The Rise, Fall and Rise of Mikhail Glinka

born June 1, 1804

In 1946, just one year after World War II ended, the director Leo Arnshtam came out with the film Glinka. Arnshtam – a respected man of culture and a subtle thinker – deserves credit for sensing the precise moment when the life of nineteenth-century composer Mikhail Glinka became permissible subject matter.

Before the war, the Soviet government had little use for Glinka. This is hardly surprising when you consider that his most famous opera was A Life for the Tsar, based on the legend of the peasant Ivan Susanin's ultimate sacrifice to save young Tsar Mikhail Romanov from Polish occupiers in the early seventeenth century. Hardly suitable entertainment for Soviet audiences in the 1930s.

Glinka was much beloved by artsy Silver Age types. His lyrical songs and magnificent operas were not exactly banned, but they were certainly not encouraged. By the late forties, the situation began to change. Clearly, the title had to go, but once the opera was renamed Ivan Susanin, its eponymous hero could be held up as a patriot, a folk hero, and a defender of the motherland. Allowing a man legendary for sacrificing his life for the tsar into the pantheon of national heroes definitely represented an expansion of Soviet orthodoxy, but by the late forties, the idea of standing up for the tsar had lost the negative connotations of the immediate post-revolutionary years. Suddenly, in the most varied spheres of life, the prerevolutionary past began to be “rehabilitated,” and even held up as a suitable object of nostalgia.

During the war, the term “officer” – banned during the Civil War as carrying the taint of tsarism – again began to be applied to Soviet commanders, who even had their shoulder boards restored (during the Civil War, a hint of a shoulder board was enough to put a warrior's life in peril). The Russian Orthodox Church, after years of being beaten down and brought to the brink of annihilation, was now given a patriarch. And at a banquet held to celebrate victory over Hitler, Stalin proposed a toast to “the Russian people” – not the Soviet people, the Russian people.

Of course the tsars of yore were still considered hateful exploiters of the working people (except, of course, for Stalin's favorites, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great), but the leadership of the Soviet Union suddenly started to bear a subtle resemblance to the long-gone autocracy. It abandoned its erstwhile internationalism, even banning singing of The International, and began to refer to the Russian people as the older brother of all other Soviet peoples. This shift allowed Mikhail Glinka to reemerge from the margins of the national consciousness.

But first poor Mikhail Ivanovich – a womanizing lover of gaiety and drink – had to be transformed into a somber genius, consumed by sorrow over Russia's fate, misunderstood by the hostile West, and brought to the point of tears by the strains of Russian folk songs, which inspired his famous pronouncement, “It is the people who write music; we simply arrange it.” Glinka was transformed into a quintessentially Russian composer, unsullied by the “pernicious influence of the West.” In the film, Glinka is deeply moved by Russian folk music, longs to return to his native land during a visit to Italy, and engages in a deep conversation about Russian culture with another icon, Pushkin.

Glinka's makeover turned him into such suitable material that in 1952 another film director, the renowned Nikolai Alexandrov, made him the subject of a second film, Glinka the Composer, which presents this nineteenth-century figure through a twentieth-century Cold War lens. Of course the film features obligatory scenes of Glinka enthralled by Russian folk music and suffering the scorn of high society for the fact that his music was insufficiently Western. Furthermore, the librettist the tsar thrusts on Glinka in the film speaks with a German accent and bore a last name that would have had sounded suspiciously foreign or even “cosmopolitan” in 1952, Rozen.

In the first film, Glinka's wife was played by Valentina Serova, one of the biggest stars of Soviet cinema at the time, but in Glinka the Composer, Alexandrov thinks better of casting his superstar wife, Lyubov Orlova, in this role, and does not delve too deeply into Glinka's marital relations. The real-life composer's many affairs and the fact that he divorced his wife, accusing her of adultery, or rumors that she wed someone else while still married to him, did not fit well into portrayals of the new, improved Glinka.

Given the puritanical mores of the Stalin era, it was also not advisable to include the passionate love affair that consumed Glinka as his marriage was falling apart, or the detail that, once he was actually free he cooled to the idea of marrying his beloved and even helped her arrange to terminate a pregnancy. All this marital unsavoriness is probably why Alexandrov cast Orlova not as Glinka's wife, but as his sister, who truly was an outstanding woman and helper to her brother, working to preserve his archive. An array of Russian greats make appearances in this film, including Pushkin and Gogol, who are also seen as impervious to Western influence and delighted by Glinka's uniquely Russian music.

The Stalin era is history, and both these films have been thoroughly forgotten. But the mythology of Glinka that grew out of that period – that he was an earnest Russophile whose primary passion was writing music based on folk melodies – lives on. According to writer Solomon Volkov, during the 1940s one musicologist almost doomed himself for daring to suggest that Mozart influenced Glinka's work. What an insult, comparing Glinka to Mozart! Since then, sanity has been restored, and everyone understands that being compared to the great Austrian composer is a compliment.

What during Soviet times went by the name Ivan Susanin is now performed under its original name, A Life for the Tsar. A production of another Glinka opera staged recently by the Bolshoi shocked many viewers and critics by supposedly being excessively erotic. It is highly doubtful that Glinka would have been among those objecting. One member of the audience even tried to file a lawsuit against the producer, claiming that the production had caused her mental anguish. Surely a Russian classic could never have written something so unseemly!

Glinka himself would have had a good laugh over such silliness. The great national poets and writers of Russia who genuinely appreciated Glinka's work would have scoffed at the idea that the only source of “the true music of the people” is folklore. They would probably have followed a few derisive remarks with a jolly round that was a collaboration between many writers, including Pushkin, composed during a dinner in honor of Glinka after the premiere of A Life for the Tsar.*

Пой в восторге, русский хор,
Вышла новая новинка.
Веселися, Русь! наш Глинка —
Уж не Глинка, а фарфор!

За прекрасную новинку
Славить будет глас молвы
Нашего Орфея Глинку
От Неглинной до Невы.

В честь толь славныя новинки
Грянь, труба и барабан,
Выпьем за здоровье Глинки
Мы глинтвеину стакан.

Слушая сию новинку,
Зависть, злобой омрачась,
Пусть скрежещет, но уж Глинку
Затоптать не может в грязь.

Sing for joy, oh Russian chorus!
Something new came out today.
He we thought was simple clay
Turned to porcelain before us.

By this innovation giver
Everyone will be amazed;
Moscow to the Neva River
Our Orpheus will be praised.

Honoring this new creation,
Sound the trumpet, beat the drum,
Raise a glass in salutation,
Drink up to our Glinka chum.

Having heard this innovation,
Envy may be feeling hurt,<
And hurl mud in irritation,
But our Glinka's safe from dirt.

* Translator's Note: It was impossible to capture all the word play contained in this round. Suffice it to say that a глинка is a type of clay, or perhaps something made from that clay. In the Russian original, the line “Moscow to the Neva River” is literally “From Neglinnaya to the Neva,” a reference to a street by that name in Moscow that means “Non-clay.”