For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his
being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the
great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for
gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all
his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells:
"Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will be torn
from thee. Neither thy past glory nor thy wisdom can save thee. Thou
wilt know what it is to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears of
the hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this world." It is as
though he had heard that cry incessantly from a million throats, as
though it had tolled in his ears like a bourdon until it informed him
quite, and suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is as
though his being had been opened entirely in orientation upon the vast,
sunless stretches of the world, and distended in the agony of taking up
into himself the knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is the
countless defeated millions that live again in his art. It is they who
speak with his voice. Better even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky might
have said:
"Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"--
It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, had
relinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, his
joy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession might
reach the ears of the living.
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