Natasha's Dance (72 page)

    is a profoundly national phenomenon’, wrote the painter Shevchenko. ‘Russia and the East have been indissolubly linked from as early as the Tatar invasions, and the spirit of the Tatars, of the East, has become so rooted in our life that at times it is difficult to distinguish where a national feature ends and where an Eastern influence begins… Yes we are Asia and are proud of this.’ Shevchenko made a detailed case for Russian art originating in the East. Comparing Russian folk with Indo-Persian art, he claimed that one could ‘see their common origin’.
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    Kandinsky himself was a great admirer of Persian art and equated its ideals of simplicity and truth with ‘the oldest icons of our Rus’ ‘.
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Before the First World War, Kandinsky lived in Munich, where he and Marc were the co-editors of
The Blue Rider
almanac. Alongside the works of Europe’s leading artists,
The Blue Rider
featured peasant art and children’s drawings, folk prints and icons, tribal masks and totems - anything, in fact, that reflected the ideal of spontaneous expression and vitality which Kandinsky placed at the heart of his artistic philosophy. Like the Scythians, Kandinsky at this time was moving to the idea of a synthesis between Western, primitive and oriental cultures. He looked to Russia as the Promised Land (and returned to it after

    1917). This search for synthesis was the key theme in Kandinsky’s early (so-called ‘Russian’) works (which were still pictorial rather than abstract). In these paintings there is in fact a complex mix of Christian, pagan and shamanic images from the Komi area. In
Motley Life
(1907) (plate 19), for example, the scene is clearly set in the Komi capital of Ust Sysolk, at the confluence of the Sysola and Vychegda rivers (a

    small log structure in the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, just below the hilltop monastery, confirms the locale: the Komi used these Inns on stilts as storage sheds). On the surface this appears to be a Russian-Christian scene. But, as Kandinsky suggests in the title
Motley

Life
, underneath the surface there is a collision of diverse beliefs. The red squirrel in the tree, directly at the visual centre of the painting and

    echoing the golden dome of the chapel to the right, is an emblem of the forest spirits, to whom the Komi people offered squirrel pelts as a

    sacrifice. The old man in the foreground may have the appearance of

    a Christian pilgrim, but his supernaturally coloured beard (a pale

    green) may also mark him out as a sorcerer, while his stick and musical

    accomplice, in the form of the piper to his right, suggest shamanic lore.
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Several of Kandinsky’s early works narrate the story of St Stephan’s confrontation with the Komi shaman Pam on the banks of the Vychegda river. According to legend, Pam led the resistance of the Komi people to the fourteenth-century Russian missionary. In a public debate by the riverside Pam based his defence of the pagan religion on the notion that the shamans were better than the Christians at hunting bears and other forest animals. But Stephan challenged him to a ‘divine trial by fire and water’, inviting Pam to walk through a burning hut and dive into the icy river. The shaman was forced to concede defeat. In Kandinsky’s version of the legend, as portrayed in
All Saints II
(1911) (plate 20), Pam escapes from persecution in a boat. He wears a pointed ‘sorcerer’s hat’. A mermaid swims alongside the boat; another sits on the rock to its right. Standing on the rock are a pair of saints. They, too, wear sorcerer’s caps, but they also have haloes to symbolize the fusion of the Christian and the pagan traditions. On the left St Elijah rides his
troika
through a storm - blown by the piper in the sky - a reference to the Finno-Ugric god the ‘Thunderer’, whose place Elijah took in the popular religious imagination. St Simon stands on a column in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. He is another compound figure, combining elements of the blacksmith Simon, who builds an iron pillar to survey the world in the Russian peasant tale of ‘The Seven Simons’, and St Simeon the Stylite, who spent his life in meditation on top of a pillar and became the patron saint of all blacksmiths. Finally, the figure in the foreground, seated on a horse with his arms outstretched, is the World-watching Man. He is seen here in a double form: as the shaman riding his horse to the spirit world and as St George.
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This figure reappears throughout Kandinsky’s work, from his first abstract canvas,
Composition II,
in 1910, to his final painting,
Tempered Elan,
in 1944. It was a sort of symbolic signature of his shaman
alter ego
who used art as his magic instrument to evoke a higher spiritual world.

    The shaman’s oval drum is another leitmotif of Kandinsky’s art. The circle and the line which dominate Kandinsky’s abstract schemata were symbols of the shaman’s drum and stick. Many of his paintings, like
Oval No.
2 (1925) (plate 21), were themselves shaped like drums. They were painted with hieroglyphs invented by Kandinsky to emulate

    the symbols he had seen on the drums of Siberian shamans: a hooked curve and line to symbolize the horse, circles for the sun and moon, or beaks and eyes to represent the bird form which many shamans used as a dance head-dress (plate 22).
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The hooked curve and line was a double cipher. It stood for the horse-stick on which the shaman rode to the spirit world in seances. Buriat shamans hit their sticks (called ‘horses’) while they danced: the tops were shaped like horses’ heads, the bottom ends like hoofs. Among Finno-Ugric tribes the shaman’s drum itself was called a ‘horse’ and was equipped with reins, while the drumstick was referred to as a ‘whip’.
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    In eastern Europe the hobby horse has a preternatural pedigree which belies its benign status in the Western nursery. The Hungarian
taltos,
or sorcerer, rode with magic speed on a reed horse - a reed between his legs - which in turn became the model of a peasant toy. In the
Kalevala
the hero Vainamoinen travels to the north on a straw stallion - as emulated by generations of Finnish boys and girls. In Russia the horse has a special cultural resonance as a symbol of the country’s Asiatic legacy - the suc-cessive waves of invasion by nomadic horsemen of the steppe, from the Khazars to the Mongols, which have shaped the course of Russian history. The horse became the great poetic metaphor of Russia’s destiny. Pushkin started it with
The Bronze Horseman.

    Where will you gallop, charger proud, Where next your plunging hoofbeats settle?
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    For the Symbolist circles in which Kandinsky moved, the horse was a symbol of the Asiatic steppe upon which Russia’s European civilization had been built. It featured constantly in Symbolist paintings (perhaps most famously in Petrov-Vodkin’s
Bathing the Red Horse
(1912) (plate 25) and it was a leitmotif of Scythian poetry, from Blok’s ‘Mare of the Steppes’ to Briusov’s ‘Pale Horseman’. And the hoofbeat sound of Mongol horses approaching from the steppe echoes throughout Bely’s
Petersburg.
To attribute a ‘dark side’ to the hobby horse in Russia, where children no doubt rode it in all innocence, would be absurd. But from an early age Russians were aware of what it meant to ‘gallop on a charger of the steppes’. They felt the heavy clatter of the horses’ hooves on the Asiatic steppeland beneath their feet.

    overleaf:
Anna
Akhmatova
at the Fountain House

    Akhmatova arrived at the Fountain House, the former palace of the Sheremetevs, when she went to live there with her second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, in 1918. The house remained as it had always been, a sanctuary from the destruction of the war and revolution that had transformed Petersburg in the four years since it had been renamed Petrograd;* but, like the city (which had lost its status as the capital), the beauty of the palace was a retrospective one. Its last owner, Count Sergei, the grandson of Praskovya and Nikolai Petrovich, had preserved the house as a family museum. He himself had written several books on the history of the Sheremetev clan. During the February Revolution of 1917, when crowds came to the house and demanded arms to help them in their struggle against the Tsar’s last loyalist troops, the count had opened the collection cabinets of Field Marshal Boris Petrovich, the founder of the palace, and handed out to them some picks and axes from the sixteenth century.
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To save his home from the violence of the mob, he turned it over to the state, signing an agreement with the newly installed Soviet government to preserve the house as a museum, before fleeing with his family abroad. The old Sheremetev servants were kept on, and Shileiko, a brilliant young scholar of Middle Eastern archaeology who had been a tutor to the last count’s grandsons and a close friend of the family, was allowed to keep his apartment in the northern wing. Akhmatova had known Shileiko since before the war, when he was a minor poet in her bohemian circle at the ‘Stray Dog’ club with Mandelstam and her previous husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev. The Fountain House was more than just the scene of her romance with Shileiko - it drew her to him in a spiritual way. The Sheremetev motto,
‘Deus conservat omnia’
(‘God preserves all’), inscribed on the coat of arms at the Fountain House, where she would live for over thirty years,

    * After the outbreak of the First World War the German-sounding name of St Petersburg was changed to the more Slavic Petrograd to appease patriotic sentiment. The city kept that name until 1924, when, after Lenin’s death, it was renamed Leningrad.

    became the guiding redemptive principle of Ahkmatova’s life and art. Although she was only twenty-nine when she moved to the Shereme-tev palace, Akhmatova, like her new home, was from a vanished world. Born in 1889, she had gone to school at Tsarskoe Selo, where, like Pushkin, she imbibed the spirit of French poetry. In 1911 she went to Paris, where she became friends with the painter Amedeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her, one of many, hung in her apartment at the Fountain House until 1952. Her early poetry was influenced by the Symbolists. But in 1913 she joined Gumilev and Mandelstam in a new literary group, the Acmeists, who rejected the mysticism of the Symbolists and returned to the classical poetic principles of clarity, concision and the precise expression of emotional experience. She won immense acclaim for her love poetry in
Evening
(1912), and then
Rosary
(1914): the accessibility and simplicity of her verse style made her poetry easy to commit to memory; and its female voice and sensibility, at that time a novelty in Russia, made it hugely popular with women in particular. Akhmatova had many female imitators of her early style - a fact she would deplore in later years. As she wrote in ‘Epigram’ (1958):

    I taught women to speak…

    But Lord, how to make them cease!
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    On the eve of the First World War, Akhmatova was at the height of her success. Tall and astonishingly beautiful, she was surrounded by friends, lovers and admirers. Freedom, merriment and a bohemian spirit filled these years. She and Mandelstam would make each other laugh ‘so much that we fell down on the divan, which sang with all its springs’.
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And then, at once, with the outbreak of the war, ‘we aged a hundred years’, as she put it in her poem ‘In Memoriam, 19 July, 1914’ (1916):

    We aged a hundred years, and this Happened in a single hour: The short summer had already died, The body of the ploughed plains smoked.

    Suddenly the quiet road burst into colour, A lament flew up, ringing, silver… Covering my face, I implored God Before the first battle to strike me dead.

    Like a burden henceforth unnecessary, The shadows of passion and songs vanished

    from my memory. The Most High ordered it - emptied -To become a grim book of calamity.
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