The feeling for comedy which is to be found in many of the songs is not missing in the stage work. Moussorgsky loved Gogol, set his Le Mariage to music (only one act) and savoured the salty humour of the great writer. But the composer has his tragic side, and therein he reminds me of Dostoievsky--both men died during the same year--who but Dostoievsky, if he had been a composer, could have written the malediction scene in Boris? As a matter of fact he did write a play on the same historical subject, but it has disappeared. There are many other contacts with Dostoievsky--intense Slavophilism, adoration of Russia; its very soil is sacred; carelessness as to the externals of their art--a Chinese asymmetry is present in their architectonic; they both excel in portraying humour, broad, vulgar, uproarious, outrageous, reckless humour; and also in exposing the profundities of the Russian soul, especially the soul racked by evil and morbid thoughts. Dostoievsky said: "The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian soul is a dark place...." The obsession of the abnormal is marked in novelist and composer. They are revolutionists, but in the heaven of the insurgent there are many mansions. (Beethoven--a letter to Zmeskell--wrote: "Might is the morality of men who distinguish themselves above others. It is my morality, anyhow.") Dostoievsky and Moussorgsky were not unlike temperamentally. Dostoievsky always repented in haste only to sin again at leisure; with Moussorgsky it was the same. Both men suffered from some sort of moral lesion. Dostoievsky was an epileptic, and the nature of Moussorgsky's "mysterious nervous ailment" is unknown to me; possibly it was a mild or masked epilepsy. Moussorgsky was said to have been a heavy drinker--his biographer speaks of him as being "ravaged by alcohol"--a failing not rare in Russia. The "inspissated gloom" of his work, its tenebrous gulfs and musical vertigoes are true indices of his morbid pathology. He was of a pious nature, as was Dostoievsky; but he might have subscribed to the truth of Remy de Gourmont's epigram: "Religion est l'hopital de l'amour." Love, however, does not play a major role in his life or art, yet it permeates both, in a sultry, sensual manner.