I sat down at the piano and played through Pictures at an Exhibition (well, the easy parts of it) as an act of contrition for today’s episode. Mussorgsky did not have a happy life, dying an underappreciated, diseased alcoholic whose own supporters viewed his works as novel but horrendously sloppy and mistake-ridden. For a really awesome recording of the Pictures, by the by, check out Sviatoslav Richter’s Sofia recording from 1958. It is way rad.
Oh, and in two short days, on August 7, my brand new comic, The Vocate, will launch its first episode, so drop on by! It’s about a fellow whose profession is doing odd jobs for minor deities and kicks off towards the beginning of the Roman Empire, as polytheism, his bread and butter, is starting to shudder. It’s like Frederick, except with mythology and religion in place of history and differential equations. It updates every Saturday, so please oh please read it lots!
And here in California a bit of history all its own was made today, it seems.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Peter the Great. What draws me to him is largely what draws me to Frederick – the mass of contradictions oozing about under his skin. The starry eyed innocence of his pleasure in mechanical devices and building things with his own hands at one moment, and the cynical mass destruction of human life in the next. In his biography of Charles XII, Voltaire summed up what was for him the essence of Peter the Great:
“He (Peter) compelled the young nobles of his realm to travel in order to educate themselves and bring back to Russia the polish they had acquired abroad. I have met young Russians who are extremely witty and knowledgeable (!). This is how a single man has changed the greatest empire in the world. It is appalling that this reformer of men should have lacked the principal virtue, humanity. Many virtues as he had, he was bestial in his pleasures, ferocious in his behavior, and barbarous in his vengeance. He civilized his subjects, but was a savage himself.”
– Count Dolby von Luckner
