Natasha's Dance

THE ARTIST

AS SHAMAN. Left: Kandinsky: Oval No. 2 (1925). The oval shapes and hieroglyphia of Kandinsky's abstract paintings were largely copied from the symbols he had seen on the drums of Siberian shamans. A hooked curve and line symbolized a horse, circles symbolized the sun and moon, while beaks and eyes were meant to represent the birdlike headdress worn by many shamans for their dance rituals (below).

RUSSIA AND THE ASIATIC STEPPE. Isaak Levitan:

Vladimirka (1892). This was the road on which Russia's convicts travelled

to their penal exile in Siberia. Below: Vasily Vereshchagin: Surprise Attack

(1871). An official war artist with Russia's army on the Turkestan

campaign, Vereshchagin's canvases were perceived as an attack on the

savage Russian violence against the Asian tribes.

HORSES AND APOCALYPSE. Prom Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, the

horse became the great poetic metaphor of Russia's destiny and a symbol of apocalypse, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin: Bathing the Red Horse (1912), a work strongly influenced by the Russian icon tradition. Below: Kazimir Malevich: Red Cavalry (1930).

Nathan Altman: Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (1914).

Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s, Prince Ukhtomsky, the press baron and adviser to the young Tsar Nicholas II, advocated the expansion of the empire across the whole of the Asian continent, reasoning that Russia was a sort of 'older brother' to the Chinese and the Indians. 'We have always belonged to Asia,' Ukhtomsky told the Tsar. 'We have lived its life and felt its interests. We have nothing to conquer.'¹⁴² Inspired by the conquest of Central Asia, Dostoevsky, too, advanced the notion that Russia's destiny was not in Europe, as had so long been supposed, but rather in the East. In 1881 he told the readers of his Writer's Diary:

Russia is not only in Europe but in Asia as well… We must cast aside our servile fear that Europe will call us Asiatic barbarians and say that we are more Asian than European… This mistaken view of ourselves as exclusively Europeans and not Asians (and we have never ceased to be the latter)… has cost us very dearly over these two centuries, and we have paid for it by the loss of our spiritual independence… It is hard for us to turn away from our window on Europe; but it is a matter of our destiny… When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her, something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when America was discovered. For, in truth, Asia for us is that same America which we still have not discovered. With our push towards Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength… In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we can be Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will encourage our spirit and draw us on; the movement needs only to be started.¹⁴³

This quotation is a perfect illustration of the Russians' tendency to define their relations with the East in reaction to their self-esteem and status in the West. Dostoevsky was not actually arguing that Russia is an Asiatic culture; only that the Europeans thought of it as so. And likewise, his argument that Russia should embrace the East was not that it should seek to be an Asiatic force: but, on the contrary, that only in Asia could it find new energy to reassert its Europeanness. The root of Dostoevsky's turning to the East was the bitter resentment which he, like many Russians, felt at the West's betrayal of Russia's Christian cause in the Crimean War, when France and Britain had

sided with the Ottomans against Russia to defend their own imperial interests. In the only published verse he ever wrote (and the poetic qualities of 'On the European Events of 1854' are such that one can see why this was so) Dostoevsky portrayed the Crimean War as the 'crucifixion of the Russian Christ'. But, as he warned the Western readers of his poem, Russia would arise and, when she did so, she would turn toward the East in her providential mission to Christianize the world.

Unclear to you is her [Russia's] predestination!

The East - is hers! To her a million generations

Untiringly stretch out their hands…

And the resurrection of the ancient East

By Russia (so God had commanded) is drawing near.¹⁴⁴

A resentful contempt for Western values was a common Russian response to the feeling of rejection by the West. During the nineteenth century the 'Scythian temperament' - barbarian and rude, iconoclastic and extreme, lacking the restraint and moderation of the cultivated European citizen - entered the cultural lexicon as a type of 'Asiatic' Russianness that insisted on its right to be 'uncivilized'. This was the sense of Pushkin's lines:

Now temperance is not appropriate I want to drink like a savage Scythian.¹⁴⁵

And it was the sense in which Herzen wrote to Proudhon in 1849:

But do you know, Monsieur, that you have signed a contract [with Herzen to co-finance a newspaper] with a barbarian, and a barbarian who is all the more incorrigible for being one not only by birth but by conviction?… A true Scythian, I watch with pleasure as this old world destroys itself and I don't have the slightest pity for it.¹⁴⁶

The 'Scythian poets' - as that loose group of writers which included Blok and Bely and the critic Ivanov-Razumnik called themselves -embraced this savage spirit in defiance of the West. Yet at the same time their poetry was immersed in the European avant-garde. They

took their name from the ancient Scyths, the nomadic Iranian-speaking tribes that had left Central Asia in the eighth century bc and had ruled the steppes around the Black and Caspian seas for the next 500 years. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals came to see the Scyths as a sort of mythical ancestor race of the eastern Slavs. In the final decades of the century archaeologists such as Zabelin and Veselovsky led huge excavations of the Scythian kurgans, the burial mounds which are scattered throughout southern Russia, the south-eastern steppe, Central Asia and Siberia, in an effort to establish a cultural link between the Scyths and the ancient Slavs. In 1897, the artist Roerich, who was a fully-trained archaeologist before he became famous for his Scythian designs for The Rite of Spring, worked with Veselovsky on the excavation of the Maikop kurgan in the Crimea. The gold and silver treasures which they excavated there can still be seen today in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.¹⁴⁷

As a student of archaeology, Roerich had been deeply influenced by the ideas of Stasov on the Eastern origins of Russian culture. In 1897, he made plans for a series of twelve paintings on the founding of Russia in the ninth century. Only one of these paintings was ever completed - The Messenger: Tribe Has Risen against Tribe (1897), which Roerich submitted as his graduation project at the Academy -but it is a good example of the ethnographic programme which he planned to execute. Roerich checked on every minor detail of the way of life of the early Slavs by writing to Stasov. Not that much was known about the early Slavs. So there was artistic licence to extrapolate these details from the archaeology of the ancient Scyths and other Eastern tribes, on the assumption, as Stasov wrote to Roerich, that 'the ancient East means ancient Russia: the two are indivisible'.¹⁴⁸ Asked about designs for window frames, Stasov replied, for example, that there was no record of Russian ornament before the eleventh century. He advised the artist to make friezes up from motifs found in ancient Asia and in the Near East.¹⁴⁹

This imaginary quality was also to be found in Roerich's paintings

of the Stone Age in Russia. Roerich idealized the prehistoric world of

this Scythia cum-Rus' as a perfect realm of spiritual beauty where man

and nature lived in harmony, and life and art were one. In his essay

'Joy in Art' (1909), in which he describes the ancient Slav spring ritual

of human sacrifice upon which The Rite of Spring was based, Roerich argues that this prehistoric Russia could not be known thorugh ethnographic facts: it could only be approached through artistic intuition or religious faith. This was the spirit of his Stone Age paintings such as The Idols (1901) (plate 17), which, for all their look of archaeological authenticity, were really no more than abstract or iconic illustrations of his mystical ideals. The same was true of his designs for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. The Asiatic image of ancient Scythian Rus' was conjured up by Roerich in the set designs and costumes for The Rite of Spring and Rimsky's opera The Snow Maiden (plate 18). Set in the mythic world of Russia's Scythian past, the designs for both these works combined motifs from medieval Russian ornament with ethnographic details (such as the heavy jewellery or the Tatar-like head-dress of the village girls) to suggest the semi-Asian nature of the early Slavs. It is easy to forget that, in the controversy surrounding the first performance of The Rite of Spring, it was the Asiatic look of Roerich's costumes which was seen by many critics as the ballet's most shocking element.¹⁵⁰

The Scythian poets were fascinated by this prehistoric realm. In their imaginations the Scyths were a symbol of the wild rebellious nature of primeval Russian man. They rejoiced in the elemental spirit ('stikhiia') of savage peasant Russia, and convinced themselves that the coming revolution, which everybody sensed in the wake of the 1905 one, would sweep away the dead weight of European civilization and establish a new culture where man and nature, art and life, were one. Blok's famous poem The Scythians (1918) was a programmatic statement of this Asiatic posturing towards the West:

You are millions, we are multitudes And multitudes and multitudes. Come fight! Yes, we are Scythians, Yes, Asiatics, a slant-eyed greedy tribe.

It was not so much an ideological rejection of the West as a threatening embrace, an appeal to Europe to join the revolution of the 'savage hordes' and renew itself through a cultural synthesis of East and West: otherwise it ran the risk of being swamped by the 'multitudes'. For

centuries, argued Blok, Russia had protected a thankless Europe from the Asiatic tribes:

Like slaves, obeying and abhorred, We were the shield between the breeds Of Europe and the raging Mongol horde.

But now the time had come for the 'old world' of Europe to 'halt before the Sphinx':

Yes, Russia is a Sphinx. Exulting, grieving, And sweating blood, she cannot sate Her eyes that gaze and gaze and gaze At you with stone-lipped love and hate.

Russia still had what Europe had long lost - 'a love that burns like fire' - a violence that renews by laying waste. By joining the Russian Revolution, the West would experience a spiritual renaissance through peaceful reconciliation with the East.

Come to us from the horrors of war,

Come to our peaceful arms and rest.

Comrades, before it is too late,

Sheathe the old sword, may brotherhood be blest.

But if the West refused to embrace this 'Russian spirit', Russia would unleash the Asiatic hordes against it:

Know that we will no longer be your shield But, careless of the battle cries, We shall look on as the battle rages Aloof, with indurate and narrow eyes

We shall not move when the savage Hun

Despoils the corpse and leaves it bare,

Burns towns, herds the cattle in the church,

And the smell of white flesh roasting fills the air.¹⁵¹

The inspiration of Blok's apocalyptic vision (and of much else besides in the Russian avant-garde) was the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. The opening lines of his memorable poem 'Pan-Mongolism' (1894) were used by Blok for the epigraph of The Scythians. They perfectly expressed the ambivalent unease, the fear and fascination, which Blok's generation felt about the East:

Pan-Mongolism! What a savage name! Yet it is music to my ears.¹⁵²

In his last major essay, Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of History (1900), Soloviev described a vast Asiatic invasion of Europe under the banner of the Antichrist. For Soloviev this 'yellow peril' was an awesome threat. But for the Scythians it represented renewal. Mixed with Russia's European culture, the elemental spirit of the Asiatic steppe would reunite the world.

Andrei Bely was another disciple of Soloviev. In Petersburg Bely maps a city living on the edge of a huge catastrophe. Set in the midst of the 1905 Revolution, when Russia was at war with Japan, its Petersburg is swept by howling winds from the Asiatic steppe that almost blow the city back into the sea. The novel builds on the nineteenth-century vision of an all-destroying flood, which was a constant theme in the literary myth of the Russian capital. Built in defiance of the natural order, on land stolen from the sea, Peter's stone creation was, it seemed, an invitation to Nature's revenge. Pushkin was the first of many Russian writers to develop the diluvial theme, in The Bronze Horseman. Odoevsky used it, too, as the basis of his story 'A Joker from the Dead' in Russian Nights.*

By the middle of the nineteenth century the notion of the flood had become so integral to the city's own imagined destiny that even Karl Bruillov's famous painting The Last Days of Pompeii (1833) was

* The story of a beautiful princess who abandons her young lover to marry a middle-aged official. One stormy autumn night they attend a ball in St Petersburg, where she has a fainting fit. In her dreams the Neva breaks its banks. Its waters flood the ballroom, bringing in a coffin whose lid flies open to reveal her dead lover. The palace walls come crashing down, and Petersburg is swept into the sea.

viewed as a warning to St Petersburg.* Slavophiles like Gogol, a close friend of Bruillov, saw it as a prophecy of divine retribution against Western decadence. 'The lightning poured out and flooded everything', commented Gogol, as if to underline that the city on the Neva lived in constant danger of a similar catastrophe.¹⁵³ But Westernists like Herzen drew the parallel as well: 'Pompeii is the Muse of Petersburg!'¹⁵⁴ As the year 1917 approached, the flood became a revolutionary storm. Everybody was aware of imminent destruction. This was expressed in all the arts - from Benois' illustrations for The Bronze Horseman (1905-18), which seemed to presage the impending revolution in the swirling sea and sky, to the violent ('Scythian') rhythms of The Rite of Spring and the poetry of Blok:

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.¹⁵⁵

Bely portrays Petersburg as a fragile Western civilization precariously balanced on the top of the savage 'Eastern' culture of the peasantry. Peter the Great - in the form of the Bronze Horseman - is recast as the Antichrist, the apocalyptic rider spiralling towards the end of time and dragging Russia into his vortex. The bomb which structures the thin plot (a student is persuaded by the revolutionaries to assassin-ate his father, a high-ranking bureaucrat) is a symbol of this imminent catastrophe.

The novel takes division as its central theme. The city is divided into warring class-based zones, and the two main characters, the senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov and his student revolutionary son Nikolai Apollonovich, are on opposing sides of the barricades. Like Russia itself, the Ableukhovs are made up of discordant elements from Europe and Asia. They are descended from the Mongol horsemen who rode into Russia with Genghiz Khan; however Europeanized they might appear, this Asiatic element is still within them. Nikolai is a

* Apocalyptic fantasies of modern technological cities destroyed by Nature obsessed the literary imagination in nineteenth-century Europe (see G. Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, 1971),

pp.20-24)

follower of Kant but 'entirely Mongol' in his way of life, so that 'his soul is divided in two halves'. Apollon is a typically European bureaucrat, who thinks on rational lines and likes well-ordered city grids. But he has a morbid fear of the Asiatic steppe, where he was once nearly frozen as a boy, and he thinks he hears the thundering sound of horses' hoofs as Mongol tribesmen ride in from the plain.

He had a fear of space. The landscape of the countryside actually frightened him. Beyond the snows, beyond the ice, and beyond the jagged line of the forest the blizzard would come up. Out there, by a stupid accident, he had nearly frozen to death. That had happened some fifty years ago. While he had been freezing to death, someone's cold fingers, forcing their way into his breast, had harshly stroked his heart, and an icy hand led him along. He had climbed the rungs of his career with that same incredible expanse always before his eyes. There, from there an icy hand beckoned. Measureless immensity flew on: the Empire of Russia.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov ensconced himself behind city walls for many years, hating the orphaned distances of the provinces, the wisps of smoke from tiny villages, and the jackdaw. Only once had he risked transecting these distances by express train: on an official mission from Petersburg to Tokyo. Apollon Apollonovich did not discuss his stay in Japan with anyone. He used to say to the Minister: 'Russia is an icy plain. It is roamed by wolves!' And the Minister would look at him, stroking his well-groomed grey moustache with a white hand. And he said nothing, and sighed. On the completion of his official duties he had been intending to…

But he died.

And Apollon Apollonovich was utterly alone. Behind him the ages stretched into immeasurable expanses. Ahead of him an icy hand revealed immeasurable expanses. Immeasurable expanses flew to meet him.

Oh, Rus', Rus'!

Is it you who have set the winds, storms and snows howling across the steppe? It seemed to the senator that from a mound a voice was calling him. Only hungry wolves gather in packs out there.¹⁵⁶

This agoraphobic fear of Asia reaches fever pitch in a nightmare vision of his revolutionary son:

Nikolai Apollonovich was a depraved monster… he was in China, and there Apollon Apollonovich, the Emperor of China, ordered him to slaughter many thousands (which was done). In more recent times thousands of Tamerlane's horsemen had poured down on Rus'. Nikolai Apollonovich had galloped into this Rus' on a charger of the steppes. He was then incarnated in the blood of a Russian nobleman. And he reverted to his old ways: he slaughtered thousands there. Now he wanted to throw a bomb at his father. But his father was Saturn. The circle of time had come full turn. The kingdom of Saturn had returned.¹⁵⁷

The thunder of those chargers from the steppe was the approaching sound of 1917. For in the minds of Russia's Europeans, the destructive violence of the revolution was an Asiatic force.

Among the scattered emigres who fled Soviet Russia was a group of intellectuals known as the Eurasianists. Stravinsky found himself at the centre of their circle in Paris in the 19 20s; his friends the philosopher Lev Karsavin and the brilliant music critic Pierre Souvchinsky (Karsa-vin's son-in-law) were leading members of the group. But Eurasianism was a dominant intellectual trend in all the emigre communities. Many of the best-known Russian exiles, including the philologist Prince N. S. Trubetskoi, the religious thinker Father George Florovsky, the historian George Vernadsky and the linguistic theorist Roman Jakobson, were members of the group. Eurasianism was essentially a phenomenon of the emigration insofar as it was rooted in the sense of Russia's betrayal by the West in 1917-21. Its largely aristocratic followers reproached the Western powers for their failure to defeat the Bolsheviks in the Revolution and civil war, which had ended with the collapse of Russia as a European power and their own expulsion from their native land. Disillusioned by the West, but not yet hopeless about a possible future for themselves in Russia, they recast their homeland as a unique ('Turanian') culture on the Asiatic steppe.

The founding manifesto of the movement was Exodus to the East, a collection of ten essays published in Sofia in 1921, in which the Eurasianists foresaw the West's destruction and the rise of a new

civilization led by Russia or Eurasia. At root, argued Trubetskoi, the author the most important essays in the collection, Russia was a steppeland Asian culture. Byzantine and European influences, which

had shaped the Russian state and its high culture, barely penetrated to the lower strata of Russia's folk culture, which had developed more through contact with the East. For centuries the Russians had freely intermingled with the Finno-Ugric tribes, the Mongolians and other nomad peoples from the steppe. They had assimilated elements of their languages, their music, customs and religion, so that these Asiatic cultures had become absorbed in Russia's own historical evolution.

Trubetskoi drew on Russian geography, where the Eurasianist idea had a long pedigree. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the geologist Vladimir Lamansky had shown that the soil structure was the same on either side of the Ural mountains: there was one vast steppe stretching from the western borders of the Russian Empire to the Pacific. Building on the work of Lamansky, the Eurasianist geographer Savitsky showed that the whole land mass of Eurasia was one continuum in biogeographic terms. It was made up of a series of parallel zones that ran like ribbons latitudinally across the continent -completely unaffected by the Ural mountains - from the plains of Hungary to Mongolia. Savitsky grouped these strips into four categories - starting with the tundra of the north, followed by the forest, the steppe and then the desert in the extreme south. There was nothing exceptional in this geography, but it served as a sort of 'scientific' basis for more daring arguments about the Eastern influence on Russia's folk culture.

In his essay 'On the Higher and Lower Strata of Russian Culture' (1921), Trubetskoi set out to prove the Asian influence on Russian music, dancing and psychology. He argued that Russian folk music was essentially derived from the pentatonic scale - an argument he based on the observation of the simplest peasant songs. Folk dance, too, according to Trubetskoi, had much in common with the dancing of the East, especially that of the Caucasus. Russian dancing was in lines and circles, rather than in pairs, as in the Western tradition. Its rhythmic movements were performed by the hands and shoulders as well as by the feet. The male dancing was virtuosic, as exemplified by the Cossack dance, with heels hitting fingers and high jumps. There was nothing like this in the Western tradition - with the single exception of Spanish dancing (which Trubetskoi put down to the Moorish influence). Female dancing also showed an Eastern character, with great

importance placed on keeping the head still and on subtle doll-like movements by the rest of the body. All these cultural forms were seen by Trubetskoi as the Russian manifestations of a distinctively Eastern inclination for schematic formulae. This 'Eastern psyche' was manifested in the Russian people's tendency to contemplation, in their fatalistic attitudes, in their love of abstract symmetry and universal laws, in their emphasis on religious ritual, and in their 'udal' or fierce bravery. According to Trubetskoi these mental attributes were not shared by the Slavs in Eastern Europe, suggesting, in his view, that they must have come to Russia from Asia rather than from Byzantium. The 'Turanian psychology' had penetrated into the Russian mind at a subconscious level and had left a profound mark on the national character. Even Russian Orthodoxy, although superficially derived from Byzantium, was 'essentially Asiatic in its psychological structures', insofar as it depended on 'a complete unity between ritual, life and art'. For Trubetskoi this unity explained the quasi-religious nature of state authority in Russia and the readiness of the Russians to submit themselves to it. Church, state and nation were indivisible.¹⁵⁸

Such ideas had little in the way of ethnographic evidence to support them. They were all polemic and resentful posturing against the West. In this respect they came from the same stable as that notion first advanced by Dostoevsky that the empire's destiny was in Asia (where the Russians could be 'Europeans') rather than in Europe (where they were 'hangers-on'). Yet because of their emotive power, Eurasianist ideas had a strong cultural impact on the Russian emigration of the 1920s, when those who mourned the disappearance of their country from the European map could find new hope for it on a Eurasian one. Stravinsky, for one, was deeply influenced by the mystical views of the Eurasianists, particularly the notion of a natural Russian ('Turanian') inclination for collectivity, which the music of such works as The Peasant Wedding, with its absence of individual expression in the tinging parts and its striving for a sparse, impersonal sound, was Intended to reflect.¹⁵⁹ According to Souvchinsky, the rhythmic immo-bility (nepodvizhnost') which was the most important feature of Strav-insky's music in The Peasant Wedding and The Rite of Spring was 'Turanian' in character. As in the Eastern musical tradition, Strav-insky's music developed by the constant repetition of a rhythmic

pattern, with variations on the melody, rather than by contrasts of musical ideas, as in the Western tradition. It was this rhythmic immobility which created the explosive energy of Stravinsky's 'Turanian' music. Kandinsky strived for a similar effect of built-up energy in the geometric patterning of lines and shapes, which became the hallmark of his abstract art.