“Genius and evildoing are two things that do not combine,” Mozart remarks in Mozart and Salieri, Alexander Pushkin’s short play written in 1832. The Mozart of Pushkin’s play is an impure genius. He does not see perfection in himself or seek perfection in others. He has a natural humility and earthiness. On his way to visit his friend and fellow composer Antonio Salieri, Mozart hears a blind violinist playing one of his melodies in a tavern, and to Salieri’s irritation Mozart brings the violinist along with him. He wants this street musician to perform for Salieri. Mozart is enamored of the blind violinist’s rude art, leaving it to Salieri to spell out his disdain: “No. I don’t find it funny when some worthless dauber/makes smears and drips on Raphael’s Madonna,/ I don’t find it funny when some vulgar showman/ reels off parody that dishonors Dante.” For Salieri, the very point of genius is the escape from impurity that it enables. “You, Mozart, are a god,” Salieri declares, “and you don’t know it.” In this play Salieri is so consumed by envy that he poisons Mozart. Too refined to tolerate smears or drips on a Raphael painting or to suffer through a parody of Dante, Salieri becomes a murderer. Whereas Mozart, already writing his Requiem at the behest of a mysterious black-clad visitor, is human enough to be mortal. Pushkin’s Mozart believes in genius no less than Salieri does. Artists are not godlike for Mozart, though they “form a priesthood seeing only beauty,” and the members of this priesthood “are but few.” Musing about this small priesthood, Mozart advances his thesis about genius — that “genius and evildoing do not combine.” Salieri and Mozart diverge in the degree of their talent, but they diverge more fundamentally in the ethical tenor of their talent, a distinction mirrored in Salieri’s homicidal jealousy and in Mozart’s affection for the blind violinist, which is his love for his audience or for humanity, of which the actual Mozart was such a stupendous benefactor. Surely Pushkin must have seen himself in Mozart: an artist not so pure as to be inhuman and no snobbish connoisseur of Raphael and Dante (like Salieri), but a poet of innately moral genius. He belonged to the priesthood seeing only beauty and who, by creating beauty, could not be involved in evildoing. To complete the affinity between author and subject, Russian poet and Austrian composer, Pushkin died at the age of thirty-seven, two years older than Mozart had been at the time of his death. Pushkin’s global following is smaller than Mozart’s, but his posthumous fame is certainly Mozart-like in Russia. Outside of contemporary Russia, very little of Mozart’s angelic innocence accrues to Pushkin. In an essay in The New Yorker called “Reading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War,” the writer Elif Batuman episodically addresses the careers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but she keeps circling back to Pushkin. She describes a movement known as Pushkinopad, “Pushkin fall,” which began “sweeping Ukraine [in April 2022], resulting in the dismantling of dozens of Pushkin statues.” In ways she herself had not recognized before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “the Pushkin who championed individual freedom was always alternating with the Pushkin who celebrated the [Russian] Empire.” Throughout Batuman’s essay, Pushkin’s art tends to melt into “the interests of the Russian Empire.” She notes that Dostoevsky’s speech at the unveiling of a Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880 “is quoted on the Russkiy Mir Foundation’s web site.” Russkiy Mir is a Russian government initiative intimately connected to the war in Ukraine, to Vladimir Putin’s notion that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, and to the Russian government’s efforts to snuff out Ukrainian language and culture. Pushkin’s Mozart has a purity that Pushkin himself does not possess, although the historical Mozart was never free from political appropriation. Together with Bach and Beethoven, Nazi Germany upheld Mozart as an example of German cultural superiority. Pushkin has the distinction of having been instrumentalized by imperial Russia, by the Soviet Union, and by post-Soviet Russia. Nor is this, in Batuman’s view, an accident of fate. The politicization stems from Pushkin’s literature. Complicit in the spread of Russian imperialism, Pushkin is anything but pure, and his impurity is not the humdrum impurity of his fictional Mozart; it is not broadness of mind or closeness to the people. Batuman does not dispute Pushkin’s genius, and she does not argue against reading or teaching Russian literature, but she comes down on the opposite side of the argument from Pushkin’s Mozart or (possibly) from Pushkin himself. Genius and evildoing are two things that can go together. (Batuman’s essay is a kind of apologia for her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a puckish and entirely apolitical celebration of Russian literature published some ten years after Putin came to power. In 2023, she suddenly writes to register her discomfort with Pushkin and with Russian literature in general, with its newly discovered political impurity, or, as Batuman might put it, its old impurity suddenly perceived.) Scrutinizing the terrible uses to which great art can be put is a necessary exercise for lovers of beauty. “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin famously declared. Whether or not every document of civilization is simultaneously a document of barbarism, civilization and barbarism are certainly intertwined. Brutal dictators have had their favorite painters and writers — Hitler’s outsize love of Rembrandt, Stalin’s studied love of novels and especially of poetry. Empires have always projected themselves forward through art, recognizing instruments of power where others see only beauty. Even when untouched by the political powers that be, most works of art and documents of civilization betray opinions and prejudices. In antebellum America, passages from Aristotle and the Bible were deployed to justify slavery; Aristotle was a defender of slavery, and the Bible does not always
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