Natasha's Dance (65 page)

    This oriental element was one of the hallmarks of the Russian music school developed by the
kucbkists
- the ‘Mighty Handful’ (
kuchka)
of nationalist composers which included Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Many of the
kuchkists’
quintessential ‘Russian’ works - from Balakirev’s fantasy for piano
Islamei
(a cornerstone of the Russian piano school and a ‘must perform’ at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition) to Borodin’s
Prince Igor
and Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Scheherazade
- were composed in this oriental style. As the founding father of the school, Balakirev had encouraged the use of Eastern themes and harmonies to distinguish this self-conscious ‘Russian’ music from the German symphonism of Anton Rubinstein and the Conservatory. The ‘First Russian Symphony’ of Rimsky-Korsakov -which was in fact composed more than twelve years after the
Ocean Symphony
of Rubinstein - earned its nickname because of its use of Russian folk and oriental melodies, which Rimsky’s teacher, Balakirev, had transcribed in the Caucasus. ‘The symphony is good’, wrote the composer Cesar Cui to Rimsky in 1863. ‘We performed it a few days ago at Balakirev’s - to the great pleasure of Stasov. It is really Russian. Only a Russian could have composed it, because it lacks the slightest trace of any stagnant Germanness
[nemetschina
].’
⁷⁸

    Along with Balakirev, Stasov was the major influence on the devel-opment of a Russian-oriental musical style. Many of the pioneering
kuchkist
works which shaped that style, including
Prince Igor
and
Scheherazade,
were dedicated to the nationalist critic. In 1882 Stasov wrote an article on ‘Twenty five Years of Russian Art’, in which he

    tried to account for the profound influence of the Orient on Russian composers:

    Some of them personally saw the Orient. Others, although they had not travelled to the East, had been surrounded with Orienral impressions all their lives. Therefore, they expressed them vividly and strikingly. In this they shared a general Russian sympathy with everything Oriental. Its influence has pervaded Russian life and given to its arts a distinctive colouring… To see in this only a strange whim and capriciousness of Russian composers… would be absurd.
⁷⁹

    For Stasov the significance of the Eastern trace in Russian art went far beyond exotic decoration. It was a testimony to the historical fact of Russia’s descent from the ancient cultures of the Orient. Stasov believed that the influence of Asia was ‘manifest in all the fields of Russian culture: in language, clothing, customs, buildings, furniture and items of daily use, in ornaments, in melodies and harmonies, and in all our fairy tales’.
⁸⁰

    Stasov had first outlined the argument in his thesis on the origins of Russian ornament during the 1860s.
⁸¹
Analysing medieval Russian Church manuscripts, he had linked the ornamentation of the lettering to similar motifs (rhomboids, rosettes, swastikas and chequered patterns, and certain types of floral and animal design) from Persia and Mongolia. Comparable designs were found in other cultures of Byzantium where the Persian influence was also marked; but whereas the Byzantines had borrowed only some of the Persian ornaments, the Russians had adopted nearly all of them, and to Stasov this suggested that the Russians had imported them directly from Persia. Such an argument is difficult to prove - for simple motifs like these are found all over the world. But Stasov focused on some striking similarities. There was, for example, a remarkable resemblance in the ornamental image of the tree, which Stasov thought was linked to the fact that both the Persians and the pagan Russians had ‘idealized the tree as a sacred cult’.
⁸²
In both traditions the tree had a conic base, a spiral round the trunk, and bare branches tipped with magnoliaceous flowers. The image appeared frequently in pagan rituals of the tree cult, which, as Kandinsky
had discovered, was still in evidence among the Komi

    25.
Vladimir Stasov: study of the Russian letter ‘B’ from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Novgorod

    people in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Stasov even found it as the calligraphic trunk of the letter ‘B’ in a fourteenth-century Gospel from Novgorod, where a man kneels in prayer at the base of the tree. Here is a perfect illustration of the complex mix of Asian, pagan and Christian elements which make up the main strands of Russian folk culture.

    Stasov turned next to the study of the
byliny,
the epic songs which contained Russia’s oldest folk myths and legends, claiming that these too were from Asia. In his
Origins of the Russian Byliny
(1868) he agued that the
byliny
were Russified derivatives of Hindu, Buddhist or Sanskrit myths and tales, which had been brought to Russia by armies, merchants and nomadic immigrants from Persia, India and Mongolia. Stasov’s argument was based upon the theory of cultural

    borrowing - at that time just recently advanced by the German philologist Theodor Benfey. During the last decades of the nineteenth century Benfey’s theory was increasingly accepted by those folklorists in the West (Godeke and Kohler, Clouston and Liebrecht) who maintained that European folk tales were secondary versions of oriental originals. Stasov was the first to make a detailed argument for Benfey’s case. His argument was based on a comparative analysis of the
byliny
with the texts of various Asian tales - especially the ancient Indian stories of the
Mahabharata,
the
Ramayana
and the
Panchantra,
which had been translated into German by Benfey in 1859.

    Stasov paid particular attention to the narrative details, the symbols and the motifs of these ancient tales (not perhaps the strongest basis from which to infer a cultural influence, for basic similarities of plot and character can easily be found in folk tales from around the world). * Stasov concluded, for example, that the Russian legend of
Sadko
(where a merchant goes to an underwater kingdom in search of wealth) was derived from the Brahmin story of the
Harivansa
(where the flight to the underworld is a spiritual journey in search of truth). According to Stasov, it was only in the later versions of the Russian tale (those that date from after the fifteenth century) that the religious element was supplanted by the motif of commercial wealth. It was at this time that the legend was transposed on to the historical figure of Sadko - a wealthy member of a seafaring guild in Novgorod who had endowed a church of St Boris and St Gleb in the twelfth century.
⁸³

    Similarly, Stasov argued that the folk heroes
(bogatyrs)
of the
byliny
were really the descendants of the oriental gods. The most famous of these
bogatyrs
was Ilia Muromets - a brave and honest warrior who championed the people’s cause against such enemies as
Solovei Raz-boinik,
the ‘Nightingale Robber’, who was usually recast with Tatar features in the later versions of this Russian tale. Stasov drew attention to the supernatural age of Ilia Muromets - several hundred years by logical deduction from the details of the tale. This suggested that

    * There is some historical evidence to support Stasov’s thesis, however. Indian tales were certainly transported by migrants to South-east Asia, where these tales are widely known today; and the
Ramayana
tale was known from translations in Tibet from at least the thirteenth century (see J. W. de Jong,
The Story of Rama in Tibet: Text and Translation of the Tun-huang Manuscripts
(Stuttgart, 1989)).

    Muromets was descended from the mythic kings who reigned over India for centuries, or from the oriental gods who transcended human time.
⁸⁴
The word
‘bogatyr’
was itself derived from the Mongol term for ‘warrior’
(bagadur),
according to Stasov. He drew on evidence from European philologists, who had traced the word’s etymological relatives to all those countries that had once been occupied by the Mongol hordes:
bahadir
(in Persian),
behader
(in Turkish),
bohater
(in Polish),
bator
(in Magyar), etc.
⁸⁵

    Finally, Stasov analysed the ethnographic details of the texts - their place names, number systems, scenery and buildings, household items and furniture, clothing, games and customs - all of which suggested that the
byliny
had come, not from the northern Russian forests, but rather from the steppe.

    If the
byliny
really did grow out of our native soil in ancient times, then, however much they were later altered by the princes and the Tsars, they should still contain the traces of our Russian land. So we should read in them about our Russian winters, our snow and frozen lakes. We should read about our Russian fields and meadows; about the agricultural nature of our people; about our peasant huts and generally about the native, always wooden buildings and uten-sils; about our Russian hearth and the spiritual beliefs that surround it; about the songs and rituals of the village chorus; about the way we worship our ancestors; about our belief in mermaids, goblins, house spirits and various other superstitions of pagan Rus’. Everything, in short, should breathe the spirit of our country life. But none of this is in the
byliny.
There is no winter, no snow or ice, as if these tales are not set in the Russian land at all but in some hot climate of Asia or the East. There are no lakes or mossy river banks in the
byliny.
Agricultural life is never seen in them. There are no wooden buildings. None of our peasant customs is described. There is nothing to suggest the Russian way of life - and what we see instead is the arid Asian steppe.
⁸⁶

    Stasov caused considerable outrage among the Slavophiles and other nationalists with his Asiatic theory of the
byliny.
He was accused of nothing less than ‘slandering Russia’; his book was denounced as a ‘source of national shame’, its general conclusions as ‘unworthy of a Russian patriot’.” It was not just that Stasov’s critics took offence at his ‘oriental fantasy’ that ‘our culture might have been descended from the

    barbarous nomads of the Asian steppe’.
⁸⁸
As they perceived it, Stasov’s theory represented a fundamental challenge to the nation’s identity. The whole philosophy of the Slavophiles had been built on the assumption that the nation’s culture grew from its native soil. For over thirty years they had lavished their attentions on the
byliny,
going round the villages and writing down these tales in the firm belief that they were true expressions of the Russian folk. Tales such as
Sadko
and
Ilia Muromets
were sacred treasures of the people’s history, the Slavophiles maintained, a fact which was suggested by the very word
bylina,
which was, they said, derived from the past tense of ‘to be’ (byl).
⁸⁹

    One of the strongholds of the Slavophiles was the ‘mythological school’ of folklorists and literary scholarship which had its origins in the European Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. Stasov’s fiercest critics belonged to the school, which numbered the most venerable folklorists, such as Buslaev and Afanasiev, among its followers. The exponents of the mythological theory worked on the rather questionable assumption that the ancient beliefs of the Russian people could be reconstructed through their contemporary life and art. For Buslaev, the songs about Sadko were ‘the finest living relics of our people’s poetry which have been preserved in all their purity and without the slightest trace of outside influence’. Ilia Muromets was a real folk hero of the ancient past ‘who embodies, in their purest form, the spiritual ideals of the people’.
⁹⁰
In the early 1860s the
byliny
had suddenly become a new and vital piece of evidence for the mythological school. For it had been revealed by Pavel Rybnikov that they were still a living and evolving form. Rybnikov was a former civil servant who had been exiled to the countryside of Olonets, 200 kilometres to the north-east of Petersburg, as a punishment for his involvement in a revolutionary group. Like so many of the Tsar’s internal exiles, Rybnikov became a folklorist. Travelling around the villages of Olonets, he recorded over thirty different singers of the
byliny,
each with his own versions of the major tales such as
Ilia Muromets.
The publication of these
Songs,
in four volumes between 1861 and 1867, sparked a huge debate about the character and origins of Russia’s folk culture which, if one is to judge from Turgenev’s novel
Smoke
(1867), even engulfed the emigre community in Germany. Suddenly the origins of the
byliny
had become the battleground for opposing views of Russia and its cultural

    destiny. On the one side there was Stasov, who argued that the pulse of ancient Asia was still beating in the Russian villages; and on the other the Slavophiles, who saw the
byliny
as living proof that Russia’s Christian culture had remained there undisturbed for many centuries.