NATASHA

(A fine revenge for a murderer's death)

The little house now burns, a delight to their gaze,

Circassian freedom set ablaze!⁷²

Lermontov was an accomplished watercolourist and in one self-portrait he paints himself with a Circassian sword gripped firmly in his hand, his body wrapped in a Caucasian cloak, and the cartridge cases worn by mountain tribesmen fixed on to the front of his Guards uniform. This same mixed identity, semi-Russian and semi-Asiatic, was assigned by Lermontov to Pechorin, the subject of A Hero of Our Times. Restless, cynical and disillusioned with the high society of St Petersburg, Pechorin undergoes a transformation when he is trans- ferred, as a Guards officer, to the Caucasus. He falls in love with Bela,

24. Watercolour copy of a lost self-portrait with Circassian sword and cloak by Mikhail Lermontov, 1837

the daughter of a Circassian chief, learns her Turkic language, and wears Circassian dress to declare his love for her. At one point the narrator compares him to a Chechen bandit. This, it seems, was the essential point: there was no clear boundary between the 'civilized' behaviour of the Russian colonists and the 'barbarous' acts of the Asiatic tribes.

Lermontov was not the only Russian to adopt the Caucasus as his

'spiritual home'. The composer Balakirev was another 'son of the mountains'. The founder of the 'Russian music school' came from ancient Tatar stock, and he was proud of it, judging from the frequency with which he posed for portraits in Caucasian costumes.⁷³ 'The Circassians', he wrote to Stasov in 1862, 'beginning with their costume (I know no better dress than that of the Circassians) are as much to my taste as to Lermontov's.'⁷⁴ Rimsky-Korsakov described Balakirev as 'half-Russian and half-Tatar in his character'. Stravinsky recalled him as a 'large man, bald, with a Kalmyk head and the shrewd, sharp-eyed look of a Lenin'.⁷⁵ In 1862 Balakirev toured the Caucasus. He fell in love with the region's wild landscape. It summoned up the spirit of his favourite poet, Lermontov. 'Of all things Russian', he wrote to Stasov from Piatigorsk, 'Lermontov affects me most of all.'⁷⁶

Balakirev attempted to evoke this love for the writer in his symphonic poem Tamara (1866-81), based upon Lermontov's poem of that name. Lermontov's Tamara (1841) retold the folk story of a Georgian queen whose seductive voice lured lovers to her castle in the mountains overlooking the Terek river. After a night of orgiastic dancing she would throw the bodies of the lovers she had murdered from the tower of the castle into the river far below. It was the spirit of Tamara's 'whirling dance', as Stasov was to put it, which Balakirev tried to re-create in the frenzied music of his piano suite:

And strange wild sounds

All night were heard from there

As if in this empty tower

A hundred horny young men and girls

Came together on a wedding night

Or on the feast of a great funeral.'

The musical devices which Balakirev used were mostly from the common stock of 'oriental sounds' - sensuous chromatic scales, syncopated dance-like rhythms and languorous harmonies designed to conjure up the exotic world of hedonistic pleasure which people in the West had long associated with the Orient. But Balakirev also intro duced a stunning new device which he had picked up from his transcriptions of Caucasian folk songs. For Balakirev had noticed that in

all these songs the harmonies were based on the pentatonic (or five-tone) scale common to the music of Asia. The distinctive feature of the pentatonic or 'Indo-Chinese' scale is its avoidance of semitones and thus of any clear melodic gravitation towards any particular tone. It creates the sense of 'floating sounds' which is characteristic of Southeast Asian music in particular. Tamara was the first major piece of Russian music to make extensive use of the pentatonic scale. Bala-kirev's innovation was akin to the discovery of a new artistic language with which to give Russian music its 'Eastern feel' and make it so distinct from the music of the West. The pentatonic scale would be used in striking fashion by every Russian composer who followed in the Balakirev 'national school', from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky.

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.⁸¹Analysing 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