Stasov, the European conservatories and academies were just bastions of me-

diocrity, which had helped to conrm harmful ideas and tastes in art. They
have created not artists, but only people who crave attaining this or that rank,
or this or that privilege. What he found most distasteful about a conservatory,
however, was that it:
interferes in the most harmful way in the creativity of the artist being trained, ex-
tends its despotic power (from which nothing can protect him) onto the mold and
the form of his works, tries to give to them its own direction, to drive them toward
a quantied academic yardstick, to instill in them its own recognized habits, and,
nally, worst of all, to put its claws into the very understanding of the young artist,
to foist on him opinions about artistic works and their composers from which it is
impossible, or extremely difcult, for a person who has devoted himself to art to
disassociate himself.37

Stasovs language is highly emotive, and by personalizing his arguments he

was being deliberately provocative. Rubinstein had criticized the amateurs
and declared: In Russia there are almost no artist musicians in the usual sense
of this word, but nowhere had he referred to any Russian musician by name.
Yet, within just a few sentences of beginning his article, Stasov had accused Ru-
binstein of being a foreigner, who has nothing in common with our national
roots and our art. By disowning Rubinstein, and depriving him of the right to
an opinion on any matter concerning national art, he was able to reject his ideas
on musical education in Russia. Stasov loathed the notion of a conservatory on
principal because he saw it as a foreign institution foisted onto Russian soil:
Each of us knows how many foreign products have been grafted onto us, and
how few of them have grown. It seems that it is time to stop these graftings,
which have no meaning, and to think about what is really useful and suitable
for our soil and for our national roots.38 There is much that is negative and
unconstructive in Stasovs arguments, and his frankly obscurantist convictions
are simply indicative of a hell-bent determination to ght a corner and to de-
fend at all costs the values of the New Russian School, which he supported with
an all-consuming passion bordering on religious fanaticism. The thought that
the foreigner Rubinstein and his equally foreign patroness might steal a march
on the real Russian school lled him with horror, and he wrote to Balakirev:
Or perhaps you think that I wrote it [the article] to prove critically that Anton
is ridiculous and doesnt know how to write articles. . . . No, the fact is that out
of his zeal for Russia and his stupidity, Anton has started up something whose
repercussions, to my mind, must do dreadful harm. If there is just the slightest
chance, I want to prevent this, or at least to make those people, who, like industri-
ous little ants bustling about and trying to drag the log that the brilliant maestro
has pointed out to them, should stop and think. I want the entire stupid Rubin-
stein camp of Odoyevskys and Yelena Pavlovnas, etc., at least to know what this is
about.39

The issue of the conservatory was becoming dangerously confused with

xenophobic sentiments surrounding Rubinstein. Balakirevs hatred went even

The Founding of the Russian Music Society 93