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

© 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 language¹. 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?
 
 
And you give me timid inspiration,
And sweet healing of ailments,
And bring me quiet dreams,
My genius, my angel, my friend…
 

The genius of young Blok’s first passionate love was thirty-seven-year-old Ksenia Sadovskaya. Witnesses of the stormy holiday romance note that «she was Ukrainian, and her beauty, dapper toilets and bold, enticing coquetry had a strong effect on the youthful imagination.»

But in the near future, Blok began to lack this easy quiet poetic and musical inspiration of Fet for expressing emotional disturbances and love experiences. Fascinated by amateur theater, Blok also became interested in his peer, theater partner Lyubov Mendeleeva, daughter of the famous scientist-chemist, whose dacha was next door. During this period of his life, «in connection with acute mystical and romantic experiences,» when, next to the still unextinguished feeling of first love, new heartfelt desires arose, when he was «disturbed by the signs» that he saw in nature, he felt a craving for mystical poetry. In the spring of 1901, Blok discovered the poet Vl. S. Solovyov² and his philosophy of life and love for the «eternal friend,» who appears at the «call of the soul» as the «radiance of the Divine.»

Having found support for his spiritual turmoil and armed with deep thoughts about the meaning of love, Blok chooses his Beautiful Lady – after a year-long cooling of the relationship, he goes to the Mendeleevs and in long conversations shares his new secret spiritual world with Lyubov Dmitrievna, in which, as she felt, «everything is melodious, everything is unsaid, where these beautiful poems, one way or another, still come from me.» Now his vague inner vibrations of the soul began to resonate more and more confidently with the music of the world, and the mysteries of life became close and understandable to him, and the image of the «Majestic Eternal Wife» appeared in its earthly incarnation.

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880—1921)

 
I never understood
The art of sacred music,
And now my hearing discerned
The voice of someone’s innermost voice.
 
 
I loved that dream in it
And the excitement of my soul
That all the beauty of the past
They bring in waves from oblivion.
 
 
The past rises to the sound
It seems close and clear:
Then the dream sings for me,
It smells like a beautiful mystery.
 

His beloved and confidant in secret thoughts about another life, new trends in art, carrying the initiated into «primordial chaos,» «into the thrill of ideas, into singing images,» also approached the resumption of relations renewed. If earlier she was represented by «magnificent golden hair,» «delicate white-pink complexion, black eyebrows, childish blue eyes and a stern, unapproachable appearance,» now the lights of sensual desires flashed in her eyes. In her memoirs about her growing up, Lyubov Mendeleeva wrote:

I felt my awakened young body. <…> Sometimes, late in the evening, when everyone was already asleep, <…> I took my ball gown, put it right on my naked body and went into the living room to the large mirrors. <…> Then I threw off my dress and admired myself for a long, long time. <…> I was a gentle, well-groomed ancient girl. <…> Later I found the flow of my lines partly in Giorgione, especially the flexibility of long legs, short waist and small, barely blooming breasts.

It is not difficult to imagine the deep disappointment of a young girl yearning for «non-platonic love» when, on the third day after the proposal, her groom withdrew into his illness, which «they do not tell girls about,» and a year later immediately after the wedding (1903) he announced that he would like for ideal reasons, in order to maintain a high style of relationship, to avoid physical intimacy with her. Aphrodite Pandemos wanted to protect her from a cruel fate and sent her signs a year before the fatal consent, so the premonition of the strange role in which her attraction to Blok involved her resulted in the decision to break with him. In a prepared but unsent letter, she informed Blok that she felt like

something in my soul had suddenly broken off, died; I felt that your attitude towards me now only outrages my entire being. I am a living person and I want to be one, at least with all the shortcomings; when I am looked at as some abstraction, even the most ideal one, it is unbearable, offensive, alien to me…

None of these thoughts were expressed; the relationship cooled for the second time, but did not break off. In fact, a direct explanation would not reveal anything that the poet did not already know about, catching involuntary signs – a year ago he wrote down:

 
I’ve understood the meaning of your aspirations —
I’m blocking your path.
The fire of unearthly lusts
Heaves up the virgin breast.
 
 
Shall my pathetic, feeble speech
To fight your flame
On the verge of an uncharted rendezvous
With a beginning dear and alien!
 

At the same time, Aphrodite Urania fought with «unearthly lusts» for the soul of the poet, who had embarked on the path of the «knight-monk,» and revealed to him her transcendental and underground secrets:

 
Oh, how alive I am, how the blood springs beat!
I am kindred here with subterranean springs!
Moments of mystery! You, eternal love!
I understood you! I’m with you! I’m behind you!
 

In this verse from the collection Poems about a Beautiful Lady (1902), with its cheerful opening, there are also hints of other experiences associated with one’s own shadow sneaking «by the moonlit walls,» some «joyless seeds,» cold wind, bare twigs and yet a triumphant smile at the crossroads of the one who «revealed the holy writings.»

Here, in our opinion, one of the characteristic features of symbolism is quite clearly manifested, not so much as a special direction of art that conveys an intuitive understanding of the depths of the natural and spiritual world through secret signs and symbolic images, but as the artist’s own immersion in the world of these shadows, conventions and mysteries, bringing all life to the altar of sacred revelations and setting up life experiments in order to test the true power and truth of the vague, but inexorably attractive phenomena of the divinely beautiful.

One of such tests of «his system» for Blok was communication with prostitutes – not just to satisfy «dirty lust,» but in order to awaken passion even in these women – «flat professionals,» achieve manifestations of tenderness and feel the breath of the «eternal femininity.» As if Dostoevsky’s hero from his spiritual underground, Blok resorts to «debauchery,» though not for the purpose of a reckless collision of the dark and noble qualities of his own soul, but in order to «drink the passion of a vampire» and establish himself in connection with the higher and brighter beginning of life.

In a letter to his fiancée, in raptures of love, Blok amazingly mentions both Dostoevsky and Chekhov, feeling that he is standing «on the threshold of all-joyful knowledge,» that the «era of Chekhov’s despair,» darkness, skepticism, decadence and… romanticism is left behind. At that moment, Blok was infinitely confident in the earthly incarnation of the Beautiful Lady: «I feel that everything I would ever again need, I will find in You.» Indeed, during periods of life’s adversity and hours of despair, Blok always turned to his wife and found her understanding.

But the ghost of the Beautiful Lady gradually dissipated and four years later Blok saw her features in the image of another «Stranger» – actress Natalya Volokhova, who «combined subtle, solemn beauty, an interesting mind and nobility of character.» Although the door of the soul was already bolted in the ice cave, Volokhova’s «wonderful charm» – «tall, slender figure, pale face, delicate features, black hair and eyes, precisely winged, black, wide open» – burned the «golden coal» into the poet’s heart, despite the fact that it also caught «the snowy gloom of her eyes.» However, even this time Blok was disappointed – the heart of the Snow Maiden listened to his beautiful poems, but remained mute.

Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok (Mendeleeva) (1881—1939)

 
And once again, sparkling from the wine cup,
You put fear in my heart
With your innocent smile
In heavy-snaked hair.
 
 
I’m overturned in the dark currents
And inhale again without love,
Forgotten dream of kisses
Of snowy blizzards around you.
 

Blok’s love for Volokhova, which lasted through two theater seasons, was immersed in an atmosphere of endless fun «in the ghostly light» of the capital’s young «literary and artistic bohemia.» Perhaps, observing her husband’s deep passion and heartache, Lyubov Dmitrievna decided to give him up to Volokhova, warning that with love it was necessary to «accept the poet with his high mission.» The sacrifice was rejected due to Blok’s inconsistency with the ideal image of someone whom the actress, famous for her «bright personality,» could love with «ordinary female love.» At the end of 1908, the love obsession began to wane, Blok tried to assure himself that «it no longer mattered which lips to kiss, which shoulders to caress,» but he could not decide what mark the «debunked shadow» left in his fate, and, having forgotten her, he «became serious.» A year later, Blok wrote his own version of poems on the theme of the now famous for centuries romance «Don’t go away, stay with me…,» created by the natural composer Nikolai Zubov, who was passionately and unrequitedly in love with the singer Anastasia Vyaltseva, who from a poor peasant family became a popular singer, a rich a woman and a model of feminine elegance. In contrast to the banal «delight of love» and «fiery caress,» the poet spoke to his imaginary friend about deception enveloping like a «gray fog,» about the «sadness of gloomy places» and proposed, having fenced her with «a living ring, a ring of hands,» to flow together like smoke towards the light of dawn «into the scarlet circle.»

In search of an answer to the question of the feasibility of the earthly embodiment of the Eternal Femininity, Blok in 1911 discovered the works of the Swedish writer August Strindberg, where, behind love tragedies and family troubles, the underlying causes of the eternal struggle of the sexes are revealed and the path along which «culture will follow in creating a new type of man» is illuminated. Reflecting on the new man, Blok imagines a different combination of «masculine and feminine principles» – their «harmonious distribution» – than the one created so far by culture. At the same time, in the conditions of a «changed life» these principles should not degenerate – the masculine should be open, firm, truthful, and the feminine should not turn into «womanhood.» Choosing, like Strindberg, the path of masculinity, Blok speaks of a preference «to be left alone with one’s cruel fate, when there is no real woman in the world, whom only an honest and austere soul can accept.»