Natasha's Dance (46 page)

    The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first
matriosbka,
or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow
zemstvo’s
craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the
matrioshka
has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the
matriosbka
was an ancient Russian toy.
¹¹⁶
At Talashkino Maliutin also applied his distinctive style to furniture, ceramics, book illustrations, stage designs and buildings. Urban admirers like Diaghilev saw his work as the essence of an ‘organic peasant Russianness’ which, Diaghilev claimed in one of his most nationalistic utterances, would herald a ‘Renaissance of the North’.
¹¹⁷
But the real Russian peasants took a different view. When, in 1902, Tenisheva put on an exhibition of the Talashkino products in Smolensk, less than fifty people came to see it and, as she recalled, the

    peasants ‘viewed our things not with delight but with dumb amazement which we found hard to explain’.
¹¹⁸

    It is not immediately obvious what attracted Diaghilev to the neo-nationalists of Abramtsevo and Talashkino - a marriage that gave birth to the folklore fantasies of the Ballets Russes. In 1898, he delivered a tirade on ‘peasant art’, attacking artists who thought to ‘shock the world’ by ‘dragging peasant shoes and rags on to the canvas’.
¹¹⁹
By artistic temperament the impresario was aristocratic and cosmopolitan, even if he came from the provincial town of Perm. At his grandfather’s house, where he had been brought up from the age of ten, there was an atmosphere of cultivated dilettantism, with regular concerts and literary evenings, in which the young Sergei, with his fluent French and German and his piano-playing skills, was in his element. As a law student at St Petersburg University in the early 1890s, Diaghilev was perfectly at home with young aesthetes such as Alexander Benois, Dmitry Filosofov (Diaghilev’s cousin) and Walter (‘Valechka’) Nouvel. There was a general mood of Populism in these circles, especially at the Bogdanovskoe estate near Pskov which belonged to Filo-sofov’s aunt Anna Pavlovna, a well-known activist for women’s liberation and a literary hostess whose salon in St Petersburg was frequently attended by Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Blok. The four students would spend their summers at Bogdanovskoe; and it was then that they first conceived the idea of a magazine to educate the public in the great art of the past. Together with the artist Leon Bakst (an old schoolfriend of Benois, Filosofov and Nouvel at the May Academy in Petersburg) they established the World of Art movement, which arranged concerts, exhibitions and lectures on artistic themes, and founded a magazine of the same name which lasted from 1898 to 1904. Subsidized by Tenisheva and Mamontov, the magazine would come to feature the folk-inspired artists of their colonies alongside modern Western art - the same combination that would later be repeated by Diaghilev and Benois in the Ballets Russes.

    The co-founders of the World of Art saw themselves as cosmopolitans of Petersburg (they called themselves the ‘Nevsky Pickwickians’) and championed the idea of a universal culture which they believed was embodied in that civilization. They identified themselves with the aristocracy, and saw that class as a great repository of Russia’s cultural

    heritage. In a passage of his
Memoirs
that is crucial to an understanding of the World of Art, Benois underlined this point when he reminisced about the Filosofovs, one of Russia’s ancient noble families:

    Theirs was the class to which all the chief figures of Russian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belonged, the class that created the delights of the characteristic Russian way of life. From this class came the heroes and heroines in the novels of Pushkin and Lermontov, Turgenev and Tolstoy. This was the class that achieved all that is peaceful, worthy, durable and meant to last for ever. They set the tempo of Russian life… All the subtleties of the Russian psychology, all the nuances of our characteristically Russian moral sensibility arose and matured within this milieu.
¹²⁰

    Above all, they identified with the artistic values of the aristocracy. They saw art as a spiritual expression of the individual’s creative genius, not as a vehicle for social programmes or political ideas, as they believed the Russian arts had become under Stasov’s leadership. Their veneration of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky stemmed from this philosophy - not ‘art for art’s sake’, as they frequently insisted, but the belief that ideas should be integrated in the work of art.

    Reacting against the nineteenth-century realist tradition, the World of Art group sought to restore an earlier ideal of beauty as the artistic principle of what they envisaged (and successfully promoted) as Russia’s cultural renaissance. The classical tradition of St Petersburg was one expression of this ideal. The World of Art circle made a cult of eighteenth-century Petersburg. It was practically defined by nostalgia for a civilization which they sensed was about to pass away. Benois and his nephew Eugene Lanceray each produced a series of prints and lithographs depicting city scenes in the reigns of Peter and Catherine the Great. Benois lamented that the classical ideal of eighteenth-century Petersburg had been abandoned by the vulgar nationalists of the nineteenth century. In the revolutionary year of 1905, Diaghilev mounted an exhibition of eighteenth-century Russian portraits in the Tauride Palace, shortly to become the home of the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet. He introduced the portraits as ‘a grandiose summing-up of a brilliant, but, alas, dying period in our history’.
¹²¹

    But peasant art could also be regarded as a form of ‘classicism’ - at least in the stylized forms in which it was presented by the neo-nationalists. It was impersonal, symbolic and austere, strictly regulated by the folk traditions of representation, a mystical expression of the spiritual world yet intimately linked with the collective rituals and practices of village life. Here was an ancient, a different ‘world of art’, whose principles of beauty could be used to overturn the deadening influence of nineteenth-century bourgeois and romantic art.

    For Diaghilev, money played a part. Always keen to spot a new market opportunity, the impresario was impressed by the growing popularity of the neo-nationalists’ folk-like art.
Fin-de-siecle
Europe had an endless fascination for ‘the primitive’ and ‘exotic’. The savage of the East was regarded as a force of spiritual renewal for the tired bourgeois cultures of the West. Diaghilev had spotted this trend early on. ‘Europe needs our youth and spontaneity’, he wrote on his return from a tour there in 1896. ‘We must go forth at once. We must show our all, with all the qualities and defects of our nationality.’
¹²²
His instincts were confirmed in 1900 when Russia’s arts and crafts made a huge splash at the Paris Exhibition. The centre of attention was Korovin’s ‘Russian Village’, a reconstruction of the wooden architecture he had studied on a trip to the Far North, complete with an ancient
teremok,
or timber tower, and a wooden church, which was built on site by a team of peasants brought in from Russia. The Parisians were enchanted by these ‘savage carpenters’, with their ‘unkempt hair and beards, their broad, child-like smiles and primitive methods’, and as one French critic wrote, ‘if the objects on display had been for sale, there would not be a single item left’.
¹²³
There was a steady flow of peasant-crafted goods from Russia to the West - so much so that special shops were opened in Paris, London, Leipzig, Chicago, Boston and New York in the 1900s.
¹²⁴
The Parisian couturier Paul Poiret travelled to Russia in 1912 to buy up peasant garb, from which he drew inspiration for his fashionable clothes. The term
‘blouse russe’
echoed round the fashion halls, and models could be seen in clothes which bore the mark of Russian
sarafans
and homespun coats.
¹²⁵

    But there was more than business to draw Diaghilev to the neo-nationalists. The fact that artists such as Polenova and Maliutin were increasingly rendering their ‘peasant art’ in the stylized forms of mod-

    ernism brought them into line with the ethos of the World of Art. Diaghilev was particularly attracted to the paintings of Viktor Vasnet-sov, which displayed less folk content than a general sense of peasant colouring. Vasnetsov believed that colour was the key to the Russian people’s understanding of beauty, and he developed his own palette from the study of folk art (the
lubok
woodcuts and icons) and peasant artefacts, which he collected on his tours of Viatka province in the 1870s. The artist brought these vibrant primary colours to his brilliant stage designs for Mamontov’s production of
The Snow Maiden
(plate 15), a production that became the visual model for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

    Vasnetsov’s designs were an inspiration for the neo-nationalists who followed in his footsteps from Abramtsevo to the World of Art. Their fairytale-like quality was clearly to be seen in later stage designs for the Ballets Russes by Alexander Golovine
(Boris Godunov:
1908;
The Firebird:
1910) and Konstantin Korovin
(Ruslan and Liudmila:
1909). Even more influential, in the longer term, was Vasnetsov’s use of colour, motifs, space and style to evoke the essence of folk art, which would inspire primitivist painters such as Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. These artists, too, gravitated towards the folk tradition, to the icon and the
lubok
and to peasant artefacts, in their quest for a new poetic outlook on the world. Introducing an exhibition of icons and woodcuts in Moscow in 1913, Goncharova talked about a ‘peasant aesthetic’ that was closer to the symbolic art forms of the East than the representational tradition of the West. ‘This art does not copy or improve on the real world but reconstitutes it.’ Here was the inspiration of Goncharova’s designs for the Ballets Russes, such as
Le Coq d’Or
of 1914.

    The Ballets Russes was meant to be a synthesis of all the arts, and it has often been described as a Russian brand of Richard Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk,
in which music, art and drama are united. But in fact that synthesis had less to do with Wagner than with the Russian peasantry. It had its roots in Mamontov’s Private Opera which had been founded on the spirit of artistic collaboration at Abramtsevo. The whole purpose of the colony was to bring together all the arts and crafts to unite life and art-through a collective enterprise which its pioneers equated with their own idealized notion of the peasant commune. What

    16.
Church at Abramtsevo. Designed by Viktor Vasnetsov, 188
1-2

    the artists at Abramtsevo admired most about peasant culture was the synthetic nature of its arts and crafts. Simple artefacts, like textiles or ceramics, brought artistic beauty into people’s daily lives. Collective rituals like the
khorovod
were total works of art - little ‘rites of spring’ - combining folk song and ceremonial dance with real events in village life. The colony was an attempt to re-create this ‘world of art’. The whole community - artists, craftsmen and peasant builders - became involved in the building of its church. Artists combined with singers and musicians, costume-makers with set-builders, to stage productions of the opera. This was what Diaghilev meant when he said the Ballets Russes was built on the foundations of peasant arts and crafts.

    ’I am sending you a proposal’, Diaghilev wrote to the composer Anatoly Lyadov in 1909.

    I need a
ballet
and a
Russian
one - the
first
Russian ballet, since there is no such thing. There is Russian opera, Russian symphony, Russian song, Russian dance, Russian rhythm - but no Russian ballet. And that is precisely what I need - to perform in May of the coming year in the Paris Grand Opera and

    in the huge Royal Drury Lane Theatre in London. The ballet needn’t be three-tiered. The libretto is ready. Fokine has it. It was dreamed up by us all collectively. It’s
The Firebird -
a ballet in one act and perhaps two scenes.
¹²⁶

    Diaghilev’s enthusiasm for the ballet was not always evident. His professional entree into the art world had been through painting, and his first job in the theatre was a long way from the stage. In 1899 he was employed by Prince Sergei Volkonsky, the grandson of the famous Decembrist, who had just been appointed by the Tsar as Director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Volkonsky asked Diaghilev to run the theatre’s in-house magazine. Eight years later, when Diaghilev took his first stage productions to the West, it was opera, not ballet, that made up his exotic
saisons russes.
It was only the comparative expense of staging operas that made him look to ballet for a cheap alternative.