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Alexey Makhrov, Introduction to V.V. Stasov, 'Perov and Musorgskii'

Copyright © 2003; all rights reserved. Redistribution or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author(s).

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This article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the artist Vasilii Perov and the composer Modest Musorgskii and represents a combination of Stasov's two major interests: the criticism of music and the visual arts. Stasov had taken upon himself the mission to promote the development of the Russian national school of music, and passionately advocated the works of Mikhail Glinka and the composers associated with the group 'The Mighty Handful', including Musorgskii, Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, Milii Balakirev and Aleksandr Borodin. Although Perov and Musorgskii were unacquainted with each other, Stasov discovers many 'parallels' in their life and work, which he considers against the background of historic and social change, particularly concentrating on the impact which serfdom and its abolition made on their creative thinking. The article demonstrates that the criteria for his judgements of both painting and music were identical: realism and nationality. The method which he used in order to be able to apply these criteria to two forms of art so obviously dissimilar from each other was to analyse the 'types' of Russian people represented by both artists, such as peasants, holy fools, policemen, land owners, clergy and others. Stasov's emphasis on the subject matter and his literary descriptions are not accompanied by the analysis of the works themselves, which may have been inappropriate to the task which he set himself. However, this text, written for an historical journal, differs considerably from the more succinct and spirited articles published by Stasov in the daily press. Indeed, the limiting of the entire output of two major artists to such a narrow set of criteria resulted in the long-windedness and the repetitiveness of this lengthy essay. This was a characteristic feature of Stasov's attempts to write a history of art and music, particularly obvious in his extensive monograph The Art of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1901, which includes sections on Russian, European and American architecture, sculpture, painting and music.