o Boris. After all, the "people,"
that mystic quantity in Russian art, must have a spokesman.
Notwithstanding this every tune to be found in Pratsch's Russian
anthology, and utilised by the new men, was composed by an individual
man. Art is never democratic, but it is all the stronger when it
incarnates the woes and joys of the people--not quite the same thing
as being composed by the "people." The tree is rooted in the soil, but
the tree stands alone in the forest. The moujik dominates the stage,
even after the generous lopping from the partition of some of the
choruses.

The feeling for comedy which is to be found in many of the songs is
not missing in the stage work. Moussorgsky loved Gogol, set his Le
Mariage to music (only one act) and savoured the salty humour of the
great writer. But the composer has his tragic side, and therein he
reminds me of Dostoievsky--both men died during the same year--who but
Dostoievsky, if he had been a composer, could have written the
malediction scene in Boris? As a matter of fact he did write a play on
the same historical subject, but it has disappeared. There are many
other contacts with Dostoievsky--intense Slavophilism, adoration of
Russia; its very soil is sacred; carelessness as to the externals of
their art--a Chinese asymmetry is present in their architectonic; they
both excel in portraying humour, broad, vulgar, uproarious,
outrageous, reckless humour; and also in exposing the profundities of
the Russian soul, especially the soul racked by evil and morbid
thoughts. Dostoievsky said: "The soul of another is a dark place, and
the Russian soul is a dark place...." The obsession of the abnormal is
marked in novelist and composer. They are revolutionists, but in the
heaven of the insurgent there are many mansions. (Beethoven--a letter
to Zmeskell--wrote: "Might is the morality of men who distinguish
themselves above others. It is my morality, anyhow.") Dostoievsky and
Moussorgsky were not unlike temperamentally. Dostoievsky always
repented in haste only to sin again at leisure; with Moussorgsky it
was the same. Both men suffered from some sort of moral lesion.
Dostoievsky was an epileptic, and the nature of Moussorgsky's
"mysterious nervous ailment" is unknown to me; possibly it was a mild
or masked epilepsy. Moussorgsky was said to have been a heavy
drinker--his biographer speaks of him as being "ravaged by alcohol"--a
failing not rare in Russia. The "inspissated gloom" of his