Natasha's Dance

the war against Japan. The second reaction was no less imperialist but it justified the empire’s eastern mission on the questionable grounds that Russia’s cultural homeland was on the Eurasian steppe. By marching into Asia, the Russians were returning to their ancient home. This rationale was first advanced in 1840 by the orientalist Grigoriev. ‘Who is closer to Asia than we are?’ Grigoriev had asked. ‘Which of the European races retained more of the Asian element than the Slavic races did, the last of the great European peoples to leave their ancient homeland in Asia?’ It was ‘Providence that had called upon the Russians to reclaim the Asian steppe’; and because of ‘our close relations with the Asiatic world’, this was to be a peaceful process of ‘reunion with our primeval brothers’, rather than the subjugation of a foreign race.140 During the campaign in Central Asia the same thesis was advanced. The Slavs were returning to their ‘prehistoric home’, argued Colonel Veniukov, a geographer in Kaufman’s army, for ‘our ancestors had lived by the Indus and the Oxus before they were displaced by the Mongol hordes’. Veniukov maintained that Central Asia should be settled by the Russians. The Russian settlers should be encouraged to intermarry with the Muslim tribes to regenerate the ‘Turanian’ race that had once lived on the Eurasian steppe. In this way the empire would expand on the ‘Russian principle’ of ‘peaceful evolution and assimilation’ rather than by conquest and by racial segregation, as in the empires of the European states.141

    The idea that Russia had a cultural and historic claim in Asia became a founding myth of the empire. During the construction of the

    FOLKLORE FANTASIES. The Rite of Spring (1913): the original score by Igor Stravinsky. Below: Viktor Vasnetsov: set design for Mamontov’s production of Rumsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden (Abramtsevo, 1881). Vasnetsov’s designs, with their folk-like use of colour, became a visual model for the Ballets Russes and primitivist painters such as Goncharova, Malevich and Chagall.

    SCYTHIAN RUSSI A. The Rite of Spring was conceived by Nikolai Roerich

as the re-enactment of an ancient (‘Scythian’) ritual of human sacrifice. A trained

archaeologist, Roerich designed the sets and costumes of The Rite of Spring. These were

reproduced by the Joffrey Ballet for its revival of the original ballet in 1987 (above).

The rhythm of the music and the choreography emphasized the dancers’ weight and

immobility, a sense conveyed by Roerich in his many paintings of Scythian Russia.

    Below: Roerich: The Idols (1901).

    Roerich: costume designs for The Snow Maiden (Chicago, 1921). A disciple

of Stasov, Roerich believed in the Asiatic origins of Russian folk culture, as

suggested hereby the heavy jewellery and the Tatar-like headgear.

    PAGAN RUSSIA. Vastly Kandinsky: Motley Life (1907). Ostensibly a Russian-Christian scene, the painting is filled with pagan symbols from the Komi region, which Kandinsky had explored as an anthropologist. Below: Kandinsky: All Saints II (1911) tells the story of the confrontation between St Stephan and the Komi shaman Pam. Like

Pam (seen escaping persecution in a boat) the two saints (standing on the rock) wear sorcerer’s caps but they also have halos to symbolize the fusion of the Christian and the

pagan traditions.

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