ing 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