Tchaikovsky and Aksakov

Reviews by Robert Blaisdell

Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer

Simon Morrison
Yale University Press; 384 pp.; $35.

Get the book

Morrison, a professor of Music and Slavic Languages at Princeton and an accomplished biographer and historian, writes with an expert’s directness about Tchaikovsky’s life and work. The most thoroughly engaging section is his introduction, wherein he takes a broad view: “Tchaikovsky (with Mozart as his model) kept his music accessible, infectious and pliant.” To justify the “Empire” of the title, the author reminds us of the discomfiting truth that Tchaikovsky’s “compositions supported the state and speak to the imperial effort to Russify conquered territories.” Morrison is impatient with other biographers and commentators, and he makes short work of trendy academic theories about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality.

His history of the composition of the ballet Swan Lake is particularly interesting: “Its origins are unclear, owing to the loss and destruction of records concerning the unprecedented commission, the sources for the scenario, and the 1877 premiere production. Tchaikovsky had mixed feelings about his achievement, though, then again, he had mixed feelings about most of his achievements. In his diary, he said that hearing Swan Lake gave him ‘a moment – just one – of absolute happiness’…” This compelling section reminds me that Morrison’s Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today, where he also told this ballet’s history, is a finer, more coherent book.

Though written for the general reader, Morrison sometimes stretches that “general” into specialties. For instance, he quotes Russian (and even Georgian) poems and lyrics with side by side English translations, as if most readers will have the ability and interest to do the comparisons; showing me my limitations, he analyzes the music with terms that I assume only his graduate students at Princeton and professional musicians while listening to the music would readily grasp: “The first phrase moves from iv 6/3, i, iv 6/3, i , i 6/3, ii 7/5, i 63; the others are comparable, nothing really changes.” If you say so! (At times, I couldn’t help thinking that Tchaikovsky’s Empire has been compressed from decades of Morrison’s lectures and articles, and is an adaptation of one of his favorite courses.)

While leery of quoting Tchaikovsky’s famous letters, Morrison uses them now and then as well as contemporaries’ accounts of the great man at home and at work and leisure: “Tchaikovsky aspired to be ‘sincere in my music—and as a matter of fact I am predominantly inclined to sad songs […] in recent years, although I want for nothing and generally consider myself a happy man!’” In 1891, “happy” Tchaikovsky conducted at the opening in New York City of the venue that became Carnegie Hall, “bringing Russian Imperial swank to America’s Gilded Age.” Most importantly, Morrison appreciates the composer’s work in ways that have encouraged me to give them a renewed listen; the biographer reminds us that Tchaikovsky’s “music is a manifestation (not a reflection) of his personality.” And what a manifestation so much of it is!

A Family Chronicle

By Sergei Aksakov. Translated by Michael R. Katz. Introduction by Marcus C. Levitt
Northern Illinois University Press; 280 pp., $26.95.

Get the Book

In the good and informative introduction, Marcus C. Levitt describes the difficulty of labeling what this classic of Gogol’s era is, exactly: “A Family Chronicle is not a novel, and still less an autobiography; it sits on an uncertain border between them. Its unusual blend of history and fiction defines its position in Russian literature’s quest for narrative reliability.” Whatever it is, is wonderful.

The main character, the author’s actual grandfather, Stepan Mikhailovich Bagrov, a giant presence, a tyrant, and also, somehow, a force for moral order, is “one of the great ‘positive heroes’ of Russian letters, a figure of Homeric, biblical dimensions,” writes Leavitt. The world of Aksakov’s grandfather is often delightfully larger than life: “During his rakish youth, in his spirited amusements, when a number of his fellow officers ganged up on him at once, he shook them off like a sturdy oak shakes away raindrops after a storm when its branches sway in the wind.”

Bagrov is the human sun that vitalizes the late eighteenth-century provincial community in the Bashkir lands near Ufa; he is also the sun that warms or withers the spirits of almost every family member and servant: “This kind, generous, and even considerate man would sometimes become so clouded by outbursts of rage that his human image would become distorted and render him capable in the moment of cruel, repulsive actions. I saw him like that and the terror I felt is alive in my memory to this day!”

Aksakov expands our fascination with Bagrov through a peculiar power of dramatization. He imaginatively “knows” what his mother, Sofya Nikolaevna Zubin, the second-most dynamic character, felt and said and did as a young woman and what his grandfather felt and said and did throughout his life. It’s as if the seeds of family tales grew into vast forests in Aksakov’s mind as he set down these enhanced stories. The dam-building scene for Bagrov’s mill is thrilling, practically Dickens-like in its vividness and excitement:

“And so, after first choosing the location where the water was not too deep, the bottom firm, and banks were high and also stable, he started to build a dam out of brushwood and earth from both sides of the river, like two hands eager to clasp each other. … It was no easy task to stem the flow of the stubborn river. For a long time it tore away and carried off brush, straw, manure, and sod, but at last, people overcame it, the water couldn’t get through and stopped, as if contemplating, flustered, then turned back, overflowed its banks and began to inundate the meadows, and by evening a pond had already formed, or, rather, a lake, without banks, without the greenery, grass and bushes, which always grow around it; here and there the tops of submerged, downed trees stuck up out of the water. The next day the gears began to turn and the mill began to grind—and it’s still grinding and pounding to this very day …”

I would compare Bagrov to the dynamic characters in British novels rather than to those in Russian ones. He’s hot-tempered but not perverse, like Fyodor Karamazov. He’s that figure who, despite his limited education, is fully realized through the consciousness of his own surging feelings and thoughts, like the fateful Michael Henchard of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, or D. H. Lawrence’s Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, as Bagrov and Brangwen are vital, sensitive, roughhewn farmers with huge and vulnerable feelings.

I thought I had nearly covered my survey of important nineteenth-century Russian literature, but I had overlooked Aksakov’s classic – until now, thanks to Michael R. Katz’s fresh, lively translation. The author, having concluded these five so-called “Fragments” (ОТРЫВОК), asks his exuberant family to take a bow: “Through the mighty power of writing and print your descendants have now become acquainted with you. They have greeted you with sympathy and recognized you as their brothers, no matter when and how you may have lived or whatever clothes you wore.” A Family Chronicle is essential and sensational reading.

It’s as if the seeds of family tales grew into vast forests in Aksakov’s mind as he set down these enhanced stories.