zigzags please me. That is the end of the matter!...
So not for one moment do I doubt the worthlessness (to my mind) of Maximov’s pictures, I at once placed him in the same category as your favorites, MM. Dargomijsky, Stcherbatchev, Repin, and tutti quanti; all those half-baked geniuses filled with spiced stuffing in which you keep detecting the real essence.
He also speaks casually of Saint-Saëns and his wife.
Stassov sums up the matter this way: “Turgénieff, a great writer, was, as might be expected from a Russian, realistic and sincere in his own novels and tales; but in his tastes and views of art his cosmopolitanism made him the enemy of realism and sincerity in others. In such ideas and in such unaccountable prejudices he elected to spend his whole life.”
Which proves that the Russian critic was ultra-Russian in his view of Turgénieff. The new Russians are descendants of Chopin and Schumann and again Chopin. Few have attained to largeness of utterance, perhaps Tschaïkowsky alone. Men like Borodine and Glazanouw over-accent their peculiarities, and much of their music—when it is not sheer imitation—is but rude art. Rimsky-Korsakoff has fallen into the rut of cosmopolitanism, as did Rubinstein, indulging in supersubtleties of orchestral painting, and has never conceived an original idea. Turgénieff was right then, this man who loved Russia, loved her faults and dared to catalogue them in his beautiful novels. His art in its finish reminds one of Chopin’s; there is vaporous melancholy, the vague sighing for days that have vanished and the dumb resignation,—the resignation of the Slav peoples. But his idealism was robuster than Chopin’s and his execution of character hardier. Once at Flaubert’s dinner table the talk turned on love. De Goncourt, I have forgotten which one, told Turgénieff that he was “saturated with femininity.” The other answered:—
With me, neither books nor anything whatever in the world could take the place of woman. How can I make that plain to you? I find it is only love which produces a certain expansion of the being, that nothing else gives ... eh? Listen! When I was quite a young man there was a miller’s girl in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg, whom I used to see when out hunting. She was charming, very fair, with a flash of the eye rather common among us. She would accept nothing from me. But one day she said to me, “You must give me a present.”
“What is it you want?”
“Bring me some scented soap from St. Petersburg.”
I brought her the soap. She took it, disappeared, came back blushing, and murmured, offering me her hands, delicately scented:—
“Kiss my hands—as you kiss the hands of ladies in drawing-rooms at St. Petersburg.”
I threw myself on my knees—and you know, that was the finest moment of my life.
Like Chopin and Tschaïkowsky, Turgénieff was all love.