Alexander Serov and the Birth of the Russian Modern: (New and Revised 2nd edition)

By Paul du Quenoy

When did Russia become “modern?” Historians of Russia – including even many Russian historians – have long tried to identify Russia’s “modern” moment. While most scholars have looked to economic or ideological transitions, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy approaches the problem through culture, and specifically the performing arts, as told through the prism of one of its leading nineteenth-century practitioners, the composer and critic Alexander Serov. Born in 1820, Serov grew to adulthood under the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855). Long disparaged as a dark and reactionary period of Russia’s past, it instead offered many educational, cultural, and professional opportunities that conventional histories have failed to appreciate. Educated in law and tutored in music, Serov rose to become Russia’s first significant music critic and a noted composer whose three operas won him fame and gestured toward the creation of a national style. Although his renown was fleeting after his untimely death in 1871, his life and observations provide a vital eyewitness account to a Russia poised to embrace a fresh and fully modern identity. In a volume prepared to mark the 150th anniversary of Serov’s death, du Quenoy’s pastiche of Russian life offers one of the best approaches to Russia’s imperial past and its legacies today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680537574

Book preview

Introduction

The Most Famous Composer You Have Never Heard Of

"Ma position, c’est l’opposition," Alexander Nikolaevich Serov (1820-1871) defiantly declared to his sister and close confidante Sofiia in November 1859.¹ Nearly forty years old at the time he wrote those combative words, no one in Russia’s small but vibrant arts community would have disagreed. Thoroughly schooled in music from childhood, Serov’s ambition to become a famous composer had faced enormous challenges. Without serious institutional structures of musical education, the art of composition in Russia remained a gentleman’s affair, an eccentric pursuit for noble amateurs with the means and leisure to indulge in it. Some, like the foundational national composer Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) and Serov’s near contemporary Aleksandr Dargomyzhskii (1813-1869), managed to acquire elements of formal musical education in Europe. But they were unusual exceptions in a Russian musical world still dominated by enterprising foreigners, talented serfs, and fellow nobles who contented themselves with musicmaking in a handful of private salons and sparse public performance spaces only accessible to a circumscribed elite.

Serov’s birth into an ennobled bureaucratic family of high professional standing but meager means placed him outside of this small and amorphous community. Yet drive, passion, and opportunity brought the young man close enough to learn its manners and mores, imbibe its tastes and fads, meet almost everyone in its cast of characters, and, eventually, even take part in its work, if usually in a difficult and obstreperous way.

Earlier in life, Serov’s ambitious father, a senior official in the Ministry of Finance, arranged for him to enter the inaugural class of the newly founded Imperial School of Jurisprudence. He intended for young Alexander to acquire the elite legal education he would need to rise to the top of the Empire’s conservative yet determinedly modernizing state administration.² Serov would not be the last Russian cultural figure to follow this practical path,³ but the Imperial Law School’s ancillary program of musical studies and St. Petersburg’s thriving arts scene diverted his attention from his law books and helped alienate him from most of his classmates. Although Serov graduated with honors in 1840, his desire to pursue a career in music brought down a torrent of paternal disapproval that marched him into a bureaucratic career in the Empire’s higher judicial bodies.

Serov’s dreary work in a series of stultifying posts deadened his senses and frustrated his superiors as well as his father, who continued to insist on a successful career in legal administration. Alexander’s only comfort arrived in the evenings, when he could immerse himself in St. Petersburg’s cultural offerings in the company of a handful of likeminded people, especially his Law School classmate Vladimir Stasov, who would rise to become one of Russia’s leading cultural critics. Serov’s inability to progress with his own music troubled him, however. His lack of training, diluted inspiration, and low level of confidence proved the major culprits. After five unproductive but still educational years, a prolonged assignment to Simferopol, the capital of distant Crimea, left him aching for the stimulation of Petersburg’s amusements. While in Simferopol, he fell madly in love with a married gentlewoman of Greek extraction who, separated from her officer husband, supported his ambitions and eventually inspired him to return to the capital with dreams of a reunion. Serov resumed what he hoped would be a purely musical life with renewed energy and enthusiasm, but his weak musical training and limited confidence continued to frustrate his creative projects.

Bereft of compelling inspiration, in the early 1850s Serov took to critical writing. With little competition in the field and no serious tradition of music criticism to be judged by, he quickly established himself as one of Russia’s leading authorities on musical matters. Although this lofty superordinate role did not meet even his most basic financial needs and forced him to return to government service in 1855, he brooked neither condescension nor disagreement. Instead, he made it a virtually inescapable point to criticize – often in deliberately provocative and vitriolic terms designed to call attention to himself – almost everyone around him. This invited all the predictable reactions, to which Serov usually, and sometimes uncomprehendingly, reacted with wounded indignation. His list of antagonists eventually included even his best friend Stasov, who had critiqued his lackluster compositional work for many years but whose barbs and judgments now wearied him. More fatally to their friendship, Serov failed to embrace the leading intellectual current, Slavophilism, which required strict adherence to tendentious principles of popular nationalism that opposed the stern official government philosophy under Nicholas I. By the time Serov wrote his sister about his truculent position in 1859, he raged with indignation at his exclusion from two related initiatives to improve Russian musical life: the Russian Musical Society (RMO, founded only a few months before his letter to Sofiia in 1859), which would organize a regular concert series to present Russian music alongside foreign masterpieces, and the formal courses of musical instruction that coalesced into St. Petersburg’s Conservatory (established in 1862), the mission of which was to train Russian musicians on the European model.

To deepen his already profound sense of alienation, Serov discovered that many of his ideas and tastes were unpopular and even singular. Greatest among these was his deep admiration for the music and theoretical writings of Richard Wagner, whose work was scarcely known in Russia in the 1850s but nevertheless left grand impressions on Serov in his private reading and, even more so, when he visited Germany on extended mid-year journeys in 1858 and 1859. Despite the power of Serov’s pen, he failed to attract many new adherents to Wagnerism, however loosely defined the term was at the time, and suffered an additional failure when St. Petersburg’s cultural luminaries almost unanimously ignored programs of public lectures he organized on the history and meaning of music. Serov’s self-conscious desire to make himself a cosmopolitan cultural figure, rather than merely a Russian one, proved as controversial as it did difficult.

Yet shortly after Serov wallowed in this impoverished opposition, his fortunes suddenly and dramatically changed. Inspired by an Italian play about the legendary Biblical-era heroine Judith, the would-be composer invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in a new compositional project to realize an operatic adaptation. Premiering in May 1863, Judith launched the forty-three year old Serov into the small but growing pantheon of Russian composers. Riding a rising tide of patriotism ushered in by the 1860s and their major socioeconomic reform – the abolition of serfdom, – Serov suddenly knew fame, popularity, and celebrity. Nevertheless, Stasov and his other critics among the Mighty Handful (moguchaia kuchka) composers continued to quail at elements of his compositional style and dramatic choices. Serov’s finances remained troubled, and his self-indulgent personal spending habits did not help. A few months after Judith’s premiere, he found a bride in his young student Valentina Bergman (1846-1924), who had precipitously left the Conservatory for his private music lessons. Their only son Valentin Serov (1865-1911) would grow up to become one of Russia’s most important painters, known for his many portraits of prominent people and for daring explorations of impressionism and, at the very end of his life, expressionism.

Serov’s second opera, the supremely patriotic Rogneda (1865), drew on medieval Russian legend to create an intimate story set on the eve of Russia’s tenth-century conversion to Christianity. Its success dwarfed even that of Judith, winning the personal attention of Tsar Alexander II and other members of the imperial family.

Nevertheless, Serov’s success did not grant him long-term stability. Within a few months of Rogneda’s premiere, his infant daughter with Valentina died, sending him into a deep depression. After a rocky period in his marriage, Serov recovered enough to launch a journal to champion his artistic sensibilities, only to see it close after a few months due to a lack of subscribers. Still pursuing composition, he gained the agreement of the famous Moscow playwright Aleksandr Ostrovskii to adapt one of his plays as his third opera, The Power of the Fiend (1871). As work progressed, Serov’s notoriety grew to the point that even some of his longtime critics began to warm to his ideas and style and accept him into the emerging institutions that set the pace of Russian musical life. By 1870, he was elected to the Russian Musical Society and chosen to represent it in Vienna at the centennial celebration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. Already in poor health, the trip taxed his weakened system beyond its capacity to endure. After returning to St. Petersburg, Serov succumbed to an attack of angina pectoris on January 20, 1871, just nine days after his fifty-first birthday.

Serov was laid to rest in the prestigious cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery (Lavra) amid a flood of laudatory obituaries. His young widow, who outlived him by fifty-three years and became a noteworthy composer, music educator, and social activist, remained dedicated to his memory despite her remarriage and the needs of her second family. Serov’s final opera, The Power of the Fiend, appeared posthumously and, along with his first two operas, enjoyed a degree of popularity until the Revolution of 1917. Thereafter, they, like the man himself, sank into almost complete obscurity.

It is perhaps easy to understand why a man like Serov would fall into an eclipse after his death. Despite much sincere mourning, he was a man whom many seemed to want to forget. His opposition left him with no emulators, few admirers, and a large number of enemies. Vladimir Stasov, the one who knew him best before their friendship soured into bitter enmity, offered one compelling explanation. Although he recognized Serov’s considerable talent, wide learning, intelligence, vigour and brilliance, he lamented that he lacked the most important, the highest qualities. Accordingly, his gift for composition was second-rate and completely unoriginal; his critical gift lacked depth and solidity. His chief trait was instability and vacillation in his convictions. As a consequence, neither Serov’s musical nor his critical writing left any lasting mark, and they cannot possibly affect the future course of Russian music.⁴ Serov’s personal qualities fared little better in Stasov’s estimation. He was crippled by unfavourable circumstances, extreme irresoluteness, a lack of self-confidence amounting to weakness and, above all, the lack of genuine inspiration.⁵ Stasov’s acolytes among the Mighty Handful musicians concurred in their posthumous assessments. César Cui, whose published criticism reflected their general view on artistic topics, dismissed Serov as a second-rate talent who indulged in passions that were rough and violent rather than delicate and elegant. He was only saved from inferiority and oblivion, in Cui’s grudging opinion, by a distinguished spirit and vast erudition.⁶ Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, who encountered Serov very early in life, still disliked him in the 1890s even more as a critic than as a composer.⁷

Many of Serov’s contemporaries agreed with these unflattering assessments, including those who worked with Serov and were favorably disposed toward him. The critic Count Feofil Tolstoi, who maintained a friendship with Serov after some years of antagonism, noted his titanic pride and overconfidence, a consciousness of his own strength and denial of all Russian critics before him.⁸ In the opinion of his sometime collaborator Dmitrii Lobanov, who helped write the libretto of his first opera, Judith, Serov was a Don Quixote in the musical sphere, a knight who never feared any antagonism and was ready to engage in polemics with everyone even about the smallest of matters … with their eccentricity Serov’s articles conjured up a whole storm.⁹ Another friend and literary collaborator, Konstantin Zvantsov, later lamented Serov’s spirit of treachery and shameless lack of discretion, qualities that steeled others against him. Even Serov’s good qualities – his genial nature, sincerely artistic sensibilities and light and entertaining persona registered with Zvantsov as a lack of character.¹⁰

These negative impressions were exported from Russia with much greater success than Serov’s music. Stasov’s student, the British musicologist Rosa Newmarch, provided the English-speaking world with a portrait of Serov as a naturally vain man susceptible to flattery and intrigue and hobbled by short-sighted egotism.¹¹ In consequence, Serov left no lasting traces in Russia or music.¹² Richard Taruskin, the late dean of North American specialists on Russian music, recalled the story of his life one of continual run-ins with all and sundry, including his closest and most fruitful collaborators.¹³ Taruskin’s British counterpart, the late Stuart Campbell, presented Serov as a quarrelsome individual who rubbed almost everyone the wrong way and ran into problems on account of his unfortunate way of treating people.¹⁴ The most recent assessment, by Stephen Walsh, calls him a difficult, quarrelsome man with an unhappy tendency to antagonize those with whom he came into close contact.¹⁵ Perhaps the most generous recent description of Serov calls him one of the more interesting of lesser known Russian composers.¹⁶

One of the problems of remembering such a difficult character is that without many sympathetic contemporaries, effective biographical treatments would have to be left for later, more dispassionate generations. Although Tchaikovsky admired Serov’s operas, the personality factor dissuaded him from writing a biography when the task was suggested to him. As he wrote his patroness Nadezhda von Meck less than a decade after Serov’s death, "he was extraordinarily clever, a living encyclopedia of knowledge, but I knew him personally and never cared for him as a man. He was not kind, and this alone is sufficient to deter me from dedicating my leisure time to him."¹⁷ Stasov also considered a biography but never followed through, almost certainly for the same reason. In abandoning his project, however, he did do enormous service to later scholars by preserving Serov’s letters to him. He later donated them to the Imperial Public Library, where he was employed, and between 1875 and 1878 published selections serially in the historical journal Russian Heritage (Russkaia starina).¹⁸

Why should anyone take the trouble to write a biography of an obscure and widely disliked figure? As I hope this book will demonstrate, the life of Alexander Serov deserves our attention for a number of reasons. To begin with, his facility as one of Russia’s first and, in his time, leading music critics placed him among his country’s most important cultural and intellectual figures during a crucial transitional period. The years bookending his life, 1820 and 1871, saw a dramatic transformation of Russia and the world. Serov was born in a fearsome superpower, an early modern land empire that dominated Eurasia by sheer size, resolute will, and unparalleled military might. It marshaled its immense power under an autocratic ruler who held a virtually undisputed mandate from God. Claiming the mantle of the Romano-Byzantine tradition, he presided over a social system in which he was the final arbiter of all questions of state and society. Some ninety percent of his people were legally owned by himself or by a landed servitor estate largely committed to managing a vast agrarian bureaucracy.

By the time Serov died just over fifty years later, Russia’s superpower status had receded in the face of competition and challenges from a modernizing Western world that in many ways left Russia behind. Dominated by the abolition of serfdom in 1863, Serov’s prime working years – indeed almost all of his mature years – coincided not only with the purposeful and ambitious modernization of many of Russia’s institutions, but also with the beginning of the Empire’s consequent urbanization, industrialization, and nearly complete integration into European cultural life. The old regime’s strictly defined social categories were breaking down, changing, and fading away. Russia’s delayed industrial revolution was turning its cities into manufacturing emporia of international stature. The technological implications of this transformation fundamentally altered how Russians traveled, communicated, understood themselves, and engaged with each other and the world. A rising generation of intellectuals was angrily questioning the legitimacy of state power in ways that portended revolutionary trauma. Millions of ordinary people were entertaining aspirations toward better futures that would have been unthinkable at the time of Serov’s birth. A sliver of reactionary authoritarians was left with the impossible task of arresting or reversing these changes.

This book agrees with the authors of recent biographical studies of noteworthy, if not exactly famous, figures in Imperial Russian history that following the arc of an individual’s life can reveal kaleidoscopic truths about his surroundings in addition to the factual details of his more limited personal story.¹⁹ The musicologist Gerald Abraham observed that Serov occupied an oddly ambiguous position in the history of Russian culture.²⁰ It is precisely because his position – and his position – was so odd and ambiguous, however, that he emerges in unusually great relief as a medium for understanding both his cultural milieu and the larger world around him. Although Stasov refrained from writing Serov’s biography, he nevertheless recommended reading Serov’s letters because they present not only a picture of his own internal life, but also a complete perspective of Russian musical life in the 1840s and 1850s.²¹ As his son Valentin Serov’s most recent biographer put it in relation to his intriguing life during a subsequent transformational period – Valentin lived from 1865 to 1911 – the insights gained in learning the full story, personal as well as artistic, presented … not just a ‘history of Russian art’ but a far broader panorama.²² The pages that follow will argue that this is at least as true for an appreciation of his father’s life.

A fundamental premise of this book, therefore, is that Alexander Serov’s life and times present not merely a biographical account of one individual’s admittedly interesting life, but access to a cultural topography of the Russian Empire useful for understanding the totality of its experience at a time of immense transformation. As my late doctoral dissertation adviser Richard Stites wrote in the last book he published before his untimely death, the widening of the social ambit of all the arts from the 1830s onward … generated a parallel breadth of vision and self-discovery by individual creative figures of inner forces, ambivalences, and psychological tensions that laid the foundations of Russia’s greatest era of artistic creativity.²³ Rather than the stasis that much traditional scholarship located in the middle decades of Russia’s nineteenth century, the period’s cultural currents were instead forever flowing and anticipated the great changes of the postemancipation period.²⁴ Serov was born early enough to experience that social ambit as it expanded, and he died late enough to witness a fair number of the great changes that began to unfold in the 1860s. While his individual biography might qualify as a microhistory, the breadth of his experiences and impressions refract information that credits his life story with relevance on a macro level.

Another argument presented here is that although Serov’s creative output was for the most part limited to his three operas, they nevertheless played a considerably greater role in the evolution of Russia’s cultural life than his many antagonists and the scholars who followed them were willing to admit. By experimenting with stylistic innovations rooted in Russia’s emerging musical tradition or adapted from the increasingly influential European cultural universe, Serov’s œuvre bridged the early efforts of Glinka and Dargomyzhskii to the flowering of musical life that blossomed in the luxuriant universe of Russia’s Silver Age and beyond. While Serov’s three operas – Judith (1863), Rogneda (1865), and The Power of the Fiend (1871) – all appeared in the longer transformational era described above, their premieres occurred within a shorter and unusually tumultuous eight-year period during which Russian intellectuals faced challenging questions of how to approach political and social change, how to articulate their nation’s identity in relation to its past as well as its neighbors, and how to balance the development of Russia’s national culture alongside the older and highly alluring cultures of Western Europe.

The belief that the West overshadowed, outperformed, and intruded upon Russia’s unique path of develop raised the additional question, important for our consideration, of how Russia could define itself in national cultural terms through the newly accessible medium of music. Academic study of Russian music remains so thoroughly dominated by discussion of its national authenticity that it seems inescapable. Since most of the cultural figures we will encounter, including Serov, thought very deeply about this question, this is perhaps understandable. Their imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet intellectual heirs have continued to dwell upon it down to the present day. As a natural consequence, Western valuations of Russian culture, especially music, have long assessed its representative works in terms of national authenticity.²⁵ Taruskin denounced this circumscribing tendency nearly twenty years ago with the stinging cri de coeur: If ‘How Russian is it?’ is your critical question, then however the question is answered, and however the answer is valued, you have consigned Russian composers to a ghetto.²⁶

Despite Taruskin’s admonition, musicologists and scholars in other cultural fields continue to churn out study after study of works that revolve around what he called the baleful national question, often while professing to move away from it or claiming to answer it with an absolving degree of nuance or qualification.²⁷ Rutger Helmers’s recent study, though praised by Taruskin for its erudition, even tentatively answers his taboo question with its very title, Not Russian Enough.²⁸ Although Helmers admits that Russianness was constructed, unstable, and subject to continuous negotiation, he nevertheless strives to put the role of nationalism in the Russian opera world into better perspective while criticizing Western scholars who insist on and fetishize what he believes they see as the uniqueness of an exotic Russian culture.²⁹ It should be of little surprise that Taruskin threw up his hands in more recent reflections on his original critique: Russians, and we who study them, he wrote in 2011, will always remain confined to the ghetto, resist though we may.³⁰ Admitting that even his own work had at best, merely added a new wing to the ghetto,³¹ he included himself in his indictment of his subfield.

As an historian who makes no claim to be a musicologist, I do not seek place within this confining debate. Those interested in detailed musical analyses of Serov’s operas can, coincidentally, find them in Taruskin’s earliest body of work: they comprise a significant portion of his doctoral dissertation, which he adapted into his first book.³² This study will address approaches to the national question when relevant, but only as one of many considerations useful to its larger purpose of situating Serov’s life and career in Russia’s evolution toward modernity. I would argue that a detailed study situated within this larger context reveals that practical, financial, commercial, aesthetic, and, often, purely opportunistic considerations shaped, informed, and sometimes even trumped strictly formulaic approaches to national content, and that determining the authenticity of such content depended on an interlocking matrix of other factors. In this way, the crafting of Serov’s operas navigated the emerging landscape that would define the contours of the commercial arts culture in the Empire’s final decades. In my first book, I concluded that this arts culture both reflected and helped create the broader civil society that was sinking luxuriant roots into Russian soil.³³ The present study aims to illustrate the early stages of that growth through the life and career of one man. Indeed, our ability to observe how this process functioned by studying only one life testifies to its potency.

This book takes a neat progression of decades as its organizational basis for the purely coincidental reason that they opened and closed distinct chapters in Serov’s life. Stasov’s unrealized biographical project noted this clear-cut periodization and logically recommended it as the basis of a future biography.³⁴ Chapter 1 begins, as Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts instructed, with the beginning. The opening chapter discusses the origins of Serov’s family, its rise from the lower ranks of the Moscow merchantry to relatively high-ranking officialdom and intermarriage with a distinguished immigrant minority family of German-Jewish converts to Lutheranism. Exploring Serov’s childhood and education at the Imperial Law School reveals much about how bureaucratic families not only saw themselves but how they sought to perpetuate their tentative and evolving sense of identity and status. In Serov’s case, that meant a parentally mandated legal education followed by what his father hoped would be a distinguished professional career in the bureaucracy. An accompanying emphasis on music, both at home in childhood and later as a component of the Law School’s pedagogical approach, began to draw Serov in a different direction, however.

Chapter 2, which begins with Serov’s graduation from the Imperial Law School in 1840, lays out a quintessentially modern problem: how to balance the creative impulse with a general desire for self-actualized cultural accomplishment with the practical dilemma of having to earn a living through unrelated professional work. As Serov’s life unfolded, his career as an official of the Russian Empire’s sprawling judicial bureaucracy caused him to suffer from these competing and mutually exclusive demands on his time, energy, and spirit. His path through these difficult years exposed him to the grinding drudgery of official life during the reign of Nicholas I, but also gave him access to the cultural life of St. Petersburg as it began to blossom in the period under review. Serov’s unexpected assignment to Crimea in 1845, furthermore, brought him into contact with the East as it was defined in the Russian context, with its layering of new ideas, and with his first love, who augmented and facilitated the continuation of his creative career.

Buttressed by that support, in 1850 Serov decided to make an exclusive move in the creative direction, which is the subject of Chapter 3. Then, as now, indulgence in artistic creativity offered a tantalizing alternative to the stifling routine of the office job. Once again, the rising public culture associated with modernity intervened by accommodating a space, however modest and financially unrewarding, for Serov’s musical journalism and other cultural projects. That he failed to derive a living from his work as what we would now modishly call a creative – although he functioned as one on a national and sometimes even an international level – returned him to the original dilemma of having to balance his artistic interests with an office job. Here, too, his life struck yet another modern chord in that he found support from people who valued his cultural explorations as a means and reflection of their own self-actualization and desire to promote the public good. What the old world called patronage – terminology Serov naturally used – now migrated toward the more modern concept of philanthropy, while the vocation of an artist began to resemble a profession more than a craft.

Along with Serov’s persistent restlessness, beginning in 1860 his rising confidence launched him on the path to becoming what he had always wanted to be: a composer. Chapter 4, the longest in the book since the final decade of Serov’s life was also by far the best documented and most complex, explores his brief reign as Russia’s most successful composer. The 1860s saw the premieres of Serov’s first two operas, Judith (1863) and Rogneda (1865), and the realization of most of his final opera, the posthumous Power of the Fiend (1871). This final decade of Serov’s life saw him at his most productive, but his results reveal a great deal about Russia as it traversed one of its most transformative decades. As much as Serov’s operas reflected his creative imagination, they further revealed, informed, and reacted to dramatic shifts in cultural sensibilities, philosophical values, conceptions of national identity, the refinement of audience tastes, and the increasingly grubby commercial aspects of modern theater.

Serov’s union in 1863 with his young student Valentina Bergman added a frisson of generational conflict not only as the couple’s interests and perspectives clashed, but also as they harmonized. It is essential to observe, as studies of this era often do, that Russia was progressing through a period defined by that nondescript and overused word flux. The very fact that Russian society was in a state of confusing and unpredictable transitions is itself perhaps one of modernity’s most distinguishing manifestations. The uncertainties, insecurities, and other indefinite qualities that characterize societies in flux radiate modernity through the prism of dynamism and flexibility. Serov experienced them with every bit as much verve, enthusiasm, and hardship as the next generation did in Russia’s Silver Age, the era during which his son Valentin would become such an important figure as a leading visual artist.

By way of conclusion, the final chapter opens with the posthumous premiere of Serov’s last opera, The Power of the Fiend (1871). It describes attempts to establish a legacy, or at least to maintain an echo, of the man and his work as Russia continued to evolve into a modern state characterized by an actively reformist public spirit, an increasingly durable civil society, and a resistant autocratic government that had no choice but to try – not always unsuccessfully – to negotiate the Empire’s further development. A coda to this discussion addresses Serov’s appropriation as an intellectual as well as a composer by the Soviet regime as an avatar of the realism that it wished to instill in its ideologically mandated socialist realist aesthetic. Projecting important elements of that ethos back into the Great Russian cultural past highlighted Serov’s usefulness as a figure whose experiences could potentially authenticate Soviet cultural concepts and their authority over a society whose deep origins were very much a part of Serov’s experience. This is no less true in Russia today.

¹ Serov to Sofiia Diu-Tur, November 5, 1859, in Pis’ma Aleksandra Nikolaevicha Serova k ego sestre S. N. Diu-Tur (1845-1861 gg.), ed. Nik[olai] Findeizen (St. Petersburg: Findeizen, 1896), 228. Original italics.

² On state administration in mid-nineteenth century Russia, see W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982).

³ Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his brother Modest also graduated from the Imperial Law School, as did Serov’s contemporary, close friend, and eventual nemesis, the critic Vladimir Stasov. Other Russian cultural luminaries who completed legal educations included the arts impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the painter Vasilii Kandinskii, the composers Igor’ Stravinskii and Nikolai Cherepnin, and the directors Vsevolod Meierkhol’d, Nikolai Evreinov, and Aleksandr Tairov.

⁴ Vladimir Stasov, Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art: Our Music, in Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Praeger, 1968), 85.

⁵ Ibid., 85.

⁶ César Cui, La musique en Russie (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1880), 57-58.

⁷ V. V. Yastrebtsev, Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 125.

⁸ F. M. Tolstoi, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov, 1820-1871: Vospominaniia F. M. Tolstogo, Russkaia starina (hereafter RS), 2 (1874), 341-342.

⁹ D. I. Lobanov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov i ego sovremenniki (Biograficheskii ocherk) (St. Petersburg: Department udelov, 1889), 8.

¹⁰ K. I. Zvantsov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov v 1857-1871 gg. Vospominaniia o nem i ego pis’ma, RS, 8 (1888), 346-348.

¹¹ Rosa Newmarch, The Russian Opera (New York: Dutton, 1914), 154, 158.

¹² Ibid., 160.

¹³ Richard Taruskin, "Opera and Drama in Russia: The Case of Serov’s Judith," Journal of the American Musicological Society, 32: 1 (1979), 79.

¹⁴ Stuart Campbell, ed. and trans., Russians on Russian Music, 1830-1880: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 220.

¹⁵ Stephen Walsh, Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure (New York: Knopf, 2013), 112.

¹⁶ John W. Freeman, untitled review of Serov’s Judith published in Recordings, Opera News, 56: 13 (March 14, 1992), 34.

¹⁷ Tchaikovsky to Nadezhda von Meck, September 21, 1880, in Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, ‘Beloved Friend’: The Story of Tchaikowsky and Nadejda von Meck (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1937), 387.

¹⁸ V. V. Stasov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov. Materialy dlia ego biografii, in Stasov, Stat’i o muzyke v piati vypuskakh, 5 vols. (Moscow: Muzyka, 1974), II, 295.

¹⁹ See for example Michael Khodarkovsky, Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), a life of the Russified officer and defector Semen Atarshchikov during Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus, and Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), a study of the Baltic German soldier Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who became one of the nastier anti-communist White Russian generals.

²⁰ Gerald Abraham, Essays on Russian and East European Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 40.

²¹ Stasov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov, II, 295.

²² Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Valentin Serov: Portraits of Russia’s Silver Age (Evanstson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 3.

²³ Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 9.

²⁴ Ibid., 426.

²⁵ For a specific study of the world of opera, see Paul du Quenoy, ‘In the Most Uncompromising Russian Style’: The Russian Repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera, 1910-1947, Revolutionary Russia, 28: 1 (2015).

²⁶ Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvii.

²⁷ See for example Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a similar study in another art form, see Catherine A. Schuler, Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). Taruskin uses the adjective baleful in Richard Taruskin, Non-Nationalists and Other Nationalists, Nineteenth-Century Music, 35: 2 (2011), 132.

²⁸ Rutger Helmers, Not Russian Enough?: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).

²⁹ Ibid., 4, 12, 15.

³⁰ Richard Taruskin, "Crowd, Mob, and Nation in Boris Godunov: What Did Musorgsky Think, and Does It Matter," Journal of Musicology, 28: 2 (2011), 144.

³¹ Idem, Non-Nationalists and Other Nationalists, 132.

³² Idem, Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), 33-248. The middle chapters (2, 3, and 4) discuss Serov’s three operas sequentially.

³³ Paul du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009).

³⁴ Stasov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov, II, 296.

Chapter I

The Youth, 1820-1840

Alexander Serov entered the world in Russia’s stately imperial capital, St. Petersburg, on January 11, 1820. His birth came toward the troubled end of the reign of Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825). Placed on the throne of his murdered father Paul I (r. 1796-1801) at the tender age of twenty-three, Tsar Alexander began his rule as what counted for a liberal. Raised under the control of his grandmother Catherine the Great (r. 1762-1796) and tutored by the Swiss philosophe Frédéric-César de La Harpe, he immediately reversed many of his father’s nastier policies and loosened harsh restrictions on thought, expression, association, travel, and even dress. Alexander I entrusted high state responsibilities to a clique of like-minded young noblemen, whom he jokingly called the Committee of Public Safety, the name of the body that had ruled France under a self-proclaimed reign of terror during the most radical phase of that country’s revolutionary era. At a time when the radicalism of the French Revolution had made constitution a bad word throughout Europe, Alexander relied on the meritocratic talents of a humble priest’s son, Mikhail Speranskii, to pursue a constitutional project for his Empire, officially an autocracy since the sixteenth-century reign of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1533-1584).

Like every other European power, the Russia of Alexander I was drawn into the long, bloody conflict arising from the French Revolution and dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Military reversals early in Alexander’s reign yielded to a short-lived cold peace, which Napoleon ended by invading Russia in 1812. The French ruler’s disastrous campaign of that year compelled Russia to take a leading in role in the coalition that finally defeated him and sent him into exile. As the European powers set about restoring Europe’s Old Regime and containing a suspect France, Russia stood as the continent’s greatest land power. Its authority was girded by a massive, battle hardened military so strong that its erstwhile allies began to worry about its long-term potential for aggression and conquest.

In one of Russian history’s many paradoxes, victory and power brought little comfort to the Empire’s ruler. After 1812, when the culmination of Enlightenment thought seemed to have brought the biggest army yet known in history to quarters in the Kremlin, Alexander I abandoned the idealism of his early reign. The Tsar banished constitutionalism from official discourse and dispatched Speranskii, already out of favor even before Napoleon’s invasion, to govern distant Siberia. He assigned responsibility for education to the chief state official responsible for religion. Dreams of creating a permanent military caste drawn from Russia’s serf population dominated the thinking of Alexander’s new favorite, the reactionary Count Aleksei Arakcheev, an artillery expert who had risen to become Minister of War. A web of informants and police officials scoured Russian society for signs of disloyalty and conspiracy. Fears of revolutionary contamination reached such a height that in 1821 the Tsar refused to receive fellow Orthodox Christian representatives of Greece’s rebellious national movement, then seeking his support against the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire, which held strategic territory, the all-important Straits that offered egress into the Mediterranean, millions of Christian subjects, and the Byzantine imperial legacy that Russian rulers had long coveted and emulated. By the time of Alexander I’s death in 1825, he was a haunted, fearful man, immune to ideas of reform and increasingly withdrawn into an impenetrable realm of devout faith.

Little is known of the more remote antecedents of the Serov family, but it was not of especially lofty origins.¹ The name derives from "seryi, which simply means gray." By the reign of Catherine the Great, the Serovs had become established in the lower ranks of the merchant class (kupechestvo) of Moscow, Russia’s ancient spiritual capital.² Families in such circumstances counted among the favored few non-nobles whose sons could pursue higher education to prepare them for the professions, bureaucratic service, and the advancement these fields of endeavor offered.³ It was thus that the Serov family, in the person of Alexander Serov’s father Nikolai Ivanovich, first made itself visible to history.

Nikolai Ivanovich Serov received a university legal education and became a respected official in the Imperial Ministry of Finance, where he spent his entire career. He thus fell into a rising category of bureaucratic servitors who were committed to that career and no other and who seldom had any other significant source of income.⁴ Like all of Russia’s government ministries, which were only created in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Ministry of Finance was a new and self-consciously modern institution ushered in by the reforms of Alexander I’s early reign. The job required the elder Serov to leave his ancestral Moscow for the seat of government in St. Petersburg, Russia’s northern and more European capital built by Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725).

Nikolai Ivanovich was a Renaissance man, drawn to the fashionable literary, scientific, and philosophical currents of the Age of Enlightenment. His son later described him as a strict, serious person who had received the most brilliant education possible at the time.⁵ A full blooded follower of Voltaire and free-thinking devotee of that great atheist,⁶ Nikolai Ivanovich inevitably faced obstacles to career advancement in the conservative Imperial bureaucracy. In this he was perhaps an unwitting victim of the prevailing educational system, which followed a philosophical approach that sought to impart universal truths of political life that would breed an enlightened citizenry and officialdom.⁷ In the increasingly reactionary reign of Alexander I, putting such an education into practice could only carry liabilities.

For much of Nikolai Serov’s career, Russia’s Finance Ministry was led by the archconservative Count Egor von Kankrin, a martinet whose reactionary principles led him to oppose railroad construction and government support for industrial development because he feared their potential to disrupt the Empire’s traditional agrarian-based socio-economic order. Nikolai Ivanovich’s natural acumen nevertheless allowed him to rise through the ranks of the Finance Ministry’s bureaucracy despite the political suspicions and official disfavor he likely encountered. Before retiring due to illness and frustration with Kankrin, he rose to the rank (chin) of actual state councilor, the fourth highest level in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great in 1722. Advancement to this level of the state bureaucratic service, equivalent to the rank of major general in the army, was more than enough to confer hereditary nobility on its holder and his family.

Despite Nikolai Ivanovich’s achievements, Alexander’s youth was haunted by his father’s belief that he could have risen even higher, perhaps to a ministerial portfolio had the prevailing political ethos been less authoritarian. The elder Serov was bitterly aware of the limitations the system imposed upon him. The whole tragedy of his life resulted from this missed career,⁸ Alexander recounted to the woman who would become his wife. It left his father an unhappy man who lamented the waste of his prodigious, refined, and perceptive intellect⁹ on the petty tasks of officialdom. "I remember his often expressed and energetic dissatisfaction with his fate and the occasional sharp, cruel remarks he let slip