Frustrated in his work and disenchanted with his life, especially
the moribund state of his marriage, Mixail Glinka abandoned the
capital in 1840 to flee to the peace of the
countryside. Coincidentally that year he published, in collaboration
with Nestor Kukol&soft;nik, a collection of twelve romances
appropriately titled late Romanticism
in Russia. The words and
music, with some exceptions, bear the hallmarks of the period:
false
elegance and bombast. And Kukol&soft;nik has even
contrived to include traces of Official Nationality in one of the
songs; not mere Russians, but Russia's Orthodox people manage to have
lots of fun as they merrily ride along the clean, wide fields to
Carskoe Selo on the first Russian train known as the
The friendship between Glinka and Kukol&soft;nik stands for another
aspect of the cultural life of Russia's capital in the 1830s and
1840s, the phenomenon Nicholas Riasanovsky calls Russia's
Bohemia,
whose central meeting place was
Kukol&soft;nik's Wednesday salons.
The friendship that
led to musical collaboration also contributed greatly to the end of
Glinka's marriage (as some allege). The memoirs both Glinka and
Kukol&soft;nik left behind provide a sometimes conflicting account of
the friendship and the collaboration. And in what one might call
meta-criticism,
Kukol&soft;nik audaciously reviews