Mussorgsky III:

 Clerks
 

Musorgsky was of aristocratic descent and grew up in comfort, but after 1861, when the czar ordered that the serfs be freed and given land, Musorgsky (who was 22 at the time) received very little income from the family property. Against the advice of friends, he had already renounced his military commission in order to dedicate himself to music, but he made very little money from music either. As a result, he was forced to take a poorly-paid civil service position. The position he got was not a sinecure, though he was treated very leniently by some of his supervisors. His rank was "titular counselor", but what he actually was was a clerk, copyist, or scribe -- more or less the equivalent of a typist, or even of a photocopy machine.

In old Russia where Musorgsky's great operas were set, as in medieval Europe, clerks and scribes had a unique, ambiguous status -- not peasants, not nobles (boyars), not soldiers, and not really clergy -- though their education almost always was religious:

In an illiterate world, scribes had a degree of power, but they also were mistrusted, and like Jews, were not able to defend themselves.

Musorgsky's nameless clerk (pod'yachii) in Khovanshchina is not much discussed in what I've read, but I think that he is one of Musorgsky's best-drawn characters and is also a key to the understanding of the opera. (In the Bolshoi version he is very well played by Vitaly Vlasov). Both dramatically and musically Musorgsky very effectively portrays the clerk's obsequiousness, venality, fearfulness, and impotent resentment. 

At the very beginning of Khovanshchina, the clerk enters just after the thuggish streltsy policemen have finished bragging about the scribe that they had just killed:

He ignores the streltsy taunts as best he can and sets up to do business. He writes out a dangerous letter of accusation for Shaklovity, reluctantly reads a police  proclamation to the Muscovite crowd (which also bullies him), and then leaves in a hurry when the arrival of Shaklovity's enemy Khovansky is announced. Later on Khovansky, representing the old aristocracy, accuses the reformer Golitsyn of having made the boyars  "equal to the serfs" and "the laughingstock of the clerks (dyakam)" (Act II, p. 82). Later, however, this "lowly scribe who scratches and scribbles" will have the pleasure (which he dissimulates very well) of telling the roistering streltsy that Peter's foreign soldiers had attacked the streltsy quarter -- in effect, that they are all doomed (Act III, p. 104).

Pimen, the scribe in Boris Godunov (a monk) likewise brings the bad news to Boris: a shepherd had had a miraculous vision of the child Boris had murdered in order to attain the throne.  Earlier Pimen had been seen recording Boris's crime for future ages:

By Mussorgsky's time the clerk was just a low-paid civil servant, without the clerical connection and also without the ancient clerks' marginal, slightly dangerous reputation. But perhaps Musorgsky nonetheless felt some affinity with the clerks in his drama. Like the clerk in Khovanshchina, he witnessed events he was powerless to affect. Like Pimen, he wrote for future generations.

Mussorgsky's operas paint a dark picture: the commoners are brutes who do not understand what's happening to them and only suffer history, whereas the real players in the game are sly, dishonest, selfish, and ruthless. Pimen and the clerk are the third term, and represent that familiar figure, the powerless intellectual who sees clearly but cannot act. An resentful intellectual with delusions:

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