Natasha's Dance (70 page)

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.*