Boris Gasparov. Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xxii + 268 pp. ISBN 0-300-10650-5. Cloth.

Boris Gasparov’s long-awaited book on the Russian musical tradition is not, strictly speaking, a book about Pushkin. But its central portion—which for literary people will be its most productive payoff—directly addresses Pushkin’s foundational significance for Russian opera. These four chapters can be reviewed as a free-standing segment. Not only does Gasparov contribute richly to the ancient debate over “fidelity” in transposed works with a mass of local insights about each opera; he also improves on most theories of transposition by rigorously historicizing the process, even by suggesting that the incomparably precious original literary work can at times be better understood through its transposition. The importance of this idea for opera studies is enormous. Relations once seen as derivative or parasitic are shown to be symbiotic.

With the exception of Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina (1881), the five operas of the title are all built off Pushkin: Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila (1842), Chaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1879) and Queen of Spades (1890), and that benchmark masterpiece, Boris Godunov (1874). Only one dramatic aspect of Boris is discussed in detail, its crowd scenes with their unruly, anonymous, yet keenly individualized voices. Gasparov notes the appeal of such radical musical populism at recurring periods in Russian history, eras when her medieval Time of Troubles suddenly ceases to be shameful and becomes exotic, modernist, thrilling. He attempts no new reading of Boris as a whole, but invokes it as predecessor and portal to a fascinating discussion of Puccini’s 1924 opera Turandot and the effect of its chinoiserie on the rise of Russian Eurasianism.

The other three Pushkin chapters argue for a semiotic tradition of Russian music by unpacking what Gasparov identifies as Russia’s cultural code. He argues on two planes—one interdisciplinary, the other biographical and historical. First, Gasparov claims that Russian philosophy, politics, literature, and music are all governed by a single coherent set of values: intuition, immediacy, personal charisma, spontaneity, the warmth and flexibility of family over the coldness of institutionalized rules. Gasparov begins his technical discussions with the chorale and liturgical singing and ends with the urban romance, art song, and opera aria. These genres are shown to share the same fertile, irregular, organic musical principles: an avoidance of hierarchical relations, a freedom of harmonic conjunction, asymmetrical rhythms, a slowed (or absent) drive toward the tonic, the preference for a “domain” or aural mesh over the linear cadential end-point. Thus does archaic Russian practice anticipate one vein of European Modernism, the fragmentation and collapse of the linear positivist ideal.

There is a second model that Gasparov traces over time, a master binary through which he illuminates those post-Romantic composers who transposed Pushkin into opera. This is the opposition of Russia’s external empire, with its pomp and whims of patronage, to intimate, non-theatrical, sentimental space. Gasparov insists that for all the extravagance of court etiquette           and the intoxication of imperial power, at heart Russian creativity longed for—and achieved—the ideal of Tatiana Larina, shy country maiden turned Princess against her will. This default to the domestic, to a place remembered by each of us in our own way as emotionally fulfilling and free of falsehood, is the dynamic behind Russia’s claim to universal translatability and unmediated communication. The whole world feels at home in the Great Russian Novel. Unsurprisingly, it was a novelist of genius who declared Russia’s greatest (and many would say, most untranslatable) poet to be the originary carrier of this “omnireceptiveness” (34).

In each of Gasparov’s four Pushkin chapters, this empire-into-hearth thesis is encoded differently. The chaotic libretto and tuneful pastiche of Ruslan and Liudmila (chapter 2) is read with emphasis on Glinka’s personal evolution (and disillusionment), out of the aristocratic cosmopolitan culture of salons—Pushkin’s glittering era—into the “Kukol´nik brotherhood” of shabbier, more proletarian poets in the 1840s. This shift is exemplified in the operatic score by Liudmila’s brilliantly polished Italianesque set pieces in Act I and the intimate chamber quality of the domestic Russian romance she sings in Act IV (45–50). At the far end of the century, Chaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (chapter5) is revealed as an experiment in slicing up Pushkin’s enigmatic, deadpan little story and realizing, musically and dramatically, each of the layers, in keeping with the Symbolist-era passion for fluid inner states and intuitive, simultaneous juxtapositioning of worlds. In this “temporal house of mirrors” (145), Chaikovsky pushes back the time of Pushkin’s tale to the 1790s, inserts a disruptive Napoleonic hero from the 1820s, and then portrays the obsessions of Hermann (who is in love with the old Countess, not with Liza) as might a Symbolist poet in the 1890s, anticipating the hallucinations in Bely’s Petersburg. Out of the innocent but unstable Mozartean pastorale in the court divertissement of act 2 there flowers forth, hydra-like, the uncanny musical themes that first contaminate and then resolve the plot.

For this reviewer, however, it is chapter 3, on Eugene Onegin the opera, that demonstrates the stature and scope of Gasparov as cultural semiotician. As was the case with Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila, a strong biographical note sounds here as well (and how can it not: the parallels are too evident between Chaikovsky’s passion for Pushkin’s Tatiana and his own disastrous marriage of that same year, also sparked by an unsolicited love letter, but one that the composer felt he had no right to ignore). Mercifully, this famous bit of sexual scandal is not central to Gasparov’s plan. He aims to understand why the 1820s adored Pushkin’s Onegin and the 1870s equally adored Chaikovsky’s radically altered operatic variant. To this end he disregards the “infidelity critics” (like Nabokov, who despised Chaikovsky’s opera because it distorts Pushkin) as well as those librettologists who insist that verbal texts created for musical performance have their own autonomous musico-literary merit. He recommends instead a genre-sensitive perspective based on shifting cultural codes, from Pushkin’s 1820s to the very different “men (and women) of the 1860s.”

Gasparov’s great insight is to see that structurally Chaikovsky recasts Pushkin’s masterpiece as the plot of a Turgenev novel. A country estate is visited by a superfluous man from the city who gains the love of a naïve, morally pure woman. This woman tests the caliber of her would-be suitor. The man will fail the test and perish, whereas the woman’s values of harmony, domesticity, outspokenness, and fidelity must triumph. In this Real-ist-prose model, sentimentalized in keeping with Chaikovsky’s eighteenth-century aesthetics, Olga and Lensky lose the affectionately parodic sheen they have in Pushkin’s novel-in-verse. They are serious and successful lovers. The three generations of women (nanny, mother, maidens) are celebrated in a glorious opening ensemble as the enduring, habitually virtuous heroines of the hearth. Onegin, of course, is demonized outright.

Within this larger frame, Gasparov’s reading of the duel (89–93) is simply dazzling. He directs our attention to the extraordinary detail (five stanzas’ worth) that Pushkin devotes to the rural landowner Zaretskii in book 6. Why all this background noise and distraction, just as the duel is gathering momentum? Is it another digression, like those faithless feet in chapter 1 and the berry-picking peasants at the end of chapter 3? Gasparov argues that Zaretskii is a central agent in the plot, our unhappy hero’s moral pivot. For Onegin was not, for his creator, a “superfluous man”; that category was coined later. Onegin was a society man and honnête homme who had lost his temper at a provincial party, felt badly about it, and was seeking honorable ways out ina delicate, code-based stratagem designed to save both Lensky’s honor and his life. For surely Zaretskii, “v duelakh klassik i pedant,” a man who“liubil metodu… ” (6: 26), would cancel the duel on a technicality, as soon as he realized that the obscure and low-born Monsieur Guillot had been selected by Onegin as his second. But for some reason Zaretskii does not insist on “the strict rules of the art” on this particular day; he is surprised, perhaps even insulted, but he only bites his lip. The duel moves mechanically forward; the man is dead.

In Pushkin’s time, Gasparov reminds us, severe behavioral codes could only be humanized by other codes—not through the public confessions and abject (or jocular) self-accountings that were to become common practice among the great Realist-era writers of Chaikovsky’s time. By the 1870s, duels had been parodied mercilessly in literature, from Fathers and Children to War and Peace. In a way that would have appalled Pushkin, it had become honorable to invite audiences to share your private life, together with its doubts and failures, in the style of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer or Tolstoy’s Confession. Honor has now become “honesty.” As Gasparov shows, in the operatic Eugene Onegin, the fragile device that Pushkin suggests to his compassionate Onegin, a ruse to save his friend’s life without incurring further offense to either side’s honor, is transformed into an emotionally overheated (but still cold-blooded) relic of the barbaric pre-Realist era.

The Pushkin transpositions of Glinka, Musorgsky, and especially Chaikovsky have been hated and worshipped by generations of theater-goers. This is each person’s right. Gasparov would have us transcend these narrow passions, allowing literary originals to exist in one space, musical settings in another—for seriously, is Eugene Onegin really so flimsy a construct that an opera, a comic strip, a tee-shirt can threaten its integrity? But Gasparov goes further. Study and enjoy the operas, ballets, dramatic adaptations, he intimates, attend to what these later transpositions emphasize or omit depending on the codes regnant in the era of their composition, and you will appreciate details in the         original masterwork that had passed you by. Details that Pushkin took for granted, because he was living and writing for contemporaries.

To this day I remember the jolt I received when first coming across the fact that Chudov monastyr´, the “Monastery of the Miracles” where Pimen writes his dangerous (indeed, criminally illegal) denunciation of Tsar Boris Godunov, was located inside the Moscow Kremlin, within sight of the tsar’s domestic quarters. Somehow one imagines it off on some distant border, closer to Poland. And here the entire theater of operations, so to speak, was hardly larger in real life than a theatrical stage. In the nineteenth century, no one mentioned the location of that monastery—everyone knew it—and Stalin had the building blown up in the 1930s. Now we don’t see it; now we have to “look it up,” and we find that not many people had written it down. Likewise with duels of honor, with the ritual wedding songs fatally altered to prefigure Khovansky’s murder in Act IV of Khovanshchina, with the shock of an urban romance embedded in an opera and sung by a coloratura soprano. Routine background information and banal conventions (or the violation of them) are the trickiest things for a scholar to recuperate, because they are taken so for granted in their own time that their omnipresence need not be registered. Sequential transpositions between different artistic realms can help us with this hard recuperative work. And Gasparov’s wonderful volume shows what can be gained by doing so: the selective blindness of one age makes us sighted in the next.

Caryl Emerson
Princeton University

Citation:
Emerson, Caryl.  Rev. of Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture, by Boris Gasparov.  Pushkin Review / Pushkinskii vestnik 8-9 (2005-06): 141 - 44. <http://www.pushkiniana.org>.

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