¹ Asafyev, B. V., ‘Slavyanskaya liturgiya Erosu’, Simfonicheskiye etyudï (Leningrad, 1970), 20–1.Google Scholar

² Laroche, Hermann, ‘Glinka i yego znachenie v istorii muzïki’ (1867–8), rpt. in Izbrannïye stat'i, I (Leningrad, 1974), 215.Google Scholar

³ Taruskin, Richard, ‘Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music’, Journal of Musicology, 3.4 (1984), 321–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ This mythologised history of Russian music pervades Russian literature from the last century up to recent times; nineteenth-century Russian critics understandably created myths in accordance with Herderian romantic nationalism, and Soviet musicology for the most part canonised them, while adding a further layer of mythology prompted by Party ideology. To some extent this trait has carried over into Western musicology, even scholars such as David Brown and Alfred Swan at times taking these romantic nationalist metaphors as literally as their Russian counterparts. For example, Swan elaborates Boris Asafyev's description of Rachmaninov's melodies as ‘valley-like’: ‘This “Russianness” derives from the strong influence of the north-central plains which he had imbibed during the summers spent on his grandmother's Novgorod estates’; see Swan, Alfred J., Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song (New York, 1973), 172.Google Scholar Similarly, Brown says that the main pair of characters in Tchaikovsky's Vakula the Smith sound Russian ‘not because Tchaikovsky has deliberately exploited folksong pastiche, but because, like Glinka before him, he has bedded the roots that draw up nourishment for his own melodic blooms in a richly national soil’; see Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, I (London, 1978), 328.Google Scholar During the last few decades the tendency to deromanticise Russian music history has become quite strong, owing to Richard Taruskin, Caryl Emerson, Robert Ridenour and others, but the hour offinal victory still seems far off. For example, in his recent monograph on Musorgsky's Pictures, Michael Russ takes at face value some inaccurate sources, and concludes from them that Musorgsky's flattened sixths, flattened supertonics and sharpened fourths reflect ‘the tonal flavour of Russian folk music’, which ‘tends to come from alterations made to the two basic modes’. Even the Neapolitan chord in ‘II vecchio castello’ becomes Russian, owing to the belief in an all-pervading folk influence; see Russ, Michael, Musorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (Cambridge, 1992), 51.Google Scholar

⁵ But, on the other hand, ‘we understand Dickens in Russian nearly as well as the English’. See Dostoyevsky, F. M., Dnevnik pisatelya za 1873 god (St Petersburg, 1883), 79.Google Scholar

⁶ Brown, David, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974), 114.Google Scholar

⁷ O***, ; ‘Ruslan i Lyudmila, opera M. I. Glinki’, Mayak, 9 (1843), 30.Google Scholar

⁸ Laroche, , 53.Google Scholar

⁹ Musorgsky, M. P., Letters (Moscow, 1974), 156Google Scholar (letter to Stasov of 23 July 1873). The Russian word is ‘obyevropeivshiysya’, which brings in associations of ‘obyevshiysya’ (having overeaten).

¹⁰ Laroche, , 55–6.Google Scholar

¹¹ Odoyevsky, V. F., Muzïkal'no-literaturnqye nasledtye (Moscow, 1956), 276–85, 318–30, 371–80.Google Scholar

¹² Mel'gunov, N. A., Glinka i yego muzïkal'nïye sochineniya’ (1836);Google Scholarrpt. in Livanova, T. and Protopopov, V., Glinka, II (Moscow, 1955) 202–9.Google Scholar

¹³ Stasov, V. V., ‘O nekotorïkh formakh nïneshney muzïki’, Stat'i o muyke, I (Moscow, 1974), 362–83.Google ScholarFirst published as ‘Über einige neue Formen der heutigen Musik’, Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, 49 (1858), 1–4.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Stasov, V. V., ‘Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’, Stat'i o muzïke, I (Moscow, 1974), 175–351.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Balakirev, M. A. and Stasov, V. V., Perepiska, I (Moscow, 1970), 114–15.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., 116.

¹⁷ Laroche, , 62.Google Scholar

¹⁸ This example has become a part of Russian musicological ‘oral culture’, passing from lectures to exam answers without necessarily seeing print.Google Scholar

¹⁹ While it can be instructive to compare individual examples of passages displaying a tendency towards the subdominant with certain folk patterns, as does David Brown (Glinka, 116–17), the attempt to generalise from these instances is a treacherous game. Examples of die dangers can be found in Brown: ‘Nor does the tune leave any doubt about its creator's nationality. … [This] with its latent plagalism and especially its end, is Russian to the core’ (Tchaikovsky, 103); or ‘This is a fresh, airy tune, especially Russian in its high content of fourths and its repetitive behaviour’ (110). Michael Russ also takes up this generalisation when he refers to ‘the plagal cadences and melodic cadential formulas of Russian folk music’ (Musorgsky: Pictures, 53).Google Scholar

²⁰ Asafyev, B. V., ‘Glinka’, Izbrannïye truii, I (written 1940–42; rpt. Moscow, 1952), 154.Google Scholar

²¹ This is still a strong feature of Russian musicology: the departments that preside over courses on Russian music and Western music are separate in most of the tertiary-level institutions. Two years of tuition in Western music is followed by another two in Russian music; Stravinsky arrives at the end of the long process, by which time his Western contemporaries are far from the minds of students.Google Scholar

²² Laroche, , 61.Google Scholar

²³ Levasheva, O. Ye., M. I. Glinka, II (Moscow, 1988), 124.Google Scholar

²⁴ An attempt to explain some of Ruslan's harmonic procedures by referring to non-Russian folk modes was made by Rowen, Ruth Halle in ‘Glinka's Tour of Folk Modes on the Wheel of Harmony’, in Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz ed. Brown, M. H. (Ann Arbor, 1984), 35–54. While the supposed source of Glinka's modality is different, Rowen's argument runs a parallel course to the traditional Russian exaggerations and inventions, offering some quite bizarre derivations.Google Scholar

²⁵ The chorus ‘Lei’ tainstvennïy' from Act I; Finn's Ballad and The Head's Tale from Act II; the Persian Chorus from Act IV; the chorus ‘Akh tï, svet Lyudmila’ in Act V.Google Scholar

²⁶ Berkov, V., Ruslan i Lyudmila M. I. Glinki (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949), 23.Google Scholar

²⁷ Levasheva, , 113.Google Scholar

²⁸ Brown, , Tchaikovsky, I, 189.Google Scholar

²⁹ Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 192–274.Google Scholar

³⁰ This point is illustrated by P. V. Annenkov's account of Berlin during the 1830s: ‘Every Russian newcomer was wryly asked by his fellow-countrymen (those who had already lived several years in this centre of German learning) whether he wished to stay in it, and if so, what exactly he intended to become: a true, noble German (der treue, edk Deutsche) or a vain, eccentric Frenchman (der eitle, albeme Franzose). There could be n o question of his wanting to remain a Russian, because Russians as such did not exist: there were registrars, assessors, advisors of all possible kinds, landowners, officers, students who spoke Russian, but a positively Russian type, an independent and active personality who would not crack under the strain had not yet been born.’ Quoted in Kasyanova, K., O russkom natsional'nom kharaktere (Moscow, –1994), 36–7.Google Scholar

³¹ There are two fine essays by Lidiya Ginzburg and Yuriy Lotman concerning literature's influence on people's behaviour in Lotman, , ed., The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (London, 1985).Google Scholar

³² Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past The Fugitive, trans. Moncrieff, C. K. Scott and Kilmartin, Terence (London, 1989), 443.Google Scholar

³³ Laroche, , 50–1.Google Scholar

³⁴ ‘Glinka's representation of characters is so very true, accurate and poetic to the last, their dramatisation is so very convincing. Look—Farlaf, Ruslan, Ratmir, Susanin—what personalities and characters, created with such artistry, cast with such precision!’ Stasov, V., Verit' li?' Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti, 74 (1866).Google Scholar

³⁵ Pushkin, A. S., Domik v Kolomne.Google Scholar

³⁶ Kotlyarevsky, N., quoted in the commentary accompanying Ruslan i Lyudmila. Poema A. S. Pushkina. S. istoriko-literatumymi kommentariyami G. V. Aleksangrovskogo (Kiev, St Petersburg, and Odessa, 1912).Google Scholar

³⁷ Gogol, N. V.', Collected Edition, VIII (Leningrad, 1952), 50.Google Scholar

³⁸ Maykov, A. N., cited in Murav'yova, O. S.'s essay Obraz Pushkina: istoricheskiye metamorfozii’, in Legendi i mifi o Pusbkine (St Petersburg, 1994).Google Scholar

³⁹ Dostoyevsky, F. M., Pushkin (St Petersburg, 1899), 15–16.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Even an incomplete list of suggested sources of Pushkin's Ruslan is impressive: Ariosto, Parny, Wieland, Hamilton, Voltaire, La Fontaine, plus, of course, Russian sources like the folk tales (A Tale of Yeruslan Lazarevich) reworked by Tchulkov, Karamzin's Ilya Muromets, Radishchev's warrior poems, Zhukovsky's Dvenadtsat' spyashchikh dev. bïlinï from Kirsha Danilov's collection, etc. A similarly international combination accompanies Glinka's Ruslan: commentators mention Mozart, Cherubini, Beethoven, Weber, Rossini, Auber and the traditions of Russian opera and ballet.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Quoted in Trubachov, S. S., Pushkin v russkqy kritike (St Petersburg, 1889), 267. The same image of Pushkin as epic singer occurs in Bayan's second song from Glinka's opera.Google Scholar

⁴² Taruskin, Richard, ‘Glinka's Ambiguous Legacy and the Birth Pangs of Russian Opera’, 19th-Century Music, 1 (1977–1978), 162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ Taruskin, Richard, ‘Ruslan i Lyudmila’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, IV (London, 1992), 94–7.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ The authorship of this article remains controversial: Gozenpud, A., Russkiy opernïy teatr XIX veka (Leningrad, 1969), 173–7, sees Odoyevsky's hand, while Protopopov (see n. 45) rejects Odoyevsky's candidacy without proposing his own.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ The main points of the article were first quoted in Livanova, T. N. and Protopopov, V. V., Opernaya kritika v Rossii, I (Moscow, 1966), 279.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ O***, 31–2.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Quoted in Serov, A. N., Stat'i o muzyke, IV (Moscow, 1988), 344.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ During the wedding ceremony of the Orthodox Church, crowns are held over the heads of bride and groom.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Once again I must refer to the strong oral element in Russian musicology. Extended explanation of the parallelism between the wedding and coronation was given by Y. M. Levashev in his unpublished Conservatoire lectures.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Cooper, Martin, Russian Opera (London, 1951), 23, mentions that Dostoyevsky viewed Ruslan as a political fable: Western Slavs are represented by Lyudmila, the Orthodox Empire of Russia by her rescuer Ruslan, Turkey by the oppressor-magician Chernomor, and Austria by the comic coward Farlaf. I cannot locate this passage in Dostoyevsky, though it sounds very much in the style of his ‘Writer's Diary’, where the author dedicated a lot of space to Russia's defence of Western Slavs; he could easily have chosen there to appropriate the plot of Ruslan in his reflection on the contemporary situation.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Asafyev, (seen. 20), 20–1.Google Scholar

⁵² Kaltat, L. and Rabinovich, D., ‘U istokov russkoy narodnoy muzikal'noy shkoli’, Sovetskaya Muyka, 3 (1934), 44.Google Scholar

⁵³ Laroche, , 127.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Aksakov, K., ‘Neskol'ko slov o poeme Gogolya “Pokhozhdeniya Chichikova” ili “Myortvye dushi” ’ (1842);Google Scholarquoted in Terts, Abram, V tern Gogolya (London, 1975), 446–7.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Belinsky, V. G., Otecbestvenritje Zapiski, 11 (1842); quoted in Terts (see n. 54), 447.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid., 448–9.

⁵⁷ I should like to thank Jonathan Walker for his invaluable help in the composition of this article.Google Scholar