Let’s Have More Borodin

LET’SHAVEMORE BORODIN I found the Kauffman-Bumpassarticle on Aleksandr Borodin, published in your last issue (Leonardo21, No. 4, 429436, 1988),extremely interesting . The authors covered their title material thoroughly and left me with two questions which I think could be the stimulus for more research into the life and work of this fascinating man. The questions are “Whateffect did Borodin’s illegitimacy have on him?”and “Whatinfluence did his wife Ekaterina have?” The questions may not be unrelated . Rimsky-Korsakov has told us that Borodin referred to his mother always as ‘auntie’when everyone else knew the true relationship and Borodin knew that they knew. We know that illegitimacy can have strange consequences . Edward Frankland is another chemist whose carefully concealed roots have recently been revealed . La Combe, mentioned in the Leonardo article, has commented on Borodin’s quest for ‘sentimentand emotion’ in his music. More evidence on this point may not be too far to seek. It is in Borodin’s relations with women that we might seek other aspects of his character and guess their causes. Biographers hint at Borodin’s pre- and extra-marital dalliances , and others again tell of RimskyKorsakov ’s‘straight-laced’wife and Mussorgsky’shopeless passions for women and the bottle. Was there something sexually ambivalent about ‘TheFive’and their mentor, Mili Balakirev? Borodin has said that he was first attracted to his pianist wife when he discovered that she had perfect pitch. After this, there is no more talk of her musical abilities, although much is made of her lifestyle (see RimskyKorsakov ’sautobiography) and of the fact that she and her husband lived apart for much of their married life. The letters that passed between them have been published, but only in Russian, their contents thus denied to most of the scholarly world. They are variously drawn on to illuminate Aleksandr ’s life, but what of Ekaterina? Did she offer comment on his work or did he listen only to ‘The Five’? And what of her playing-was it a life of pianissimo after marriage? I do hope that the interest being shown in Borodin 100years after his death will encourage further study of him and his wife. The raw material is available and awaitsbut the scholar with command of Cyrillic. IAN D. RAE Monash University Melbourne, Australia REPLY TO IAN D. RAE: BORODIN’S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN Ian Rae’s letter raises two intriguing questions about Aleksandr Profir’evich Borodin regarding the effect of his illegitimacyand the influence of his wife-both related to his relations with women. Unfortunately, little information is available in English. Although the Borodins had no children, Aleksandr adopted several orphans (all girls)-Elizaveta (Lisa) Gavrilovna Balaneva, Elena A. Guseva,and Gania Litvineko-who lived with them. The first married Aleksandr Pavlovich Dianin, Borodin ’s student and successor at the institute, and became the mother of Sergei Aleksandrovich Dianin, Borodin ’sbiographer (N. A. Figurovskii and Yu. I. Solov’ev,Borodin: A Chemist ’s Biography, translated by Charlene Steinberg and George B. Kauffman, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1988, pp. 106, 118).During the summer of 1868,22-year-old Anna Nikolaevna Kalinina, the sister of the composer Nikolai Nikolaevich Lodyzhenskii, became infatuated with the 34year-old Borodin, which aroused Ekaterina’sjealousy. Borodin told his wife of the affair in a letter dated 25 October 1868: “Myfeelings toward her do not alter the way I feel toward you, and I am giving only that which I cannot give to you; it is nothing more than that ‘feeling of mine towards children’.’’ Anna’s influence led Borodin to compose the songs, “The Sea Princess”, “My Songs Are Filled with Poison”, and “The False Note” (ibid., p. 60). another member of ‘TheFive’ appear in Ken Russell’s 1970 motion picture, The Music Lwers, loosely based on the life of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (played by Richard Chamberlain). In the film, the mother (Maureen Pryor) of Antonina Miliukova,Tchaikovsky ’s estranged wife (GlendaJackson ), has initiated her daughter into a life of prostitution by leading her to Oddly enough, Borodin and believe that her ‘lovers’are famous Russian composers. Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov appears to the fanfare from Scheherazadebut is obviously not...