Authors

Discussion

Following the draconian measures of Nicholas I there was optimism that there would be a liberalisation in society leading to reform in Alexander II’s reign. This, amongst others, laid the foundation to the realism movement in both literature and the arts. Following travels in Europe, during which he painted urban life in the raw, Vassily Perov shocked society with his paintings from 1865 onwards showing the realist life of Russian peasants. Perov later joined the Wanderer realist painter movement formed in protest of academic restrictions who were also influenced by the realist literary movement initiated by Belinsky and Chenyshevsky and continued by Turgenev and Dostoevsky.

The interaction between literature and painting has long been studied, however, less has been written about how music interacted with realism and how it extended the movement into the political sphere. The Russian romance developed from urban songs to an art form that became popular in the salons of the 19^th century. It was Glinka that laid the foundation of the Russian romance, however, because of his European training he extensively used verses by Mestasio, Goethe and Schiller and only later Zhukovsky and Pushkin. However, the blooming of the romance came in the 1860’s through the Kuchka composers.

 After 1826 Pushkin’s verses were initially subject to being censored by Nicholas I and later by Benchendoff, head of the newly created Third Department of the Tsar’s Chancellery, the secret police. It can be seen from the verses, written in this period, a criticism of the state of Russia, although often written in a Christian disguise. Although apolitical, another critical observer of Russian beaurocracy and society from the late 1850’s until his death was the satirist Alexei Tolstoi. Many of Tolstoi’s poems were published in the literary and political journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), founded by Pushkin but suppressed in 1866 due to its increasingly political views.

 It is interesting to note that many of the Kuchka composers used both Pushkin’s and Tolstoi’s verses as a basis for their romances. Rimsky-Korsakov used seventeen by Pushkin and thirteen by Tolstoi. However, in both Mussorgsky’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s romances there is a definite change from the romantic love-based poems to a use of verses echoing criticism of the Russian regime. In particular, one can point to the use of Pushkin’s The Prophet and The Upas Tree in 1897 during, which time Rimsky-Korsakov’s criticism of Nicholas II’s regime became focussed. In Tolstoi’s Sleep my Good Friend, also composed in 1897, he reminisces on how ‘You are tired of the looks and speeches of the enemy’, ‘And with a sorrowful soul on it lies the oppression/Until the new morning, it will rise invisibly.’. As a popular musical vogue these romances would have a struck a chord.