“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.