(crosspost from the "What are you currently reading?" thread; too much fun to let it be buried there.)
This must be the most defamatory book I've ever read about anything and anyone.
What does one learn from it? Well, many lovely things such as:
1. All along the 19th century, but with roots in its deepest history, the Russian society was a stultifying, soul-poisoning mixture of madhouse and prison, marked by extreme vicioussness, depravity and perversion of both mind and body in all social strata.
2. All Russian composers from
Glinka to
Medtner, with the possible but improbable exception of
Borodin but including
Scriabin, were:
(a) emotionally repressed / immature / unstable;
(b) unable or unwilling to initiate, nurture and preserve healthy relationships with women, be it as wives, mistresses or friends;
(b) either very effeminate or aggresively mysoginistic, both instances betokening either latent / repressed / inveterate homosexuality or impotence, in many cases probably both;
(c) heavy drinkers (all things considered, though, this appears as their lesser, even endearing, vice) and heavy masturbators;
(c) damned if they did, damned if they didn't:
Mussorgsky was freakish for drinking himself to death, but so was
Balakirev for being a teetotaller;
Mussorgsky (again; for Bowers he is clearly the poster boy for everything that was physically repugnant and morally repulsive in Imperial Russia) is chastised for willingly mingling with, and greatly enjoying the company of, the lowest scums, while
Taneyev is reprimanded for being austere, polite and pudic.
3. The famous piano teacher
Nikolai Zverev was actually an inveterate pederast for whom the piano lessons were only so many opportunities to pervert his innocent pupils (among his victims,
Scriabin himself but also
Rachmaninoff,
Igumnov and
Goldenweiser).
And all this marvelous stuff is scattered through the introductory chapters only. I guess, and expect, that the chapters dedicated to
Scriabin proper will reveal more information.
One cannot help but wonder: how could such miserable, wretched and (depending on the readers' own moral stance) either despicable or pitiful human beings, fit rather for the mental asylum than for the salons, social circles and concert halls where they spent their lives, have composed at all, let alone compose such music as they have composed.
Seriously now, the book is funny (pun) in its own peculiar way.
