clocks so as not to drive their guests away.⁵⁵ From October to the spring, when provincial families with a daughter to marry off would take a house in Moscow for the social season, there were balls and banquets almost every night. Moscow balls were larger than those in Petersburg. They were national rather than society events, and the atmosphere was rather down to earth, with old provincial ladies in their dowdy dresses as much in evidence as dashing young hussars. Yet the champagne flowed all night - and the first guests never left before the morning light. This Moscow lived a nocturnal way of life, its body clock reset to the social whirl. Crawling into bed in the early morning, revellers would breakfast around noon, take their lunch at three or even later (Pushkin made a point of eating lunch at eight or nine in the evening) and go out at ten p.m. Muscovites adored this late-night life - it perfectly expressed their love of living without bounds. In 1850, the government in Petersburg imposed a ban on the playing of live music after four a.m. In Moscow the reaction was practically a fronde - a Muscovite rebellion against the capital. Led by Prince Golitsyn, famous for his all-night masquerades, the noblemen of Moscow petitioned Petersburg for a repeal of the ban. There was a lengthy correspondence, letters to the press, and, when their petitions were finally turned down, the Muscovites decided to ignore the rules and party on.⁵⁶

4

In 1874 the Academy of Arts organized a show in remembrance of the artist Viktor Gartman, who had died the previous year, aged thirty-nine. Today Gartman is best known as a friend of Musorgsky, the painter at the centre of his famous piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). Musorgsky was struck down by grief at Gartman's death, and the drinking bouts which led to his own death are dated from this time. He paid his own tribute to his artist friend by composing Pictures after visiting the show.⁵⁷ Gartman's 'neo-Russian' style had a huge influence on the music of Musorgsky - and indeed on all the trends of nineteenth-century art that took their inspiration from Moscow's cultural world. His architectural drawings were based on years of

11. Viktor Gartman: design for the Kiev city gate

study of medieval ornament. The most famous was his fanciful design for the Kiev city gate, shaped in the form of a warrior's helmet with a kokosbnik arch, which Musorgsky celebrated in the final picture of

the piano suite. One critic called the Gartman design 'marble towels and brick embroideries'.⁵⁸