In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia.
His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and the
savage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of the
conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon of
court costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was of
pure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russian
maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly the
imprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently
the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and
color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar
fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the
savage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is
distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has
none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep
humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It
has none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none of
Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness. It
is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous
blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a
singularly fine romantic fervor.
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