The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter

Before Ivan left the hospital that morning, he had made all arrangements and provided a generous check for Joseph's funeral. Then, utterly exhausted, he drove to a quiet hotel, sent a telegram bidding Piotr join him with necessary clothes, and finally retired. He remained in the city for four days:—until the interment was over. During that time there occurred two incidents of which he never afterwards was heard to speak, but of which the remembrance never left him; for they eventually proved to be the end of his long and dramatic acquaintance with Irina Petrovna Lihnoff.

For all the unspeakable heartlessness of her later career, this many-sided woman showed deep emotion over the tragic end of the man whose youth and career she had ruined. Ivan recognized the fact that, even had he not appeared, Joseph would have received every attention, every aid, while he lived; every honor after his death. And her first visit to Ivan was to beg that he would allow her to reimburse him, at least for the funeral just ended. Ivan's refusal was unalterable. Nor was his feeling of repugnance towards her softened, either by this incident, or by her later well-acted but over-theatrical appeal to his pity, his former affection for her, for the possible restoration of his consideration, even though entire forgiveness for the irrevocable past should be impossible. Ivan unfortunately read her too well. Did he do her an injustice when he said to himself, bitterly, that Prince Gregoriev was worth an attempt which would not have been wasted on Ivan the composer?

It was noon on the fourteenth day of the month when Ivan re-entered the lonely house at Klin, whence he was practically not to emerge for five long years.

In the years between the October of 1879 and that of 1884, he performed the hardest labor of his career. His life was one of Spartan simplicity; nor, though about him Russia fainted beneath the terrible blows of nihilist knouts, did he once lift his head to catch so much as an echo of the furore. Unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he took little interest in the tempestuous history of the period. Still, the event of March 13, 1881, did affect him powerfully enough to produce the most beautiful of all requiem masses: one worthy of the martyrdom it commemorated. For the Liberator met the base reward of his long and arduous struggle to help his people as nobly as had his great American predecessor, who, sixteen years before, had also fallen by a traitor's hand. Yet it is said that none who had known him doubted, as they laid the shattered form of Alexander down, for the last time, on the iron cot of his soldier's room in the great Winter Palace, that the sigh of the dying Czar was no confession of pain, but rather one of relief at this swift solution of his unsolvable problem.

It was two years before the third of that royal name dared don his heavy crown; and when that was done, it was Loris Melikov who became Czar. But, though the secret societies might shriek and rave of the necessary doom of the double tyrant to be downed, the people themselves had tired a little of the everlasting howls of bomb-thrower and assassin; and quieter years succeeded those of Russia's greatest shame.

Ivan, from his hermitage, took some part in the coronation festival; for from his hand came the Triumphal March, and the great "Victory" overture, played in the Kremlin Square by an orchestra of one hundred and seventy pieces, augmented by bells and cannon.

This was, however, one of the works that Ivan never heard. At the time of its first performance he refused the invitation to conduct it, and did not so much as think of going to Moscow to hear it played. He was in a very different mood from one of triumph; for there had come upon him the bitter grief of Nicholas Rubinstein's death. For two years the old man had faded, visibly. During the summer of 1881, he had spent much time at Maidonovo, where he helped Ivan with the final polishing of his last opera, the famous "Boris Telekin." That autumn, all the old circle conspired together to keep him in the country, where Ivan longed to tend him as a son. But the old man, dominant to the last, insisted on returning to town and resuming his work at the Conservatoire. In the February of 1883 he actually went to Paris, to help Anton and Davidoff prepare for their great festival there. The journey, however, fulfilled Kashkine's bitter prophecy. Nicholas died in the French capital on the evening of March 11th; and Ivan, struck to the heart, crept yet closer into the solitude and isolation of Klin, where, for three months, he yielded himself to Tosca and opium, till a second catastrophe in the Russian musical world was averted only by Kashkine, who routed out his friend and forcibly insisted on beginning rehearsals for "Boris Telekin"; which opera saw its première in November; and became the sensation of the season.

This one was the last of Gregoriev's operas. He had already expended too much time on a form unsuited to his talent; and when "Boris" left his hands perfected, he completely lost interest in it, and began at once to devote himself to his unnumbered symphony, the "Æneid"; one of the greatest of musical epics, and well worthy of the poem whence it had risen. The fruit of the winter of 1883 and 1884, included also the too-popular "Nathalie" dances, (where, for once, Ivan over-melodized); the "Cinderella" ballet; and his symphonic poem "Dream of Italy." These completed, he sank into a state of torpor from which nothing seemed to rouse him. Overwork had shorn him alike of vitality and of the imagination which had become as the breath of life to him. And the brief tone-poem "Hypatia," forced after a fortnight's visit in October from Madame Féodoreff and her daughters, is the driest, most hopelessly academic, of his works.

Nathalie's departure, however, seemed to break the spell of his dreariness. During the following six weeks he was frequently seen in Moscow and seemed to cling to the companionship of Kashkine; who, in a measure, began to replace Rubinstein with him. In December came Avélallement, acknowledged envoy from the five greatest German orchestras, begging Monsieur Gregoriev to consent to a tour of the orchestra cities of Germany, where he should conduct programs of his own works. To the amazement of the Moscow circle, Ivan received this proposition with something like enthusiasm. Before Christmas he bade good-bye to Russia for an indefinite period; for, the German tour over, he was determined to spend a summer in Switzerland, and follow the autumn down into that Italy of his dreams which he had never seen.

"I have spent too many years in this gray land, Constantine. I am beginning to feel the grayness. My whole soul is yearning for the sun.—I have grown narrow, and stern, and stiff, mentally and bodily. I must expand: must seek out men once more: and countries and peoples that are not ours.—I long for the contrasts of Africa, of Egypt; of the burning desert, with skies of fiery blue.—I bid good-bye to Russia. Time shall lead me whither it will!"