It is a conception of the Russian people - suffering and oppressed, full of destructive and impulsive violence, uncontrollable and unable to control its own destiny - that applies equally to 1917.
* So the tendency of modern productions to include both these scenes, though understandable on the basis of the music, contradicts the will of Musorgsky, who physically
ripped out the St Basil's scene from the revised version of the score.
'History is my nocturnal friend', Musorgsky wrote to Stasov in 1873; 'it brings me pleasure and intoxication.'77 It was Moscow that had infected him with the history bug. He loved its 'smell of antiquity' which transported him 'into another world'.78 For Musorgsky, Moscow was a symbol of the Russian land - it represented a huge weight of inertia in the customs and beliefs of old Russia. Beneath the thin veneer of European civilization that Peter had laid down, the common people were still the inhabitants of 'Jericho'. 'Paper, books, they've gone ahead, but the people haven't moved', the composer wrote to Stasov on the bicentennial jubilee of Peter's birth in 1872. 'Public benefactors are inclined to glorify themselves and to fix their glory in documents, but the people groan, and drink to stifle their groans, and groan all the louder: "haven't moved!"'79 This was the pessimistic vision of old Russia that Musorgsky had expressed in the last prophetic words of the Holy Fool in Boris Godunov:
Darkest dark, impenetrable dark Woe, woe to Rus' Weep, weep Russian people Hungry people.
After Godunov he began immediately on Khovanshchina, an opera set amid the political and religious struggles in Moscow from the eve of Peter's coronation in 1682 to his violent suppression of the streltsy musketeers, the last defenders of the Moscow boyars and the Old Belief, who rose up in a series of revolts between 1689 and 1698. More than a thousand musketeers were executed on the Tsar's orders, their mangled bodies displayed as a warning to others, in reprisal for their abortive plot to replace Peter with his sister Sophia, who had ruled as regent in the 1680s when he was still too young to govern by himself. As a punishment for her role in the revolts, Peter forced Sophia to become a nun. The same fate befell his wife, Eudoxia, who had sympathized with the insurrectionaries. The Streltsy revolt and its aftermath marked a crossroads in Russian history, a period when the new dynamic Petrine state clashed with the forces of tradition. The defenders of old Russia were represented in the opera by the hero Prince Khovansky, a Moscow patriarch who was the main leader of
the streltsy musketeers (Khovansbchina means 'Khovansky's rule'); and by the Old Believer Dosifei (a fictional creation named after the last patriarch of the united Orthodox Church in Jerusalem). They are connected by the fictional figure of Marfa, Khovansky's fiancee and a devout adherent to the Old Belief. Marfa's constant prayers and lamentations for Orthodox Russia express the profound sense of loss that lies at the heart of this opera.
The Westernists viewed Khovansbchina as a progressive work, a celebration of the passing from the old Moscow to the European spirit of St Petersburg. Stasov, for example, tried to persuade Musorgsky to devote more of Act III to the Old Believers, because this would strengthen their association with 'that side of ancient Russia' that was 'petty, wretched, dull-brained, superstitious, evil and malevolent'.80 This interpretation was then fixed by Rimsky-Korsakov, who, as the editor of the unfinished score after Musorgsky's death in 1881, moved the prelude ('Dawn over the Moscow River') to the end, so that what in the original version had been a lyrical depiction of the old Moscow now became the sign of Peter's rising sun. All before was night.
This simple message was reinforced by an act of vandalism on Rimsky's part. To the end of the opera's final chorus, a melismatic Old Believers' melody that Musorgsky had transcribed from the singing of a friend, Rimsky added a brassy marching tune of the Preobrazhensky Regiment - the very regiment Peter had established as his personal guard to replace the streltsy musketeers (it was Musorgsky's regiment as well). Without Rimsky's programmatic alterations the Old Believers would have had the fifth and final act of the opera to themselves. The fifth act takes its subject from the mass suicides of the Old Believers in response to the suppression of the Streltsy revolt in 1698: some 20,000 Old Believers are said to have gathered in churches and chapels in various remote regions of the Russian north and burned themselves to death. At the end of Musorgsky's original version of the opera the Old Believers marched off to their deaths, singing chants and prayers. The opera had thus ended with a sense of loss at the passing of the old religious world of Muscovy. As far as one can tell, it had been Musorgsky's aim to close Khovansbchina in this melancholic vein, in the same pianissimo and pessimistic mood as Boris Godunov. He had never felt the need to 'resolve' the opera with a forward moving plot, like that
imposed on it by Rimsky-Korsakov. Deadlock and immobility were Musorgsky's overarching themes. He felt ambivalent about Russia's progress since the fall of Muscovy. He was sympathetic to the idealism of the Old Believers. He thought that only prayer could overcome the sadness and despair of life in Russia. And he held to the conviction that the Old Believers were the last 'authentic Russians', whose way of life had not yet been disturbed by European ways. Such ideas were widely held in the 1860s, not just by the Slavophiles, who idealized the patriarchy of old Muscovy, but by Populist historians such as Kostomarov and Shchapov, who wrote social histories of the schismatics, and by ethnographers who made studies of the Old Believers in Moscow. These views were shared by writers such as Dostoevsky - at that time a member of the 'native soil' movement (pocbvennichestvo), a sort of synthesis between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles which was immensely influential among writers and critics in the early 1860s. The character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment has a name that means 'schismatic'.
The painter Vasily Surikov also focused on the history of the Old Believers to explore the clash between the people's native customs and the modernizing state. His two great history paintings, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy (1881) and The Boyar's Wife Morozova (1884) (plate 7) are the visual counterparts of Khovanshchina. Surikov was closer to the Slavophiles than Musorgsky, whose mentor Stasov, despite his nationalism, was a confirmed Westernist. Surikov idealized Moscow as a 'legendary realm of the authentic Russian way of life'.81 He was born in 1848 to a Cossack family in the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk. Having graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, he settled down in Moscow, which made him 'feel at home' and inspired him to paint on historical themes. 'When I first stepped out on to Red Square it evoked memories of home, and from that emerged the image of the Streltsy, right down to the composition and the colour scheme.'82 Surikov spent several years making ethnographic sketches of the Old Believers in the Rogozhskoe and Preobrazhenskoe areas of the city, where much of Moscow's small trade, and about a third of its total population, was crammed into houses in the narrow winding streets. His idea was that history was depicted on the faces of these types. The Old Believers took a shine to him, Surikov recalled, 'because