Dostoevsky and Opera: Prokofiev's The Gambler

Abstract

F, as is often maintained, great literature is rarely transferred successfully to the operatic stage, someone forgot to tell the Russians. Virtually all the classics of the Russian operatic repertory are based on works of Russian literature that were recognized as masterpieces in their own right before being transformed into librettos. The stories, fairy tales, and long narrative poems of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), often called Russia's Shakespeare, inspired many Russian operatic composers: Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov), Tchaikovsky (Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades), Rimsky-Korsakov (Tsar Saltan and The Golden Cockerel), Glinka (Ruslan and Ludmilla) and Dargomyzhsky (The Stone Guest), to name only a few. Not far behind is Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who was a special favorite of RimskyKorsakov (May Night and Christmas Eve). Dmitri Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, comes from a muchloved short story of the same title by Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), a writer still highly regarded in Russia. But conspicuous by their absence are the two titans of nineteenthcentury Russian literature: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Perhaps Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and RimskyKorsakov passed them over because they were their contemporaries. Yet Rimsky-Korsakov did write an opera, The Snow Maiden, based on a play by another well-known contemporary, the playwright Nikolai Ostrovsky (1823-1886). More likely, the enormous scale and complexity of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the huge task of reducing them to manageable and dramatically viable librettos, intimidated the composers. How could one hope to convey in a oneevening opera the epic sweep and abundance of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, or the lengthy philosophical excesses of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment? 96