Natasha's Dance

1

Before he turned to art Kandinsky thought he might become an anthropologist. As a student reading law at Moscow University, he had fallen ill in his final year, and to recuperate he had set off on a trip to the remote Komi region, 800 kilometres north-east of Moscow, to study the beliefs of its Finno-Ugric tribes. Travelling by train as far as Vologda, where the railway stopped, he then sailed east along the Sukhona river, entering the forests of 'another world', as he recalled, where the people still believed in demons and spirits. Anthropologists had long marked out the Komi region as a meeting point between Christianity and the old shamanic paganism of the Asiatic tribes. It was a 'wonderland' where 'the people's every action is accompanied by secret magic rituals'.¹ The trip left an indelible impression on Kandinsky. The shamanism he discovered there became one of the major inspirations for his abstract art.² 'Here I learned how to look at art', he would later write - 'how to turn oneself around within a painting and how to live in it.'³

Kandinsky's journey east was a journey back in time. He was looking for the remnants of the paganism which Russian missionaries had described in that region from medieval times. There were ancient records of the Komi people worshipping the sun, the river and the trees; of frenzied whirling dances to summon up their spirits; and there were legendary tales about the Komi shamans who beat their drums and flew off on their horse-sticks to the spirit world. Six hundred years of church-building had given no more than a gloss of Christianity to this Eurasian culture. The Komi people had been forcibly converted to the Christian faith by St Stephan in the fourteenth century. The area had been colonized by Russian settlers for several hundreds years, and the culture of the Komi, from their language to their dress, bore a close resemblance to the Russian way of life.

Ust-Sysolsk, the region's capital, where Kandinsky lived for three summer months in 1889, looked much like any Russian town. It consisted of a small classical ensemble of administrative buildings in the centre of a sprawling settlement of log-built peasant huts. As Kandinsky did his fieldwork, recording the beliefs of the old people

21. Group of Komi people in typical clothing, c. 1912

and looking for motifs of shamanistic cults in their folk art, he soon found traces of this ancient pagan culture concealed underneath the Russian one. None of the Komi would describe themselves as anything but Orthodox (at least not to someone from Moscow), and in their public rituals they had a Christian priest. But in their private lives, as Kandinsky ascertained, they still looked to the old shamans. The Komi

people believed in a forest monster called 'Vorsa'. They had a 'living soul' they called an 'ort', which shadowed people through their lives and appeared before them at the moment of their death. They prayed to the spirits of the water and the wind; they spoke to the fire as if they were speaking to a living thing; and their folk art still showed signs of worshipping the sun. Some of the Komi people told Kandinsky that the stars were nailed on to the sky.⁴

Scratching the surface of Komi life Kandinsky had revealed its Asian origins. For centuries the Finno-Ugric tribes had intermingled with the Turkic peoples of northern Asia and the Central Asian steppe. Nineteenth-century archaeologists in the Komi region had unearthed large amounts of ceramic pottery with Mongolian ornament. Kandinsky found a chapel with a Mongolian roof, which he sketched in his journal of the trip.⁵ Nineteenth-century philologists subscribed to the theory of a Ural-Altaic family of languages that united the Finns with the Ostiaks, the Voguls, Samoyeds and Mongols in a single culture stretching from Finland to Manchuria. The idea was advanced in the 1850s by the Finnish explorer M. A. Castren, whose journeys to the east of the Urals had uncovered many things he recognized from home.⁶ Castren's observations were borne out by later scholarship. There are shamanistic motifs, for example, in the Kalevala, or 'Land of Heroes', the Finnish national epic poem, which may suggest a historical connection to the peoples of the East, although the Finns themselves regard their poem as a Baltic Odyssey in the purest folk traditions of Karelia, the region where Finland and Russia meet.⁷ Like a shaman with his horse-stick and drum, its hero Vainamoinen journeys with his kantele (a sort of zither) to a magic underworld inhabited by spirits of the dead. One-fifth of the Kalevala is composed in magic charms. Not written down until 1822, it was usually sung to tunes in the pentatonic ('Indo-Chinese') scale corresponding to the five strings of the kantele, which, like its predecessor, the five-stringed Russian gusli, was tuned to that scale.⁸

Kandinsky's exploration of the Komi region was not just a scientific quest. It was a personal one as well. The Kandinskys took their name from the Konda river near Tobolsk in Siberia, where they had settled in the eighteenth century. The family was descended from the Tungus tribe, who lived along the Amur river in Mongolia. Kandinsky was

proud of his Mongol looks and he liked to boast that he was a descendant of the seventeenth-century Tungus chieftain Gantimur. During the eighteenth century the Tungus had moved north-west to the Ob and Konda rivers. They intermingled with the Ostiaks and the Voguls, who traded with the Komi and with other Finnic peoples on the Urals' western side. Kandinsky's ancestors were among these traders, who would have intermarried with the Komi people, so it is possible that he had Komi blood as well.⁹

Many Russian families had Mongol origins. 'Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar,' Napoleon once said. The coats of arms of Russian families - where Muslim motifs such as sabres, arrows, crescent moons and the 8-pointed star are much in evidence - bear witness to this Mongol legacy. There were four main groups of Mongol descendants. First there were those descended from the Turkic-speaking nomads who had swept in with the armies of Genghiz Khan in the thirteenth century and settled down in Russia following the break-up of the 'Golden Horde', the Russian name for the Mongol host with its gleaming tent encampment on the Volga river, in the fifteenth century. Among these were some of the most famous names in Russian history: writers like Karamzin, Turgenev, Bulgakov and Akhmatova; philosophers like Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Berdiaev; statesmen like Godunov, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky; and composers like Rimsky-Korsakov. * Next were the families of Turkic origin who came to Russia from the west: the Tiutchevs and Chicherins, who came from Italy; or the Rachmaninovs, who had arrived from Poland in the eighteenth century. Even the Kutuzovs were of Tatar origin (qutuz is the Turkic word for 'furious' or 'mad') - an irony in view of the great general Mikhail Kutuzov's status as a hero made of purely Russian

* The name Turgenev derives from the Mongol word for 'swift' (tiirgen); Bulgakov from the Turkic word 'to wave' (bulgaq); Godunov from the Mongol word godon ('a stupid person'); and Korsakov from the Turkic word qorsaq, a type of steppeland fox. Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko. She changed her name to Akhmatova (said to be the name of her Tatar great-grandmother) when her father said he did not want a poet in his family. Akhmatova claimed descent from Khan Akhmat, a direct descendant of Genghiz Khan and the last Tatar khan to receive tribute from the Russian princes the was assassinated in 14X1). Nadezhda Mandelstam believed that Akhmatova had invented the Tatar origins of her great-grandmother (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (London,1989), p. 449).

22. (opposite) Vastly Kandinsky: sketches of buildings in the Komi region, including a church with a Mongolian-type roof. From the Vologda

Diary of 1889

stuff. Families of mixed Slav and Tatar ancestry made up a third category. Among these were some of Russia's grandest dynasties - the Sheremetevs, Stroganovs and Rostopchins - although there were many at a lower level, too. Gogol's family, for instance, was of mixed Polish and Ukrainian descent but it shared a common ancestry with the Turkic Gogels, who derived their surname from the Chuvash word gogul-a type of steppeland bird (Gogol was renowned for his bird-like features, especially his beaky nose). The final group were Russian families who changed their names to make them sound more Turkic, either because they had married into a Tatar family, or because they had bought land in the east and wanted smooth relations with the native tribes. The Russian Veliaminovs, for example, changed their name to the Turkic Aksak (from aqsaq, meaning 'lame') to facilitate their purchase of enormous tracts of steppeland from the Bashkir tribes near Orenburg: and so the greatest family of Slavophiles, the Aksakovs, was founded.¹⁰

Adopting Turkic names became the height of fashion at the court of Moscow between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Tatar influence from the Golden Horde remained very strong and many noble dynasties were established. During the eighteenth century, when Peter's nobles were obliged to look westwards, the fashion fell into decline. But it was revived in the nineteenth century - to the point where many pure-bred Russian families invented legendary Tatar ancestors to make themselves appear more exotic. Nabokov, for example, claimed (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that his family was descended from no less a personage than Genghiz Khan himself, who 'is said to have fathered the Nabok, a petty Tatar prince in the twelfth century who married a Russian damsel in an era of intensely artistic Russian culture'.¹¹

After Kandinsky had returned from the Komi region he gave a lecture on the findings of his trip to the Imperial Ethnographic Society in St Petersburg. The auditorium was full. The shamanistic beliefs of the Eurasian tribes held an exotic fascination for the Russian public at

23. Masked Buriat shaman with drum, drumstick and horse-sticks. Note the iron on his robe. Early 1900s

this time, when the culture of the West was widely seen as spiritually dead and intellectuals were looking towards the East for spiritual renewal. But this sudden interest in Eurasia was also at the heart of an urgent new debate about the roots of Russia's folk culture.

In its defining myth Russia had evolved as a Christian civilization,

Its culture was a product of the combined influence of Scandinavia and Byzantium. The national epic which the Russians liked to tell about themselves was the story of a struggle by the agriculturalists of the northern forest lands against the horsemen of the Asiatic steppe -the Avars and Khazars, Polovtsians and Mongols, Kazakhs, Kalmyks and all the other bow-and-arrow tribes that had raided Russia from the earliest times. This national myth had become so fundamental to the Russians' European self-identity that even to suggest an Asiatic influence on Russia's culture was to invite charges of treason.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, cultural attitudes shifted. As the empire spread across the Asian steppe, there was a growing movement to embrace its cultures as a part of Russia's own. The first important sign of this cultural shift had come in the 1860s, when Stasov tried to show that much of Russia's folk culture, its ornament and folk epics (byliny), had antecedents in the East. Stasov was denounced by the Slavophiles and other patriots. Yet by the end of the 1880s, when Kandinsky made his trip, there was an explosion of research into the Asiatic origins of Russia's folk culture. Archaeologists such as D. N. Anuchin and N. I. Veselovsky had exposed the depth of the Tatar influence on the Stone Age culture of Russia. They had equally revealed, or at least suggested, the Asiatic origins of many folk beliefs among the Russian peasants of the steppe.¹² Anthropologists had found shamanic practices in Russian peasant sacred rituals.¹³ Others pointed out the ritual use of totems by the Russian peasantry in Siberia.¹⁴ The anthropologist Dmitry Zelenin maintained that the peasants' animistic beliefs had been handed down to them from the Mongol tribes. Like the Bashkirs and the Chuvash (tribes of Finnish stock with a strong Tatar strain), the Russian peasants used a snakelike leather charm to draw a fever; and like the Komi, or the Ostiaks and the Buriats in the Far East, they were known to hang the carcass of an ermine or a fox from the portal of their house to ward away the

'evil eye'. Russian peasants from the Petrovsk region of the Middle Volga had a custom reminiscent of the totemism practised by many Asian tribes. When a child was born they would carve a wooden

figurine of the infant and bury it together with the placenta in a coffin

underneath the family house. This, it was believed, would guarantee a long life for the child.¹⁵ All these findings raised disturbing questions

about the identity of the Russians. Were they Europeans or Asians? Were they the subjects of the Tsar or descendants of Genghiz Khan?