Kremlin officials accusing America of “blatant Russophobia” and “unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria” haven’t seen New York’s Imperial Theater lately. Its long, narrow lobby, plastered in Soviet constructivist-style propaganda posters, leads to a theater covered completely in red velvet and parquet, after the Small Throne Room of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. Hundreds of paintings of Romanovs and the Russian countryside, and yet more Soviet propaganda, adorn the theater’s gilt-trimmed walls. Actors clad in a mix of cabaret and punk dress walk around chucking boxed pierogi and mock-Fabergé egg shakers at the audience. Vendors sell vodka like peanuts at a ballpark. From curtain rise to call, the vodka, the accordion, the samovars, the snow, and the Hopak dancing never stop.
The New York Times thinks this all gives “the impression that we are all guests sharing a sumptuous drawing room.” But a theater festooned with so much Tsarist portraiture and state-approved “art” might just as well give the impression that you are a guest in a kind of imperial Russian nightmare.
Welcome to Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, Broadway’s new shrine to Russophilia.
Written by Dave Malloy, The Great Comet is an “electropop opera” based on a seventy-page section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In the production, Natasha Rostova (played by Denée Benton), a young Muscovite princess, is engaged to Andrei Bolkonsky, an honorable officer away at war. While awaiting his return she destroys her engagement, her reputation, and her life in a torrid affair with the cad Anatole Kuragin. (The U.S. military has a name for Anatole’s type: “Jody,” the man who stays home while you go to war and helps himself to everything you miss, namely your girlfriend.) In the end the affair fizzles out, the engagement is broken, Andrei sulks away, and Natasha finds redemption in her love for a third man, Pierre Bezukhov (played by platinum-selling recording artist Josh Groban), her spurned fiancé’s friend and an all-around mensch.
Readers of War and Peace will notice the artistic liberties taken: In the novel it is Andrei’s slow, painful death that brings Natasha and Pierre together, and their marriage in the end, while affectionate, is not a Disney climax to a wild love story but the mature resignation of two adults to a stable, less passionate form of love.
But even those who haven’t braved War and Peace will find little in The Great Comet they might have expected, for it is taken from a section of the novel (Volume II, Part V) that isn’t particularly famous. In it, there is no Napoleon, no Alexander I, no General Kutuzov. There is no philosophy of history or theory of warfare, for which the 1,200-page novel is usually known. Indeed, there isn’t a war at all; the show’s opening number begins, “There’s a war going on out there somewhere, and Andrei isn’t here,” and ends, “Chandeliers and caviar, the war can’t touch us here!”
It also happens to be based on one of the most moving parts of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, and it is no wonder Malloy saw in it the potential for an operatic epic. Unfortunately, his vision is not of a timeless human story adapted to song and stage but of cheap melodrama festooned with the aesthetic trappings of a 19th-century Russian club. This American appropriation of a Russian classic is so obsessively Russophilic that one doubts whether Malloy saw any dramatic value in the setting beyond pleasing quirks and trinkets to delight the audience.
The timing of The Great Comet seems just right: The part of War and Peace on which it is based tells the story of a group of well-heeled young people living through a time of great unrest and social change, who begin to lose their sense of moral grounding as the world around them comes undone. It is set in the period of the Napoleonic revolution, which Tolstoy identified as the great turning point in Russian history, and the lens through which Russian spiritual life could best be examined.
Of course, to write about the problems of elites is to subject oneself to criticism, then as now. Responding to the charge that his novel took no notice of “the horrors of serfdom, the immuring of wives, the whipping of adult sons,” and other such brutalities of the age (think Lin-Manuel Miranda’s critics who accuse Hamilton of whitewashing slavery and sexism), Tolstoy wrote in 1868:
In those times, too, people loved, envied, sought truth, virtue, were carried away by passions; there was the same complex mental and moral life, sometimes even more refined than now, among the upper classes.…
To conclude that the prevailing character of that time was brutality is as incorrect as it would be for a man who sees only treetops beyond a hill to conclude that there is nothing but trees in that region. There is a character of that time (as there is of every epoch), which comes from the greater alienation of the upper circles from the other estates, from the reigning philosophy, from peculiarities of upbringing…and so on.”1
Tolstoy takes this approach most vividly in the part of War and Peace on which The Great Comet is based: The longer Andrei is away at war, the more his social circle back home, supposedly safe from the war’s consequences, begins to fray. Pierre, Andrei’s dear friend and a good man, loses himself in conspiracies, delusions of grandeur, and vodka; Natasha, Andrei’s fiancée, gets lost in the glittering but hollow social life of the aristocracy. Natasha betrays Andrei, whose stoic military service symbolizes the spiritual virtue of the age, when she attempts to run away with the handsome scoundrel Anatole. Natasha’s bubble eventually bursts, twice: first, when her attempt to elope with Anatole fails; and again, when Andrei is badly wounded at the Battle of Borodino, eventually dying in her care.
In The Great Comet, however, there is no sense that the war plays any role in the lives of the characters other than a source of occasional concern; there is no connection between it and the chaos in Natasha’s life. Her affair with Anatole has no consequence beyond her own temporary unhappiness, leaving the audience to wonder why it warranted an entire opera. Pierre does not embody any take on human nature (in the novel, Andrei and Pierre can be interpreted as two conflicting sides of Tolstoy’s, and many other people’s, personality: the former is an emotionally-withdrawn stoic, while the latter is social, good-natured, and bumbling); he just rises every so often from the orchestra pit to declare that he’s drunk, that he’ll assassinate Napoleon, or that he loves his scorned friend’s ex-fiancé. This is neither Tolstoy the Hedgehog nor Tolstoy the Fox; this is Tolstoy the soap opera mogul.
When The Great Comet does give a nod to the book’s substance, it is usually in the form of quotes from Tolstoy or jokes at his expense. In the show’s only reference to the comet of the title, Pierre sings in beautiful language copied closely from the novel:
And this bright star
Having traced its parabola
With inexpressible speed
Through immeasurable space
Seems suddenly to have stopped
Like an arrow piercing the earth
Stopped for me.
In the book, the comet is meant to symbolize both premonitions of apocalypse and Pierre’s newfound hope of marital happiness. It’s a literary device that makes sense in Tolstoy’s able hands but none whatsoever in Malloy’s, who has made it merely another sign of his characters’ self-involvement.
In another song Pierre teasingly mocks Tolstoy’s gratuitous chapters on the historical process, a pleasure for those who agree with Isaiah Berlin that the quality and significance of these exegeses pale somewhat beside Tolstoy’s actual narrative:
[Napoleon] is not a great man
None of us are great men
We are just caught in the wave of history
Nothing matters
Everything matters
It’s all the same!
But occasional references to Tolstoy are, unsurprisingly, not enough to keep the two hour and thirty minute show moving. When Malloy is not quoting Tolstoy, his own lyrics are tedious (“There was never such a night before/I feel like putting my arms round my knees/And squeezing tight as possible!”), trivial (“I throw my fur coat on my shoulders/Unable to find the sleeves”), and cloyingly self-conscious (“In 19th-century Russia we write letters, we write letters/We put down in writing what is happening in our minds”). Despite Benton’s extraordinary voice, Natasha flits around describing her non-action so excruciatingly that one almost looks forward to her buckling under the weight of a tragedy.
The show’s best music borrows from Slavic folk melodies, the boxed pierogi are pretty good, and the vodka flows. I don’t want to give the impression that a superficial take on Tolstoy is without its pleasures.
Yet the struggle of Natasha and Pierre to reconcile their timeless youthful longings with the great drama unfolding in the world outside is one with which many young Americans (especially ones likely to see a Broadway show and read this magazine) could have connected. But Malloy does not seem to have found in War and Peace anything approaching this kind of spiritual significance. As he recently confessed in an interview with the New York Times:
There’s a perverse interest in picking the texts that have a reputation as being boring…Well, no: ‘War and Peace’ is an amazing book, and here’s all the reasons why. It’s a trashy romance novel. It’s not this unapproachable academic piece.
I’ll be the first to concede that Tolstoy’s long, repetitive, “academic” chapters on his philosophy of history are my least favorite parts of the book. But anyone who claims to have solved the puzzle of War and Peace by discovering its frivolity hasn’t quite figured it out. Natasha’s failed love affair is the story of a changing, turbulent world encroaching on a supposedly safe society. To strip it of that drama is to make it a trashy romance.
And yet The Great Comet has been called, in some circles, “the best new musical to open on Broadway since ‘Hamilton,’” and indeed, the show grossed $1.13 million in ticket sales its first week. The production’s glib imitation of Russian culture—its drunkenness, gaudiness, violence, passion—is clearly doing something for American audiences. Malloy seems to have tapped into what George F. Kennan called “Russia, Russia—unwashed, backward, appealing Russia,”2
…where the spark of human genius has always had to penetrate the darkness, the dampness, and the cold in order to make its light felt, and has acquired, for that very reason, a strange warmth, a strange intensity, a strange beauty.3
Malloy’s opera is a kind of tribute to this fascination with Russia, and the show’s popularity is proof that Americans are not leagued in a conspiracy against its people or culture. If the Kremlin is right, then, that Americans are Russophobic, it’s most likely the regime they dislike, not the country: a distinction few of the Kremlin’s inhabitants have ever acknowledged. Perhaps of that, if nothing else about The Great Comet, Tolstoy would approve.
1Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage Books, 2007), p. 1, 217.
2Found in David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 30.
3George F. Kennan, The Kennan Diaries (W.W. Norton, 2014), p. 185.