Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part II – The Silver Age

Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part II – The Silver Age
Yury Tomin

A journey through time to the origins of the phenomenon of Russian love. The book consists of three parts: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the Torn Age.The second part presents the search for true love, concentrating around the key idea of new people who, with their changed nature, gain the opportunity to overcome all its contradictions. The excitement of the Silver Age was associated with the discovery of new energies of the human spirit and their use for the transformation of man.

Refusing to Love

The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part II – The Silver Age

Yury Tomin

© Yury Tomin, 2024

ISBN 978-5-0062-2267-0 (т. 2)

ISBN 978-5-0060-0978-3

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Preface

Dedicated to my lovely children Egor, Darya, Ilya, and Anna

In the first part of the book about the paths of Russian love, we became acquainted with its Golden Age, which to a certain extent consecutively chronologically presents three stages of love culture reflected in the fates of outstanding writers and their works: romantic, rational, and innermost. And in each of these configurations of love relationships there is a desire to overcome the internal conflict associated with a certain gap between the ideal image of the participants in the love couple and their real embodiment. In a flurry of romantic feelings, a lover recklessly and passionately strives for an ideal, which is more associated with his own heroic ideal self than with the charms or spiritual qualities of the beloved. For a person who highly values both his own freedom and the dignity of his partner, in love, while honoring sublime romantic aspirations and life-giving energies, it is important to follow and conform to a certain set of reasonable principles that are supposed to be able to rationally harmonize the relationship. When immersed in the recesses of the human soul, it is discovered that the insidious enemy of love, its evil spirit, is the person himself striving for true love, or rather his dark shadow hypostasis.

The understanding that the paradoxes of love, discovered at different stages of the Golden Age of Love, could be eliminated only in some radical way, associated with overcoming the gravity of bodily human nature and breaking the insidious inertia of natural erotic drives, was latently or explicitly expressed by many seekers of true love. Reflecting on the inscrutable ways of love and the origins of love torment F.M. Dostoevsky, in the words of Dmitry Karamazov, called for the narrowing of the human soul:

Too many mysteries oppress man on earth. Solve it as best you can and get away with it. Beauty! Moreover, I cannot bear that another person, even higher in heart and with a lofty mind, begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. It is even more terrible, who already with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns from it and truly, truly burns, as in his young and pure years. No, the man is broad, too broad, I would narrow it down.

Although in fact Dostoevsky himself hoped for the realization in a surprising way in the indefinitely distant future of a synthesis of the broad Russian soul with the rational European one, as a result of which a universal person with a harmonious soul would appear, containing all its natural, but already transformed breadth.

Leo Tolstoy, as a result of his search for a cardinal remedy for love’s misfortunes, came to the conclusion about the need to free man from the demands of his own animal personality, and he saw the highest stage of this liberation in such a predominance of the rational principle of the soul that the meaning of his whole life becomes clear to a person and romantic love is filled with its own the truly noble and bright quality of love for one’s neighbor.

Herzen and Chernyshevsky called for new love relationships, freed from conventions and restrictions imposed from outside, based on ideas about human dignity, which alone can be the basis for a fair and reasonable organization of social life, including family relationships of «new people.»

Turgenev and Chekhov, who examined in detail the quality of the human material of those in whom others saw «new people» capable of resolving fatal love issues, can be attributed to the camp of skeptics, while Turgenev stopped short of the human ability to comprehend the metaphysical meaning of love, and Chekhov nevertheless directed his timid, optimistic glances towards future, albeit distant, generations of new people.

All this baggage of questions related to the search for ways to find true love, concentrating around the key idea of new people who, with their changed nature, gain the opportunity to overcome all its contradictions, was bequeathed to descendants and forwarded to the next Silver Age of Russian love.

I

Excitement time. New energies. A secluded place of passion. Fantastic attitude. common sickness. Passion in the language of music. Information flows of feelings. Storm in «The Tempest». Yet what kind of love? Love in words and music

The Silver Age located its two outgoing and opening twenties at the turn of the 20th century. The Russian philosopher Berdyaev called this era «a time of great mental and spiritual excitement.» The excitement was associated with the discovery of new energies of the human spirit and the hope of their use for the transformation of man, relationships between people, social order and overcoming all obstacles to harmony, justice and happiness that stretched from the past.

We will begin our exploration of such promising energies of the human spirit with the story of the undoubtedly high and no less peculiar love of a forty-five-year-old woman, raising eleven children, widowed and managing a million-dollar fortune, for a composer thirty-six-year-old professor of the Moscow Conservatory, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was just approaching the threshold of his world fame.

In the life of Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, who married early, not glittering beauty and not distinguished by fine taste in clothes and women’s jewelry, but possessing a rare practical mind, there were no full-blooded romantic plots and experiences. But in her soul there was a special secluded place where sublime passionate feelings could manifest themselves in all their diverse palette and depth. And the tuning fork of these intimate romantic experiences was music. In 1874, having heard Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasy The Tempest to Shakespeare’s drama of the same name (The Tempest, 1611), she «was delirious for several days, could not free herself from this state» and fell in love with the music of a composer unknown to her. Three years later, having entered into correspondence with the composer and offering him regular financial support, Nadezhda von Meck described her fascination with Tchaikovsky’s music:

…You wrote music that takes a person into the world of sensations, aspirations and desires that life cannot satisfy. How much pleasure and how much longing this music brings. But you don’t want to tear yourself away from this longing, in it a person feels his highest abilities, in it he finds hope, expectation, happiness, which life does not give.

In the same letter she confesses that behind the outstanding music she would like to see the composer as a person of high moral qualities, and that she, learning about him different reviews, has brought to him «the most intimate, sympathetic, enthusiastic attitude». It means that «these sounds have a noble, genuine meaning,» they were written «to express one’s own feelings, thoughts, state,» and one can recklessly «surrender to the complete charm of the sounds of your music.» In essence, this statement means the following: your music speaks of love, these images of love are sincere and come from your heart, I share your feelings.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840—1893)

In their further correspondence that lasted thirteen years, Nadezhda von Meck once failed to stay in this graceful and airy shell of love and stepped onto sinful earth, confessing to Tchaikovsky her love, her jealousy of his fleeting wife and the feeling that he belonged only to her. This episode only confirms the true nature of Nadezhda von Meck’s «fantastic» attitude towards Tchaikovsky, which she experienced as «the highest of all feelings possible in human nature.» Both tried to protect from the prosaic, the bodily and the mundane this each in their own way understood closeness of thoughts, feelings, attitude to life and… illness, which Tchaikovsky perceived as a special kind of misanthropy, «which is not based at all on hatred and contempt for people,» but on fear of «that disappointment, that longing for the ideal which follows any bonding.»

Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck (1831—1894)

These fantastic relationships embodied amazing and to a certain extent universal experience of ideal, pure love, conveyed through the language of music. To what extent the original feelings and the circumstances that gave rise to them were skillfully embodied by the composer in musical images, and then correctly interpreted by the listener can be gleaned from the following first-hand testimony.

At the request of Nadezhda von Meck, who informed the composer about her deep shock with one musical theme from the early opera Oprichnik and the images that emerge, Tchaikovsky, based on this passage, reacting favorably to her interpretation: «how pleasant and gratifying it is for a musician when he is sure that there is a soul that will feel just as strongly and just as deeply everything that he felt when he conceived and carried out his work,» writes the march. Having received a new piece, she tells him that

the sounds of this march run a shiver through all my nerves, I want to cry, I want to die, I want a different life, but not the one that other people believe and expect, but another, elusive, inexplicable. And life, and death, and happiness, and suffering – everything is mixed with one another: you feel how you rise from the ground, how your temples are knocking, how your heart is beating, it blurs before your eyes, you clearly hear only the sounds of this enchanting music, you feel only that… what is happening inside you, and how good you feel, and you don’t want to wake up.

Above we have given a description of Nadezhda von Meck’s experiences from the work The Tempest. The theme and program of this musical fantasy was proposed to Tchaikovsky by the music critic V.V. Stasov, who described the outline of this work as follows:

An innocent fifteen-year-old girl who grew up on an island, having never seen a man except her sorcerer father, who causes a storm and a shipwreck so that his daughter will meet the surviving prince.

In the first part of the overture, Stasov proposes the theme of Miranda’s transition from «the state of childhood innocence to the state of a girl in love,» and in the second part, «she and Fernando would already be flying in full sails of passion, engulfed in the «fire of love.»

– Is a storm necessary in The Tempest? – Tchaikovsky clarifies from Stasov, not expecting any difficulties with the musical expression of the state of first love, turning into a love fire.

– Let the storm suddenly bark and growl, like a dog that has broken free from its chain and rushed at the enemy on the orders of its owner to bite <…> and immediately then fall silent, only little by little shuddering, and grumbling, and walking away. – Stasov explains his vision.

From the memoirs of Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest, we learn that the thirty-three-year-old composer drew the feelings he put into The Tempest from his teenage love for twelve-year-old Seryozha Kireyev, who studied with him in his junior year at the School of Law, a closed male institution:

This was the strongest, longest and purest love interest of his life. It had all the enchantment, all the suffering, all the depth and power of love, the most sublime and bright. This was knightly service to the «Lady» without any thought of sensual encroachment.

One cannot help but find it surprising that the thrill of an innocent girl’s first love, turning into a soulful storm of love, will be embodied in all its depth and beauty in an object of art – a talented piece of music – by a man with a homoerotic orientation, and then wholeheartedly perceived by an aging woman dreaming of «another life» – sublime, elusive, where suffering dissolves into happiness and hope and strength are found to fight oneself and work.

The connection of his music to the universal powerful energies of love is also indicated by Tchaikovsky’s answer to Nadezhda von Meck’s direct question about his opinion about the possibility of complete happiness only in non-platonic love, in which to the play of imagination (which is typical of the geniuses of art) she adds heartfelt passion, physical intimacy and… a woman, which according to her ideas means love «with all one’s organism.» Answering, he changes the emphasis of the question: the point is not in the object of love or the combination of passion with imagination, but in its depth and purity of heartfelt impulses, from where only one can understand «all the power, all the immeasurable strength of this feeling.» It was precisely this high love and its «bliss» that he «tried to express repeatedly through music,» and at the same time its «torment,» since in his life he did not have to experience the desired «fullness of happiness in love.»

You ask, my friend, if I am familiar with non-platonic love. Yes and no. If we pose this question a little differently, i.e. ask if I have experienced complete happiness in love, I will answer: no, no and no!!! However, I think that in my music there is an answer to this question. If you ask me whether I understand all the power, all the immeasurable strength of this feeling, then I will answer; yes, yes and yes, and again I will say that I have lovingly tried many times to express with music the painfulness and at the same time the bliss of love.

Explaining his thought, Tchaikovsky speaks not about the absence of words that fully express love, but about the need for their special semantic sound, which is generated in the poem by the musicality of the poetic language[1 - «Words arranged in the form of verse have ceased to be just words: they have become musicalized.» Indeed, as the culturologist and semiotician Yu. M. Lotman noted already in the 20th century, despite the «unfreedom» of a poetic text in comparison with prose, it is more informative, since «the verse structure reveals not just new shades of meaning of words – it reveals the dialectics of concepts, that internal inconsistency of the phenomena of life and language, for the designation of which ordinary language does not have special means.»]. At the same time, however, «music has incomparably more powerful means and a more subtle language for expressing thousands of different moments of spiritual mood.»

At this very time, a new direction of poetic creativity was already emerging in France – symbolism, which opened up other possibilities for a poetic text to convey the deep inner experiences of the poet, his insights and intuitions. After the sudden death of Tchaikovsky, who contracted cholera in 1893, this direction of poetry settled on Russian soil, took root in other arts and became a symbol of the Silver Age of Russian culture.

II

Light shadows of love. The incarnation of a Beautiful Lady. The disappointment of non-platonic love. By the moonlit walls. Tall woman in black. The path of masculinity. The fruits of internal chaos. The echo of a forgotten hymn. Traces of human hooves. Never to give account to anyone

As an example of the musicality of poetry, Tchaikovsky referred to the work of Afanasy Fet, whom he greatly appreciated. He wrote a romance based on one of Fet’s poems while still at school, dedicating it to Sergei Kireyev. Forty years later, another seventeen-year-old lover, the future famous poet Alexander Blok, in a letter (1898) to the lady of his heart, speaking about his «ardent, sincere love,» about the «terrible storm» raging in his soul, quotes the same poem by Fet:

Aren’t you here as a light shadow,
My genius, my angel, my friend,
Talking quietly to me
And quietly fly around?