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Igor Stravinsky, Nikolai Roerich, and the Healing Power of Paganism.


The Rite o Spring as f Ecstatic Ritual of Renewal for the Twentieth Century

Marilyn Meyer Hoogen

A dissertation submitted i partial fdfihnent n o the requirements for the degree o f f

Doctor o Philosophy f
University of Washington 1997

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Marilyn Hoogen

Doctoral Dissertation

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University of Washington Abstract Igor Stravinsky, Nikolai Roerich, and the Healing Power of Paganism. The Rite o Spring as f Ecstatic Ritual of Renewal for the Twentieth Century by Marilyn Meyer Hoogen Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee Professor James D. West Department of Slavic Languages and Literature

This study reexamines The Rite of Spring as a product of turn-of-thecentury Russian culture. Western scholarship has focused on the sources, structure, and style of the musical score, while it has demonstrated less understanding of the concept that motivated Igor Stravinsky and Nikolai Roerich. Russian creative intelligentsia saw art as a way to reconcile the material and spiritual worlds, a union that had been fragmented by rational philosophy and empirical saence. There was an impulse to return the arts to

their original sacred function in ritual, particularly in the theater. In this


cultural context The Rite of Spring can be seen as a mysterizim for the

twentieth century: it is a grand synthesis of music, design, and dance at an


enachnent of a sacred mystery that will reveal to the participants the nature of the human spirit and its relation to both the earthly and higher spiritual worlds. Chapter I summarizes Western scholarship on The Rite of Spring. As a corrective it discusses the movement in Russia to express the Russian national cultural heritage in the arts and the role that religious revival played

in the broad debate about Russian identity and Russia's future.

Chapter II examines Roerich's participation in this debate through his art and writings.

He idealized the distant past as an example of a n

aestheticized and harmonious way of life that must be restored to solve modem man's spiritual crisis. His role in The Rite of Spring was not limited to providing ethnographic accuracy; rather, this ritual is one of a life-long

a' series of projects created in an effort to heal m n s life through a synthesis of


art and spirituality.
Chapter III describes the Russian intelligentsia's search for religious renewal as exemplified in the works of Alexander Scriabin and Viacheslav Ivanov. It establishes the prevalence of these ideas across educated and artistic culture. Chapter N demonstrates Stravinsky's hrll participation in the religious aspect of this ecstatic ritual. Finally, musical analyses, both those

made by Stravinsky's Russian contemporaries and those of modern scholars,


support the concept of The Rite of Spring as rnysterhm.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .....................................................

Chapter I:

The Rite of Spring in Western Scholarship: What's Missing? .....................................

Chapter II:

"The Future Resides in the Past." Nikolai Roerich's Concept of The Exalted Sacrifice. ...... 54
Ecstatic Ritual and the Mystmizirn: The Intellectual Context in which The Exalted Sacrifice WasBom...........................................

Chapter m.

111

Chapter N: Stravinskyfs Mysterircm .............................. 150


Conclusion

..................................................... 171
175

Bibliography .....................................................

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my dissertation advisor, James D.
West, and to the members of the committee, Gordana Crnkovic, Jack Haney,

and Larry Starr. David Graber and Herbert Coats provided much appreciated
advice, assistance, and support as well. I am also grateful to Richard White

for his wise words on research and writing.

Introduction

From the perspective of turn-of-the-century Russian culture, western scholarship has only partly succeeded in its investigation of The Rile of

Spring. In the analysis of the form and style of the work and in the search for
musical and ethnographic sources, western scholarship has fragmented The

Rite of Spring and, for the most part, removed it from its cultural context.
This methodology necessarily marginalizes the work of Igor Stravinsky's collaborators; Nikolai Roerich is seen as a painter/ethnographer, and Vaslav Nijinsky is seen as musically ignorant and perhaps mad. Western

scholarship often adopts the view that Stravinskyfs genius propelled him far beyond what little common vision the collaborators may have had in the

planning stages of The Rife of Spring. Viewed in its cultural context,


however, this ballet is a grand synthesis of music, ornament, and dance, a

ritual performed, as Stravinsky himself wrote, in the presence of "the Panic awe of nature, of the beauty which arises, a holy terror of the midday sun, a

sort of cry of Pan . . the birth of Spring,"' It is just one example of an idea that
preoccupied the Russian creative intelligentsia; art is a non-rational form of

cognition, the expression of spiritual truth which can transform man's


intelligence. The Rile o Spring is the product of an era in Russia when artists and f intellectuals were searching for ways to transform a world perched
'1gor Stravinsky, "Ce que j'ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sane du Printemps," Montjoie! I/8 29 May 1913: 1, quoted in Truman C. BulIard, "The First Performance of Igor Stravinskyfs'Sacre du Printemps."' 3 vols., diss. ,U of Rochester, 1971,2: 6-7.

precariously on the edge of haos. Begun as modernization and industrialization threatened folkways, this search involved a considerable effort to preserve the oldest traditions of pre-modern culture through systematic collecting, transcribing, and, somewhat ironically, reshaping them into new

myths for the modern world. Many Russian artists and intellectuals considered the failed 1905 revolution and stirrings of war in Europe ominous indications of the coming apocalypse that paradoxically would bring a new world through the destruction of refined civilization as it was known. The present world seemed to have moved too far from the idealized ancient unity of man, nature, and the cosmic elements, a time when the material and spiritual worlds were believed to be in balance. Stravinsky and Roerich were caught in the spell of the ancient spirituality, as were many other contemporary poets and painters. Eastern Church historian Georges Florovsky recalls the intellectual ferment of this period:

Fin de siecle Russia represented both an end and a beginning, the apex of awareness, when the very rhythm of life changed. . . . More than just a spiritual quest, it was a new experience. During
those years many suddenly discovered in man a metaphysical being; men suddenly found in themselves unexpected depths, and often dark chasms. The world seemed changed, for vision had become sharper and a new profundity has been revealed in the world. A religious need again awakened in Russian society. And just as in the time of Alexander I, it was again painful and difficult. The more the " s o d awoke" the more temptation increased, and life took on greater risks. The religious theme became a theme of life, and not merely a category of thought. People began to seek for more than just a religious worldview-a genuine thirst flared up for faith. A need was born for the "spiritual Me" and For preparing and ordering one's soul. Everything suddenly became quite serious. This does not mean that everyone was serious and truly valued the sigruficance of what was transpiring. On the contrary-there

was too much of the most dangerous dilettantism, mystical irresponsibility, and mere games. Yet the events themselves became serious and acquired a distinctive and harsh apocalyptical rhythm. Men's fates were being decided. Some were saved, others perished; some were swept from the road and lost; some redeemed t e r souls and the souls of their brothers. hi There were many accidents, and hopes were seldom realized. Those who achieved anything at a i l were outnumbered by the fallen. A few found themselves in the Church, but many more remained, and wished to remain, outside of it. Still others followed serpentine paths and entered upon a bitter trial. "Once h more dreams floated, and t e soul, captivated by them, worshipped unknown gods." It was a time of searching and temptations. Paths strangely crossed and diverged, contradiction reigned, white the anxiety of the consaence intensified.2 At the turn of the century in Russia, practitioners of literary, musical, visual, and dramatic arts, the creative intelligentsia, saw art as a way to reconcile the material and spiritual worlds. Symbolist artists accepted

Vladimir Solovfevrscalling to use the arts as a way of knowing a higher truth. Part of this process involved the dissolution of conventional boundaries between the arts. Painters and poets tried their hands at visual and verbal "symphonies." Behind these experiments lay belief in the theurgic property of a t the belief that words and sounds in the form of ritual, prayer, and r, incantation have magical power. There was an impulse to return the arts to their original sacred function as an integral part of ritual. Interest in studying and restoring the ancient forms continued, as did attempts to use synthesis of
the arts to create new myth and ritual as a response to the current age. Artists

including Andrei Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Maximilian Voloshin, Nikolai Roerich, and Viachesiav Ivanov adopted a highly principled and

2 ~ e o r g e s Florovsky, Ways of Russian BiichenrertriebsanstaIt, 1989) 233-234.

Theology: Part

Two

(1937; Vaduz:

uncompromising view of their priest-like roles in communicating their mystical visions of higher truth. They became interested in the occult and sought enlightenment through both contemplative and frenzied ecstasy. The Rite of Spring was conceived in ti context and dearly reflects these artistic hs concerns.

f It is without question that Igor Stravinsky's The Rite o Spring had a


profound impact on twentieth-century music. Robert Craft likened it to "a prize bull [that] has inseminated the whole modern movementw3an assertion substantiated by the profusion of studies that discuss and analyze all aspects of the score, the ballet's reception by audiences and critics, and the lives and works of those involved. In the years since the ballet's riotous

n premiere in Paris i 1913, a body of legend has attached itself to the work and
has obscured the artistic intent of the collaborators. Stravinsky himself is

partly responsible, as is Sergei Diaghilev, the purveyor of Russian "exotica" to


European audiences. Of particular concern is the interpretation of The Rite of Spring as subhuman barbarism. The Euro-centric view of Russian "barbarism" was a distortion of a term used by art historians to describe the influx of highly decorative oriental or Byzantine art into the Roman world of architecture and sculpture; over time "barbarism" came to connote savagery and the subhuman, a meaning that was easily attached to The Rite of Spring. Russians were ambivalent about their reputation as "barbarians" i Europe; n some were anxious to prove themselves as civilized as their European neighbors, others, like Diaghilev, found this image lucrative, and still others
3 ~ o b e r tCraft, "The Rite o Spring Genesis of a Masterpiece," Perspectives of New f S(1966-67): 20.

Msc ui

thought Russia's connections to the East to be the source of her unique position at the turn of the century.

In the last several decades there have been numerous attempts in


western scholarship to iden* the musical, historical, and folkloric sources of

The Rile o Spring, first to demonstrate Stravinsky's innovation in the use of f


folk music sources in creating a new style, and then to reveal Stravinsky's debt to Russian culture, an influence that he greatly denied. In these analyses Stravinsky's co-librettist and designer Nikolai Roerich has generally been relegated to the role of consultant, the provider of accurate detail in matters of authentic ritual, costume, and a story to bring it all together. These studies conclusively demonstrate that Stravinsky and Roerich were knowledgeable
in their selection of materials; however, they do not address what it was that

Stravinsky and Roerich were doing, nor do they acknowledge that Stravinsky
and Roerich shared one vision for this project.
Music historian Richard Taruskin adopts the view of the ballet as
subhuman and creates a metaphor to describe the form and style of Stravinsky's score. He calls The Rife of Spring the ultimate Scythian act-a new use of folk materials that swept away conventions of rhythm, melody,

and harmony-a

modern parallel to the barbaric Scythian hordes from the

East who swept away ancient Slavic settlements long before the founding of the Kievan state and its adoption of Christianity.

Taruskin's analysis

identifies Stravinsky's sources and analyzes the composer's technical and


stylistic innovations. However, he finds Stravinsky's emancipation from the German-dominated art music tradition a more interesting topic than the collaboratorsf own descriptions of this project.

This study has no argument with the influence of Stravinsky's music;


rather, it examines Stravinsky's and Roerich's statements regarding the ballet's concept in the cultural context of early twentieth-century Russia to demonstrate that they had in mind a different and far greater purpose than musical revolution Stravinsky did not have Scythian dreams; he "dreamed" a pagan ritual sacrifice. He and Roerich envisioned a work that, rather than portray ancient ritual with ethnographic accuracy, would recreate it in all of
its power. The Rite of Spring is a myslerium for the twentieth century: it is

the integration of music and dance to call forth the presence of the spiritual

h world at the enactment of a sacred mystery that will reveal to t e participants


the nature of the human spirit, its relation to physical Life, and its restoration to a higher Life. Chapter I will give an overview of The Rite of Sp~ingas interpreted in western scholarship. Common faults of this scholarship are the result of the authors' maintaining a European point of view, or, when Russian sources are gathered, failing to see in them the evidence of a major trend in turn-of-thecenhuy Russian culture that played a large role in Shavinsky's and Roerich's

creative vision, the revival of religious life both within and outside Russian Orthodoxy. As a corrective, this chapter will provide a brief background of

t e movement in Russia to express the Russian national cultural heritage in h


the arts. It will also discuss the role religious revival played in the broad debate about Russian identity and Russia's future as exemplified in the writings of Leskov, Dostoevsky, Solov'ev, and others. The various solutions offered were characteristically eclectic; it is nearly impossible to isolate lines of "pure" influence. Finally, I will discuss the recent restoration of Nijinsky's

choreography and Roerich's costumes and sets for The Rite of Spring that also refutes the frequently expressed view of this b d e t as subhuman barbarism. Chapter II will examine Roerich's participation in this debate through

i his art and writings. It will summarize h s view of the distant past as an
example of an aestheticized and harmonious way of life that must be restored
if modern man's current crisis is to be solved. After clarifying Roerich's

definition of neonationalism, I will demonsbate how this pan-human,panreligious concept is manifested in his fresco The Queen of Heaven, the work f that was taking shape simultaneously with the libretto for The Rite o Spring. Finally, this chapter will demonstrate that Roerich's role was not limited to providing ethnographic accuracy; rather, this ritual is one of a life-long series of projects he created in an effort to heal modem man's fragmented life

through a synthesis of art and spirituality.


Chapter III wiU describe the Russian intelligentsia's search for religious renewal as exemplified in the works of Alexander Scriabin and Viacheslav Ivanov. Retrospectivism was a major trend in the arts and popular culture at the turn of the century; in great part it was manifested in artists' efforts to restore the original religious function of the theater by the selection of repertoire and by joining all of the arts in service to the spiritual realm. This chapter will establish the prevalence of these ideas across educated and artistic culture in turn-of-the-century Russia; painters, poets, philosophers, and composers did not work in isolation from one another. Chapter IV will examine Stravinsky's concept of The Rite of Spring as evidenced in his comments made prior to the ballet's premiere. In Light of the context developed in the first three chapters of this study, Stravinsky's statements can be taken at face value and understood as a reflection of an

important strand of Russia's intellectual dimate. Musical analyses, both those made by Stravinsky's Russian contemporaries and those of modern scholars, support the concept of The Rite o Spring that this study puts forth. f

This ballet is commonly known as Le Same du Printemps, or The Rite


of Spring. I use both of these titles in my discussions of the finished project

and the scholarly response to it. Its Russian title, Vesna soiashchennaia
(Consecrated Spring), evolved from the French title w i h had become hc
attached to the ballet by the fall of 1911.4

In discussion of Stravinsky's and

Roerich's concept of the ballet, however, I prefer to use their working title

Veliknia zhertva (The Exalted Sacrifie), for it evokes images of the sacred
ritual they envisioned. In the finished ballet Velikaia zhertva became the

title for the second act; the first was called Potselui Zemle (A Kiss L the o

Earth).
I have used the Library of Congress system for transliteration. Familiar
Russian names have been Anglicized in the main text, but in footnotes and bibliographical references they are cited according to the conventions of transliteration.

I have used the Scandinavian spelling of Roerich that he

himself used. Russian words and titles of publications are translated the first time they appear, either in the text itself or in footnotes. AU unattributed

translations are my own, and all use of italics follows the author's usage.

4 ~ o a chronoiogical account of the ballet's various titles see Richard Taruskin, Stmuinsky and r the Russian Traditions: a Biography of the Works through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley: U California P, 1996) 871-881.

Chapter I
The Rite of Spring in Western Scholarship: What's Missing?

T i chapter will summarize t e concept of The Rite of Spring in hs h


western scholarship. In particular I will discuss how this scholarship is Limited by its selection of formal or stylistic frames of reference and by its reliance on European interpretations of Russian events and sources.
A

western definition of neo-Russian style, also called neonationalism,

motivates the tendency toward predominantly stylistic or formal analyses of


The Rite of Spring. In order to correct this definition, I will summarize two successive periods of the nineteenth century movement to express Russian national cultural identity in the arts, the Russian and neo-Russian periods.
The element of religious revival, usually overlooked in western sources, but

a standad topic in Russian histories and analyses of Russian art o the period f

from 1880 to 1917, wiU be restored to ti definition. Next, as a case in point, I hs


will address Richard Taruskin's recent book, Stravinsky and the Rzissinn Tmditions,' the most comprehensive work to date in its attempt to identify

a l of the traditions that influenced the composer's Russian works, but one l
that nevertheless still suffers from western "blind spots." Finally, I will discuss the 1987 reconstruction of the original choreography, sets, and costumes as an example of scholarship that supports the ballet as sacred ritual rather than as the presentation of subhuman, barbaric violence.
l ~ i c h a r d Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley: U Catifomia P, 1996).
A Biography of the Works

In the years following Stravinsky's death in 1971 scholars attempted to

penetrate his well-constructed smoke screen about his own Russian past The
unreliability of Stravinsky's memoirs is well documented.2 Tamskin offers
this explanation: Stravinsky lived very much i the present; he was quite n

conscious of creating himself f o r the moment.

Instead of the usual

assumption that his early experiences gave him a "latent musical reservoir
[which] was stored, then periodically tapped later as it served his immediate

compositional needs,"3 Taruskin maintains that Stravinsky consciously


acquired "subjects" (Russian art music traditions, folklore, folk music) that he then transformed into his own style.4

By the centennial of Stravinsky's birth i 1982, musicologists had n


begun to follow up on their intuitions that there was more Russian content
in The Rife o Spring than Stravinsky admitted. Awareness of Sbavinsky's f
fabricated past led to the

urge to d e b u n k i t More seriously, any identification

of Stravinsky's sources beyond his f a m o u s dream would provide material for

a more complete analysis of his work.5 Knowledge of Roerich's contribution

2 ~ a r ukin, Strauinsky 1-19. Charles Joseph refers to the memoirs as "mirab le d ictu narratives." s See Charles Joseph, Stm~insky and fhe Piano (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 2983) 2. Many other scholars refer to this unreliability and to the influence Robert Craft must have had in shaping the later memoirs. See, for example, Donald C. Nevile, "Symbol and Archetype in the Music of Igor Stravinsky: A Study in the Correlation of Myth and Musical Form," diss., McGilI U, 1980,153-155. 3~oseph See also Lawrence Morton, "Footnotes to Stravinsky Studies: Le Sacre du Printemps," 2. Tempo 128 (1979): 1 . 2 4 ~ i c h a r dTaruskin, "From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters," Confronting Stravinsky: Man Musician and Modmist, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley: UCP, 1986) 16-38. %'he most well-known account comes from Stravinsky's Autobiogrphy: "One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau defeu in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision. . . I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring." Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (7903-1934) (1936; London: Marion Boyars, 1990) 31.

was generally Limited to information contained in the English translation of


his 1930 lecture, "Sa~re."~ Robert Craft had already summarized the intentions of the authors, or
"the argument of the ballet as it was at the time of composition, insofar as

Stravinsky's memories and [his] collocations of them [were] able" in his 1966 lecture "'The Rite of Springf Genesis of a Masterpiece."
Roerich's contribution, but did not go into detail:

Craft credited

Stravinsky confided his prefiguration of the new ballet to Nicholas Roerich, painter, ethnographer, archaeologist, designer of Rimsky-Korsakovrs tomb, and it was one of the most fortunate confidences of his life, for Roerich's knowledge, whatever it may have been, inspired Stravinsky and helped to sustain his vision. Roerich was the catalyst of the subject, an incomparably more effective function than that of set and costume designer by which he is remembered. . . . [At Talashkino] they composed the scenario, Stravinsky contributing the idea of the division in two parts to represent day and night, and Roerich suggesting the episodes based on h primitive ceremonies; t e anthropological titles, with the exception of a single word, are by Roerich.7 Craft understood that Roerich's contribution was important, but it is dear that
he was not interested in what Roerich may have had in mind. By the mid
1980s a series o increasingly thorough accounts of the ballet's inception and f

analyses of its musical and conceptual sources had been published: Vera
Stravinskyfs and Cats 1978 chronology induded Roerich's scenarios as well rf' as the composer's. They also published letters that hint at Roerich's more active role in the collaboration, although inconsistencies in translation of some documents betray the authorsf lack of concern regarding the original

6~icholas Roerich, "Sacre," Realm o Light (New York: Roerich Museum P, 1931) 185-191. f ' ~ o b e r t Craft, "The Rite of Spring Genesis of a Masterpiece," Perspectives of New Music 5 (1966-67): 22, 23.

concept of the ballet!

In 1979 Lawrence Morton posited Sergei Gorodetsky's

poems as a Literary source and Juszkiewiu's collection of Lithuanian folk music as a melodic source of The Rite o Spring.g In 1980 Taruskin moved f beyond the identification of musical sources to an analysis of the ways these sources are fragmented and transformed and how this contributes to the ballet as a whole. This study is the beginning of Taruskin's remarkable contribution to Stravinsky scholarship, his effort to combine musicology with broader cultural perspectives in order to discover what motivates the music,

and what are its meaning and sigmficance on other than purely musical
levels.1 His artides explore the ideas and source of the ballet's scenario and the importance of Stravhky's association with Diaghdev and the World of

A r t (Mir iskusstoa) group."

Finally, Jann Pasler's contribution to the

International Stravinsky Symposium of 1982 gives Roerich due recognition as a full collaborator in this project.12 This research has been recently

augmented by Taruskin's monumental study of Stravinsky and the Russian

traditions, which I will return to below.


Much of the research done on Stravinsky's Russian period suffers from the authors' unfamiliarity with the Russian cultural context and their need to
Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon, 1978) 75-107. In this account the working title of the ballet, Velikaia zhertoa, has various translations. In Stravinsky's letter to Benois it is "The Great Sacrifice;" two weeks later in Stravinsky's next letter to Benois it has become "The Great Victim." I prefer the translation. "The Exalted Sacrifice." g ~ o r t o 9-16. n l0~ichardTamskin, "Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring," lournal of the American Musicological Society 33 ( 1980): 51 2. llRichard Taruskin, "The Rite Revisited: The Idea and the Source of its Scenario," Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henty Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Maniates (New York: Norton, 1984) 183-202. Taruskin, "From Subject to Style." 12~annPasler, "Music and Spectacle in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring," Confronting Stravinsky, 53-81.

hers Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stmoinsky in

rely on translated sources. Many studies are based on a more modern

framework of ideas, and while they often intuitively mention what I believe
to be key elements of the ballet, they fail to conned those ideas to the context of Russian culture at the turn of the century. Donald Nevile's dissertation, "Symbol and Archetype in the Music of Igor Stravinsky. A Study in the Correlation of Myth and Musical Form" points to many ideas that are indeed quite relevant to Stravinsky's creative mindset around 1910-1913, but Nevile

n fails to ground his study i ideas that were contemporary to this time. Instead
he hvns to later European models of myth, symbolism, and archetype that seem to explain what Stravinsky had done, rather than point to the sources of those ideas i Stravinsky's creative environment and his possible motin vations for using them. In interpreting Petrushkn, for example, Nevile cites Alexander Benois' view of the puppet, but he does not connect these ideas more closely to Stravinsky's world:

If [Petrushka] were to be taken as the personification of the spiritual and suffering side of humanity [--or shall we call it the poetical principle?-] his lady Columbine would be the incarnation of the eternal feminine; then the gorgeous Blackamoor would serve as the embodiment of everything senselessly attractive, powerfully masculine and unreservedly triumphant.13
Instead of recognizing the potent currency of the eternal feminine in Russian thought at that time, Nevile moves on to other interpretations made in the
1960s that support his own thesis.

I3~lexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, trans. Mary Britnieva (London: Putnam, 1941) 326, quoted in Donald C. Nevile, "Symbol and Archetype in the Music of Igor Stravinsky. A Study in the Correlation of Myth and Musical Form," diss., McGill U, 1980, 205. I have restored Nevile's ellipsis.

14

Nevile notes Stravinsky's shift from romanticism in The Firebird to physicality, vulgarity, and grotesqueness in the music of Petrlishkn. Rather

than investigate why Stravinsky might have made this shift, he makes a
tantalizing comment, "In [Stravinsky's] hands this vulgarity lost its degraded

and degrading comotations, and became a symbolic vehicle for conveying the
but Dionysian reality of popular Russian ~pontaneity,"'~ makes no further development of this point. I will return to some of Nevilefs undeveloped insights in his treatment of The Rife o Spring throughout this study: the f ritual function of the dancers, the currency of primitive Russian mythic themes, Stravinsky's participation in reviving myths, the musical creation of terror and mystery, and the metaphor of polarity that Stravinsky used to describe the harmonic structure of his pre-serialist compositions.~5While it is interesting that later theorists of psychology and myth (Jung, Eliade, Campbell, and others) can account for the imagery and structure of The Rite o Spring, Nevile leaves the impression that Stravinsky was tuned in to the f current and future European mainstream of ideas, and that the Russian intellectual environment differed in no way from the European. Taruskin and Pasler also note Stravinsky's "rapid stylistic and aesthetic transformation between 1911 and 1913."16 Paslerrs analysis is based on the model suggested by Baudelairers poem "Correspondences," but it limits its discussion to the relation of the separate elements of the ballet, not its theme.

She demonstrates how Stravinsky moved away from the "vertical


correspondence" of music to plot that formed the basis for The Firebird and

I4~evile 212. I5hleviie 217-229. 6~asler, "Music" 53. Taruskin, Stravinsky 950.

Petrushka toward the "horizontal correspondences" of Gesnrntkzins tmerk.


Although she recognizes other than formal possibilities for "vertical correspondences," for example, "[they] work between the material worid of sense impressions and the spiritual world of ideas,"17 she does not explore this seminal theme of symbolist art. Pasler considers "horizontal

correspondences" to be those between the arts of music, set design and choreography, that is "art as total theatreM'* or the notion of

Gesarntktinstwerk that she considers central to the Ballets Russes. A positive


contribution of her study is the emphasis on the equal participation of Stravinsky and Roerich from the inception of the ballet very striking suggestion: Stravinsky attempted to create musical equivalents for the instantaneity and simultaneity projected by the set design. . . . The sound forms a block with the massive power of the boulders in the set design. Shavinsky even once described this ballet as an immense and heavy "stone sculpture" - quite different from the airiness sought by traditional ballet.19
A scholar at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Elena Iakovleva, has

Pasler makes one

carefully researched the chronology of Roerich's sketches for the set designs;
she makes similar claims that Roerich's paintings influenced Stravinsky's
music, although she connects Stravinsky's music to the powerful rhythms suggested in the texture of the tree that dominates the center of the early sketches.20

l 7~asier, "Music" 59. l8pas ler, "Music" 54. 19pasler, "Music" 7 . 1 2 0 ~ P. Iakovleva, "N. K. Rerikh i balet I. F. Stravinskugo 'Vesna srvi;shchennaia1 k istorii . pervoi postanov ki," Pamiatniki kul'tu y.Novye otkrytiia. Ezhegodnik 1992 (Moscow: Nau ka, 1993) 275-285, and personal interview, July 1994.

Pasler also uedits Nijinsky for his contribution to making the music "visual." Her analysis of the interplay between the design, the music, and the choreography demonstrates how she believes synthesis of the arts is achieved

i The Rite o Spring. But she views this synthesis formally, as a transition to n f
a new style, ignoring the role it played as a means to the transformation of the material world, a concept common in the Russian symbolist aesthetic at the turn of the century. Pasler looks at this synthesis as a step toward the modernist aesthetic that favors structure over narrative as a work's organizing principle, what she calls the development of a new musical logic. In her dissertation she allows that

. . . synesthesia among the senses, the result of the structural


synchrony among several aesthetic realms, expanded the public's experience of the whole and made it more intense and more powerful than if the arts were contemporaneous but autonomous or if there had been only one of them.21

In The Rite of Spring she sees a developing emphasis on horizontal


correspondences that later manifests itself in modernist works. However I will argue that this was not the ultimate goal of the collaborators, but simply a means to an end. As part of the ongoing debate over synthesis of the arts, Nikolai Berdiaev warned his contemporaries about the danger of such formal experiment if artists lose touch with the human and spiritual elements of art." I do not believe that Roerich was at a l interested in formal experiment l

for its own sake; his works are dominated by his ideas. Stravinsky, in a

21~annPasler, "Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: The Emergence of a New Musical Logic," diss., U of Chicago, 1981, 233. Similar analysis can also be found in Stephen I. Weinstock, "Independence vs. Interdependence in Stravinsky's Theatrical Collaborations: The Evolution of the Original Production of The Wedding," diss., UC Berkeley, 1982. 2 2 ~ i k o l a iBerdiaev, Krizis iskussfua (Moscow, 1918). This was originally a lecture, "The Crisis of Art," read in Moscow on 1November 1917.

17

position to follow his chosen mentor, had human and spiritual goals in mind as well. In Chapter III I will discuss the concept of "correspondences" or synthesis of the arts as it developed in Russian theater and ballet. Pasler's discussion of the concerns shared by Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and Roerich in this project falls short of completely exploring the issues that comprised the core of their impulse. There are other, more satisfying

explanations for their interest in prehistoric, seasonal rites and collective experience than "creating a language of form and movement within the global instantaneous effect of the whole."23 Pasler's study provides analysis that leads to an understanding of Stravinskyrs development of a modernist style; it describes the dramatic shift in his aesthetic by an analysis of the interplay of the music, design, and dance in the original production. The study simply does not go far enough; Pasler has intuition about Roerich's contribution that she does not develop, perhaps because she does not read Russian.

In fact she commits a rather misleading error in her translation

from the French; she refers to "ancient slave games" in the ballet's program
and to Roerich's "primitive slave paintings," rendering the French slave as a cognate instead of the correct "Slav" or " S l a ~ i c . " ~ ~ error reveals her This
minimal acquaintance with Roerich's works. Further, Pasler does not explore

the allusions to the spirit that are so numerous in the very Little bit of Roerich

she quotes. She also refers to the "mysticism," "enchantment," and "otherworldliness" that result from the music and choreography, but fails to explore why they are there.

23~asierI "Music" 68. 24~aslerI "Music" 67.74.

The nature of Stravinskyfs stylistic transformation is an enticing

puzzie that has lured many scholars, and each piece that finds its match
evokes a sense of great intellectual satisfaction. Andriessen and Schonberger

n quote Nabokov's analogy as a apt description of this puzzie:


The music of Stravinsky sounds "as i a painter said: Look, here f I'm going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it"25 Studies like Pasler's focus on w a v e l i n g the " h a r m o ~ o u sfusion" to discover the musical sources and how Stravinsky uses them. Too few

scholars, however, discuss the "landscape" disclosed as Stravinsky and Roerich intended us to see it. Scholars familiar with Russian language and the cultural context have added to our understanding of The Rife o Spring, yet most still seem more f attracted to analyses of the structure and style of Stravinsky's music than to the larger question, "What did Stravinsky and Roerich intend to accomplish?" At the International Shavinsky Symposium Simon Karlinsky commented:

Why this musical innovator chose to compose some of his most revolutionary works on subjects taken from archaic, and, by his
day, mostly defunct preliterary dramatized folklore is a fascinating problem in creative psychology.26

He ignores this "problem," however, in effect supporting the view that


Stravinsky was an anomaly of creative genius rather than a product of his
2 5 ~ Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941; Norfolk: New Directions, 1959) 95, . quoted in Louis Andriessen and EImer Schonberger, The Apollonian Clockwork. On Str~vinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) 17. 2 6 ~ i r n o n Karlinsky, "Igor Stravinsky and Russian Preliterate Theater," Confronting Stmuinsky, 5.

time and culture. Karlinskyfs analysis does contribute to our understanding

of Stravinsky's development of modernist style. He traces the internalization


and progressive "deformation" of folk materials in Stravinsky's stage works

from Petrushka to Histoire du Soldat where he created "dazzlingly original

Russian music that was free of both ethnography and stylization."

27

This and other studies that have returned Stravinsky to the context of
turn-of-the-century Russian culture still generally ignore a large part of that

culture. Most willingly discuss the influence o Diaghilev and the aesthetics f

of the World o Art group on Stravinsky's works for the stage, but in f
discussing these influences they exdude ideas associated with the impulse toward religious revival that manifested itself in serious discussions of mysticism, theurgy, spiritualism, Russian messianisrn, and religious philosophy. The world of the Russian intelligentsia was not neatly compartmentalized into dearly defined groups. Eclecticism dominated; there was a great mingling of minds at various musical, literary, religious and philosophical "circles," as well as on the pages of contemporary journals such as M r iskusstoa, Vesy, Zolotoe runo, and ApoIZon.28 i Scholars have proved the influence of this mingling i the realm of n Stravinsky's music, but they steer dear of admitting the influence of religious or mystical ideas. For example, studies demonstrate Stravinsky's weliability

in admitting his debt to Scriabin; they point out abundant musical influences,
but categorically deny that Stravinsky might have paid attention to Scriabin's ideas. Without documenting Stravinsky's opinion, Andriessen and Schonberger assert
2 7 ~ a r l i nky, "Igor Stravinsky" 6. s 28~he World of Art. The Scales, The Golden Fleece, and Apollo.

The relationship of Stravinsky to Scriabin is more complex; it had to be, if only because Saiabin's aesthetics and philosophy of art were completely alien to Stravinsky. Saiabin's ideal of a musical Universe-orchestras and choirs wandering through a paradisial India, hugging one another, and the audience too, playing and singing against a background of sunrises and sunsets, since merely the introduction to M y s l e r i u r n , the Prefatory Action, was supposed to last seven days-belonged to a world of Blavatskian utopianism that Stravinsky even then, considered much out of date? Others have made similar daims regarding Stravinsky's setting of Russian symbolist Konstantin Balfmont's poem Zoezdoliki. Balfmont's text has a mystical, symbolical character such as might well have appealed to Saiabin How such a text could appeal to Stravinsky is a puzde, particularly after the blinding daylight and the humor of Petrz~shka.30

In a ten-page section on Bal'mont, Taruskin asserts that "Russia's poets and


musicians did not as a rule know or understand one another particularly well" and that Stravinsky's justification for this setting is too facile; "its words were good, and words were what I needed, not meanings." Taruskin

concludes that the poem's appeal lay in its fire poetry, which he then links to the sun god in The Rife.31 As a corrective to these omissions of the religious context, this study will address the pervasiveness of religious revival in the public discourse of artists and intellectuals and as a specific feature of Roerich's life work-

29~ndriessen Schonberger 239. In the pages following this assertion the authors discuss the and structural and harmonic similarities in the two composers' works. "Even in the Sacre, the inventor of 'mystic chords' has left tracks. . . And Stravinsky played Scriabin. He played Scriabin on the same piano that he played the Sacre on before he wrote down the notes." 240. 30~ndr6 Boucourechliev, Struoinsky, trans. Martin Cooper (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987) 54. Zoezdoliki is commonly translated as The King o the Stars. f 3 l ~ ruskin, Sbauinsky 780-79 a 1.

In Straninsky and the Russian Traditions, Taruskin provides analysis


of cultural influences on Shavinsky in his Russian years; he discusses the cultural context, the concepts behind the works, the composition process, and he analyzes the final products, providing abundant examples to prove Stravinsky's debt to Russian culture. Taruskin's framework for his discussion of The Rile of Spring is neonationalism, a dominant trend in the Russian cultural world from I880 to 1917. Neonationalism was a departure from earlier attempts to reproduce Russian folk culture in the arts with ethnographic accuracy, the so-called Russian style. Now artists fragmented folk arts into elements of color, rhythm, h e , perspective, harmony, and so forth, and recombined the elements into their own creations. As a definition

of neonationalism, Taruskin quotes Yakov Tugenhold's review of


Diaghilev's 1910 Saison russe in Paris which included the premiere of The Firebird: Despite all the cosmopolitanism of our art, one already sees the beginnings of a new and long-hoped-for style in Russian archaism. The folk, formerly the object of the artist's pity, is becoming increasingly the source of artistic style. To its inexhaustible living mine music has returned, and now art is retuzning along with choreography. The Firebird, this ballet based on Slavonic myth, these ballet numbers [tantsy] transformed into folk dance [plyas], this music, suffused with folk melodies, this painting by Golovin, brocaded w t antique ih patterns (even to the point of being too patterned and honeycaked)-is this not the very latest attainment of our art? Here we no longer behold official Stasovian cockerels, nor even a showpiece ballet divertissement like Le Festin; this is no patriotic display of our "national countenance," but a serious longing for the unfettered milieu of folk mythology.32

32~akov Tugenhold, "Russkiy sezon' v Parizhe," Apollon, 10 (1910): 21, quoted in Taruskin, Stravinsky 502. Bracketed translations are Taruskin's.

Taruskin, Like Pasler, uses the neonationalist approach to source materials to account for the radical &ange in the form and style of Stravinskyfs works. His presentation of neonationalism, however, omits one important aspect of this trend, the impulse toward religious revival that manifested itself both within and outside Russian Orthodoxy. This omission
is common in western surveys of Russian art of this period. A brief summary

of the movement to express Russian national cultural identity in the arts will correct this omission and will provide a more complete background against

w i h Stravinskyfs and Roerich's work on Veliknia zhertua (The Exalled hc


Sacrifice) can be examined.
From 1850 u t l 1917, all of the arts-architecture, ni the Literary arts, art

music including ballet and opera, easel painting, and the applied arts, including furniture, interior design, utensils, book design, and graphic artsin some way reflected the desire to assert autonomy from the dominance of

western culture in Russia begun by Peter I early in the eighteenth century. These responses were inspired by growing collections of visual, verbal, and musical artifacts of the rich indigenous culture that existed prior to and in spite of Peter's reforms.33 Underlying much of this movement was the belief that Russia continued to be different from the West, and for many, induding
3 3 ~ o m eof the earlier folk music collections included those made by Balakirev in 1866, by Tchaikovsky in 1872, by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1875 and 1877, by Melgunov in 1879 and 1885. In 1886 and 1893 the Imperial Geographical Society sent expeditions to the north of Russia to collect native music. Later collections were aided by the use of recording devices that precluded f the "correction" of what the collector was hearing. See Richard Leonard, A Histo y o Russian Music (1957; Westport: Greenwood P, 1977) 200. In 1870 and 1872 two volumes were published on Russian folk ornamentation, and beginning in 1876 a new journal, Motifs of Russiizn Architecture, published designs and motifs for Russianstyle wooden dwellings, interiors and furniture. See Evgenia Kirichenko, Russian Design and The Fine Arts 1750 - 1917, trans. Dr. Arch Tait (New York: Abrams, 1991) 125. Parallel efforts collected and recorded folklore and rituals.

the intelligentsia, this difference was positive. They felt themselves superior
in their ability to synthesize their eastern and western heritages. This gift
would enable them to solve the pressing problems threatening the future of

all mankind, dearly a messianic role. Feelings of spiritual and moral decline
were symptomatic of the problems revealed in the rapid social changes and the loss of fokways caused by industrialization and urbanization, the economic crises of both peasants and landowners, and the vast gulf that separated the primarily westernized intelligentsia from the wisdom of the people. Nikolai Leskov's 1881 story "The Left-hander" (Levsha)3* carries this theme: a simple, provincial, cross-eyed gunsmith possessed the talent to

sr surpass the work of British artisans who had presented T a Alexander I with
a life-sized, clockwork steel flea; years later at the bidding of Tsar Nicholas I, the Ievsha and his fellow Tula gunsmiths crafted tiny shoes (signed by the
artists) for the flea's feet Later, after the leosha was given VIP treatment by

Nicholas I, his fate changed. Were it not for the Russian bureaucracy that refused to listen, the Ievsha could have prevented Russia's defeat in the Crimean War; he had learned that Russian gun-cieaning methods seriously compromised the guns' accuracy. The continuous harsh beatment of the

Ieosha by Nicholas I's court, a manifestation of the disregard for the wisdom
of the little people, caused the levsha's death before he could reveal his discovery. In this story, using the voice of a simple, provincial storyteller and

many images and devices from Russian folklore, Leskov explores the
Slavophile and Westernizer points of view concerning western technology,
3 4 ~ i k o l a iLeskov, "Levsha," N. 5. Leskov. Povesti i msskmy (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1966) 358389.

while celebrating the innate s i l of Russian craftsmen in spite of the kl deplorable state of their working conditions in Russia. Ironically, his adopted folk idiom was so well crafted that his contemporaries accused him of passing off a piece of folklore as his own creation Only later did critics come to appreciate the literary craft of Leskovfs text and his quite serious message. The conviction that Russia had a messianic role in the future of

humankind dates much earlier to the doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome,
written early in the sixteenth century by Abbot Filofei of Pskov. Following the fall of the Chuch of Constantinople to infidel Turks in 1453, it was believed that it and the previous Church of Rome had fallen because of corruption and heresy. Moscow, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church, had become the Third and find Rome; her role was to illuminate the whole world in the Christian f a i t h This doctrine arose horn religious conviction, separate from any political program; however, this powerful religious idea could not help but spread beyond the realm of religious activity through the following centuries. The fragmentation of Russian society caused by Peter 1's westernizing reforms emphasized the dual nature of Russia: it was a society that could adapt to western ideas, but it was also a society whose mission for the future of mankind depended on its innate, non-western aetributes. Fyodor Dostoevsky articulated both of these ideas. He was concerned that educated Russians had turned away from the common people-the very

people who possessed the special insights which could provide "the word," or

the solution for the future of mankind. In his well-known Pushkin speech of
1880,35 Dostoevsky refutes the Westernizersf argument that Russia must
35~. Dostoevsky, "Pushkin (ocherk)"and "Ob"iasnitelrnoeslovo po povodu pechataemoi M. nizhe rechi o Pushkine," D n m i k pisafeliia. lzbrannye stranitsy (Moscow: Sovremenni k, 1989)

follow the European path of development in economics, science, and civil law in order to have a voice in the West regarding the future of humanity. Instead, he insists that Russia must turn to the wisdom of its rural past if it is to serve a messianic role in the history of mankind. Dostoevsky uses

Pushkin as a springboard to launch into his own view of this role:

. . . had Pushkin not existed, it might well be that o w faith in our Russian individuality, our new conscious hope in the strength of our People, and with it our faith in our future independent mission in the family of European peoples would not have been formulated with such unshakable force?
For Dostoevsky the Russian spirit transcends narrow nationalism and extends to universalism, "[flor what is the strength of the spirit of Russiamess if not its ultimate aspirations toward universality and the universal brotherhood of peoples?"37 Russia's future does not depend on the strict acceptance or denial of western ideas. Dostoevsky points to Russia's long history of borrowing and adapting from other peoples; he predicts Russia's strength lies in her ability to reconcile western rationalism with her own indigenous wisdom: Russia accepted the genius of other nations into our soul, all of them together, making no discriminations by race, knowing instinctively almost from our very first step where the distinctions lay, knowing how to eliminate contradictions, to excuse and reconcile differences; and in so doing we revealed the quality that had only just been made manifest--our readiness and our indination for the general reunification of all people of all the tribes of the great Aryan race. Indeed the mission of the Russian is unquestionably pan-European and universal. To
514-537.The speech was delivered to the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature on June 8,1880 and published in the 1881 volume of D n m i k prkateliia. Passages quoted in the following section use Kenneth Lank' translation, Fyodor Dostomsky. A Writer's Diary. 2 vols. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1994)2: 1271-1295. 36~ostoevs 1291. ky 37~ostoevsky 1293.

become a real Russian, to become completely Russian perhaps, means just . . . to become a brother to a l l people, a panhuman if you like. . . . Oh the nations of Europe simply do not know how dear they are to us! And subsequently, I am certain, we ( mean I not we, of coutse, but Russian people to come) will realize to the very last man that to become a genuine Russian will mean specifically: to strive to bring an ultimate reconciliation to Europe's contradictions, to indicate that the solution to Europe's anguish is to be found in the panhuman and all-unifying Russian soul, to enfold all our brethren within it with brotherly love, and at last, perhaps to utter the ultimate word of great, general harmony, ultimate brotherly accord of all tribes through the law of Christ's Gospel.

. . . the Russian soul, the genius of the Russian People may have
a greater capacity than other nations to embrace the idea of the universal fellowship of humans, of brotherly love, the sober view that forgives enmity, distinguishes and excuses that which is dissimilar, eliminates contradictions. This is not a n economic trait or any such; it is only a moral trait, and can anyone deny or dispute it in the Russian People?38

Those desiring to express Russian national cultural identity looked to


Russian spirituality as a foundation. This was perhaps most conspicuous in architecture. I 1883 Count Uvarov, who in 1825 had promoted Orthodoxy, n Autocracy, and Nationality as the three essential elements of official populism, was part of a committee overseeing the construction of the red brick Moscow Historical Museum on Red Square. The architect Vladimir Shemud hied to give the building an ecclesiastical character to communicate

"the fact that the church is not just a holy idea in our popular history, but the
primary cultural element of our nationhood."39 The questionable result of this attempt notwithstanding, nineteenth-century Russian architecture often drew on the lines and rich ornament of seventeenth century Russian church

architecture for both religious and secular buildings.40 The first two decades

of the twentieth century saw an increase in the numbers of churches and


monasteries built in Russia. From 1900-1917, 165 new monasteries were

founded; from 1906-1912, 5,500 new churches were built.*'

This revival of

church construction invited broad participation of the artistic community. Painters entered competitions for the design of new and restored churches; they designed fabrics for vestments, restored icons and painted new ones. Vasnetsov, Nesterov, Bilibin, Vrubel' and Roerich were among those active
in creating religious applied art."

Composers were also involved in creating

new church music. Rachmaninov, for example, composed The Liturgy of Saint JohnChrysostom (1910) and a cycle of Vespers (1915).43 The philosopher and poet Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900), like his dose friend Dostoevsky, carried throughout his works the belief in Russia's messianic role. He is perhaps best known as a religious philosopher who worked to make Orthodox theology a meaningful part of modem society. He advocated a positive role for Christian Russia in the historical process, dearly a messianic role for Russia in the reconciliation of Russian Orthodoxy and western Christianity in a Universal Church. He formulated powerful ideas of reconciliation which influenced Russian thought well past the turn of the century. He assumed a dialectic in his thought process that used the

reconciliation of opposites to arrive at a new synthesis. He wrote passionately about the pantheism of nature, a reconciliation of matter and spirit. He
-

40~irichen 1 1 . ko 3 41Kirichenko 202. 42See Kirichenko for numerous illustrations of examples. 43~ergei Rachmaninov, The Vespers, dir. Vladislav Tchernouchen ko, Cappella of St. Petersburg, Saison Russe, Le Chant du Mond, LDC2888050,1994.

promoted the image of Sophia, the world soul who promised love and reconciliation for all peoples. This imagery, present everywhere in Solov'ev's poetry, took on an important role in Russian philosophy and symbolist poetry. It reflects the neo-Platonic idea that reality is arranged along a vertical axis from the material at one end to the spiritual at the other. Other polar opposites include male and female, reason and the irrational, Apollo and Dionysus, Cosmos and Chaos. Both poles are essential; there is an attraction between them. An artist or poet, through an ecstatic or irrational experience, was the most likely candidate to reconcile the contradiction, or antinomy, of

the opposite poles. The artist, now fulfilling the role of a priest, could then
bring to the material world the knowledge gained through his ecstatic, creative vision and, as a result, bring about the transformation of the material world. Just as Dostoevsky asserted that Russia's strength lay in her knowing how to reconcile differences, Russian philosophers were obsessed with the problem of integrating belief with reason in a philosophical theory of cogni t i ~ n .Following ~ ~ European Neo-Kantian philosophers' efforts to

revise Kant's philosophy of knowledge, the Russians felt themselves particularly suited to develop a theory based on the direction Kant indicated
in The Critique of \udgemmt, that the absolute might be knowable through

other non-rational modes of human discourse. From 1889 this question was discussed frequently in the pages of the philosophical journals Voprosy

4 4 ~ o a detailed description of this movement in Russian thought see James D. West, "The r Philosophical Roots of the 'National Question,"' Studia Slavica Hungarica 41 (1996): 55-66. See also Janes D. West, "Art as Cognition in Russian Neo-Kantianism," Studies in East E!i ropenn Thought 47(1995): 195-223.

filosofii i p~ikhologii4~and Logos; the question also captured the minds of Russian symbolists. It is important to remember that Russian intellectuals believed that their ideas-xpressed
in philosophy, drama, music, painting,

poetry, or other literary arts--could be a practical solution to the moral disintegration of the world around them. This particular group of thinkers included the philosophers Solov'ev, Sergei and Evgenii Trubetskoy, I. Lapshin, N. Grot, and Alexander and Aieksei Vvedensky, the symbolist poet Ivanov, and the composer Scriabin. It was widely believed that the West had come to recognize and appreciate Russia's particular mode of thought

through the literary works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Given that license,
plus the long-held belief in Russia's messianic role, Russian thinkers h u l y believed that they held the key to the future of mankind. It must be swessed, however, that the future they visualized was both "Russian," and "panhuman." Symbolist artists had accepted Solov'ev's calling to use the arts as a way of knowing a higher truth.
This religious consciousness had much i n

common with Russian Theosophy, a "syncretic mystico-religious philothat hs sophical ~ystern"4~ gained momentum during ti same period as a part of a broader European fascination with the occult. Theosophy offered a compelling alternative to twentieth-century man's hagmented life:

One of Theosophy's greatest temptations for certain idealist elements within the Russian intelligentsia was its promise of the Great Synthesis: of science, religion, and philosophy, of matter and spirit, and of East and West. For these idealists Theosophy was, first and foremost, a particular view of the
4 5 ~ u e s t i o n sof Philosophy and Psychology. 4 6 ~ a r i aCarlson, "No Religion Higher Than Truth." A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 7993) 6 .

world, of life and death, of God and man, of good and evil, and of the purpose of human existence. It was neither a faith nor a science (both had been discredited), but it seemed to have already achieved the unification of the secular and the religious spheres into one enormous, sublime, and glorious system that reconciled all contradictions between sacred and profane and expressed the Tncth. . . . Theosophy promised a single brotherhood uniting all humanity, a global utopia.47 Solov'ev saw a dear role for art in this process of synthesis: [Solov'ev] viewed reality as a transcendent "total-unity" whose feeble comprehension by man required a synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science-of faith, thought, and experience. Art he stated to be a microcosm of "total-unity," . . . hence latent with theurgic energy. "Art must be a real force," he proclaimed, "enlightening and regenerating the entire human world."48 Theosophy's Great Synthesis and search for the Truth supported the growing impulse to return the arts to their original function in ritual where they were conjoined in service to the sacred. Behind these experiments lay
the belief in the theurgic property of art-that

words and sounds in the form

of prayer and incantation have magical power to evoke the gods and spirits

and bring them closer to man. Such ritual and the pure expression of the beautiful in art could transform the material world by embodying spiritual principles in it.49 Artists also experimented with synthesis of the arts, that is dissolving the conventional boundaries between the arts, another "fragmentation" of the modem world. Painters and poets tried t e r hands at hi visual and verbal "symphonies;" Mikolajus Ciurlionis (1875-1911) painted

f works with musical titles, for example Sonata o the Stars and Andante (1908)

*~ulalcom Brown, "Skriabin and Russian 'Mystic' Symbolism," Nineteenth Century Mwic 3(1979): 44. 49~his idea is developed in Solovev's essay, "Krasota v prirode," (1899), Sochineniia, 2nd. ed, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mysl', 1990) 2: 351-389.

in an attempt to give expression to musical elements on the two-dimensional

space of the canvas. Andrei Bely wrote four symphonies in prose between

Theosophy strengthened the perception that Russia had a messianic role to play; according to Theosophy, the impending apocalypse had a cosmic purpose, and Russia held the keys to the future of mankind: World war, revolution, civil war were all perceived as reflections in the material world of a cleansing catastrophe that heralded the end of one cycle and, after a period of obscuration, the beginning of a new, superior cycle in which Russia would f l i l its dharma, the "higher truth" that informs its cosmic ufl mission, and finally give voice to its spiritual "word."
All this had been predicted by Mme Blavatsky, Mrs. Besant, and Rudolf Steiner (well before 1917, he had made several predictions about the catastrophe that would overtake Russia). The Slavs were to be the people of the next (sixth) cub-race; theirs was a b r a a n t future. Clearly the world catastrophe only heralded the end of the fifth sub-race, the Aryan race that had so long dominated world evolution. FoLlowing the cosmological pattern, the brief period of obscuration would be followed by the rise of the Slavs and the fulfillment of their cosmic mission. The Theosophists, blending f i n de si&deRussian millennialism and messianisrn with Buddhist cosmology, knew what that mission would be.50

[Theosophists] subscribed to the "Russian idea" and saw in Theosophy that spiritual union of East and West that would bring Russia out of its long sleep and send it forth to save decaying Western civilization from the deadening hand of positivism and scientific materialism.51

The Theosophists' way of coming to know higher truth depended on


developing a particular kind of receptivity that is possible only when the self

is transcended, for in this state of openness, things and events can speak to
the seeker.S2 This way of knowing is evident in Roerich's approach to

artifacts of ancient civilizations and in his own spiritual search. Receiving this knowledge is contingent upon a state of mind that rejects the more customary, rational imposition of one's self on things and events that results from speaking about them.

In Chapter III it will be shown that the

renunciation of the self is a commonplace among those who seek spiritual enlightenment. Artists including Bely, Roerich, Voloshin, and Ivanov

adopted priest-like roles as they communicated their mystical visions of higher truth. Their attitudes toward art and religion were undoubtedly influenced by their participation in Theosophic cirdes in the first decades of
this century.53 Along with other members of the creative inteiligentsia, they

studied the occult and sought spiritual enlightenment through ecstatic experience.

f Theosophy offered a way of integrating key ideas o Russian religious


revival. It supported the view of the Russian people as a particularly gifted resource for the future of mankind. It returned a specifically religious function to art; retzospectivism in art focused on rejoining the arts in sacred ritual, and artists were viewed as especially gifted souls, or priests, who participate in revealing beauty in the material world. Although many

Russian artists who explored mysticism, Theosophy, and the occult have
52~udolf Steiner, Teosoj%z, trans. A. R. Mintslova (St. Petersburg: Stasiulevich, 1910) 16453~ely participated in a Moscow Theosophical Circle as early as 1902. Carlson 89. He later followed Steiner's "Christianized" adaptation of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and during the years 1912-1916 he studied Anthroposophy in Europe, spending 1914-1916 in Domach, Switzerland with Steiner. See Stefani Hope Hoffman. "Scythianisrn: A Cultural Vision in Revolutionary Russia,'' diss. Columbia U, 1975, 163. Anna Mintslova, the translator of Steiner's Teosofia, was a close companion of Viacheslav Ivanov from 1907-10. Roerich was involved with Theosophy at least as early as 1906.

found a place in the West's view of Russian culture, western scholars have

generally ignored these activities. "Eccentric Russian mystics" have not fit a
scholarly paradigm. If these activities are discussed at all, it is commonly with

a condescending tone peppered with terms such as "pseudo-religious" and


"bogeyman. "5"owever,
this view has recently been corrected; Maria

Carlsonrs 1993 study, "No Religion Higher Than Tnith." A History of the Theosophical Movement

in

Russia, 1875-2922, has established the

pervasiveness of occult practices and the influence of prominent mystical philosophers in the broader cultural life of Russia around the turn of the century. Theosophy was more widespread in Russia, especially following the relaxation of censorship in 1905, than western scholarship usually acknowledges: Occultism, in a bewildering variety of forms, became the intellectual craze of the time. The Russian Spiritualist journal Rebus reported in 1906 that "according to our correspondent, all of Petersburg is caught up in an unusually powerful mystical movement and at the moment a veritable maelstrom of little religions, cults, and sects has taken shape there. This movement embraces both the upper and lower levels of society. Among the upper levels we find the Theosophic-Buddhist trend. Admirers of Theosophy are uniting and are even beginning to discuss the question of building a Buddhist lamasery (a dormitory) and a Theosophic-Buddhist temple." . . . And not only Petersburg was caught up in the trend. Moscow and the provinces buzzed with new secret societies, demonstrations of hypnotism, public Spiritualist seances, gypsy fortune-tellers, and secret sectarian ecstasies (mdeniia). Every educated reader who was not a recluse had at least a nodding acquaintance with Theosophy and Spiritualism. . . . People knew about these things, even if their

S4~imon Karlinsky, "The Composer's Workshop." The Nation 15 June 1970: 730-733- Karlinsky uses the term "bogeyman" in describing Roerich's titles for the dances in The Rite of Spring. Taruskin is fond of the qualifier "pseudo-" in descriptions of the ideas and activities of Roerich, Russian symbolists,and others.

knowledge was based only on cafe gossip and sensational newspaper artides in N o w e Vremia.55

Scholars have begun to acknowledge the influence of Theosophy in the

works of Scriabin, Ivanov, Roerich, Bely, and others.

This study will

place Velikaia zhertoa in this context, and it will demonstrate that this intellectual climate is evident in the concept of the ballet. I wiU return to the religious function of the arts in Chapters II and

m.

In general the movement to express Russian traditional culture in the


arts developed over a period of time. The use of Russian subjects and

ornament in art forms that had been borrowed from the West, the so-called
Russian Style,56 evolved into a gradual fragmentation and synthesis of the elements of folk art (color, perspective, rhythm, melody, etc.) into the socalled new style (novyi stil') or neo-Russian Style.57 The Russian style

parallels the turn toward realism in literature and easel painting in the mid nineteenth century, inspired both by artists' rejection of the aesthetic imposed
by the Academy of Fine Arts and by the call for art to serve social reform.

Verisimilitude and "scientific" accuracy in duplicating the forms of decoration were valued in t i period dominated by rationalism. The idea hs that Russia's future was inextricably Linked to the peasants' and workers' future fueled interest in the peasants' heritage as well as in efforts to preserve

and protect that heritage. Ironically, industry, the very threat to the peasant

5 6 ~ o example, Venetsianov's paintings of Russian peasants, and the surface use of Russian r decoration on the still classical lines of the Moscow City Duma and the Upper Market Rows. Kirichenko 43, 109, 2 2 I. 57~aruskinrefers to this style as neonationalism. It is also known as the rnoderne, or, in reference to the literary arts, symbolism. See E. I. Borisova and C.Iu Sternin, Ruskii modern (Moscow:Sovets kii khudozhnik, 1990) 20.

way of life, provided some means for its preservation by patronizing the
kustar' movement. Kllstar' workshops such as those at Abramtsevo, near

Moscow, and Talashkino, near Smolensk, preserved and taught Russian applied art and also attempted to provide income to peasants whose livelihood was threatened by urbanization. In the 1870s there was a revival of wooden architecture, especially the heavily decorated peasant hut or izba. Wooden pavilions, carefully copied fiom traditional peasant design, were the attraction at manufacturing and polytechnic exhibitions in the 1870s, both in Russia and abroad.58 The pervasiveness of this revival of Russian design is evident in the pages of historical surveys of Russian art and architecture in the second h l of the nineteenth century. Kirichenko, for example, writes: af Concluding our history of the Russian styLe of the second half of the nineteenth century, we should emphasize once more that a it was the only stylistic movement in this period which could L y d i to being tnrly universal and comprehensive. In the extent am of its dissemination and popularity, in both architecture and applied art, it had no rivals.59
The revival of wooden architecture, especially in urban settings and in

structures that were essentially monuments to western technology and industrialization, can be seen as an effort to provide an antidote or balance to the rapid changes threatening the ideal of Russian traditional life.

The kustar' movement was in the same spirit as the earlier Arts and
Crafts movement in Britain, an effort to create a utopia or paradise on earth through the total aestheticization of the Living and working environment.

58~or example, the 1870 Manufacturing Exhibition at St. Petersburg, 1872 Polytechnic Exhibition in Moscow and the Paris Exhibition of 1878. This trend continued until early in the twentieth century. See Kirichenko 99-101, George Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia (1954; New York: Penguin, 1983) 395. 59~irichen 132. ko

36

Dostoevskyfs pronouncement, "Beauty will save the world"60 was fundamental to the commitment to beauty made by artists and intellectuals alike. I Chapter II I will demonstrate how Roerich's work was based on this n foundation. The Russian style of the 1850s to 1870s gradually gave way to the neoRussian style. The new style rejected verisimilitude and rationalism; it

turned to "lyricai transf0rmation,"~1 synthesis, stylization, and creative


interpretation of the structural elements, materials, and themes found in artifacts of the Russian national heritage. As explained above, there was a belief in the intercomectedness of all the arts, and of art with religion and philosophy.

AU modes of discourse and all modes of knowing were explored.

Added to this was the conviction that the arts had a life-transforming or theurgic mission. To this end, artists took on the role of rnifotoorchestoo (mythmaking), the creating of new sacred stories to guide modem man.62 The art historian and critic Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906) was an ardent supporter of painters and musicians who attempted to reflect the Russian cultural heritage in their works. Because he was such a prominent and outspoken figure in the world of Russian art for over half of the nineteenth century, remaining active even in the beg-g of the twentieth, and

because Roerich's work is often categorized by his brief association with Stasov, it is important to clarify his position and his role.63 Too many

scholars have labeled Stasov on the basis of some of his public conflicts,
6@These words were spoken by Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. 61~irichenko 140. 6 2 ~ i s o v and Stemin 6. a 63This section is based on Yuri Olkhovsky, Vladimir Stasoo and Russian National Culture (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 2983).

37

identifying him as a chauvinist nationalist, a populist, or an unscientific promoter of the theory of Asian origins of Russian culture. It is important to
free our understanding of the role he played at the turn of the century from

labels that obscure rather than clarify.

Early in his career, Stasov was consumed by the struggle against

European dominance of the fine arts. The Academy of Fine Arts had required
artists to work in the dassical style and limited subjects of paintings to scenes
of history, the Bible, or mythology. The Imperial Opera was Italian, not Russian, even though Glinkafs A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lirldrnila had been performed in St. Petersburg, although in lesser halls. Glinka's sad experience over the lukewarm reception of Ruslan and Liudmila in 1842 greatly angered Stasov and perhaps fueled his activities in the world of music for the rest of his career. The institutions of Imperial Russia in the 1850s and 1860s were generally opposed to the intrusion of "the Russian," viewing it as substandard. Circumstances gave Stasov an "army" to fight for Russian music and Russian musical education. In the 1860s he had the opportunity to support, encourage, and guide a group of self-educated musicians-"The Handful" (Moguchaia kuchka) as he later called them-all Mighty

followers of Mili

Balakirev. The group included Modest Musorgsky, C6sar Cui, Alexander Borodin, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Balakirev fought to promote the Russian school of music, encouraging his followers to break with the German training and style that the new conservatories in St. Petersburg (1862) and Moscow (1866) represented. Although "The Mighty Handful" stood for the proposition that the native music of the Russian people, both folk and

religious, was a worthy basis for an intellectual art music:'

they were not

conservative nationalists. Their music was largely eclectic, combining both Russian and European elements; they were innovators, looking for new forms, rhythms, harmonies-a new style. Musorgsky was the most

innovative of the five; he used distinctive harmonic innovations, a variety of


scales, and dissonance in his effort to focus on content over form. For example, in his opera Boris Godunoo (1870) he evoked Medieval Russia largely through thematic material of his own invention, although he quoted some folk song and Russian religious music. He abandoned Italian opera form for a new type of music drama that he felt represented the unvarnished life of the pe0ple.~5

The growing opposition to European domination of Russian culture


and the turn toward realism i art made the investigation of the origins of n
Russian culture all the more attractive. I the 1850s Russian folklorists were n already promoting the theory that their own folklore was borrowed from other folklores including Greek, Tibetan, and Siberiad6 The popularization of German orientahst Teodor Benfey's theory that India was the source of all of these folklores resulted in a flurry of publications broadly applying it.67 In
1868 Stasov wrote a long article, "The Origin of Russian Byliny"

(Proiskhozhdenie rzisskikh bylin), asserting the oriental origins of Russian

@Leonard 74. %eonard 108,92. 6 6 ~ o a discussion of the development of this theory from the "improbable" statements of N.A. r L'vov in his introduction to Jan Prach's 1790 Sobranie narodnykh russkikh pesen s ikh yolosami, that all Russian folksongs were of Greek origin to the more scientific works of A.N. Pypin and A. A. Shifnner in 1857, see A. I. Balandin, Mifologicheskiin shkola o russkoi fol'kloristike. F. I. Buslam (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) 109-2 11. 6 7 ~ h i theory was published in a long introduction to Benfey's German translation of s Pantschantantra from Sanskrit in 1859. Balandin, 111.

39

epic folklore and culture.68 He wrote about the indisputable continuity of Russian and European culture from Asia that manifested itself in everything

including language, clothing, customs, buildings, furnishings, ornaments,


melodies and harmonies, oral epos (byliny), and fairy tales. This article put Stasov in opposition to nationalists; he was criticized for depriving the Russian folk epos of its national origins and for disparaging national ~ u l t u r e - ~ g question of the truth of Stasov's theory, while interesting, is The less important than the impact of this theory on Stasovfs contemporaries. The possibility of an indigenous culture made strong by its long interaction with various nomadic tribes from Asia, and later with Greeks and

hi Scandinavians as they conducted t e r commerce on Russian lands, was


much more attractive to many than the canonized views of Slavic historycultura.Uy unformed groups of Slavs welcoming the culture of the Greeks wholesale, or the view that Russia had no culture prior to Peter 1's contacts
with western Europe.

Archeological evidence of Scythian settlements in southern Russia began to disprove the canon. The Scythians were Indo-Iranian nomadic warriors who, from the seventh century to the third century BC, moved
across southern Russian lands from the Caucasus to the Crimea and Ukraine

and on to the Danube.

Russians had been fascinated with the Scythian

civilization at least since the early nineteenth century when French and German archeologists began to excavate burial mounds in southern Russia. These excavations provided most of the Scythian artifacts that were on

6 8 ~Stasov, "Prois khorhdenie russ k kh bylin" Vesleshik Eoropy 3 (1868) 225-277, 651-699. . i 69~alandin 126-127.

40

display in t!e Hermitage museum in St. P e t e r s b ~ g . Throughout the ~~ nineteenth century archeologists continued to discover rich evidence of Scythian presence across the southern lands of Russia. The commonly held view of Scythians as barbaric nomadic invaders was challenged by evidence that they settled and practiced agriculture in some cases. I the last two n decades of the nineteenth century, scholars began to argue against the commonly held view of Greek dominance in southern Russian culture. Stasov was among those who attempted to promote the view that there was a rich native culture worthy of study in its own right? also prominent in Roerich's writings. Stasov's ideas fueled discussions of Russian identity as separate from western Europe and contributed to the growing idea of Russia's messianic role in mankind's future. Soviet scholarship was responsible for the general dismissal of Stasov's theory. "Soviet ideologists and official historians This point of view is

[found] Stasov's theory on the oriental origin of Russian culture particularly offensive. They daimed this was a 'pseudoscientific' theory."7* Stasov's

theory has proved to be more and more substantive. Later archeological investigation has given credence to the idea that early Slavic culture was a blend of those cultures that interacted through commerce and invasion in the lands now known as southern Russia. For many scholars the end of Stasov's career is defined by his

f vehement opposition to the activities of the World o Art group. He railed

7 0 ~ o r early twentieth-century view of archeology in southern Russia see M. Rostovtzetf, an hnians and Greeks in South Russia (1918; 1922; New York: Russell, 2969) 6. 71~ostovtreff 7. 7 2 ~ I. Suvorova, V.V. Stasoo i russluzia peredooaia obshchestoennuin mysl' (Leningrad, 1956) . 46, quoted in Oikhovsky 144.

against the "utterly idiotic, outrageous, anti-artistic, and repulsive" works at a

World of Art exhibit. He held Diaghilev responsible for the artistsf blind
imitation of European decadents:

In regard to Russian decadents . . . they have not accomplished anything which is decadent. Whatever they have is . . . miserable imitation . . . The entire decadence of our decadents consists of decadent conversations about the European decadents. When the latter would finally fall silent and vanish our poor monkeys would immediately put their tails between their legs and would shut up forever?
Stasov maintained his goal-to achieve independence for Russian arts

from domination by foreign arts-throughout

his career.

He publicly

maintained his opposition to the dogma of the academy, be it the Academy of Fine Arts or the St. Petersburg Conservatory, long after such a position was warranted. Through a quirk of his personality, he viewed it as a weakness to apologize in print, although he did recant many of his words in private letters. His outspoken, often conservative opinions made it easy to stereotype

him in later scholarship. Certainly he felt it necessary to continue the battle


against blind imitation of the foreign in art; but this does not mean that he was chauvinistic.

In fact he was an avid listener of all kinds of music,

European as well as Russian. He admired Beethoven and Bach and found much to admire in the music of Richard Wagner. His letters reveal a

continuing interest in new art, including the music of Scriabin. In 1904 he corresponded briefly with Scriabin to express his positive response to his Third Symphony (The Divine Poem). What tasks! What plans! What strength and smoothness! There is so much passion and poetry in the second movement!
-

7 3 ~ Stasov, "Vystavki," Dbr. soch. 111: 215-26, quoted in Olkhovsky, 133. .

And the orchestration-it's marvelous, powerful, strong, sometimes tender and charming, and sometimes brilliant! Yes, among the Russians you already have great numbers of supporters and admirers.74
This is neither program music nor music that expresses national themes; Scriabin has already begun to explore mysticism, an exploration that Stasov finds most interesting. We must remember that Stasov's contributions to Russian culture were far broader than his polemic against the imitation of European art. His life-long career was in archeology, a field which also included ethnography, early architecture, oral epos, and studies of ornamentation and medieval letter design. His published work on Russian folk ornament influenced artists of the time and artists that followed, both those who were dose imitators of folk design and those who abstracted the forms in their more modernist works. His theory on the Asian origins of Russian culture fed a growing interest in archeology. Roerich sought out Stasov's expertise in these fields; he was not searching for a mentor in chauvinistic nationalism, nor did
he find one.

It is the less tangible but no less important agenda of religious revival that is missing from most western surveys of Russian art from 1850 to 1917. Russian sources, however, even throughout the Soviet period, usually acknowledge this important component of the impulse to express Russian traditional culture in the arts. There seems to be a reluctance in western scholarship to address the moral and religious motivation for much of the art produced in the neo-Russian style. For example, in their discussions of

Roerich's involvement with the kzlstar' workshops and art colony at Talashkino, both Taruskin and the art historian John Bowlt include a photograph of Roerich at work on his fresco i the interior of Tenisheva's n

church at Talashkino, but neither gives its title, The Queen of Heaven, or
makes any comment about its religious symbolism, other than describing it as "neo-Rus~ian."~5 will discuss the significance of this omission in Chapter II. I We cannot understand what Stravinsky and Roerich were intending to do with their ballet Velikaia zkrtva until we examine the intellectual context i n
which it was created.

Two studies of Stravinsky's music, while Limited by their reliance on translated sources, nevertheless point to Stravinsky's debt to symbolism and to the presence of religious impulses in his music. Warren Bourne discusses "decadent religiosity" or the fascination with primitive and alternative religious experiences as part of the extra-musical ideas that influenced Debussy, Stravinsky and S~hoenberg.7~ Joan Acocella also writes from a European focus, but she brings into her discussion major trends of symbolist art that include the transfer to art of religious yearnings (mystery, mysticism),
and the concept that art is the product of a different kind of knowledge.77

These works touch on topics that this study will explore in greater detail and within the Russian context.

75~aruskin,Stravinsky 872, John Bowlt, The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the "World of Art" Group (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1979) 46. 76~arren Bourne, "A Kindling Fever: A Study of Some Religious, Socio-Ethical, and Literary Themes in Music between 1890 and 1920 with Special Reference to Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg," diss., U of Auckland, 1969. 77~oanAcocella, "The Reception of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by Artists and Intellectuals in Paris and London, 1909-1914," diss., Rutgen U, 1984.

Taruskin also acknowledges the presence of religious ideas in The Rite

of Spring, based on Stravinsky's own comments:

The Rite of Spring, then, would not tell a story of a pagan ritual; it would be that ritual. One can detect here a prime tenet of early modernism with its insistence that genres and media not be mixed. But it was no less a derivation from the theurgic aims of Russian symbolism, and however much Stravinsky may later have denied it, his goal was frankly 'Scriabinis tic'-the communication of ecstasy, of terror. In interviews he gave the St. Petersburg press during a brief visit to his native city in the fall of 1912, he referred to his new work more than once as a 'mysterium(!)' He dubbed the new kind of ballet he was pioneering a 'choreodrama which is bound to replace the type of our contemporary ballets,' indebted as they were to the impure principles of 'music drama.'78
Yet, Taruskin has drawn a line separating religious revival from what he sees as the "art for art's sake" aesthetic of the Wwld of Art, and by extension Diaghilev's and Stravinsky's aesthetic. "Their mission was neither to explore the world nor to transfigure it, but to adorn it-"79 This misrepresents the

h purpose of t e journal; Bowlt notes that, among other things, it was a vehicle
for the propagation of Russian symbolist philosophy.80 It is dear, then, that the life-transforming task of art would have been familiar to readers of the journal and participants in the society's activities. I will discuss the World of Art aesthetic in more detail in Chapter III.
As a example of western scholarship, Taruskin's work is thorough, n

well researched, and more steeped in the Russian traditions than most works

ia that have preceded it, but in the f n l analysis it overlooks the active efforts to
7 8 ~ a mkin, "The Rite Revisited," 185-186. Taruskin quotes from Krasovska ia, Russkii balehryi s t e a k 2 vols. (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1971-2) 2: 232. 7 9 ~ a r ukin, Stravinsky 437. s 80~ohn Bowlt, "Russian Modernism,'' Handbook o Russian Literature, e d . Victor Terras (New f Haven: Yale UP, 1985) 284.

revive spiritual life in tun-of-the-century Russian culture.

Taruskin's

conclusions about The Rite of Spring, as exciting and right on the mark as they may seem to someone unfamiliar with the Russian context, nevertheless depend on hasty and sometimes dearly erroneous interpretations of Russian ideas. He allows the revolutionary effect of The Rite of

Spring on twentieth-century music to influence his analysis of the ballet's


concept. Hs expertise in formal analysis of Stravinsky's developing style i leads him to a metaphor that aptly describes the revolutionary effect of this work, but which fails to describe Stravinsky's conceptual intent and to account for the fact that Stravinsky shared Roerich's vision Taruskin concludes that the ballet is Scythian, a barbaric, primitivistic, subhuman destruction of refined tradition:
In a far more fundamental and insidious way than [high dissonance and crashing orchestration], Stravinsky's ballet merited the Scythian label. For it already answered the as yet only half-articulate call of its time for the "great sacrifice" of kul'tura [German symphonic tradition] on the altar of stikhiya.81

The word stikhiia, generally referring to the elements of nature-earth,

air,

water, and fire,82 took on broader metaphorical meaning in the writings of

t e Russian symbolists. In addition to the forces of nature, stikhiia had h


connotations of the apocalypse, coming either from catastrophic natural disasters or from anarchic uprisings of the people. Sometimes this force was associated with the image of Scythian or Asian hordes plundering the lives

and property of the peoples settled on the southern steppes. Alexander Blok

81~aruskin, Straainsky 951.


8 2 ~ Dal', Tolkooyi slooar' zhiwgo velikorusskogo iazykx (1882; Moscow: Cosudarstvennoe . izdatel'stvo inostrannykh i natsionalfnykh slovarei, 1955).

uses this term in his essay "Sfikhiia i knl'tura" where he sees both natural disasters and revolutionary impulses as signs that modem civilization has made itself vulnerable thxough its materialism and the fragmentation of man's once harmonic life- For the symbolists, sf ikhiia carried connotations of Chaos and the irrational. Roerich's use of the word stikhiiu carries a slightly different connotation. He idealized primitive man's harmonious relationship with the powerful forces of nature, maintained through religious rikal and celebrated in the rich ornamentation he applied to everyday objects. This life
is not an idyll, but one o balance where the symbols of ritual and ornament f

testify to the "forever-frightened life of man."83 Roerich believed that the restoration of this ancient harmony could be a curative for the ills of modem civilization. He did not see ancient man as a primitive barbarian, but rather

as the possessor of a way of life that could be a viable solution to modem


disharmony. I will discuss Roerich's ideas in greater detail in Chapter II. Taruskin defines stikhiia as "primitive immediacy" and "elemental ~ p o n t a n e i t y , "alluding to the age-old traditions of the Russian people, ~~

especially to the idiom of their music. His condusion, however, does not
address the concept of the bailet that Stravinsky and Roerich envisioned. It is
rather a description of the revolutionary effect of Stravinsky's new style: Stravinsky set free a stikhiya that had always been latent in Russian art music, ever contending with the requirements of European kul'fura. So magruficently realized was The Rite that it turned the tables on the historical struggle. It convinced many Western musicians that Russian drobnost ' [the quality of being a
8 3 ~ . Rerikh, "Zakliatoe zver'e," Tulashkino. Sbornik dokurnentoo, ed. Larisa Zhuravleva ~ .

(Srnolensk: Izdatel'stvo Posokh, 1995) 399. 84~aruskin,Shaoinsky 1746, 850.

sum of parts as opposed to developed form] was a viable alternative, not merely an anarchic or incompetent deviation. . . . Now kul'tura would be on the defensive. The Rite, Russian as no music before it had ever been, made the Russian universalwhich is to say, it Russianized the musical universe-and thus transcended the Russian. It had f l e to Stravinsky to redeem aln with interest the debt Rubinstein had incurred to the West on Russia's behalf when, half a century before, he summoned a German staff to man his country's first conservatory.85
The Scythian metaphor convincingly describes post-Rite-ofspring music
history. However, Taruskin's enthusiasm leads him to misrepresent key

elements of the ballet and thereby to distort Roerich's and Stravinsky's original concept. Taruskin seems to suggest that Stravinsky and Roerich were clairvoyant: the ballet answers "the as yet only half-articulate call of its time for the 'great sacrifice' of kul'turu on the altar of stikhiyu." Taruskin's

assertion that The Rite of Spring is Scythian Leads him to attempt to demonstrate that it reflects ideas held by the group of revolutionary artists

and thinkers who called themselves Scythians. This view is misleading on


several counts. First, there is the problem of chronology. Roerich and Stravinsky began their collaboration in 1910, completing the outline of the entire ballet

in the summer of 1911. Themes of Pan-Mongolism and the Asian, hence


barbarian, elements of Russian culture were not new; they had appeared in the nineteenth century as elements of Slavophilism.

The abundance of

exquisitely-crafted Scythian artifacts, the evidence of elaborate, highly ritualized burial practices, and Herodotus' fifth century BC eye-witness descriptions of the Scythian civilization a l l fed the romantic imagination of
85~aruskin,Stravinsky 965.

48

Russian writers and thinkers and gave evidence to those who nurtured the theory of Russian culture's oriental origins. Yet, while several examples of musical compositions and poetry referring to the ancient Scythians were written before 1916, the movement that can be called Scythianism did not develop until well into the First World War, and did not flower until well into t e Revolution. The twentieth-century Scythians made a metaphorical h connection between the ancient Scythians and themselves, valuing their predecessors' fierce independence, barbarism, and the primordial harmony of their lives in contrast to the civiIization that later developed in Europe-8h The image of the ancient Scythians had become a powerful inspiration to artists and writers by the 1917 Revolution, but it was not Scythianism as such that motivated The Rite o Spring. f Taruskin's assertion that The Rite of Spring is Scythian calls up images of the subhuman and barbaric that are not congruent with Roerich's images, as I will demonsbate in Chapter II. Taruskin views Roerich's writings and art through the lens of Scythianism, but he neglects to investigate thoroughly what he believes to be Roerich's fascination with the ancient Scythians. He interprets Roerich's 1898 essay "At a Burial Mound"

(Na kurgane) as open admiration of the Scythians; he seems to understand


the word kurgnn in Roerich's title as a specific reference to Scythian burial mounds, known widely as kurgnns.

This assumption leads him to the

condusion that the sacred hill depicted in Roerich's scenic design for The Rite o Spring is a Scythian kurgan.87 f However, contemporary references made to

this sacred hill commonly refer to Roerich's beloved northern landscape,

49

which was not part of the ancient Scythian domain.88 Roerich's essay is
actually a lyrical description of his work excavating burial mounds in the St.

n Petersburg region, as the subtitle of the essay indicates.89 I this essay kurgan

has the generic meaning of "burial mound;" Roerich specifically states that he
is describing the graves of Novgorod Slavs, a detail important to him because it verifies the existence of artifacts entirely

among the Slavs that did not derive

horn contacts with the Scandinavians.90 This essay is an early

example of Roerich's promotion of the beauty of ancient human culture. Taruskin's

choice of Scythianism as the motivating concept for

Stravinsky's and Roerich's work on The Rite of Spring effectively dismisses


the very important and serious role that the revival of religion was playing in

turn-of-the-centuryRussian culture. It leads to the misunderstanding of


Roerich's work in particular and the necessary but false conclusion that
Stravinsky

and Roerich did not share a common purpose in this project.

The Joffrey Ballet's 1987 performance of the restored first production of

Le Sucre du Printemps effectively strips away layers of subsequent


interpretations presented .gl

and enables us to experience the ballet almost as it was first

This reconstruction, based on

careful analysis of primary

88~ee, example, Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian BaNet 347. for See also Krasovskaia 1: 439. 89~ikolai Rerikh, "Na kurgane. V Vodskoi Piatine (SPb. gub.)," Glaz dobyi (Moscow: Khudozhestvemaia Literatura, 1991) 15-32. The title translates "At a Burial Mound in the Vodskaia Region of the St. Petersburg Province." This area was once part of the Novgorod Lands, becoming part of the St. Petersburg Province in the nineteenth century. The Vodskaia Region included the lands between the Volkhov and Luga rivers. go~erikh, "Na kurgane" 31. 91This performance was recorded and presented as part of the P S Great Performunces series. B See "The Search for Nijinskyfs Rite of Springl" produced by Judy Kinburg and Thomas Grim, WNET, New York and Danrnarks Radio, 2989. Millicent Hodson reconstructed the choreography, Kenneth Archer researched the costumes and stage design.

sources ,92 corrects many misconceptions about the ballet that have accumulated over time and brings out some features of the performance that lie hidden in analyses of just one aspect of the ballet. Perhaps the most

striking impression results from the intensified effect of the combined arts
that underscores the ritualistic nature of the ballet and the absolute balance between earth and sky, human community and the cosmos: From the first glimpse of the gorgeous scenic design and costumes . . . the stage is like some great cosmic machine-a cyclotron, a giant radar dish that sucks in and radiates out the forces of the universe. Nothing in the ballet is naturalistic. All is controlledpreordained. The community must repeat the ritual, step for inexorable step-explosive, dispassionate, umfyhg and crue1.93

. . . Roerich's scenario is about the marriage of earth and sky. . - . Nothing is haphazard in this scenario. In Roerich's version every action has its ritual meaning as a distillation of communal customs.94
This balance is supported by Nijinsky's choreography which looks primitive not because of its heaviness, but because of the dancers' postures and patterns of movement. What was once perceived as Nijinsky's "crime against grace" is revealed in this ballet as "a denial of the authority invested in modern civilization. .

. . Turning

inward suggested a different set of social and

psychological priorities, a different notion of the power relationships between

92~ee Millicent Hodson, NGimky's Crime Against Grace. Reconstruction Score of the Origmal Choreographyfor Le Sacre du Printemps (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon P, 1996) for a description of the score, notes by Stravinsky and Nijinsky's assistant Marie Rambert, eye-witness drawings and accounts in memoirs, designs and actual costumes, and photographs that were used in the reconstruction. 93~arcia Siegel, "'Sacre' ballet reconstructed," Christian Scimce Monitor, 12 November 1987:
26. 94~nna Kisselgoff, "Roerich's 'Sacre' Shines in the loffrey's Light," 7% N m York Times, 22 November 1987: HlO, 26.

51

man and the universe."95 The idea of creation through sacrifice, paradoxical
to modem man, was an integral part ancient man's view of the cosmos. As one c i i asserted in 1913, "'if one can, for once, stop confusing grace with rtc syrnmetcy and the arabesque,' it can be found everywhere in Le
Snc~e."96

Heaviness does not dominate this reconstruction; dance critic Anna Kisselgoff notes that "'Sacre' is a stamping dance, but it may not be the weighted dance we have been led to believe."97 Shipped of t e layers of over h one hundred subsequent choreographic interpretation^,^^ many of which exaggerated Nijinsky's earth-bound innovations, the restored choreography has an unexpected lightness. As the Chosen Maiden dances herself to death she leaps and extends her arms, trying to reach the sky. Even after she f d s to
the earth her body continues to resist gravity, and before she fully collapses
the elders lift her body as an offering to the sky.99

In her extensive notes about the reconstruction, Hodson reinforces the


dose collaboration of Roerich, Stravinsky, and Nijinsky, demonstrating how
the choreographer's art mirrored the concept developed by the other two. She

95~illicent Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime, xix. 96~arisian critic Jacques Riviere's 1 November 1913 essay, "Le Sacre du Printemps," La Nouoelle R m e Franccise, quoted in Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime, xi. 97~isselgoffH 0 1. 98~ynn Garafola and Joan Acocella, "Rites of Spring: Catalogue Raisonnl," Ballet Rezliew 20.2 (1992): 71-92. 99~ronislava Nijins ka, Nijinsky's hand-picked Chosen One, remembers that the maiden's body does not touch the ground. "The last jump, a high wave of the arms, and the old ones, who are guarding the sacrifice, catch the unbreathing body in their arms so as not to let it touch the ground." Quoted in Hodson, Nijimky's C h e 200. Stravinsky offered a similar account: "When she is at the point of falling in exhaustion the ancestors see this and, creeping around her Like greedy monsters so that she will not touch the earth as she falls, they lift her high in the air and offer her to the sky," although he later denied authorship of this article. See [gor Stravinsky, "Ce que j'ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre d u Printemps," Mantjoie! Organe de l'lmpi~lismeArtktique Francais, 29 May, 1913, in Truman Bullard "The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky's 'Sacre d u Printemps,"' 3 vols., diss., U of Rochester, 1971,2: 9.

52

emphasizes the ballet's basic polarity, evidenced in the tensions between the earth and sky, in the colors of the costumes, and in the grouping and regrouping of the dancers. Hodson also emphasizes the archetypal, ritualistic aspect of the dance that she feels is characteristic of Stravinskyfs music.

Finally, this reconstruction brings Roerich's concept-seen


decor and costume design as well as the scenario-into

through his

the spotlight. For

example, as Hodson worked she noticed that the ground patterns of the choreography echo the lines painted on the costumes; it is known that Nijinsky had waited u t l he had the costume designs before he began his ni portion of the work.loO While the idea of a maiden's sacrificial dance has been attributed to Stravinsky as someone "steeped in the traditions and

dich6s of the romantic musical theaterfWl0' Roerich may be most responsible


for its presentation as a willful though frightening act, done for the benefit of

the human community to maintain the balance between earth and sky. In
this reconstruction, the sacrifice does not exhibit the savagery and brutality that have come to be associated with The Rite of Spring in the more than eighty years since its premii?re. Observing Nijinskv's demonstration of the Chosen One's solo, his assistant Marie Rambert recailed his "ecstatic performance, . . . the greatest tragic dance I ever ~aw."'~2Hodson reinforces this impression, "the solo as [Nijinsky]constructed it is heroic, not pathetic. The Chosen One-isolated from the community by an act of destiny, not by

the community itselfdances the solo as a demonstration of courage."'u3


O O ~ o d n,o Nijinsky 's Crime 116, 40- The source cited is a letter from Sergei Grigoriev, s rdgisseur of the Ballets Russes, to Igor Stravinsky, dated 18 December, 1912. lol~aruskin, Stmuinsky 864. lo2~arie Rarnbert, Quick;iloer (London:Macmillan, 1972) 64, quoted in Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime xi. 1 0 3 ~ o d s o nNijinskyrs Crime xi. ,

53

Hodson's and Archer's work corroborates the presence of images and ideas that support the view of this ballet as an attempt to solve modem man's

crisis through ritual. The analysis of Nikolai Roerich's work which follows
in Chapter 1 does not contradict Hodson's and Archer's restoration. Rather, it 1

will contribute a better understanding of The Rife o Spring as it was f

conceived and developed from its beginnings as The Exalted Sacri!ce.

Chapter [ I

"The Fuhue Resides in the Past/"' Nikolai Roerich's Concept of The Exalted Sacrifice
Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947) was in one important way typical of the leading cultural figures of his generation; he was deeply interested in more

than a few specialized disciplines, and he worked throughout his life to


integrate them into his own unified philosophy. These disciplines were archeology, history, law, painting, stage design, architecture, arts education, ethnography, religion, and religious philosophy. Roerich is still well known

in Russia, however his portrayal in the West has usually been one or two
dimensional at best. Because his work was a synthesis of knowledge gained from all of these disciplines, it is a mistake to attempt to subordinate any of Roerich's interests to the one or two deemed the most important His contributions to Russian culture are deepened by his multi-faceted approach. However these achievements are filled with content that is unnoticed by those who dismiss some of the facets of Roerich's interest or the overall synthetic nature of his work. One must keep in mind that he valued the 'beautiful cosmogony of Earth and Sky"2 experienced in ancient civilizations, and he worked to restore this wholeness to a modern world i crisis. n

l~leksandr Rostislavov writes that familiarity with Roerich's scientific and literary works reveals the bmad horizons of his art, and the statement "the future resides in the past" can be seen as a sacred motto rather than as a paradox. A. A. Rostislavov, N. K. R&kh (1918; Kaliningrad: Knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1995) 52. 2 ~ o e r i c h Diaghilev, undated letter from the beginning of 1913. Reprinted in Zil'bershtein to and Samkov, Sergei Dingilm i rwskoe iskusstuo, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1982) 2: 120.

55

Roerich's contemporaries and later Soviet scholarship have always recognized his broad background and the fact that his activities were part of a Larger goal, namely the search for spiritual enlightenment and healing by refmrning art to its ancient sacred fimction, and by placing that art in modem man's daily life.

This chapter will outline Roerich's career. In particular I will address


the charge that he is nationalist; Roerich had his own definition of

neonationalism that was quite similar to the messianic nationalism discussed

in Chapter I. I will look at what Roerich inherited from his contemporaries


and demonstrate his participation in religious revival. I will discuss his use of the past and his ultimate purpose in articulating this position, especially as exemplified in Velikaia zhertva. While there are numerous works about Roerich including several excellent biographies available in English? a summary of his activities and accomplishments through 1913, his thirty-ninth year, wl be helpful to the il reader. Roerich was born and raised in St. Petersburg, although he spent much of his time outside the city on the family estate, Izvara, located to the

south of St. Petersburg in the Tsarskoe Selo District. Before he entered the
university, he had worked with archeologists in the north of Russia, continuing this work periodically throughout his years in Russia.' His work was serious and scholarly; he read a series of lectures at the Archeological Institute of St. Petersburg during 1898-1900. He simultaneously attended the Law Faculty of S t Petersburg University and the Academy of
3~ee Jacqueline Decter, Nicholas Roerich: The L$e and Art o a Russian Master, (Rochester: f Inner Traditions, 1989). and also Brooke Daly, "Nicholas Roerich. A study of his Life and Work 1874-1918," Thesis, U of Washington, 1988. 4~ostislavov,N. K. Rerikh 16.

56

Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, graduating from both.5 While at the University
he attended as many history lectures as he could manage. Roerich's

graduation painting "The Messenger. Clan has risen against Clan" (Gonets.
Vosstal rod na rod) won the highest prize at the student competition and was

purchased by the Tretiakov Gallery in 1897.

In 1895 Roerich became

acquainted with Vladimir Stasov, the head of the art department at the St. Petersburg Public Library and an outspoken art historian, archeologist, and critic. Stasov was very supportive of Roerich's work; they had many ideas in common about the importance of history and the role of the Near East and Asia in Russian culture.

I 1900 Roerich traveled to Europe to study painting, spending time in n


Paris, Venice, and Holland. He had akeady traveled to the south of Russia,

and in 1903 he made a kind of pilgrimage to the ancient cities of Russia,


recording the architecture of ancient churches in his paintings and sketchesHe continued to lecture at the Archeological Institute on the necessity of preserving this valuable heritage. I addition, he was a member of the n

Society of Russian Architects.


Roerich's paintings were widely exhibited. From 1902 to 1913 his paintings were part of fourteen World o Art (Mir iskusstoa) exhibitions i f n Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev.6 His paintings were also included in the

Salon d'Automne exhibit in Paris in 1906 and in another Paris exhibit

5 ~ i examination composition for the law faculty was titled "The Legal Status of Artists in s Ancient Rus" (Prmovoe polozhenie khudozhnikuv drevnei Rusi). He graduated from the law faculty in 1898. P. Belikov and V. Kniazeva, R&kh (Moscow: Molodaia gvardia, 1972) 38. %rina Kharitonova, ed. The World of Art Mooownt in Ear% 20th Centzcy Rush (Leningrad: Aurora Art P, 1991) 291 -295.

organized by Princess Mariia Tenisheva in 1907.7 Between 1906 and 1914 Roerich's paintings were frequently shown in exhibits of Russian art abroad? His works were seen in Paris, Venice, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Vienna, and London. The National Museum of Rome, the Luxembourg Museum in Paris and other European museums purchased his paintings.9 His works were Zolotoe runo, and Vesy, featured in the Russian journals Mir iskz~sstna, accompanied by articles written by art critics and literati including Voloshin, Gidoni, Makovsky, and Rostislavov.

In these years Roerich showed his commitment to art education. In


1901 he began to work for the Society for the Preservation of the Arts in St. Petersburg, and in 1906 he was appointed director of the Society's school. He undertook a reform of the curriculum, rescuing the school from its

reputation as mediocre. In 1909 the Russian Academy of Fine Arts named


him an Academician, an appointment delayed because of Academy politics.

He became a member of the Reims Academy in France as weU.Io Roerich also had a long association with Tenisheva and her workshops and school at her estate, Talashkino, near Smolensk. Tenisheva's efforts were a part of the kustnr' movement in Russia, a response to encroaching industrialization and an attempt to return dignity to hand work and beauty to

'~enisheva, an early, generous patroness of Mir iskusstua, was angry that Diaghilev had not shown Roerich's paintings as prominently as she would have liked at the 1906 Paris exhibit. She organized her own exhibit to give Roerich the attention she felt he deserved. For Tenisheva's and Roerich's correspondence on this topic see Larisa Zhuravleva, Tulashkino. Sbornik dokunrentov (Smolensk: Izdatel'shro Posokh, 1995) 266-68. 8 ~ is therefore not the case, as Taruskin argues, that Roerich was "catapulted by Diaghilev to t international fame" in 1909 because of his curtain, costume. and set designs for the second act of Borodin's Prince Igor, "The Polovtsian dances." Tamskin, Stmuinsky 851. While the designs may have "created a furor," they by no means introduced Roerich's art to Europe. 9~elikov and Kniazeva 90. Zo~elikov and Kniazeva 90.

58

everyday objects- Sergei Mamontov's workshops at Abramtsevo are a better known part of this movement, a parallel to the British Arts and Crafts movement a t the end of the nineteenth century.

In these Russian

workshops, peasants were trained in applied folk arts, and artists were commissioned to produce works using the motifs of Russian folk art." Roerich visited Talashkino, sometimes for extended periods of time, from 1903 to 1915. His designs for furniture and other decorations incorporated applied motifs of folk design blended with his own particular vision of ancient ornament. Perhaps his most important project at Talashkino was the design and execution of the decorations in Tenisheva's private church, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Roerich followed the scholarly work of Russian orientalists from early
in his career.

He read Indian classical Literature: the Bagoadghita, early

Upanishads, and Buddhist philosophical texts. He studied the t e a h g s of Ramakrishna and his pupil Swami Vivekananda. The Ramakrishna

movement (Missiia Ramakrishna) was active in Russia from 1897. Roerich worked to establish an Indian museum in St. Petersburg; he also worked to send students from his school at the Society for the Preservation of the Arts to India to study. By 1905 eastern themes began to appear in Roerich's works;

his tale of a Buddhist girl, "Devassari Abuntu," was published in Vesy along
with his illustrations.

In 1906 he published the essay "The Indian Way"

(Indiisky pzc f ') in which he celebrated the ancient civilization that produced
the artifacts he had recently seen in the collection of the Russian orientalist
l l ~ o r detailed discussion of the kustar' movement in Russia, see Wendy Salmond, The a Modernization o Folk Art in Russia: The R i a of the Kustar Art industries, 7885 - 191 7, f mul diss., U of Texas, Austin, 1989. Rerikh's activities at Talashkino are specifically discussed in DaIy 94-1 13, and in Zhuravleva 255-290.

Golubev.

Roerich became involved with Russian Theosophy during this

time as well-f Between 1907 and 1914 Roerich was actively connected with the theater, designing sets and costumes for both the Russian and European repertoire. He designed over f&y theatrical works, some for the pure joy of expressing his passionate response to the play. He was drawn to plays that reflected his own interests: the primordial world, the Stone Age, paganism, the middle ages, the world of fairy tales and legends, and the epic-heroic beginnings of civilization.

He decorated musical as well as dramatic

productions including those by Ostrovsky, Rirnsky-Korsakov, Borodin,

Wagner, Ibsen, and Maeterlindc.13


Throughout these years Roerich published essays in a wide range of publications including journals about hunting and nature, archeology, and the symbolist press.'4
A volume of his collected essays was published in

1914.15 He participated i the intellectual and creative cirdes of St. Petersburg; n the artists Kuindzhi, Serov, and Vrubelf, the art historian and critic Stasov, the impressario Diaghilev, the writers and poets Gorkii, Blok, Gumilev, the
12p. F. Belikov, "N.K. Rerikh. Biograficheski ocherk," N.K. Rerikh: lz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. M . T . Kuzmina (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1974) 25-26. See also L. V. Korotkina, Rerikh a Peterburge - Pehograde (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1985) 144-146. 13~aly 119, and Syrkina, "Rerikh i teatr" in M.T. Kuz'mina, ed., N.K. Rerikh. Zhizn i toorchtvo. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1978) 79-81. 14~hese journals included Okhota i primda (Hunting and Nature), Okhohik (The Hunter), Lektsii o Arkheologicheskorn institute (Lectures from the Institute of Archeology), lskussbo i khudozhestoennaia promyshlennost' (Art and Artistic Industry), Zapiski Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestvn (Notes of the Russian Archeological Society), 0 t c he t obshchestva pooshchrmiia khudozhesto (Chronicles of the Society for the Preservation of the Arts), Iskusstvo (Art), Vesy (The Scales), Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece), S t a y e gody (Bygone Years), and Russkaia ikona (The Russian Icon). M. Kuz'mina, ed., N. K Rerikh- k literaturnogo naslediia 528. 1 5 ~ K . Rerikh, Kniga pemaia (Moscow: Sytin, 1914). Subsequent volumes were never . published because the war intervened. This book has been republished under the title of Glaz dobryi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991).

poet and philosopher Solov'ev, and the art critics Makovsky and Ernst ail visited Roerich's home. He was also close to Belyl6 and acquainted with Briusov and Ivanov, prominent symbolists and fellow seekers of unified philosophies.

To the western eye, Roerich's fascination with scenes from the Slavic
past and his use of authentic decorative detail lead easily to the label "nationalist," too often with the connotation "chauvinist." Western

schclarship frequently lists some of Roerich's mentors and associates to lend support to this populist or nationalist view of his agenda as an artist: Stasov,
the well-known supporter of the Russian realist school of painting, the

peredvizhniki, and the first school of Russian composers, "The Mighty


Handful;" Tenisheva, organizer of the kustar' workshops at Talashkino and

collector of Russian folk arts; and Diaghilev, purveyor of "exotic" Russian art to European audiences. Roerich's relationship with each of these figures, however, is only part of the picture; any definition of Roerich solely through these particular relationships leads to a misrepresentation of this artist's work. This study will clarify Roerich's activities in relation to these figures by loolung a t Roerich's works themselves and at his scholarly and Literary writings- In some of his earliest writings, Roerich used the pseudonym "outsider" (izgoi). I believe that he considered himself an outsider throughout his life; he wished to act as a n individual rather than conform to the dogma of any

1 6 ~ Korotkina, "Pis'ma N. K. Rerikha V. Ia. Briusovu," Russkaia literatura 4 (1983): 173. In a . footnote Korotkina refers to a friendly letter Bely wrote to Rerikh that uses the informal form of address. She also cites Bely's undated letter to D. K. Metner (ca. 1909) that proposes that Rerikh contribute articles on painting, Eastern painting and ornament to the new journal they were planning.

particular school or "-ism."

He did not overtly identify himself with any

particular group, yet his works connect him to the current ideas of his day and reveal his eclecticism.

Many contemporaries sensed Roerich's uncom-

promising integrity; some admired this, others considered it the root of his

difficult personality. An appreciation of Roerich's multi-faceted expertise and


his synthetic approach is essential in interpreting his responses to his rapidly

changing environment. His essays and projects from the period when he was
working on Velikaia zhertva demonstrate that he was deeply involved in searching for the path to spiritual enlightenment and to mankind's salvation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian thinkers were absorbed with several questions of social philosophy that were partly an outgrowth of industrialization; progress brought out feelings of loss and impotence in the face of historical and natural forces. One of these questions placed civilization in opposition to the raw powers of nature. Alexander Blok was especially critical of the complacency of "civilized" men and their refusal to acknowledge the "ticking bomb" that progress had set in their midst. In a
1908 lecture, later published as "Stikhiia i kul'tura," Blok makes his audience

see the failure of progress (kul'tura) to make any difference in the face of the powers of nature or social anarchy (stikhiia). Recent severe earthquakes in
Sicily and Calabria demonstrated the power of stikhiia and paralleled the

threatening volcano-like social uprisings that Blok considers inevitable. In another essay written several months later he connects physical events on

earth to man's spiritual condition:


One simply must be spiritually blind, uninterested in the life of the cosmos and insensitive to the daily tremors of chaos in order to suppose that the formations of the earth go on independently

and in their own w a y , in no way influencing the f o r m a t i o n o f the h u m a n soul and human existence.I7
He calls this the revenge of stikhiia against kul'tura. In "Stikhiia i kul'tura"
he t o u c h e s on the idealized life of the peasant, lived dose to the earth and

accompanied by dreams of legends. But he does not stop there; he goes on t o describe the anarchic potential of the narodnaia stikhiia, the elemental power of the masses. He quotes two letters, one written b y a peasant and one written
by a m e m b e r of a religious sect, e a c h painting a picture of unrest among the

R u s s i a n people and each s t a t i n g that the w o r d s o f revolutionaries had a special relevance t o the writersr o w n experiences.

Blok's essay is not singular. The theme of the coming apocalypse, of


complete a n a r c h y o v e r t a k i n g civilization a s it w a s then known, is found in numerous writings at that tirne.18 This theme is found in many of Roerich's

paintings o f the s a m e period: The Treasure

4 the

Angels ( S o k r o v i s h c h e

angelov) 1905, The Baftle (Boi) 1906, The S e ~ e n t ' sDaughter (Zmieona) 1906, The Battle with the Serpent (Boi so z r n e m ) 1912, The Cry of the Serpent (Krik zmiia) 1913, and The Doomed City (Grad obrechennyi) 1914. This theme is also found in Nijinskyfs two series of red and black watercolor

paintings f r o m c. 1914: The Cosmos, and The Faces of War.19 Most o f the

I'A. Blok, "Gor'kii o Messine" Rech' 26 October 1909. Reprinted in Sobrnnie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Leningrad: Khudozhestvemaia literatura, 1982) 4: 134. On December 28,1908 a massive earthquake devastated the city of Messina on the northeastern coast of Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the mainland of Italy, killing more than 200,000 people- A Russian navy squadron had been stationed off the Sicilian shore, and Russian officers and sailors heroically came to the aid of the local population. This earthquake made a lasting impression on Blok and others. Images of the earthquake appeared in Blok's lecture delivered on December 30, 1908 and in other essays during the following year. l8see, for example, V. Solov'ev "Panmongolisrn" (1894), A. Bely "Apokalipsis v russkoi poerii" (The Apocalypse in Russian Poetry 1905), V. lvanov "Drevnyi &as" (Ancient Terror 1909). 19~aslavNijinsky, The Cosmos, and The Faces of War, c. 1914, Frye Art Museum, Seattle,

Washington.

63

creative intelligentsia could not escape being overwhehed at times with the fear of an unknown force that would destroy contemporary civilization.
With many, however, the apocalypse was to be welcomed as the agent which

would allow for the creation of a new world i its wake. Blok recognized that n

this elemental force was still potent among the Russian people who Lived a
life centuries old. Bely found that force in the people, i Russia's defeated n navy, and in his novel Petersburg he symbolized it all with literally a ticking bomb. Roerich's view of the people differs from Blok's. Acutely aware of

onrushing harmful change, Roerich did not identify it with the anarchy of

the people's revolution; instead, he considered it the result of man's loss of


wholeness and the absence of spirituality and beauty in all aspects of his life. Roerich idealized age-old civilizations which served as models for this beautiful, simple, highly spiritualized life. He believed that contemporary

man could create a new reality if he returned to a life steeped in beauty and
the spirituality it represented. Taruskids erroneous linking of Blok's and
Roerich's views enables him to conclude that The Rile o Spring was Scythian f
in its concept. In the previous chapter I discussed several ways that this

conclusion is misleading. I addition, Taruskin manipulates the message of n Blok's essay by focusing on several paragraphs that present an idyllic view of the people that he finds very reminiscent of Roerich's paintings.20 He summarizes and then quotes Blok's message, giving the impression that Blok

and Roerich share the same idyllic view of the people:


20~aruskin actually misreads the paragraph in which Blok compares kul'tura to the mindless society and activity of ants; Taruskin mistakenly calls this a description of "the 'elemental spontaneity' of the people." One wonders why Blok would then idealize such an ant-like existence. This discussion takes place in Taruskin, Stmvinsky 849-50 and ff.

The urgent task of art was to renounce kul'tura and embrace stikhiya and thus transform itself into an amulet for restoring ol wholeness to the battered s u of contemporary man. [This in itself is not entirely wrong; it is not Bely's message, however.] Artists must renounce culture and become "elemental people" [stikhiinye liudi], who "see dreams and create legends, indivisible from the earth. . . . The earth is with them, they are with the earth. They are indistinguishable in its lap, and it seems at times that the Ml is alive and the tree is alive . . . even as the muzhik himself is alive."21

This is indeed very dose to Roerich's view. Taruskin, however, stops short of
the last, most powerful sentence of Blok's paragraph in w i h he sums up the hc

effects of the terrible power that he associates with these people of the earth: But everything in this plain is still asleep, and when it moves, h everything as it exists will pass: the muzhiks will pass, t e woods along the slopes will pass, and the churches, incarnations of the Holy Mother, will pass from the hills, and lakes will overflow their banks and rivers will reverse their flow; the whole earth will pass.=
Blok is not opposing civilization to the idyllic life of primitive man, the

muzhik, as Taruskin suggests. Rather, he strongly states that the anarchy


lurking in the lives of the simple folk is brewing a revenge against civilization and progress. It is this view of the anarchic power of the people and of revolution that reappears in Blok's writings, most prominently in his
1918 poem "The Twelve" and in other so-called Scythian writings. Taruskin,

by drawing attention to this idyllic passage in Blok's essay, leads his reader to erroneously associate Blok's view of stikhiinye liudi with Roerich's view of primitive man, an oversimplification that later permits Taruskin to invest the concept of the ballet with Scythian anarchy.
Z1~amskin, Shrminsky 850. "Muzhik" refers to a simple peasant. 2 2 ~Blok, "Stikhiia i kul'tura." Sobranie sochinolii 4: 121. .

What was Roerich's view of ancient man?

His contemporary,

Rostislavov, suggested that Roerich's motto should be, "The Future Resides

in the Past-"23 Like many of his contemporaries Roerich Loved the past and
found in it lessons for modern civilization. particular lessons? But just what were these

They were not lessons of Russian nationalism,

chauvinistic in their evaluation of Russia's contributions to art and ideas. They were not lessons of Russian Scythianism, a celebration of the barbaric, elemental forces that brewed among the people. Nor were they a renunciation of civilization in favor of a savage life of oblivion, a model based on the view that man's development was a choice of one or the other. Roerich believed that at any stage of man's history he was capable of living life on a higher plane in unity with the spiritual realm. Ivanov also

expressed this view many times, for example in "A Corner-to-Corner Correspondence" (Perepiska i doukh uglov) he stressed the difference z between simply "going primitive" and seeking t e ancient wisdom of the h mystic, sacred unity.24 I will return to these views in Chapter III Roerich's lessons were closer to the view that Taruskin attributes to Blok, "The urgent task of art was to renounce kul'tura [westernized

civilization] and thus transform itself into an amulet for restoring wholeness to the battered soul of contemporary manrW25 although Roerich did not advocate the renunciation of Western civilization. To our eyes the word "amulet" looks trivial and naive; it was not, as I will demonstrate below.
23~ostislavov,N. R Rerikh 52. 24~iacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Gershenzon. "A Corner-to-Comer Correspondence" Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, e d . M . Raeff, trans. G. Vakar (1920; 1966; New Jersey: Humanities P, 1978) 397-398. 25~aruskin, Stravinsky 850.

Roerich expressed these ideas in an essay, "Joy i Art" (Rndosf' n isknsstvrr), published early in 1909. This essay carries the eamest message that art of the future must be purified; artists must recreate art's original sacred and ornamental function in the daily life of man.

In its soothing

ornament, ancient art expressed the harmony of man with his surroundings, and the ecstatic joy and harmony represented in that art can be reclaimed by modem man and used to heal his life. Speaking of the few stone age artifacts that archeologists had found to date, Roerich urges the drawing of this parallel: It is strange to think of the possibility that the behests of the stone kingdom stand dose to the strivings of our time. That which the turning point of history [the stone age] has shown us are those things that purely and spontaneously developed in the consciousness of the most ancient man. The earnest attempt to consider one's entire way of life, to thoughtfully and regularly shape all of its details, everything from the silhouettes of monumental sstructures to the smallest items for the hand, to bring everything to a strict harmony-these are the strivings of our art, strivings that are full of pain. They are reminiscent of the ancient one's loving concern to make from all of his surroundings something that was carefully considered, lavishly decorated and soothing to the accustomed hand? This is dearly the goal of Roerich's activities at Talashkino as well as of his entire Life in art. Roerich makes two important distinctions as he writes about the future of art. First, he uses words to describe the "audience" that imply quite a different relationship between the art object and the viewer than the one usually assumed, that is, the act of looking at a painting or work of art,
2 6 ~ K. Rerikh, "Radost' iskusstvu," Vestnik Emopy 1909 no. 2. Reprinted in Rerikh. Sobmnie . sochinenii, kniga p m i n (Moscow: Sytin, 1914). Citations are from the reprint Glaz dobryi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991) 89-124. 104-205.

analyzing it, and making an aesthetic judgement. Instead, Roerich refers to

preds toiashchie (those who stand before the art), suggesting a stance of

n veneration, as before a icon. To an Orthodox believer an icon is not art:


For Russian Orthodox believers, the icon serves as a life-giving ik source of grace. . . . The profound spiritual l n between the earthly and heavenly Church, and between the men living today and God and His holy men is manifested in the veneration of icons. . . . "He who venerates an icon venerates the Hypostasis depicted on it." Through icons we not only show our lo veneration to the Prototype, we a s pray, either individually or collectively, for intercession before God. Through icons the faithful receive grace, replenishing their spiritual strength, and also spiritual help and healing. Asserting the miracle-working power of every icon, the Church shows special reverence for icons that have performed rnira~Ies.2~

The visual image of an icon has expressive powers that transcend reason and
the power of mere words. Icons, like sacred objects made in any culture, are made according to strict ritual. There are striking parallels between Roerich's view of pagan sacred art and the Church's description of icon painting: The materials used in icon-painting have a profoundly h symbolic meaning: wood is the symbol of t e Tree of Life, Paradise, and the image of prayer by the plant kingdom; the priming, made of chalk and fish glue, is the symbol of the petrified sea of pure prayer offered up by Christian souls and by the Lord Himself, Whose symbol is the fish; it also symbolises "all that breathes" and praises the Lord; the paints themselves are of stone and clay, epitornising the earth and colour, mixed with egg, the symbol of Easter-all taken together symbofise the salvation of God's universe through prayer to God. The iconpainter is a tool of Divine Will which brings us into communion with the heavenly world through the beauty of the holy image. That is why icon-painting is a form of service to God accompanied by strict fasting and constant prayer. The
27~he Russian Orthodox Church, trans. Doris Bradbury (Moscow: Progress P, 1982) 212-213. Turn-of-the-century religious revival included a renewed interested in the collection and restoration of icons. The symbolism and power of the icon was an especially appealing example of non-rational cognition.

prepared board is asperged with holy water; the water which runs off it is collected and priming is mixed on it. The primed board is also blessed and abundantly asperged with holy water, which is then collected and used to dilute the paints. When an icon is being painted, a l l the brethren in the monastery fast and pray.28 Roerich views the art of the world's ancient civilizations as the same kind of carefully prepared incarnation of sacred truth. In this essay he also refers to the audience as polrzuiushchiesia (those who use the art objects),

underscoring his conviction that beauty must be returned to everyday life in the form of applied a t r. The second distinction Roerich makes is that the function of art is to adorn (ukmshat'). This is not merely the superficial decoration of everyday objects; in fact Roerich would strongly object to such a thoughtless distortion of this function of art. The entire essay traces how ancient peoples decorated their Lives, all the while emphasizing the dose relationship of the ornament to the spiritual lives of the people. Their life was an aesthetic unity; they were surrounded by beauty. Roerich hopes that with renewed interest in the art of the past people wiU again understand the exalted meaning of the word "to adorn." Decorativeness or ornament is the single path and basis of true
art

Thus once again the idea of the meaning of art has been purified - to adorn. To adorn life so that artist and spectator, master and consumer, are united in a creative ecstasy and, if only for a
r!9 moment, rejoice in the purest joy of a t 2

T i idea is also found in Russian Orthodox tradition: hs

28~he Russian Orthodox Church 213. 2 9 ~ e rkh, "Radost'" 89. i

A striving toward the beautiful is a typical feature of Russian religious consciousness, one which has been vividly expressed in Russian ecclesiastical art. The meticulous elaboration of the ie outward aspects of religious l f was a result of the awareness of the transforming effect of the Divine energies which build the Church in the world. The offering of @s to the Church and the decoration of the church as the house of God was always inherent in Russian Orthodoxy.30

Thus life is made beautiful in the temples of many religions; it is aesthetically


and spiritually harmonious.

Man is in a state of communion with the

spiritual world when his life is so adorned. The sacred function of ornament underlies many of Roerich's descriptions of ancient implements. For example, in a 1909 article "The Enchanted Beasts" (Zakliatoe zoer'e) Roerich describes the ornamentation

found in Tenisheva's collection of enameled objects. The forms of bewitched wild animals were used as talismans to protect the hearth: The ornaments, full of mysterious ideas, particularly attract our attention. . . . In them are fixed forms that are necessary for someone, like idols for someone . . . and many symbols preserve the forever-frightened life of man.31 Ancient decorations had an immediate purpose-to security for a life lived on the edge of the abyss. Roerich, while rejecting narrow nationalism, realized that it is important for Russians to see the landmarks of their o w n artistic achievement on their own soil. He notes the Russians' curious struggle to develop pride in their own achievements; they have a history of longing for western approval before they can be comfortably confident of the value of provide protection and

30~he Russian Orthodox Church 212. 3 1 ~ . Rerikh, "Zakliatoe zver'e," Talashkino. Sbomik dokurnmtoo 399. ~ .

those accornplishments.32 He mentions this more than once in his essays. For example, in the 1910 essay, "Icons" he writes:
Still one more foreigner has come to believe in our ancient, wonderful, beautiful icons. . . . [WJe remember that Maurice Denis and Matisse . . . and a whole crowd of the best Frenchnen, when they saw our art. . . gave our icons and our ancient art [the praise] it deserves. I name the foreigners because [Russians] did not believe us, their own, when we, in rapture, were saying the same things. Even ten years ago, when I endlessly asserted the beauty and significance of our ancient icons, many, even cultured people, still didn't understand me and looked upon my words as though they were an archeological whim.33

In "Joy in Art" Roerich writes about the skeptical reception Russian


scholars gave to the Neolithic human figures he found on the shore of lake Piros in the Novgorod region around 1902. His find created such a sensation that professor N. L Veselovskii (1848-1918), an archeologist and orientalist,

quickly pronounced them fakes. But a year later Veselovskii continued the dig and verified the authenticity of the figures found by Roerick34 In 1905
Roerich shared his discoveries at an archeological congress in France, where French specialists put them on a level with the best classical artifacts of Egypt.

"In general," Roerich writes, "if we want something with which to compare
the form and proportions of stone artifacts, then it is best to turn to the completeness of the classical world."35

Roerich suggests that the level of art

32~ccordingto Dostoevsky, Pushkin depicted this struggle more than a century earlier in his poem Eugene Onegin; had Childe Harold or even Lord Byron himself pointed out Tatiana's beauty to Onegin, he would have been amazed and astonished. As it was, Tatiana, the "apotheosis of Russian womanhoodrr and the positive protagonist of the poem, passed through Onegin's life "unrecognized and unappreciated by him." F. M. Dostoevsky, "Pushkin (ocherk)" F. M. Dostomskii. Dnmnik pisatelin. lzbrannye stmnitsy. (Moscow: Sov remennik, 1989) 527528. 3 3 ~ . Rerikh, "Ikony," Glnz dobryi 155-156. ~ . 34~elikovand Kniazeva 73. 35~erikh, "Radost"' 1 11.

of the stone age is equivalent to that of later civilizations; it should not be judged by the scaraty and worn quality of its artifacts. It is difficult to "see" the beauty of antiquity because "it is so distant from our perceptions of life. But when you have understood a part of the most ancient life, doesn't it seem to you that you have seen a patch of the starry sky with the naked eye?"36 This essay is a excellent example of Roerich's synthesis of his expertise n

in archeology and ancient history with his artistic imagination in the service
of the betterment of mankind. He uses ancient artifacts as a point of departure for his artistic restoration of ancient myths; his interpretations, either in words or on his canvases, carry the authority of his specializations. The theme of rediscovering ancient myth comes up frequently in Roerich's essays. In "Joy in Art" he refers to artifacts as "letters" from which one can,
with enough expertise, compose a story?

It is this story making, the bringing

to life of cold, dusty artifacts lying in museums, that can bring healing to the life of modem man: If there exists a series of topics permitting us even for a minute to come up for air from the maelstrom of routine Life, to cast a glance beyond the palace and above the gigantic factory smokestacks, then archeology must have a place in that nu1nber.3~

Roerich's contemporaries recognized his artistic restorations of myth.


Benois somewhat cynically noted, "I do not believe in his Slavs and his elders; in my opinion he made the whole thing up. For this reason his

36~erikh, "Radost"' 101. 37~erikh, "Radost"' 100-101. In this particular instance he refers to himself as not having sufficient expertise to compose a slmzka about the ancient Babylonians from the few "letters" that their artifacts represent. 38~erikh, "Na kurgane," Glar dobryi 32.

paintings convey the feeling of boredom and strained interpretati~n."~~ Even


in this critical stance toward Roerich, Benois unwittingly puts his finger right

on the crucial element of Roerich's work: he had a powerful ability to charm


because he could combine his academic expertise with his artistic vision.

Gidoni discerned this combination in Roerich's painting ldols (Idoly) 1901:


"Idols" . . . gives evidence of the artist's unquestionable perception that antiquity must be portrayed not only through stories or through impressions about it, but through the creative method itself. . . . In this painting, perhaps unconsciously on the part of the artist, one can sense an echo of ethnography, an inevitable tribute to scientific

In her memoirs, Tenisheva refers to Roerich's ability to bring ancient


artifacts alive. Speaking of the "passionate archeologist," she compares him to Baian, the legendary bard who sang the epics of ancient Rus':

. . . all of my life I have dreamed of digging in the ancient graves


with someone expert, together opening the pages of the ancient past. Each time that I found some kind of object that spoke about the life of people who had disappeared long ago, an inexplicable feeling overcame me. Imagination took me to that place that only Nikolai Konstantinovich [Roerich] was able to see; he enticed me to follow as he embodied those long bygone times in form and images. Many are making dim conjectures about those times, but they are not able to convey them in their fullness. I c a l l him Baian, and this appellation fits him well. He alone gives us pictures of those things that we are not able to restore in our own imagination.41 Roerich emphasizes the importance of the public's participation in coming to know ancient art in its original sacred ornamental function. In this process the past will create the future:
3 9 ~ Benois, "Pis'ma so Vsemirnoi vystavki," Mir iskusst-ua 19-20 (1900): 158, quoted in 1. Zil'bershtein and V. Samkov, Sergei Diagilm i russkoe iskwstw 1: 335. *OA. Gidoni, "Tvorcheskii put' Rerikha," Apollon 6 (1915): 10-11. 4 1 ~ K. Tenisheva, VpecluzNmiia moei zhizni (1933; Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1991) 226. .

It is invaluable that the cultured part of society is now aspiring with particular urgency to become familiar with art's past. And, immersing itself in the best sources of creativity, society will once again understand the exalted meaning of the word "to adorn." In the fire of desire for ecstasy lies the promise of future brilliant achievements. These achievements will flow together into an apotheosis of a new style, inconceivable at this time. This style wl bring an epoch that is completely unknown to us, il an epoch whose depths of ecstasy are, of course, dose to the first beginnings of art . . . In order for a harmonious epoch of art to be forged, it is necessary that, following the artists, all of society participate in the construction of the temple. People must be participants in the task rather than passive observers. This kind of mental creation will consecrate all manifestations of life. . . May it be thus;may everyone master ecstasy.42 Roerich's references to the construction of a "temple," the participation of all,

and the power of ecstasy to create a new epoch resonate with parallel efforts in
the other arb, as I wl demonstrate in Chapter III. il

In "Joy in Art" Roerich provides a corrective view of pre-Petrine


Russian art and culture: it is more than cockerels, painted yokes and embroidered sleeves.43 Roerich corrects the textbook images of Mongol invaders, Scandinavian traders, pre-Christian Slavs, and stone age "barbarians." All of these civilizations were steeped in beauty: From the Tatar yoke, as though from an epoch of hate, time has destroyed whole pages of beautiful and elegant Eastern decorations which the Mongols introduced to the Rust. The Tatar yoke is remembered only as some kind of dark pogroms. It is forgotten that the mysterious cradle of Asia reared these remarkable people and swaddled them with the rich @s of China, Tibet, and all of Hindustan. In the flash of Tatar hc swords, Rust again heard the tale of wonders w i h the Greeks and the clever Arab tradesmen of the Great Trade Route once knew -44
4 2 ~ e r i "Radost"' 89. kh, 43~eri "Radost"' 91. kh, 44~eri "Radost"' 94. kh,

The Scandinavians were not just northern traders and invaders who passed through; ruins give evidence of this culture's establishment in Russia's lands: It is without a doubt that the joy of Kievan art was established in dose contact with ~candinavi&culture. . . . Al the people accepted it. All the people believed in it. And l again there is no basis to consider the northerners wild enslavers of Novgorod's forefathers. The proof is simple. Everything they left is wise and beautiful. We do not know how they lived, but in any case they lived long and lived in such a way that true art was close to them. To the Rus' the Varangians gave gods in human form, and for so long the northern peoples honored the powers of nature, they belonged to one of the most poetic religions. T i religion is the hs cradle of the best means of ~reation.4~

Christian chroniclers had reason to demonize the pantheistic religion


of the pre-Christian Slavs because its roots were old and deep. Roerich

reminds his readers of recently discovered ruins in the Kiev region that are attributed to the cult of Astarta, a western-semitic goddess of fertility, maternity, and love, perhaps dating to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries

BC. He concludes that there must have been population centers associated
with these shrines, thus Kiev must have been a sacred site for centuries before its legendary founding by Kiy, Shchek, and Khoriv:

Sil half blind we search for an authentic image of the tl inhabitants of these most beautiful settlements. Still not seeing very dearly, we can sense the charm of abandoned cults of nature which the most ancient chroniclers of Christian times did not have the sh.ength to tell us about. The bestial way of Life, demonic games, seemingly obscene songs that the chronicler explains are the result of his judgmental view. The zeal of the clergy-the chronicler-is completely understandable. The
4 5 ~ e rkh, "Radost"' 98-99. i

Church did not bring art. The Church was founded on art. And, in creating new forms, it crushed much that was also Seautif~l.'~
The structure of "Joy in &t" makes Roerich's pronouncements on the
past immediately relevant to the present. He marches his reader backward in time to prehistory, passing the landmarks of art and culture that were created as peoples came into contact. He then moves to an even more distant time, described in such a way as to refer directly to the present moment: But we sense that standardized (metalworking) life is ending. Nationalism is ending. The conditions of political economy are ending. There is no crowd. But art does not end. A kind of new man appears. This means we have arrived at the stone age.47

The reversal of historical time and the use of present tense give such
pronouncements an eerie tone of prophesy, making the essay all the more potent. It underscores Roerich's prescription for the future, "neonationalism," which I will return to below.

Roerich concludes his essay with a view of stone-age man. He admits


that much of this is imagined, but he also points to his own extensive fieldwork and the work of others that has begun to reveal the Life and art of

the Neolithic age:


We can dimly imagine ancient dwellings. We see ancient man, not as a pompous hero with loincloths, draped with scraps of fur. We can sense in lus implements not crudeness and roughness, but a deiicate intricacy. We sense that the usual baked colors of the environment should be changed in our imagination to beautiful colors. We dearly feel that the entire daily life and dwelling of ancient man cannot be something like animal dens, but originate from an orderly, harmonious life.48
4 6 ~ e rkh, "Radostf" 100. i 4 7 ~ e r i k h , "Radost'" 101. 4 8 ~ e r i k h ,"Radost"' 11 1.

For Roerich, each of these civilizations possessed a connection to ancient truth, a connection that is missing in the contemporary world. The

ancients lived their lives in close contact with the forces of the sky and the
earth, as evidenced in the motifs used to decorate their tools and their dwellings. "It is shameful for our times: in antiquity there was not one object without decoration."49 Roerich focuses on the civilized harmony of these historical peoples as a way to bdance the commonly held view that they were
all barbarians.

He compares stone age man to the bear, an animal that

embodies the harmonious reconciliation of opposites: The joy of life is spread throughout the free, stone age. What kind of man is stone age man? He is not the ravenous and greedy woIf of succeeding times, but the tsar of the woods, the bear, thrifty in the care of his family, satisfied with the abundance of food, at once powerful and tender, swift and heavy, ferocious and benevolent, unyielding and compliant-"

This view is represented in Roerich's 1911 painting Hrrrnan Forefathers


(Chelooech'i praotsy) where a lone figure sits on a hilltop before spreading
lush green lands and plays a pipe to an audience of his kin, a group of bears. Roerich's prescription for the future requires an end to nationalism, a n odd proposition for an artist whose works appear to be quintessentially "nationalist." While Roerich celebrated the heroes and events of the Slavic past using a style composed of ancient Slavic motifs and ornaments, he honored the contributions of other cultures as well. The question of

Roerich's relationship to nationalism and nationalist painters also concerned Roerich's contemporaries. Although some colleagues and critics quickly

recognized the universalism represented in Roerich's work, others did not.


4 9 ~ e rkh, "Radost'" 109. i 5 0 ~ e rkh, "Radost'" 105. i

In some cases it took years for Roerich to rid himself of the stigma of his early
association with Stasov. Benois, who favored the eighteenth century in his own retrospectivism, w s more outspoken in his dismissal of Roerich's early a f works. In a review published in The World o Art in 1900, he wrote:

Roerich's agenda closely resembles Surikov's and Riabushkin's, but, unfortunately, this young painter does not possess these masters' gift of historical clairvoyance. It is a pity that he still has not found his niche. . . . I do not believe in his Slavs and his elders; in my opinion he made the whole thing up. For this reason his paintings convey the feeling of boredom and strained interpretstion.5'
Later he was willing to compare Roerich's work to that of ~asnetsov,~2 who
is well known for designing the facade of Moscow's Tretyakov gallery in 1905,

imitating archaic Muscovite style. I the catalog for a 1906 exhibit in Paris, n Benois refers to the paintings of Vasnetsov and his principal rivals Nesterov
and Roerich.53 Other critics took Benois to task for failing to look at the

whole of Roerich's work.

It was only much later in his career that Benois

recognized the deeper contents of Roerich's work. Another contemporary, the art critic Gollerbakh, recognized the

essence of Roerich's neonationalism:


Roerich is a Russian, but not a nationalist. . . . [In his works there] is a penetration into the universal through the Russian, a penetration that is only possible because in Roerich there is
5 1 ~ Benois, "Pisfma so Vsemirnoi vystavki," Sergei Diagilm i russkoe iskusstwo 1: 335. . V. Surikov (1848-t916), a Wanderer, was known for his work on Russian historical themes, especially on themes of social criticism and national pageantry in Old Muscovy. A. Riabushkin (1861-1904) was a genre painter who focused on scenes of seventeenth century

Moscow. 5 2 ~Vasnetsov (1848-1927) was a genre painter in the manner of the Wanderers. He is known . for his restoration of paintings in the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kiev, and for his paintings of folktales and historical scenes. Hs historical realism is said to possess only "slight poetry." i See Hamilton 395-97. 53s. Makovsky, "N. K. Rerikh," Zolotoe runo 4 (1907): 6.

always the feeling of the "elementally Russian" [stikhiinonrsskoe] i contrast to those who continued to paint the tinselly n "Holy Russia."54

I a 1907 article i Zolotoe runo, Makovsky interpreted the nature of n n


n Roerich's "nationalism" one year before Roerich himself made it explicit i
"Joy in Art." He recognizes that Roerich does not confine his interest to the national past. After a lengthy description of the various themes and faceless

figures in the paintings depicting the ancient past, Makovsky concludes:


We look: it is all the same uninterrupted dream of hoary antiquity. Is it the dream of national antiquity? If you like. But this is not the most important thing, although it is accepted to consider Roerich a "national" painter. It is not the most important thing because, for him, the national-historical theme is just a decoration. His images draw us to the farthest distances of the faceless past, to the depth of prehistoric Life, to the sources n of human fate. No matter what he sees i his daydreams, whatever epoch he resurrects with the care ar,d expertise of a n archeologist, his thought desires the depths, the utmost beginning beckons it, and it is based on that primordial granite o f the tribal spirit on which lie the layers of the centuries. Roerich's "human" is not Russian, not Slavic, not Scandinavian. He is ancient man, the primitive barbarian of the earth.55

Makovsky asserts that Roerich's faceless figures set him apart from that group of artists who see individuals; instead he is one of the other group of artists

. . . [who]are attracted by the mystery of the soul, a blind, faceless soul, common to whole epochs and peoples, a soul penetrating a l the elements of Life, a soul in w i h separate individuality l hc perishes like a weak brook in the dark depth of a subterranean lake.56

5 4 ~ Collerbakh, "Iskusstvo Rerikha," Rerikh (Riga: M u e i Rerikha, 1939) 24. . 5 5 ~ a k o v s k y4 .


S6~v(akovsky 3.

I the same issue of Zolotoe runo, Rostislavov writes about Roerich's n


"individualism;" "Among us he is singular, completely alone."57 Roerich is gifted with intuition and daiwoyance that take him beyond his scholarly knowledge of the past

In Roerich's individualism there is something fantastic, there are hints and flashes of an unsolvable, enigmatic mystery. It is as though a small corner of the soul of distant, mystical forefathers Lives in him. It seems he miraculously sees and comprehends the beauty of bygone times; he lives a l f of old; ie he senses the remote culture that is so enigmatic for us, a different, fantastic world, the particular beauty of w i h he hc attempts to convey i the precise forms of contemporary arts8 n
Roerich was not alone in his belief that art carries the power of healing; his views echo Solovfev's promotion of the unifying power of the World Soul,

t e Divine Sophia, and Dostoevsky's statements i his "Pushkin" speech h n


about the strength of Russianness. Roerich's work is directed toward

restoring man's access to collective consciousness by encouraging his partidpation i the ecstasy of art. n Roerich's contemporaries recognized his contributions and valued them-

Roerich addresses "neonationalism" early in "Joy i Art." He begins by n


suggesting that this concept might be the very solution to the problems faced

by contemporary a r t

Can we purify our art? What shall we adopt? Where shall we turn? To new misinterpretations of classicism? Or shall we descend to ancient origins? Shall we delve to the depths of primitivism? Or will our art find the new radiant path of "neonationalism," surrounded by the sacred herbs of India,
5 7 ~ Rostislavov, "Individualizm Rerikha," Zolotoe runo 4 (1907):8. . 58~ostislavov, "Individualizm" 9. We must separate the individualism of the artist that was promoted in response to the group program of The Wanders from themes of individualism in the works themselves. Rostislavov is referring to Roerich's individualism in the first sense only. See the discussion of individualism as a part of the World ofArt aesthetic in Chapter III.

strong with Finnish magic, and lofty with the flight of ideas of the so-called Slavonic peoplesl59

He resists defining "neonationaLism" at this point; he develops the concept


slowly through the pages o the essay in the accumulation of images he paints f

with his words.


As Roerich reveals his concept of "neonationalism," he stresses two of

its features. First, it was formed by the synthesis of many artistic traditions through centuries of invasion, contact through trade, and simply Living side by side with others. He implores his readers to "throw out all that is narrowly nationalistic." Looking beyond the dichPs that are generally associated with

n Russian culture, he poses the question, "Was there beauty i that life that
flowed through our territory in particularlW60 Throughout his corrective view of pre-Petrine culture, Roerich underscores the synthesis that produced

this past beauty:

The coiorfui Finno-Turks pass us by. Mysteriously the majestic Aryans appear. Unknown wanderers leave cold ashes in their hearths. . . How many of them there are! A synthesis of really neonationalist art collects itself out of their @. [. . .] If, instead of the tendency toward dulled nationalism, captivating "neonationalism" were fated to take shape, then the cornerstone of its treasure will be [. . .] the truth and beauty of exalted antiquity.61
Second, the power of neonationalism Lies in modern man's participation in the rediscovery of ancient beauty through the creative act of unraveling or imagining its original splendor and context, the kind of resurrection of ancient myth that culminates in "ecstasy in art."
Only then

will he be able to take part in creating the future:


5 9 ~ e r i "Radost'" 88-89. kh, 6 0 ~ e r i "Radost"' 90 kh, 6 1 ~ e r i "Radost"' 100. kh,

It is time for all people to begin to understand that art was not only there where it is obvious to everyone; it is time to believe that time has hidden much more art from us. And many things-as dreary as they appear-will become illuminated then by the joy of penetration, and the viewer will become a creator. In this lies the charm of the past and of the future. It is forbidden for a man who is unable to understand the past to think about t e future.62 h

This is Roerich's prescription.


Roerich's neonationalism is an ideal that transcends national borders
and chauvinistic views of national culture. It echoes Dostoevsky's evaluation of the strength of the spirit of Russianness in its "ultimate aspirations toward universality and the universal brotherhood of peoples."63 Roerich's neonationalism is based on archeological evidence of the synthesis of ancient cultures, combined with his belief in the power of beauty and his gift of retelling the old stories with his words and paintings. Neonationalism is the desire to experience the Divine Unity that regulated the balance of Chaos and Cosmos in ancient cultures, a desire renewed as a goal both by Solov'ev and

in Russian Theosophy.

Sometime during this period Roerich wrote an

epigraph for The Flowers of Monia (Tsvety Morii), a cycle of poems depicting the search for spiritual enlightenment: Above every Russia there is one Unforgettable Russia. Above every love there is one Panhuman love. Above every beautiful thing there is one Beauty that leads to Knowledge of the Cosmos.64
-

62~erikh, "Radost"' 99. 63~ostoevsky, Wtiter's Diay 2:1293. A


64~erikh,Tmety Morii (1921; Moscow: Sovrernenni k, 1988) 13.

This mirrors Ivanov's urging artists to go beyond the real to the more real, a

realibus ad realiorn, in their search for sacred and spiritual knowledge that
will transform modem life. I will discuss Ivanov's ideas in greater detail in Chapter m. The ancient truths revealed in the ornament of stone and metal artifacts represent what Roerich perceived as universal spirituality, the

"ecstasy in art," that for his generation had become distant memory. Roerich is attempting to recapture this spirituality for himself and for his contemporaries. His concept of neonationalism means recreating the

essential, universal human state of harmony with all aspects of life: the physical with the spiritual; man's place in the balance of the elements of earth, air, water, and fire; man's place among other races of men, both contemporary and historical, and man's place among all the other creatures. For Roerich the act of discovering the beauty and harmony of ancient art replicates the spiritual state of its creators and original users. Since stone artifacts demand the maximum participation in recreating primordial "ecstasy in art," they must also offer the greatest potential healing power. Perhaps this is why Roerich repeatedly returns to the stone. Makovsky writes of Roerich's early love of stones and how that manifested itself in his style of painting: The Stone Age! How often have I found Roerich at his work table, carefully fingering these wonderful "flints", considered for so long to be incomprehensible whims of nature: faceted arrowheads, scrapers, hammers and knives from burial mounds. . . . Stones, the dwelling place of earliest peoples' faceless soul. [Roerich] has been certain of them since childhood; they inspired his first artistic sense. Close to "Izvara," where he grew up on his patrimonial estate, on the hilly fields next to coniferous forests where bears and moose roamed, there were ancient burial

mounds. As a boy he dug here and found bronze bracelets, rings, pottery shards and flint implements. . . . Thus small stones of the "cave man" bewitched [Roerich's] dreams. As a result, the love of stones gave a particular nuance to his quest for primitive forms. This can be clearly seen in his decorative compositions, in his graphics, and even in his manner of painting. Among Roerich's canvases there are those delicately touched by his brush, velvet carpets with carefully executed details. But there are [canvases] thickly painted with heavy, layered seokes; they seem hewn out of stone paints. The entire style of his drawing is simplified at times to paradoxical boldness, as if these forms had felt the pressure of a stone chise1.65 Makovsky was not alone in remarking on the stony quality of Roerich's work. Gidoni noticed the earthiness of Roerich's The House o God f

(Dom bozhii). He writes of the "certainty of the stone. . . as though the artist
was groping for the skeleton of the earth."66

I a 1909 article "Archaism in n

Russian Painting" (Arkhaizm o russkoi zhivopist], Voloshin focuses on the stony quality of Roerich's painting: [Roerich] is indeed an artist of the stone age, not because he sometimes attempts to depict the people and edifices of that epoch, but because from the four elements of the world he perceived only earth, and in the earth, only her bony foundation-the stone. Not mineral, not crystal that returns the sun's light and flame, but the heavy, hard, and opaque stone of displaced skata.67 Voloshin emphasizes the opaqueness of Roerich's paintings in this essay, but elsewhere he calls Roerich prophetic. He was very aware of the spirituality of Roerich's works, as we will see in his response to Roerich's Queen of Heaven below.

65~akovsky 4. 6 6 ~ i d o n15. i 6 7 ~ Voloshin, "Arkhaizm v russkoi zhivopisi," Liki tuorchestoa (Leningrad: Nau ka, 1988) . 279. The article was first published in Apoilon 1 (1909): 43-53.

Roerich considered stones to be sacred objects in themselves. In his essay "At a Burial Mound" he describes the positioning of rare stones at the head and feet of the body that is also aligned with the east-west path of the suna68 Stones are also bearers of ornament and other evidence of the purposeful life of ancient man:
If you want to penetrate to the soul of stone, find one yourself on site; pick one up with your own hand on the shore of a lake. The stone itself will answer your questions, it will tell you of its own long life. Remnants of the forests, the venerable crust of antiquity covers the stone. You do not notice its former purpose. Turn it over in your hand slowly and a smile comes to your face; you have managed to take hold of the stone in just the same way that its ancient owner used it. For with the exact fingering you have hdppened upon all of the well-thought-out hollows and bumps. In your hands a necessary implement comes to life. You understand the entire subtlety and sculpted quality of its finishOut from under the grayed deposits the tone of jasper or jadeite begins to shine through. A portion of beauty is in your hands.69

For Roerich, the stone is directly connected to heaven. He begins the second
section of "Joy in A & ' by recalling several ancient myths about the stone. In a

Mordvinian legend a goddess shatters a piece of flint and creates the gods of earth, fire, the woods, and dwellings from the gleaming shards. In a Mexican legend a flint knife is thrown from the heavens and its shards form one thousand six hundred gods and goddesses. These and other legends and sayings give evidence that somehow the indecipherable origins of the stone age are still alive.70 "A particular mystery surrounds the remains of the stone age. Simply stated, stone remains have always been related to heavenly

68~erikh, "Na kurgane" 26. 69~erikhf "Radost"' 110. 7 k e r i kh, "Radost"' 102. 'l~erikh, "Radost"' 104.

Roerich's ideas clearly reflect Solov'ev's influence; beauty is both a divine principle and an objective, ultimate reality that manifests itself in nature and through the helping hand of man. Ideas put forth in Solov'ev's essays "Beauty in Nature" (Krasota o prirode
1889) and "The General

Meaning of Artff (Obshchii smysl iskusstua 1890) formed part of the key assumptions of many symbolist theorists and artists at the turn of the century.'Z "Beauty in Nature" begins with an epigraph, Dostoevskyfs famous

words spoken by Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, "Beauty will save the world"

(krasota spaset rnir). I this essay Solov'ev writes that, "What is beautiful in n
the aesthetic sense must lead to a real b e t t m e n t of reality," and that beauty is
" fhe

~ransfigtrrationof material through the embodiment in it of some other,

higher-than-materiul principle."73 Solov'ev sets forth the mission of art:

Thus the triple task of art in general is: 1. The direct objectification of those profound inner attributes and qualities of the living idea which camot be expressed by nature; 2. the spiritualization of natural beauty and, through this, 3. the immortalization of its individual phenomena. This is the
transformation of physical life into spiritual Me.

. .74

Roerich understands that ancient art expresses man's relation to the Absolute; stone artifacts become windows to ancient man's spirituality. Roerich's stone is the most material manifestation of the spirit. This image is but one example of the neo-Platonic idea, common among symbolist poets and artists, first because of Solovfevfsdialectic, and later articulated

7 2 ~ Solov'ev, "Krasota v prirode," Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii l(1889); "Obshch ii srnysl . is kusstva," Voprosy f l o s f i i i psikhologii 5(1890). Both essays are reprinted in Vladimi r Sergeevich Solov'ev, Sochinmiia, 2nd ed., Vol. 2 (Moscow: Mysl', 1990) 2: 35144. For a more complete discussion of these ideas see James West. Russian Symbolism. A Study of Vyacheslao luanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1970) 35-42. 73~olov'ev, "Krasota" 351, 358. 74~olov'ev,"Obshchii" 398.

more completely by Ivanov, that reality is arranged along a vertical axis, from
the material at one end to the spiritual at the other?

Other manifestations of

polar opposites include male and female, order and chaos, Apollo and Dionysus, light and darkness. Both poles are essential: there is a

simultaneous attraction between them and an apparent irreconcilability or antinomy. Russian Theosophy, a religious philosophy of Divine Unity based

partly on neo-Platonism, also recognized man's need for polarity and the
reconciliation of opposites. Divine Unity appears as duality in man's

consciousness; he needs darkness to understand the light.76 Roerich was familiar with this thought; in his 1901 essay "To Nature" (K prirode) Roerich writes that urban beauty and the beauty of nature do not cancel out one another, but "in their opposition they intensify a mutual impression giving forth a chord, a chord whose third note is the beauty of 'the m y s t e r i ~ u s . " ' ~ ~
Roerich was acquainted with Ivanov at a time when both were studying

f Russian Theosophy.78 Roerich's cycle of poems The Flowers o Moriin, begun during that time, traces the journey of a seeker of spiritual enlightenment

using images that pardel Ivanov's philosophy of art.


Armed with the evidence of ancient legends and earliest man's sacred ornaments on stone, Roerich invests stones with the power to heal modem

7 5 ~ i a c h elav Ivanov developed this theory most fully throughout his writings. For a s summary and discussion of Ivanov's philosophy of art, see West, Russirm S y m b o h 48-10676~arlson 6-1 77. 11 "~erikh, "K prirode," Glaz dobryi 73-74. 7 8 ~ Ivanov met Anna Mintslova, an active promoter of Russian Theosophy, in 1906. Mintslova . was very influential in Ivanov's life from 2907-1910. See M. Carlson 89-90. Korotkina writes that Rerikh was a close friend of Andrei Bely; they often met at Ivanov's Wednesday evenings at his home, the "tower." L.V. Korot kina, Rerikh o Petnburge- Petrogrnde 150.

man's spiritual crisis. incantation:

He begins The Flowers of M n i with a ritual o'a

III.

Know the stone. Preserve the stone. Treasure the fire. Set yowelves aflame With brave red fire With calm blue fire With wise green fire. Know the stone alone- Preserve the stone. - . -79

In this

cycle of poems, stones are "sacred signs" (sniashchmnye znaki) that

remember the past and point the way to oneness with the Spirit.80 The stone

n boulder i the center of the first act backdrop for The Rite of Spring is nothing
less than the presence of ancient sacred mystery in that world; it represents the interco~ectednessof earthly elements to the spiritual world and the

unified harmonic context for the ritual that the ballet portrays.
Roerich was not the only artist who looked for answers in the archaic and primitive, as I will point out in Chapter ID. He considered ancient peoples to be surrounded by beauty and living life in harmony with the earth and spirits, not as barbaric invaders who brought destruction and chaos to the land. He viewed traditional Russian culture as a synthesis of cultures connected to the ancient and universal ideal of beauty, not as something narrowly and superficially unique to Russia. He saw the Slavic past as closely connected to man's ideal primordial state, one that others commonly exemplified i Hellenic culture. Russia had not lost her link to this past- He n viewed the past as a manifestation of the harmony between the material and spiritual world, a harmony that could be redaimed by modern man as he
79~erikh,"Zakliatie," Tsvety 18. ("Zakliatie" is dated 1911) "III. Kamen' mai. Karnen' khrani./ Ogn' sokroi. Ognem zazhgisia./ Krasnym srnelyrn./ Sinim spokoinym./ Zelenyrn mudrym./ Znai odin. Kamen' khrani. . . ." $O~erikh,"Sviashchennye znaki," Tmety 19-20.

participated in discovering, understanding and preserving ancient beauty. This is what Roerich offered to Stravinsky as they worked together on Velikaia zhertua in 1910 and 1911. This broad view of Roerich has been obscured by the rather picturesque circumstances that surrounded his meeting with Stravinsky in 1911. They

worked together in a "little fairy tale house," a feremok built by Sergei


Maliutin at Tenisheva's estate, Talashkin0.8~ Every surface was decorated with the best examples of folk art, the very kind of Russian revivalist architecture that had been exported to Paris exhibitions as early as 1878, and again in 1900 as Russian pavilions.82 In the Parisian context these buildings were "exotica;" in the Russian context they represented part of the much broader spectrum of retrospectivism. Both Stravinsky and Roerich remarked on this setting in their later reminiscences of this meeting, and these remarks have become an easy answer to the question of the ballet's concept:

And how fitting, after all, that final plans for h s culminating landmark of neonationalism should have been concluded in Talashkino, the very cradle of the movement. "We sat in the colorful fairy-house," Roerich recalled, "working on the scheme of 'Sacre du Printernp~.'~3
This is the context that western scholars have traditionally accepted for the creation of The Rite of Spring, however they see it primarily from the Parisian point of view. They use this setting to underscore Roerich's more
8 1 ~ n description of the termok, Sergei Makovsky seems rather carried away by the fairyhis tale details of the design. "In them one can sense a kind of 'Berendey-like' beauty, something extremely Eastern and Slavic, complicated, barbaric and cozy." S. Makovsky, Talashkino. kdeliia masterskikh kn. M . KI. Tmeshmoi (Petersburg: Sod ruzhestvo, 1905) 45.
82~amilton 394-5, 408.

8%aruskin, Shminsky 871. Elsewhere Taruskin has defied neonationalism as the artistic use of folk materials as a source of a new styIe. Stravinsky 560. Many of the objects created at Talashkino, incIuding interior design, were clearIy a combination of folk design and art
nouveau.

visible ethnographic and historical contributions to the ballet's concept and design. After all, Roerich had designed the costumes from garments in The rest of Roerich's

Tenisheva's extensive collection of folk clothing.

contribution to this ballet is generally acknowledged by vague remarks about his obsession with the past.

This meeting between Stravinsky and Roerich is well known by those


who study the beginnings of the ballet!* Stravinsky, still excited by his

"dream" vision a year earlier, planned to meet with Roerich to work on the Libretto for their new ballet Velikaia zhertoa. They had begun work on the
ballet in 1910, meeting several times in S t Petersburg. They corresponded

several times that year. In one letter Stravinsky asks Roerich to send him copies of the notes they had made, since he had lost his; in others he refers to their "future It wasn't easy to get to Roerich during that summer of 1911, however. He was working at Talashkino, located some miles from Smolensk, and he
was reluctant to leave. Stravinsky underwent considerable discomfort to get

there; years later he remembers:

I journeyed from Ustilug to Brest-Litovsk, where, however, I discovered that I would have to wait two days for the next t a n ri to Smolensk. I therefore bribed the conductor of a freight train to let me ride in a cattle car, though I was a l l alone in it with a bull! The buli was leashed by a single not-very-reassuring rope, and as he glowered and slavered I began to barricade myself behind my one small suitcase. I must have looked an odd sight in Smolensk as I stepped from that corrida carrying my
84See V. Stravinsky and R. Craft, Straninsky in Pictures and Documents 75-100; Taruskin, Stravinsky 860-881; I . Vershinina, ed., "Pis'ma I. Stravinskogo N. Rerikhu," Sooetskaia rnutyka 8 (1966):57-63. 85See Stravinsky's letters to Rerikh on 7/12/1910,7/27/1910, and 7/15/1911 in Vershinina 5860,62.

expensive (or, at least, not tramp-like) bag and brushing my clothes and hat, but I must also have looked Stravinsky is more explicit in his remembered discomfort than he is regarding the setting at Talashkino: The Princess Tenichev gave me a guest house attended by servants in handsome white uniforms with red belts and black boots. I set to work with Roerich, and in a few days t e plan of h action and the titles of the dances were composed.87 Why was Stravinsky willing to go to such trouble to meet with Roerich? His later memory may have magnified the difficulties he encountered, but his letter dated July 15, 1911 a s expresses a mixture of lo

urgency and reluctance:


Dear Nikolai Konstantinovich, It is difficult to give you a definite answer why we must meet. I feel that if is necessary to come to a final agreement about our child. I expect to start composing in the fall, and health iih permitting, to f n s in the spring. There are questions about the staging. Another reason why we must meet now is that I will not spend the winter in St. Petersburg-all of us will go to Switzerland and from there most likely to Paris. Please write immediately on your arrival in Talashkino, telling me the best way to get there horn Smolensk. Perhaps if it is not too far, could some horses be sent to fetch me? Keep in mind that my train from Warsaw arrives very early, I think at 5 o'clock in the morning. Please write. I send sincere regards to you and to your wife. Yours, Igor Stravinsky Is it possible that you wiU be in Smolensk yourself, and that the Talashkino trip will be unnecessary?8*

8 6 ~Stravinsky and R. Craft, Expositions and Dmelopmmts (1962; Berkeley: U California P, . 1981) 140-141. In a note in Strauinsky in Pictures and Documents, Craft writes, "In 1929 Stravinsky told his biographer Andre Shaffner that the incident with the bull occurred on the return trip to Volhynia." 613. 87~travinskyand Craft, Expositions, 141. 88~enhinina See also V. Stravinsky and Craft, Shminsky i Pictures and Ducurnmts 82. 60. n

Why did Stravinsky seek out Roerich's help in realizing his dream of pagan
sacrifice? As he explained in 1912, "Who could help me if not Roerich; who if not he is privy to the whole secret of our forefathers' closeness to the eartht"89 Later in his conversations with Craft, Stravinsky recalls, "I had

admired his sets for Prince lgor and imagined he might do something similar for the Sacre. Above all, I knew he would not overload."90 This was not a l l he knew of Roerich: I met [Roerich], a blond-bearded, Kalmudc-eyed, pug-nosed man in 1904. Hs wife was a relative of Mtusov's, my friend and coi librettist of the Nightingale, and I often saw the [Roerichs] at MitLLMvfs Saint Petersburg house. . . . I became quite fond of him in those early years, though not of his painting. . .91 Stravinskyfs collaboration with Roerich was not by chance; it was initiated by Stravinsky himself, not by others' recommendations. He knew enough of Roerich's work and ideas, as I will argue in Chapter IV, to choose Roerich and to undergo some discomfort to meet with him. There is more to this meeting at TalasNcino than "fairy tale houses" and several days' work, however.
Why couldn't Roerich meet Stravinsky in Srnolensk? Roerich was

unwilling to leave Talashkino because, as Taruskin writes, "[he] was

designing and supelvising the execution of a series of murals and mosaics in


'neo-Russianf style for the interior and exterior of [Te~sheva's]private church."92 Roerich was one of many artists who worked in the kustar' workshops at Talashkino; Repin directed Tenishevafsschool in St. Petersburg

8 9 ~ e t t e rto Nikolai Findeizen dated 2/15 December 1912, in L.S. D'iachkova, ed. 1. F. Strauinskii: stat'i i mterialy (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1973) 470. 901. Stravinsky and R. Craft, Conversations with fgor Stravinsky (New York: Doubleday, 1959)
105.

15travinsky and Craft, Conoersations 106. 92~aruskin,Straninsky 871.

92

from 1895-1898 and worked closely with her at Talashkino during those years;

Bilibin, MaLiutin, Vrubel', Nesterov, Levitan, Serov, Benois, Korovin and


Polenova also worked there at various times, either creating their own works or designing works to be made in the workshops.93 The products of the

Talashkino workshops ranged from furniture and objects that were


considered by at least one contemporary critic to be uncomfortable, dumsy and interesting only as "curiosities,"94 to those that represented the synthesis of folk art design with something new, the rnoderne. This critic and others, however, did single out Roerich's and Vrubelrs work as well as Tenisheva's

enamels from general criticism. Roerich himself did not have a very high
opinion of many products of the kttstarf movement; he felt they failed to communicate the refined beauty of ancient applied arts, and they were but dumsy allusions that give the public the impression that the legacy itself was crude and unworthy of the modem "enlightenedtr eye.95 From his first meeting with Tenisheva in 1903, Roerich spent periods
of time living and working at Talashkino. Fearing the worst from social

w e s t in 1905, Tenisheva had taken her priceless collections to Paris for safe keeping and for exhibit. Roerich accompanied her apprehensive return to Talashkino nearly three years later, joining her in Moscow. It was on this

9 3 ~ e r i k h "Princess Tenisheff," Realm of Light 314. John Bowlt, The Siloer Age 39-46. , 9 4 ~Dib, rev. of Talashkino, by Sergei Makovsky, Zhuravleva 384-86. The review originally . appeared in Zolotoe runo 5 (1906). Diks seems especially annoyed that these objects are being thrust on the public. "Crude, useless things are for some reason considered our Russian 'applied art.' If you attempt to express surprise that these things are essential for everyday life they will undoubtedly tell you that, after all, this is the revival of 'the old' Russian style, of 'the true' form of folk art. And they will tell you in such a tone, exactly as if it must be so, that in resurrecting lo1k Art from the dark past, we must preserve it exactly as it was 150-200 years ago." Reviews of the same objects in the French press are much more enthusiastic. See Zhurav leva 386-391. 9 5 ~ . Rerikh. "Zakliatoe zver'e" in Zhuravleva 398. ~ .

93

journey that Tenisheva asked Roerich to work on her private church at Flenovo, near Talashkino, begun in 1900 in the name of the Transfiguration

of the Savior. I 1900 the newspaper Smolenskii oestnik noted that the n
church would be built in an ancient Russian style and decorated with mosaics
and ceramics. On a journey around the historic towns of ancient Russia, Tenisheva had been especially inspired by the style and richly carved ornament of the seventeenth-century tent-shaped churches in Yaroslavl. She commissioned models of these churches for exhibit at the 1900 World Exhibition in Parismg6 Several artists had contributed designs for the exterior of the church at Flenovo including Prakhov and Vrubelr, but Maliutin's designs were ultimately selected. In later descriptions of the project, the "neo-

Russian" style of the design is emphasized. Indeed, the exterior facades of the
church are decorated with mosaics and ornament in imitation of the ancient

Russian churches Tenisheva loved; Roerich himself designed one of the


mosaics, the image of the Savior Not Made By Hands (Spas nerukotoornyi), closely following twelfth- to thirteenth-century tradition.97 However, there

is no reason to assume that Roerich's designs for the interior were "neoRussian," in the common western definition that associates his artistic output
with the style of carved wooden objects, embroidered dothing, painted

96~huravleva 319-322. 9 7 ~ Zelinskii, "2abytyi parniatnik russkogo iskusstva," fskusstoo 3 (1962) : 61-62. Spas . nerukotoornyi refers to a legendary portrait of Christ miraculously imprinted on a veil during His lifetime. "The pictorial composition of the mosaic is fairly simple. The central part is occupied by a representation of the head of Christ against a background of a towel decorated with the folk patterns of Smolensk. Christ's eyes look straight forward, and his expression is severe. To the right and left of the center image in the lower part of the mosaic are three trumpeting archangels. Groups of angels ascend and gradually diminish in size until they conclude their upward flight in a small schematic representation of the church. The color scheme is in tones of gold, brown, and red."

spoons and balalaikas. In her memoirs Tenisheva recalls her reasons for enlisting Roerich:

I merely dropped one word and he responded. The wordtemple. . . . Only with him, if God deigns it so, will I complete itHe is a man living in the spirit, chosen by the Lord's flame, through him God's truth will be told. The temple will be completed in the name of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the energy of divine spiritual ecstasy, connected to all-encompassing l f by a mysterious power. . . What an undertaking for an artist! ie What a huge ground for expression! So much creative work can be part of the temple! We understood each other. Nikolai Konstantinovich fell in love with my idea, he understood the Holy Spirit. Amen-98
She has in mind something more sigruficant than a nostalgic replica of ancient Russian Christianity; she knows Roerich's mind, and she has chosen wisely. Roerich's designs for the church clearly reflect the ideas he has written about and expressed in his paintings since early in the century. In 1905 he
wrote a n introduction to Makovsky's book ~alashkinogg in which he

comects the activities at Talashkino to his vision of t e place of art in h contemporary life, years later. a view that will be repeated in "Joy in Art'' nearly four

Life at Talashkino was founded on the belief that beauty

transforms life; it attempted toreplicate the unity of ancient man's life and his synthesis of the best from all cultures. Artists lived there with the "freedom

9 8 ~ e n iheva, Vuechntlmiin 250. s - . 99~his introduction appeared in Realm o Lightf an English translation of Rerikh's writings in f 1931, where the essay is dated 1908. The text originally appeared in S. Makovsky, Talashkino. Izdeliia m t m k i k h Kn. M. KI. Tenishaoi (St. Petersburg: Sodruzhes tva, 1905). Citations are from the 1931 translation, "Talashkino," unless otherwise indicated. The original text bears the title "Vospominaniia o Talashkine;" it is reprinted in Zhuravleva 363370.

of art," combining the best of the past with the "latest utterances of the Ocadent."
On the sacred hearth, away from the contamination of the city, the people create again newly conceived objects, without servility, without the trade marks of factories--creating lovingly and freely. We are reminded of the covenants of our forefathers and of the beauty and solidity of anaent works.100 As ancient man used "loving concern to make from all of his surroundings

something that is carefully considered, lavishly decorated and soothing to the accustomed hand,"lOl Talashkino was likewise a place of "conscious creation;" each artist felt the "special pulse" that "develops in the students and young masters a specially penetrating mien:"102 Here lie no secrets of austere augurs. All phases of art are d e a to the workers in the art shops. The domestic hearth fully attentive to the best contemporary publications, to the works of new artists, to the excited discussions of exhibitions-is close to all of us. Every student creates his Holy of Holies in the execution of the selected craft; albums, designs, copies and compositions.lo3 To Roerich, all aspects of life at Talashkino were in harmony, "Even Mikllla digs the beauty of life out of the soil. The beauty is impressed on the life of the village, and is transmitted unto many generations."14 Roerich describes the products of Talashkino in the same way that he has described artifacts from ancient civilizations; to his delight, this civilization is alive, working, and celebrating its life with rituals: A procession of keen memories: loO~erikh, "Talash kino," Realm 299. lO1Rerikh, "Radost"' 105. lo2aerikh,"Talashkino," Realm 299. 103~erikh, "Talashkino," Realm 301. 104~erikh,"Talashkino." Realm 300.

Gates and posts designed with figures, animals and flowers; Fairy-like chambers. . . . Embroideries. . . . A profusion of patterns; sharp festoons, padded nnsbbka, transparent weaves, "Moscow weaves," back-stitch crosses, woolens, open sack-cloths, checked linens, hooked cloth. . . pIain textiles, velvety and soft to the sight. Dye-shops with the mystery of colors; tufts of grass and roots; the ancient witch of Mordva in antiquated garb of cotton thistlethe witch of the combination of fast colors. Choruses. Music. Village life-a theater. A theater really ingenious. [. . . ] Staging. Dances. And it is difficult to believe that they are students! How they hurry, after working at the carpenter's bench, the scythe, and the rake, to get into ancient garments; how they rehearse their parts; how they move in their dances and play in the orchestra!l05 For Roerich, the Temple of the Holy Spirit is a temple to the way of life at Talashkino, the realization of his ideal: Thus I witnessed the beginning of a temple to this life. They are building a church at Talashkino, though it is far from completion. They are adding to it all that is the best. From the top-most cross to the smallest illuminations of the speciallywritten prayer books-everything is being planned with the utmost care, unlike many of our new collaborations. In this construction it is possible to realize all the miracle-working traditions of ancient Russia with its refined feeling for ornamentation. And the unusual, unrestrained sweep of h external reliefs on t e walls of the Cathedral of Yuriev-Polsky, the phantasmagoria of Rostov and Yaroslavl churches, and the impressiveness of the Prophets of the Novgorod Sophia-all our treasure from the divine being must not be forgotten. Even the distant paths. Even the temples of Aianta and Lhasa. Let the years go by in quiet work. May the covenants of beauty be M y realized in this venture. Where else could we wish more the apotheosis of beauty than in a temple, that highest creation of our spirit?1*6

105~erikh,"Talashkino," Realm 302-303. Nastebkn is a quilted fabric. Io6~erikh,"Vospominaniia o falashkine'' 368. 1 have translated from Rerikh's Russian text; the translation in Realm is somewhat condensed, masking Rerikh's emphasis on carefully selected detail and the distant paths of The Spirit.

Just as ancient man fused together the art and wisdom of the peoples with whom he came in contact, Roerich synthesizes the traditions of ancient Russia with other traditions, both eastern and western in his designs for this

church, especially the fresco The Queen of Heoven (Tsarifsa nebesnaia) that
covered the entire wall behind the altar.

Seen in this larger context of Roerich's work, the "fairy-tale house" at


Talashkino cannot serve as XIemblem for his meeting with Stravinsky, for it represents only one facet of life there. Roerich's often quoted memories of his meeting with Stravinsky begin with this one facet:

In my Diary, I have found a page dedicated to the production of "Le Sacre d u Printemps:" "Eighteen years have elapsed since with Stravinsky, we sat in the colorful fairy-house, Talashkino in Smolensk, the estate of Princess Tenisheff, working on the scheme of 'Sacre du Printemps.' And Princess Tenisheff asked us to write on the beams of this multi-colored house some excerpts from 'Sacre' as a memento. Probably even now some fragments of Stravinsky's inscriptions remain there still. But who knows if the present inhabitants of this house realize what is written there upon the beams?"l07
This image is exotic and appealing; it is one that Europeans had come to equate with the essence of Russia and were contented to accept as the foundation for Stravinsky's and Roerich's work. However, Roerich's

reminiscence does not end with the words cited above, but continues:
It was a pleasant time when the Temple of the Holy spirit, my paintings Human Forefathers and Drevo preblagoe aragarn ozloblenie [sic] and sketches for The Queen of Heaven were completed. The hills of Smolensk and the white birches, yellow water-lilies, and white lotuses like ancient lotuses of India
1O7~erikh,"Sacre," Realm 186. "Sacre" was an address at the Wanamaker Auditorium under the auspices of the League of Composers in 1930. By September 1912 the ballet's name had been changed from Velikaiz zhertva to The Festiad o Spring (Prazdnik oesni ) which became the French Le Sacre du Printmps. The Russian title f was soon changed to Vesna miashclrmnnia, (Sacred Spring). Taruskin, Stravinsky 871-872.

reminded us of the eternal Shepherd Lel and Kupaoa, or as a Hindu would say, Krishna and the Gopis. One must point out that the sons of the East would definitely see the exalted Krishna and the Gopis in the figures of Lel and Kupaoa. In these eternal concepts the wisdom of the East has been interwoven with the best images of the West.108
Roerich makes the context of his work on Velikaia zherfva explicit, but most

scholarship has stopped at the familiar "fairy-tale" house. Taruskin, in his most thorough treatment of this collaboration, attempts to show more of Roerich's work at Talashkino by including a full-page photo of the artist at work in this chapel. However, he fails to see the connections between the symbolism of the fresco and Roerich's writings, leaving the impression that

the fresco is a new interpretation of traditional Orthodox decoration and


religious folk art and nothing more.109 He does not even identify this image, The Queen of Heaven on the Shore of the River of Life (Tsaritsa nebesnaia

na b e r e p reki Zhizni), an image found repeatedly in Roerich's life work and

lo8~erikh,"Vesna sviashchennaia," i literahtrnogo nizslediia 359-60. I h w e quoted from the z Russian text of this lecture at this point because the 1931 translation partly eliminates Rerikh's emphasis on the universality of his images. The Russian text is one long paragraph; this portion begins midway through the paragraph and not as a new paragraph as it appears in the English translation. In Slavic folklore the shepherd Lel is a character in the pagan pantheistic fairy tale Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden), transformed into a play by N. Ostrovsky and into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. Rerikh designed costumes and sets for both the play and the opera between 1908 - 1912. Kupnua or Kupala is associated with the summer sotstice. I did not translate the title, Drwo preblagoe oragam ozloblenie, because it appears that Rerikh has conflated the titles of two of his paintings, D r m preblagoe glazam uteshenie (The Tree Bearing the Gift of Solace to the Eyes), and Prechistyi grad oragam ozloblenie (The most pure city. Infuriation to the enemy). See V. Sokolovskii, "Khudozhestvennoe naslediie N. K. Rerikha (perechen' proizvedenii s 1885 po 1947 god)," N. K Rerikh. Zhizn' i tuorchesfoo. Sbornik statei ,ed. M. Kuz'mina (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1978) 271. 109~aruskin,Straninsky 871-873. The same photograph in larger format and printed with better contrast can be found in Decter 66. These photos are all that remain of Tsaritsa nebemaia. Due to a combination of unfortunate circumstances the interior plaster crumbled and fell taking the fresco with it. Korotkina 185.

an image that captured the imagination of Russian philosophers and poets at


the turn of the century. Tsaritsa nebesnaia is a symbolic composition that shows a female image, evocative of the Holy Mother (Bogoroditsa), seated on a throne beside

the River of Life in which human travelers are struggling to find their way
and not perish. Above her rise heavenly cities guarded by angels; there is a procession of saints above the apse: [The] Queen of Heaven is all powerful and omnipresent. The base of her throne rests on the firm ground. Past her, along the stormy river sail the wretched masses. The Queen of Heaven lifts up prayers for the human race following a difficult path, not knowing where good is located or where eva. Her prayers touch both the stormy waves of the world and the fantastic cities of the heavens.110 She is surrounded by h e a v d y beings: archangels, cherubim, seraphim and swarms of angels who are amazed by her good works. She sends prayers to
the Holy Spirit; all of creation rejoices in her presence.N1

The earliest sketches of Tsaritsa nebesnaia date from 1906 and coincide
with Roerich's renewed interest in ancient Indian history and culture."2

Seeds planted much earlier by Stasov began to grow and flower in Roerich's
by work. He was also greatly ~nfluenced his wife Elena's interest in Eastern religions and philosophy.ll3 The Buddhist elements of Tsaritsa nebesnaia were apparent to contemporary commentators on Roerich's work. V o l o s h wrote:

llOl(niazeva, N. R & (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968) 37. lll~erikh, "Tsaritsa Nebesnaia," GIaz Dobryi 205. 1 1 2color reproduction of a 1910 sketch can be found in E. Poliakova, Nikolai Rerikh (Moscow: ~ Is kusstvo, 1973) illustration 13. Il3~ecter 65.

What strangely startles one, and perhaps what attracts one to this composition is the fact that, although all of the elements are apparently Byzantine, it bears a purely Buddhist, Tibetan character. Whether it is the white dothing of the Mother of God among the purple throngs, or the crush of heavenly powers above the colorless expanse of earth that gives this impression, one can sense in this icon something extremely ancient and eastern.114

Not all responses were favorable; the image must have been shocking to
Orthodox believers. The artist and collector Sergei Shcherbatov recalls:
A certain stiltedness and unconvincing contrivance made many of his [Roerich's] works unpleasant. His large church fresco at Talashkino, commissioned by Princess Tenisheva, . . . horrified me, and that greatly offended the Princess. In a Russian church in the Smolensk region there sits enthroned a Tibetan-type Mother of God whose composition borrows from Tibetan and Siamese religious frescos."5

At first glance it appears that Roerich is presenting his own version of the Bogorodifsa for the apse decorations. His interpretation is dearly not canonical, however, beginning with her enormous size; her image extends from her earthly throne into the lofty heavens.

Rather than the typical

position of the Holy Mother's hands either in an open position with palms raised, ready to bestow a blessing, or holding the Holy Infant, Roerich's Queen

of Heaven holds her hands palms together in the Buddhist "namaste"


position. According to one account, the first version of her face was

masculine, "the mask of Buddha," but subsequent versions were more traditional to iconography.116 Roerich's contemporaries commented that the

Voloshin, "Khudozhestvennye itogi rimy 1910-1911 g. Moskva," (1911 :30, quoted in Zhuravleva 272. ) l15s.Shcherbatov, "Russkie khudozhniki," Vozrozhdenie 18 (1951):117. 116Zhurav1eva322.

Russkaia rnysl' 6

face in the final version strongly suggests Indian beauty.l17 At the same time, Tsaritsa nebesnaia wears the crown of the Mother of God, typical of the Roman Catholic tradition. She also wears the red veil decorated with stars that is symbolic of her intercession. As I will demonstrate below, the stars

also connect her image with the Tree of Life which was commonly depicted
in Russian folk design with the polar star at its top."B
The medallion in the center of the Queen's body does not contain t e h

expected image of Christ instead it contains the lotus, a symbol frequently found in ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern and Indian ornament In India the lotus was associated with the womb and symbolized the goddess-mother's sacred creative powers. In abstraction, the lotus also symbolized a universal power that directed the world and developed life in the world. In Buddhism, the lotus was also connected with the beginning of a new cosmic era; it shows the place for the sacred tree of Buddha.119 These symbolic meanings are conflated with the promise symbolized by the image of Christ in such medallions in Orthodox iconography.
As Roerich writes in his memoir

"Vesna Sviashchenaia" quoted above, the lotus is also associated with life at

Talashkino, the place that holds the promise for the future of mankind.
Another conspicuous symbol in Tsaritsa nebesnaia, the Tree of Life, is

also part of Roerich's later memory of that summer; he remembers working

on h s painting The Tree Bearing the Giff of Solace to the Eyes ( D r e a o i


preblagoe glazarn uteshenie). Roerich used this symbol often in his own

7~ostislavov,N.K. Rerikh 77. lI81. M. Denisova, Voprosy izucheniia kd'ta miashchenno~odereua u russkikh (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 1995) 190. l19s.A. Tokarev, "Lotos," Mify narodm mim. 2nd ed.. 2 vols. (Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 2987) 2: 71-72.

works; his 1905 painting The Treasure of Angels (Sokrovishche angeloo) shows angels standing near the Tree of Life, guarding a radiant stone. The

Tree of Life appears in Roerich's sketches for his memorial to his teacher

Kuindzhi; it also occupies the central part of a cyde of canvas panels he


painted for a private re~idence.12~ The Tree of Life is found in many ancient cultures, and it is common to Slavic folk design, especially embroidery. The vertical axis connects the spiritual and material worlds, while the whole

image symbolizes man's connection to the gods and mystical forces in nature.
It embodies the concept of the eternity and u i y of all things as well as the nt creation of life itself. I Theosophy the image is connected to the goddess n

from whom all things proceeded, variously called the Immaculate Virgin or
even primordial Chaos.121 Konstantin Bal'mont's poem "The Slavonic Tree" appeared in his 1907 collection of poems Zhar-ptitsa (Firebird). His poetic image of the Tree of Life appears to be the symbolic equivalent of Roerich's Queen of Heaven: With its roots it lodges itself deeply, With its top it ascends aloft, It extends its green branches to the unlimited azure distance. With its roots it lodges itself deeply in the earth, With its crown it ascends to the lofty crags, It extends its green branches wide to the infinite blue distance. With its roots it lodges deep in the earth, and in the eternal subterranean fire, With its crown it ascends so high, so high, disappearing radiantly in the sky, It extends its blooming emerald branches into the unrestricted turquoise expanse. And it knows gaiety,

12O~orotkina287-189.
l 2 I ~ P- Blavats ky, Theosophical Glossary (1892; New Del hi: Asian Publication Services, .

1986) 77,337.

103
And it knows sadness. . . .I22

The poem's ritualistic repetition of lines, each time embellished with more detail, evokes an image of descent and ascent that penehates farther with each return. Roerich's Tsaritsa nebesnaia, sitting on her earthly throne and with her starry veiled head extended to the heavens, also links the material world to the divine. The visual effect o Roerich's design i a parallel to the poet's f s
ritual celebration in words; the artist embellishes and restates the concept of

the World Soul in his collocation of synonymous images and in the repetition of the Slavic Tree of Life across the fabric of the Queen's silverywhite dress, all of which testifies to her power as creator and protector of all Living things. Tsaritsa nebesnaia is a complex symbolic composition that reflects

n Roerich's convictions about the role of art i the whole life of modem man,
the spiritual as well as the material. This combination of ancient sacred symbols follows his own statement in 1905, that ". . . a l l our treasure from the divine being must not be forgotten. Even the distant paths."123 Likewise, since it is a synthesis of images from Russian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, and Slavic paganism, it is a visual representation of "the new that radiant path of 'neonationali~rn~'"~24 Roerich expressed in "Joy in Art."
The divine unity inherent in the image of t e Queen of Heaven illustrates h

Roerich's lines from The Flowers of Moriia, "Above every beautiful thing there is one/ Beauty that leads to/ Knowledge of the cosmos.'r125 Tsaritsa

nebesnnia links the material world of earthly creatures to the divine, spiritual
122~onstantin Bal'mont. "Slavians koe drevo," Zhar-ptitsa (Moscow: Skorpion. 1907) 152.
123~erikh, "Vospominaniia o Talash kine" 368. 124~erikh, "Radost"' 89. 125~erikh, Tsvety 13.

world. The Queen of Heaven is more than the Mother of God; she is Christ and the Buddha; she is the Mother of the World and the World Soul. The image of the Queen of Heaven is not unique to Nikolai Roerich; it is but one manifestation of the concept of the Divine Feminine espoused by Solovfev in the last decades of the nineteenth century and reappearing in art, poetry, and essays in the first decade of the twentieth Samuel Cioran refers to this philosophical and religious tradition in modem Russian thought as Sophiology, and summarizes it in this way:
As the word implies, wisdom lies at the root of the scheme. This wisdom is in the possession of God who in creating the universe

did so with a dear purpose in mind. The universe, the world, history and mankind are not random creations but all possess meaning and are progressing towards specific ends. This purposeful journey appears to b e directed towards an achievement of, or restoration off oneness between heaven and earth, God and man Mankind is capable of gaining this end if it can discern the purpose or wisdom of God's creation. Indeed, God Himself has sought to inspire man with the wisdom of His divine plan by providing him with archetypes or prototypes representative of the union of heaven and earth, such as the perfect Godman, Christ, and the perfect Church in which mankind as a whole is united with God. God's purposeful scheme for the universe, the wisdom He displays in its formulation, was associated. . . with Sophia, or the Divine Wisdom of God.126

This single feminine archetype appears as Solov'evfs Divine Sophia

and the Divine Feminine. She is the feminine principle of nature, the EarthMistress, the World Soul. She is both the spirit of material manifestation, connected to earthly nature and darkness, while at the same time she is attracted to the divine principle of God's Wisdom and Light. Roerich's

2 6 ~ a m u e lCioran, Vladimir Soloo'ev nnd the Knighthood of the Dioine Sophia (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier LIP, 1977) 1.

Tsaritsa nebesnaia echoes the image of the Earth-Mistress in Solov'ev's 1886


poem: Earth-Mistress! To you I have bowed my head, And through your Fragrant veil I sensed the fire of a kindred heart, I heard the trembling of the life of the world. In the mid-day rays with such a burning delight Descended the blessing of the radiant heavens, And freely flowing river and rustling forest Bore a melodious greeting to the silent gleam, In the manifest sacrament again I see the union Of the world soul with an otherworldly light, And from the fire of love life's suffering Is borne away like fleeting haze.127 Blok's realization of the Divine Feminine as the Beautiful Lady (Prekrasnaia dama) in his early poetry gained him recognition as Solov'ev's "legitimate successor."~28 By 1905 she had become the White Maiden (Belaia deoa); in the poem "Delirium" (Bred), the poet, through the ravings of his "impoverished sod" and clinging to the "hoary past," searches for the White Maiden, the "Ancient Maiden." His soaety is dead to the old Life; he longs for the White Maiden to bring him relief, but she remains asleep in a doud of
mist.129

Finally the Divine Feminine is realized in her most material form as

the Stranger (Neznakomka), the incarnation of mystery and beauty as an

ordinary urban female. After 1905, Blok abandons the image of the Divine Feminine, replacing it with the unpredictable, irrational power of nature, as expressed in "Stikhiia i kul'tura," where even "the churches, incarnations of
the Holy Mother, will pass from the hills.

. .''I30

127~. Solov'ev, "Zemlia-vladychitsa! K tebe chelo sklonil ia. . ." quoted in Cioran 58-59. 128see Cioran 139-261. 129~10k, "Bred," Sobranie sochinenii 1: 377-378. 130~lok, "Stikhiia" 121.

Many of Bely's works, including his 1905 essay "The Apocalypse in Russian Poetry" (Apokalipsis n Russkoi poezii), also contain the image of the Divine Feminine.'31

In this essay Bely responds to the war with Japan and

the following civil unrest in 1905, not in geopolitical terms, but as a battle of

world terrors (chaos) against the unity of the World Soul (cosmos). He wants

the World Soul, the image of the Woman Clothed in the Sun, to come to
earth to exercise her theurgic powers to recreate unity. Bely recalls Solov'ev's insistence that one can struggle successfully against the mask of madness that is encroaching upon the world only by delving more deeply into the eternal

feminine wellspring of the spirit and by setting her image before all people.
Bely writes that the goal of poetry, w i h he closely allies with religion, is to hc find that muse's image and express the eternal truth of the whole world in that image. Thus artists take on the role of priests in facilitating the

recreation of the world; when unity is restored to man's consciousness the world will be transformed. In this way poetry is theurgic. Bely also invests

the World Soul with tones of Russian messianic nationalism; the Woman Clothed in the Sun is a particularly Russian muse: If humanity is the most genuine unity, then nationality [narodnost'] is the first sub category of humanity. Here before us is the way to unity through free and spontaneous development of the people's strength. The image of the muse must crown the development of national ~ 0 e t r y . l ~ ~ Bakst expresses in a Hellenic context what Roerich depicts in his synthesis of Christian, Buddhist and pagan images in Tsaritsa nebesnaia.

131T'his article first appeared in Vesy 4 (1905):11-28. Citations are from A. Bely, "Apokalipsis v russkoi poezii," Simuolizm kak miroponimnie (Moscow: Respublika, 1994) 408-417. 132~lok, "Apokalipsis" 41 1.

107

Bakst's 1908 panneau Terror

Antiqtdtisl33

represents the constant presence

and power of the Eternal Feminine, even in the face of the cataclysmic end of
civilization. He gives the viewer a sense of the cosmic nature of the events depicted by his use of an almost aerial perspective. The panel shows the

n imminent destruction by flood of a ancient Greek city; images of chaos-the


storm and raging sea-threaten the buildings, temples, serene statues, and

ant-sized inhabitants of this ancient civilization. The original Chaos from

which the world was created according to Greek myth was a prominent image
at the turn of the twentieth century, when many felt that civilization was
again facing destruction. However, Chaos was not to be feared, but to be

celebrated and embraced as it brought new creation, as Bakst embraces it in this work. The smiling Cretan goddess in the foreground of Terror Antiqtilcs represents the World Soul that preceded the civilization and its worship of Apollo that is depicted below her; she holds a dove, the survivor of another ancient flood. Her serenity balances the cataclysm. Bakst brings her into the world of the viewer by placing her feet and the hill she stands on completely out of the frame of the panel. She is seen against the ancient battle of

elements: sea, stony earth, fiery lightning, and sky. She has survived the destruction of this a c e t civilization, and her position in the panel tells the nin viewer that she is constant and faithful and will survive the chaos that menaces the twentieth century. The presence of the World Soul and the cydic nature of the cosmos are affirmed. Both Blok and Ivanov found important reflections of their philosophy in this work; Ivanov made it the
133~his panel is reproduced in Kharitonova 83. The original work can be seen in the permanent collection of the Russian Museum i S t Petenburg. n

subject of a lecture and an article, "Ancient Terror" (Drmii zizhns) published

in 1909.13"
The Eternal Feminine is seen as a constant of the universe; she is a divine manifestation that artists reflected in many different images: Divine Sophia, Aphrodite, the Beautiful Woman, the Woman Clothed in the Sun, the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven. Roerich shares this belief in the World Soul; the image of the Queen of Heaven presiding in the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the very temple of the new Life in art, attests to Roerich's belief in her powers and the power of beauty to transform the world. Roerich embodied expertise in a wide range of disciplines, and he used those disciplines to one end: his entire oeuvre can be viewed as his own temple to the World Soul and his belief that beauty has healing power.

Unlike Blok, Ivanov, Bely, and Bakst, who were willing to embrace the chaos
that they believed would precede the transformation of the material world, Roerich cherished the cosmic order held in place by the Queen of Heaven and

marked through time by the rituals and ornament of ancient civilizations.


This theme is fundamental to Roerichs work; series of paintings capture the beauty and order of the ancient world while also depicting the everthreatening presence of Chaos; his essays reinforce this message through scholarly discussion and through his lyrical recreation of the idealized ancient world.

Velikaia zherfva is but one part of Roerich's temple to the healing


power of beauty. A dose look at Roerich's own description of the ballet leaves

no doubt about this. In 1910 in a published interview Roerich had stated, "I
13%.

Ivanov, "Drevnii uzhas," Zolotoe runo 4(1909). It also appeared in his collection Po

zoezdarn in the same year.

want to express a bright summer night at the summit of a sacred hill, wellknown in the history of the stone labyrinth, a series of ritual ancient Slavic dances culminating with the offering of a sacrifice."'35 wrote to Diaghilev:
In answer to your questions, I can say that I have been studying Russian (and Slavic) antiquity for twenty years now, and I find beautiful traits in it, wonderful scenes which the pubLic must be reminded of. In the whirlwind of contemporary life the public often forgets about the distant life when people knew how to rejoice, when they understood the beautiful cosmogony of Earth and Sky. Sometimes people have tried to tell me that passion for the beauties of antiquity are merely mine alone, but I have seen that the better part of the public is ready to fall in love with ancient delights since they are necessary stages of future creation. Even fifteen years ago I spoke numerous times about the authentic beauty of Russian icons, and only now have people come to understand and believe in that beauty. I celebrate this. In the ballet Same du Printemps, conceived by Stravinsky and myself, I wanted t~ present scenes of the joy of Earth and the exultation of Sky in a Slavic context. I won't list the program of dances, - the program is not important to the scenes. I will only point out that the first scene, "A kiss to the Earth" [Potselui Zemle] transports us to the foot of a sacred hill, to green glades where Slavic clans are gathering for spring games. Here is an old sorceress who tells the future, here are the games "the abduction of the women," "city against city," and "the circle dances." Finally the most important moment comes: They bring the oldest and wisest one from the village so he can give the sacred kiss to the budding earth. Talented Nijinsky has beautifully stylized the mystical terror of the crowd at the moment of that mystery [taina]. After the bright earthly joy, in the second scene we are brought to the heavenly mystery [mysteria]. Among enchanted stones on the sacred hill, girls conduct mysterious games and select the chosen victim whom they exult with songs. Now she will dance the final dance and the witnesses to that dance will be the elders who have domed bear skins as a sign that the bear is considered
135~1: "Nashi besedy. U N. K. Rerikha," Obozrenie teatrov, No 1187, 30 Sept. 1910: 15. Quoted in Zil'bershtein and Samkov 430.

Early in 1913 Roerich

the forefather of humans. The elders hand over the sacrifice to the sun god Yarilo. I love antiquity, lofty in its joys and deep in its intentions [designs].I36 The experience of ecstasy, both in the creation of art and in the appreciation of its beauty, has the power to transform consciousness and therefore transform the material world. For the ancients art was inseparable from the ritual that preserved their life. Roerich believed that art can regain that power by helping contemporary man remember and reconnect to the spiritual realm represented by the beauty of ornament. The meaning of Velikaia zhertva goes beyond its more obvious sources in folk arts, archaeology and ethnography. Reinvested with their ancient connections to the spiritual

world, these sources were the foundation for the creation of a new ritual that could restore order and harmony to contemporary man's troubled Life.

1 3 6 ~ . Rerikh to Diaghilev, undated letter from the beginning of 1913. Reprinted in ~ . Zil'bershtein and Samkov 2: 120.

Chapter lII
Ecstatic Ritual and the Mysterium:

The Intellectual Context in Which The Exalted

Sacrifice Was Born

This chapter will describe the intellectual context that gave impulse to Stravinsky's and Roerich's collaborative efforts. First, I will argue that the collaborators were unified in thcir vision; subsequent disavowals and dissociations on Stravinsky's part are not evidence that he did not share Roerich's view as they worked on this project. Next, I will demonstrate that the common interpretation of the ballet as subhuman barbarism fails to take into account the Russian intelligentsia's search for religious renewal, in part by a return to ecstatic ritual, as exemplified in the work of Viacheslav Ivanov

and Alexander Scriabin. I wl also discuss the prevalence of these attiiudes il

and ideas across educated and artistic cultureAs noted in Chapter I, attempts in western schoiarship to account for
the ideas motivating Stravinsky and Roerich still fail to find a unified concept; in most analyses Stravinsky becomes the primary focus. Taruskin claims that Stravinsky's musical advances in The Rite o Spring "left the f dreamy pastoral visions o Roerich and the rest far behind."' f
While it is true

that Stravinsky later abandoned the extra-musical elements of the project, he may not have left Roerich's views entirely behind- As I have demonstrated
in Chapter 11, Roerich's contribution was not confined to what Taruskin calls
I~aruskin, Stravinsky 949. Elsewhere Taruskin states, "Stravinsky's music certainly subverted the rosy idyll that desgner/scenarist Nikolai Roerich conceived his Sacre du Prhtemps to be." Richard Taruskin, "How He Did It," rev. of Art and Enterprise in Diaghilm's Ballets Rrrsses, by Lynn Carafola, New Republic 9 Oct. 1989: 30.

a sentimental view of Slavic antiquity. Furthermore, Taruskin reconstructs

an intellectual context as a motivation for Stravinsky's later work, Soadebku


(Les N ~ c e s ) ,that dearly derived horn the intellectual climate of Stravinsky's ~
and Roerich's Russia; he also documents Stravinsky's contact with these ideas

as early as 1911.3 These Eurasian and Scythian ideas that were so attractive to
Stravinsky in emigration grew out of the ideas that the philosophers Solovfev,Sergei and Evgenii Trubetskoy, and others discussed in philosophical journals and religious-philosophical societies from around the 1890's. Taruskin, however, points to Lev Karsavin and Nikolai Trubetskoy (the son of Sergei) as the influential parties. He discusses Karsavin's messianic view of Russia that stressed all-in-oneness (oseedinsfoo), the simultaneous selfaffirmation and self-surrender of the individual, the wholeness of the church (specifically the Orthodox Church) both within itself and in connection to all aspects of "the worldly," and the wisdom of a people who are uncontaminated by Western empiricism. Nikolai Trubetskoy's Eurasian

writings idealize a Turkic proto-culture (which he extends to include the Slavs) that possessed qualities of nonreflective, "organic" wholeness. Taruskin links these ideas directly to nineteenth century Slavophilism, and while he briefly notes para11eis to Saiabin's and Ivanov's mysticism, he skips a generation of thinkers and writers, one of whom is Sergei Trubetskoy, the philosopher who asserted that the Russian mind, through its ability to synthesize reason and belief, could offer an antidote to western philosophy's dependence on reason. The reader wl see similarities to the ideas Roerich il expressed throughout his writings: the integration of religion into all aspects
-

Defining Russia Musically, Historical and Hemeneutic~i Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 393-409. 3~aruskin, Dflning Russzh Musically 400401.

2~ee Richard Taruskin,

of man's life, the wholeness of an apparently dualistic world, the collectivity

of primitive society. In this chapter I will demonstrate that not only by his
association with Roerich, but through contact with artistic and intellectual

circles including the W r d o Art, Stravinsky was familiar with these ideas ol f
well before he emigrated to Switzerland. We must also remember that the dissociation of Stravinsky's music

from the scenic and choreographic elements of that first production was the
result of circumstances that had nothing to do with any disagreement about

the concept of the ballet before its premiGre.4 Stravinsky's letters to Roerich,
written between 1910 and 1913, show his dependence on Roerich and his delight with Roerich's designs, with his own music, and his hopes for Nijinsky's choreography.5 I believe the perception that there is no unified concept in this ballet is due to an apparent reluctance to recognize, to understand, and then to accept as a motivating concept of this ballet Roerich's conviction that in order to strive for something new, man must first know "the refined primitiveness of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and refinement of gesture were great and sacred concept^."^ Roerich
4 ~ Garafola~suggests that the original mounting of The Rite of Spring disappeared from the y repertoire of the Ballets Russes because of Diaghilev's sense of enterprise. See Richard Taruskin, "How He Did It," 31-32. Millicent Hodson cites a backlash from opera house managers, financiers, and critics who urged Diaghilev to abandon "this path of Nijinsky's." because it was too avant-garde for their taste. Diaghilev had also expelled Nijinsky from the Ballets Russes in the summer of 1913 after the dancer married Romola da Pulska. See Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace, xii. In a letter to Benois written in October 1913, Stravinsky expresses deep concern over the future of "his child," given Diaghilev's change of attitude toward both Nijinsky and this work- Stravinsky can't imagine Sacre without Nijinsky. See L. Diachkova, 477478. Whatever the reason, what has come to be called Nijinsky's Sacre effectively disappeared after its first and only season. S~travinsky makes several references to "our child" in these letters. He writes to report his own progress and to get information from Roerich. On December 1, 1912, after receiving Roerich's sketches for the costumes Stravinsky wrote, "I have seen [the sketches] and my Cod, I really like them, they're a miracle!" See Vershinina, "Pis'ma I. Stravinskogo N. Rerikhu" 5763. 6 ~ o e r i c h"Sacre" 188. r

continued t o profess his ideology in poetry, essays, and paintings for the rest of his life- For example, in his 1930 lecture "Saue" w e can see that his w o r k

has p r o c e e d e d along the same path of celebrating the "constructive striving of

the spirit. . . in connecting our e a r t h l y existence with a SupremeM7 that h e


f o u n d e v i d e n t b o t h in a c e t rituals and in primitive societies that live nin scattered across the world. I this somewhat r a m b l i n g account o f recent n
travels and reminiscences, Roerich's agenda is stated as clearly and in the

same i m a g e r y as it had b e e n in his writings in the first d e c a d e o f the century.

I t e context o f New York in the 1930s Roerich's message seems s o m e h o w n h


marginal, even "crackpot," and therefore e a s y to dismiss.8 Yet, as I h a v e

shown in Chapter 1 , Roerich was serious in expressing this message and w a s 1


taken seriously by his contemporaries. The Rite of Spring must b e r e t u r n e d
to this religious c o n t e x t as I will demonstrate below, this b o d y o f thought w a s neither marginal nor something to b e dismissed lightly.

Roerich does not seem bothered that Stravhsky's m u s i c Lives on alone; a s late as 1930 he reports that it is "acclaimed everywhere ;ind there no longer
exists

any conventional prejudice against this expression."''

It seems that for

Roerich the music f u l l y e m b o d i e s the o r i g i n a l c o n c e p t and continues to


disseminate its message:

7 ~ orich, "Sacre" 188. e 8 ~ v e n the late 18' Roerich's work was haunted by westerners' ignorance and condescension. in 90s In an editorial "The Two Roerichs Are One" the writer devotes one paragraph to the recent revival of The Rite of Spring performed by the Joffrey Ballet and the remaining seven paragraphs to Roerich's unseemly influence on Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in the 1930s, including influencing Wallace to persuade the Treasury to engrave the Great Seal's mystic pyramid on new dollar bills. By the time Wallace became Roosevelt's running mate in 1940, this scandalous involvement with Roerich and his ideas was kept quiet by the Democrats' threatening to bring up Wendell Willkie's adulterous affairs should the Republicans publish Wallace's letters. See Karl E. Meyer, "The Two Roerichs Are One," New York Times 22 January 1988: A30. 9~oerich, "Sacre" 189.

This constructive striving of spirit, ti joy before the beautiful hs laws of nature and heroic sacrifice, certainly are the essential feelings of "Sacre du Printemps." We cannot consider "Saue" as Russian, nor even Slavic-it is more ancient and pan-human. T i is the natural festival of the soul. This is the joy of love hs and self-sacrifice, not under the knife of crude conventionality, but in exuberance of spirit, in connecting our earthly existence with a Supreme. . . . And still "Sacre" is new and the young ones are accepting "Sacre" as a new conception, and perhaps the eternal novelty of the "Sacre" is because spring is eternal, and love is eternal, and sacrifice is eternal. Thus in this new conception, Stravinsky touches the eternal in music. He was modern because he evoked the future; it is the great serpent ring touching the great past.. . . This should be very dose to us all because today we are striving toward the next evolution. We are trying to discard old forms and to create something new. But in order to strive for something new we have first to know the old. Only then can we attain the true enhancement of life.10 Throughout this chapter the connections between Roerich's speech and the intellectual context of turn-of-the-century Russia will be made dear. My primary task in this chapter is to redirect critical focus to this intellectual context. The identification of musical and folkloric sources and the verification of ethnographic authenticity, while interesting and informative in assessing the artistic achievements of each of the coIlaborators, should not be the main focus of understanding the ballet. Each successful

"find," as satisfying as it is, dishacts scholarship from asking other questions.


The meaning of the ballet lies in the motivation behind these selections and reworkings; once this larger purpose is revealed, the innovation and skill of

each collaborator's art can be seen in relation to this motivating concept The

Rite of Spring was a n attempt to recreate the power of ancient myth by

116

returning an act of ritual worship to the temple of the theater. In Chapter I1 I discwed Roerich's use of the past to restore spirituality in the life of modem

man. He synthesized his knowledge of ancient peoples into his grand view of

man in absolute harmony with his surroundings, with religion permeating


every aspect of man's ritualized, decorated Me. Not only has there been a failure to understand the view of primitive

man intended by Stravinsky and Roerich, but there has also been a failure to
recognize the spiritual content of their work. Western scholars have been distracted by their interpretation of the powerful forces depicted in the ballet;
they see destructive, barbaric violence, and some see a foreshadowing of the

violent sacrif5ce of youth in the coming world war."

In this mindset it is
death creates

difficult to understand the seeming paradox of the ballet-that life.

Taruskin, for example, generalizes Blok's apocalyptic view of the

anarchic potential of the masses and, influenced by barbaric images created in Blok's later Scythian writings, he sees the ballet as oproshchenie w i h he hc a defines as "'going primitive,' the vulgar rejection of cult~re,"~2 term he borrows from Viacheslav Ivanov's and Mikhail Gershenzon's "A Comer-toCorner Correspondence" (Pnepiska i dvukh uglov), written in 1920.1~ z Simply, the model of oproshchenie represents embracing subhuman barbarism and rejecting westernized, highly refined but spiritually bankrupt culture (kul'tura). As noted in Chapter I, Taruskin's adoption of this model
llsee, for example, Jean Cocteau, "Le Sacre du Printemps," Straoinsky in the Theatre, ed. Minna Lederman (New York: Da Capo P, 1975) 13. See also Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick Fuller (London: Oxford UP, 1978) 35-36, and Eric Walter White, St raoinsky's Sacrifice to Apollo (London: Hogarth P, 1930) 43. I 2 ~ r u skin, Stravinsky 855. a 13v.1. Ivmov and M. Genhenzon, "A Corner-tocomer Correspondence," trans. Gertrude Vakar, Russian lnteilectuni Histoy: An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Harcourt, 1966) 372401.

and the related metaphor of Scythianism depends

03 several

careless readings

and misinterpretations of Roerich's ideas. I developing the concept of n oproshchenie, the misrepresentation continues; Taruskin draws our attention to a text that reveals a message quite different from the one he infers. He refers to Ivanov's role in this correspondence as "the unregenerate voice of kul'turu," implying with the aid of an ellipsis-filled quote that Ivanov stands for enlightened, rational, westernized culture.14 Further

investigation of this text, however, reveals the true nature of Ivanov's preferred model, uproshchenie; it has a spiritual component that is crucial to Ivanov's vision of modern man's path to salvation. Ivanov's model depends
on man's ability to ascend, to connect with the spiritual realm that has been

available to him throughout time. He writes: This is how it w l be, my dear friend, even if there are as yet il no signs of such a change. Culture will become a cult of God and of the Earth. But it is Memory, the Primeval Memory of man, that will bring t i miracle about. . . . hs An era of great, joyous, akomprehending return will come. . . .

able to feel that they have roots. . . . Oproshchenie is betrayal, oblivion, defection-a cowardly, listless reaction. The idea makes as little sense in relation to culture as it would in mathematics, which recognizes only uproshchenie, that is, the reduction of a complexity to a simpler, perfected, unified form. Simplicity is the supreme, crowning achievement, the victory of completion over the incomplete, of perfection over imperfection. The way to this longed-for and lovely simplicity leads through complexity. It is reached not by defecting kom a given society or country but by moving upward. Everywhere-I repeat this again and again-there is a Bethel and a Jacob's ladder-in the center of anyone's world. This is the way of
--

The magic formula, to our intelligentsia, is oproshchenie; this shows to what extent they are severed from the roots. They think that by "becoming simple" they will put down roots, be

1 4 ~ a r u kin, Straoinsky 854-855. s

genuine, active, creative freedom; the freedom of oblivion is a stolen, hollow freedom. Those who forget their ancestry are runaways or manumitted slaves, not freeborn men. Culture is the c u l t of ancestors and, of course, their resurrection-as culture vaguely knows even now. The way man must follow is an ever-clearer consciousness of himself as a "God-forgotten, and by himself forgot." He has trouble remembering his primogeniture, and no wonder-even the savage has already forgotten i t The philosophy of culture I put in the mouth of my Prometheus i my philosophy: s They will invent and practice commerce, Art, mathematics, war, And governing, and being slavesSo that their days may pass in noise and fretting And sensuality, to help them to forget In dreams the straight and solid purpose of existence. While in his desert The savage roams despondent. The savage finds no joy in his pointless freedom, nor does the man who succumbs to the lure of oblivion and "simplifies" himself into the likeness of a savage; he is dejected and sad. The only way to avoid becoming "a dull guest on the dark earth" is to die in the fire of the spirit15 This passage contains a theme found throughout Ivanov's work, the restoration of spiritual life to man's daily life. According to Ivanov, man has always been able to ascend to the "more real'' world above the material one, to experience the universal spirit. Ivanov's use of the word "culture" is neither positive nor negative; it describes all of its manifestations in man's history. The culture he defends is one in which man reclaims "Primal

Memory" and finds access to the spirit. He shares Prometheus' critical view of present culture's ills; his description of this culture is reminiscent of the ant-like kul'fura described by Blok.16
15~vanov Genhenzon, "A Corner-to-ComerCorrespondence"398-399. and l65ee my discussion of Blok's essay "Stikhiin i kul'tura" in Chapter 1.

Taruskin's real contribution lies in his analysis of Stravinsky's music, but as I will point out in Chapter W , musical analysis that supports one framework-the Scythian-like destruction of western musical traditions-can ritualized venturing into chaos as a

also support another framework-man's

means of h s salvation. This second framework reflects ideas expressed by i Roerich and Stravinsky before the ballet's premike; it is not contaminated by events surrounding the riotous first performance or by subsequent history. As I will demonstrate in Chapter IV, this framework was shared by Roerich

and Stravinsky and communicated to Nijinsky when he joined the


coilaboration.

One must understand the nature of ecstatic ritual in order to


comprehend the religious framework of The Rite of Spring. The ritual is not the glorification of the terrible powers of the universe that can transform

humans into "subhuman," or transport them to an animal-like oblivion, as

many critics have a.ll too often assumed.17 Daniel Albright, for example,
understands the ballet strictly from his own western framework. The

bearskin-clad dancers demonstrate that "the ballet consisted of men so primitive that they were themselves half-bears."18 The ritual synthesis of

man and nature, male and female, mortals and gods, cosmos and chaos is
seen by Albright as evidence that The Rite o Spring is about the subhuman: f

The Rite of Spring, then, concerns the human race before it has become human, before sexual differentiation, when it is still only a provisional manifestation of nature.
17~awkin states, "So where Scriabin's occultism sought to elevate human consciousness above the human plane, the 'second sense' of The Rite of Spring plunged it down beneath, suggesting the prehuman or subhuman reality that civilized consciousness cloaks but does not replace." Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically 379. 1 8 ~ a n i e lAlbright, Stravinsky. The Music Box and the Nightingale (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1989) 14.

. . . The Rite of Spring depicts the pre-human. It is strange that Stravinsky despised Disney's cartoon of this ballet, in Fantasia (1940)-Stravinsky called it a "unresisting imbecility"-for by n making the action a minuet of dinosaurs and volcanoes Disney succeeded in eliminating the human presences that were always to some extent an embarrassment to the spectacle-19
Albright, Taruskin and others m s the point that the goal of this ritual was to is transcend the individual, to achieve a collective consciousness or sobornost' and finally, to experience a mystical oneness with the deity. These religious rituals were recognized by Russian intellectuals to be a essential aspect of n ancient civilizations. Once we understand the importance of the past for movements of religious revival in turn-of-the-century Russia, and once we see the religious significance of works that appear on the surface to be merely nostalgic or ethnographic, the conclusion of The Rife of Spring with a maiden's selfsacrifice should not seem out of place witJx either Roerich's or Stravinsky's ideas. While it is plausible, as Taruskin asserts, that the idea of a maiden's sacrifice came from Stravinsky as "someone steeped in the traditions and dich6s of the romantic musical theater. . . , the other part of his assertion, " "the idea of a ballet about a maiden sacrifice would never have occurred to Roerich spontaneously, for he was too scrupulous a c o ~ o i s s e u r authentic of Slavonic antiquity,"20 does not take into account Roerich's famed role as a myth-maker, his awareness of the universality of sacrificial rituals in ancient

cultures, or, most importantly, the glorification of the universal spirit that
underlay his work. We must remember that Roerich was one of many artists

l 9 ~ 1 b r i g h t15. Zo~aruskin, Stravinsky 864.

and intellectuals active in attempts to apply universal spiritual teachings to their endeavors.

Sacrifice in The Rite of Spring takes on an altogether different meaning

when it is put into the context of tun-of-the-century religious revival.


Numerous essays and poems attest to the fact that ecstatic ritual was of great interest to the inteIligentsia.2' Ivanov's thorough study of the Hellenic cults

of Dionysus is a n excellent example of the attempt to heal modem culture,


damaged by individualism and rationalism, with a return to ecstatic ritual.

In a 1905 essay, "The Religion of Dionysus," Ivanov sets forth his ideas about
the origin and nature of man's religious consciousness as evidenced in the

early cults of Dionysus.22 Ivanov describes ancient man's connection to


religion at every moment of his life; this is an example of man possessing and

using the capacity for ascent that he referred to later in "A Comer-to-Comer
Correspondence." The similarities between Ivanov's and Roerich's descrip-

tions of andent Life are immediately apparent- Ivanov writes:


. . . if we are able to sense how inseparably religion and daily life flowed together into a unified whole, then we shall, with heartfelt conviction, reconstruct in ourselves the spirit of that distant time. Every form of life was sacred and there was no action that would not be linked with the worship of divine power as there would be no divine ritual which would not be a function of life and a necessity for existence. There would be no separation between prayer and the stewardship of everyday
21~eefor example, Alexander Blok, "Poeziia zagovorov i zaklinanii" m Poetry of Magic and e Spells], Sobranie sochmenii 8 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, (1960-1963) 5: 3665; Andrei Bely, "0 teurgii" [On Theurgy], Novyi putr 9 (1903): 100-123; Sergei Gorodetsky, Iar': Stikhi liricheskie i liro-epicheskie [Iart: Lyric and Lyro-epic verses] (St. Petersburg: Kruzho k molod;rkh, 1907); Konstantin Bal'rnont, Zhar-ptitsa [The Fireb ird] (Moscow : Skorpion, 1907), Zelenyi oertograd [The Green Garden] (St. Petersburg, 1909), Poeziin kak oolshebstoo poetry as Magic] (Moscow: Skorpion, 1915), plus numerous essays and poems by Viac hes lav Ivanov. 22~iacheslav Ivanov, "Religiia Dionisa. Ee proiskhozhdenie i vliianiia," Voprosy zhizni June 1905: 283-220,July (1905): 122-148.

matters; not to live in a god-pleasing way meant not to Live at all. Man's devoted companions, the gods, sat as members of the household at all of his meals. Like a gigantic shadow, the deity was inseparable from man and was like his own relative, his lord, and his double; truly, everything was "full of gods."Z3 The synthesis of religion and daily life was absolutely necessary because man's existence was filled with danger: Fear of death and fear of fate, the hostility of natural and supernatural forces, the helplessness and uncertainty of mortal existence, countless dangers, ceaseless threats both mysterious and manifest-all of this made his life a race along the edge of the abyss. HoweverThere is ecstasy in battle, And on the edge of the gloomy abyss, And in the ocean roused to fury Among the tempestuous waves and stormy darkness, And in the Arabian hurricane And in the plague's breath. Everything, everything that threatens destruction conceals from the mortal heart inexplicable delightsPerhaps a pledge of immortality.24

Man's existence was punctuated with ecstatic ritual in an attempt to appease


the terrors of the abyss, but as the last four lines indicate, man must engage the chaos of the abyss in order to have access to the mystery; "there is ecstasy

in battle." In ritual ecstasy the individual abandons consciousness of himself


as a separate individual; he surrenders completely to the whole community just as the community surrenders to the chaos: In religion one needs a presentiment of the unity of the individual with everything that is outside him, and through that, the illusiory nature of each individual. . . . The awareness of one's own "I" outside of its individual boundaries incites the individual to a negation of itself and to a crossing over to the
23~vanov, "Re[igiiaW : t 90. 6 24~vanov,"Religiia" 6: 195-196.

"not I," the essence of dionysian ecstasy. This consciousness is the very origin of every mysticism.25 While Ivanovfs essay is a detailed investigation of the history and influence of the cult of Dionysus, he draws conclusions about the nature of religion and religious experience that provide direction for the spiritual remaking of modem
man.26

First, man's religious consciousness originated

in ecstatic states. Early religion was orgiastic; it depended on the frenzied

rhythms of dance, incantation, and song. Ivanov describes the ways in which ritual leads man into the abyss, but at the same time it protects him as it provides a "religious order" within the primordial chaos. To Ivanov the constant presence of both order and chaos is an essential antidote to the order imposed on m n s consciousness by his submission to a life governed entirely a' by reason:

. . . the tyranny of cosmos and [the tyranny] of order in everything down to the very bottom has transformed our internal primordial chaos; suggestions of rhythm rush past like a light ripple along the surface of our soul and the expressiveness and increasing intensity of the music barely keeps pace with our proportionately increasing power of resistance to its orgiastic magic.27
The past is vital for modem man because,

humanity will not ascend to high places from its contemporary low place if it does not become like ancient humanity. . . . We must renounce ourselves and become ancient in spirit in order to restore the now diminished image of man.28

25~vanov, "Religiia" 7: 143. 26The concluding section of this article makes explicit ivanov's prescription for the revival of religion in modem times. See "Religiia" 7: 136-148. 27~vanov. "Relieiia" 7: 138.

Ivanov wrote, "what draws our minds to the pagan pole of our dualistic culture is not the romantic dreamer's nostaZgie du passe, but the thirst for synthesis."29

In ecstatic ritual all distinctions disappear: between spectator and


participant, between participant, priest, and sacrificial victim, between victim
and the deity.30 This is antinomy, the absolute, if momentary, synthesis of polar opposites-male and female, man and god, matter and spirit, cosmos

and chaos. It will become dearer below that in this context The Rite of Spring
can be seen as a ritual aimed toward maintaining the balance between man
and the elements, both natural and supernatural, that hold the constant potential of either sustaining life or destroying it. The sacrificial victim becomes the "bride" of the sun god Yarilo, a mystical union that insures

n fertility and abundance i the coming season. The scene, the costumes, the
choreography, and the music all support this concept.

In the context of religious revival, myths inspired writers and painters


in large part because they were evidence that mortals and gods were in active
contact.

Myths figured prominently in Ivanov's discussion of ancient

religion; they externalize human experience and give man a way to

n collectively understand his place i the divine world (realiora).3

Myths

presented an alternative way of knowing. They were a revelation of ultimate reality, intuitively perceived; myths were quite separate from the Limited
truths made known by science and empirical reason. Not only did Ivanov

analyze the myths and rituals of the a c e t Greeks, whom he held as an nin
2 9 ~ Ivanov, "Elinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga," Nooyi put' 2 (1904): 59. . 30~vanov,"Religiia" 6: 214. 31~ee West, Russian Symbolism 76-88 for a discussion of the function of myth in Ivanov's theories.

example of people who lived in a "wholeness of spirit," but he promoted modern mythmaking (rnifotoorchestno), a task especially suited to artists,

whom he sees as bearing a dose connection to the collective soul. Artists can
facilitate the return of art to its original sacred function in ritual:
A true talent cannot help but express the ultimate depths of the consciousness of his age. . . . The artist imperceptibly widens our horizons in harmony with the whole elemental striving of the s o d of the people. . . . Painting craves frescoes, architecture craves public gatheringplaces, music calls for the chorus and the drama, the drama for music; the theatre strives to unite in one "action" the whole crowd gathered for the celebration. . . . Through the overlying layer of everyday speech, the language of poetry+ur language--must send forth shoots, and indeed it is already sprouting from the subterranean roots of popular language. . . . . . .Through the strata of contemporary knowledge, (poetic] hl knowledge is destined to surge up in a c i l spring from the depths of the subconscious. . . . Overcoming individualism as an abstract principle, overcoming too the "Euclidean mind", and glimpsing the faces of the divine, [poetry] engraves upon its hipod the words: Chorus, Myth, and Action. Thus art looks towards the sources of the soul of the people.32

The aspiration to a synthesis of the arts and the desire for the spiritual union of those who participate in the artistic act or celebration are essential in this view of art. At any stage in his history man is capable of living his life fully engaged with the divine world, and the arts have an essential role in facilitating this process. Alexander Scriabin saw his role along just such lines. Through his study of Solov'ev, through his association with the philosopher Sergei Trubetskoy and regular attendance at the Moscow Religious-Philosophical
3 2 ~ Ivanov, "0 veselom remesle," Po .

m a d a m . Stat'i i aforizmy. (St. Petersburg, 1909) 226, 244. Quoted from West, Russian Symbolism 70-71. The article is the transcript of a public Lecture, first published in the journal Zolotoe runo 5 (1907).

Society, through his immersion in theosophical texts and periodicals, through his friendship with Russian mystical symbolists, and through his own intuition, Scriabin created art that was directed toward the transformation of mankind through ecstatic ritua1.33 Scriabin's scant writings and the memoirs of his dose friends reveal the constancy of his vision throughout his short career; for him art was synonymous with spiritual transfiguration.34

The outline of a early, n

unfinished opera seems to encapsulate his life. It was based on the myth of Eros and Psyche: "The hero, 'a young unknown philosopher-musician-poe t,' promises to transfigure mankind through the power of celestial harmonies,
the force of miraculous and boundless love, and the might of wisdom."35

Scriabin's final, unfinished work, the Mysterium, "may be described as a dream of the unification of mankind in a single instant of ecstatic
re~elation."3~ Boris de Schloezer's description of Scriabin's artistic impulse

echoes the attitude of many members of the creative intelligentsia: To a man divided within himself, wrestling with himself, deprived of immediacy and pristine innocence by a intensified n self-consciousness, the Mys teriu rn promised to restore the integrity of self-unity. For man had once aossessed innocence, sincerity, and integrity, but he became b h d . As soon as he developed consciousness of himself, he lost his inner unity. The task of the Mysterium was to recreate this unity in the light of
3 3 ~ o r overview of Scriabin's intellectual biography see Malcom Brown, "Skriabin and an Russian 'Mystic' Symbolism," Nineteenth Centuy Music 3 (1979):42-52. 34~oris Schloezer, Scriabin, Artist and Mystic, trans. Nicholas Slonimsky (1923; Berkeley: de UCP, 1987) 103. Scriabin's entire literary output was published posthumously. It included an unfinished libretto in verse for an opera, several drafts, both in prose and poetry, for Le p o h e de I'extase ( P a m ekstnza), including a "poem of orgy," and two drafts of the text for the Prefatory Action (Predvnn'tel'noe deistuie). See "Zapisi A. N. Skriabina," Russkie propilei, ed. M. Gershenzon, 6 vols. (Moscow: Sabashnikov, 2919) vol. 6,120-247. 35~rown 45-46. 36~ch~oezer 161.

consciousness, so that man could acquire wisdom and knowledge of himself and yet preserve his innocence. He would then be clarified to himself, while retaining his sincerity and integrity? Following the Russian premiere of Le poPme de Z'exfase in St. Petersburg in 1909 and his return to Moscow in 1910, Scriabin was active in musical and intellectual circles; he attended many of the lectures, musicales,
art exhibits, and literary discussions of aesthetic and philosophical matters

that were sponsored by the Moscow Literary-Artistic Circle and the Society of

Free aesthetic^.^^ The writers who most dosely associated with him were Briusov, Bely, Merezhkovsky, Baltrushaitis, Bal'mont, and I v a n ~ v . ~ ~ Scriabin was well acquainted with Ivanov's writings, and after 1909

they formed a dose friendship. The parallels in their philosophy of art are
clear: both studied the ancient Eleusinian mysteries and understood the necessity of reviving this ancient way of knowing in a modem form of ritual. They both emphasize the transcendence of the individual through this ritual; all will become participants, and all participants will achieve a spiritual collectivity. Leonid Sabaneev, Scriabin's dose friend from 1910 until the composer's death, recalls Scriabin's early description of The Prefatory Action, (Acfe priulable) or preliminary to the Mysterium, as he began to envision it

around 1911:

37~chloezer 190. 38~rown Scriabin spent most of his time in Europe between 1904-1909. Scriabin's activities 47. are recorded in detail in Letopis' zhizni i toorchestva A.N. Skriabina, ed. M. P. Priashnikov and 0.M. Tompakov (Moscow: Muzyka, 1985). 39~artin Cooper, "Alexander Skriabin and the Russian Renaissance," Slavonic and Westem Music. B a y s for Gerald Abraham, eds. Malcom Hamrick Brown and Roland John Wiley (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1985) 235. Cooper's essay is a fairly well-informed, but biased account: he provides useful details surrounding this period, but he betrays a condescending attitude toward mysticism, he portrays ideas and movements as distinct and compartmentalized, and he ultimately marginalizes the theurgists.

There will be no question of the individual in the Mystery. It will be a colledive (sobornyi) creation, a coIlective act. It will be as one all-embracing, multi-faceted individuality, like the sun n refracted i a thousand droplets of water.* The parallels i Ivanov's and Saiabin's ideas were dear to their contemn r, poraries as well; at the end of a long analysis of Saiabin's philosophy and a t

Lapshin puts Scriabin in the very landscape Ivanov used i his description of n
primitive man's dangerous existence: Scriabin loves to walk along the edge of the abyss, to call up extreme discord in his soul. When it seems that the last harmony of the spiritual elements is destroyed, concordia discors is realized; the disharmony of the soul is reconciled i a higher n synthesis when it seems we were just a hair's breadth from falling into the abyss31 Scriabinfs ideas reflect his theosophical and neo-Platonic world view, where mystical enlightenment is achieved through the seemingly impossible
reconciliation of opposites. Schloezer wrote:

[Suiabin's] ideology was essentially a theory of oneness and the

means by which it could be achieved. . . . When he was writing Le P o h e de I'extase, he already realized that oneness could be attained only by deepening and sharpening contradictions, and
not by their negation or forcible unification-a Imagery i Scriabin's poetic text to Le P o h e de I'extase reveals the necessity n of conflict and contradictions. The spirit, "pinioned on its thirst for life," is attracted to and derives energy from its negation, the dark chasm:

In the wondrous sublimity Of pure aimlessness And i the collision n Of counter-aspirations,


*teonid Sabaneev, Vosporninaniia o Skriizbine (Moscow, 1925) 150, quoted in Brown 49. 41~. Lapshin, "Zavetnye dumy Skriabina," Khudozhestoennoe tuorchestuo (Petrograd: Mysl, I. 1922) 325. tvanovrsdescription is from "Religiia Dionisa" 195-196, quoted above. 32Sch loezer 63.

In a common consciousness, In a common love The spirit perceives The nature of Its divine essence. It understands That it desires battle.43 The composer and critic Alexander Koptiaev recognized the relationship of Scriabin's music to his ideas. In an article first published in
1910 he analyzes the "toolsrr Scriabin uses in achieving musical ecstasy:

chromaticism, full orchestration, syncopation and broken rhythm, and the

shuggle against the force of traditional cadences that restrict the elemental,
emotional essence of music.44 He concludes his article with Scriabin's own definition of ecstasy, written in 1906 to accompany Le P o h e de I'extase: Ecstasy is the supreme synthesis of a new world, summoned into Life by the mighty will of the artist. To summon from the depths of the soul the most forbidden and contradictory desires and, after a battle, to take pleasure in their ultimate n reconciliation i miraculous harmony: the unending surge of free will and heavenly power-this is ecstasy. As a supreme synthesis [ecstasy] is able to extricate pleasure from evil: that which threatened is now excitation; that which terrified is now delight; and the bites of panthers and hyenas have become but a new caress, a new torment; and the sting of the serpent [is] but a burning kiss. And eternity resounds with the joyous cry, "I
am."45

In a speech delivered to the Moscow Scriabin Society, "The National


and the Universal in Scriabin's Work (Suiabin as a Nationalist Composer)," Ivanov also describes the ecstatic effect of Scriabin's music. To Ivanov, the

4 3 ~ l e x a n d e rScriabin, "Poem of Ecstasy," trans. Hugh Macdonald. quoted in Hugh MacdonaId."Words and Music by A. Scryabin," Musical Times 113 (1972):26. 4 4 ~ l e x a n d e rKoptiaev, "Pevets ekstaza-A. Skriabin." K muzykal'nomu ideal11 (Petrograd. 2916) 204-205. 45Alexander Scriabin. "Poema ekstaza." quoted in Koptiaev 209.

failure of the West that is apparent in its rationalism and i its adherence to n order at all costs is also apparent in its music. Ivanov believes that the

desacralization of western music has resulted in empty, "despotic" f o r m 9 Ivanov celebrates Scriabin because his music embodies the solution to the problem that has plagued music-and philosophy-since
the beginning of

time: the problem of order and freedom. Suiabin, Like the ancient Greek pagan priests, has succeeded in reconding these opposing forces: This reconciliation was primarily the work of the Delphic priesthood, the spiritual-legal body representing by their authority the divine wl of both brothers, Apollo and Dionysus il together, Like two inseparable, but still distinct hypostases of one world-creating being.47 According to Ivanov, Scriabin's harmony embodies freedom or chaos, while the melody embodies o r d e r 9 As evidenced in this lecture and in several other essays dedicated to the composer, Suiabin represents to Ivanov the ideal artist-priest whose successes have implications far broader than the realm of music? Ivanov links Scriabin's genius to s o m e k g particularly

Russian He calls Scriabin a "national" composer, but is careful to put this "nationalism" in the context developed by h i m s e l f and other "nationalist" philosophers: Russians have the special gLft of being able to reconcile reason

and belief, cosmos and chaos. The Russian genius, then, transcends the
national as it looks toward the salvation of all mankind.

In this way

46~iacheslav Ivanov. "Natsional'noe i vselenskoe v hrorcheshre Skriabina (Skriabin kak natsional'nyi kompositor)," Pamiatniki kul'tury: h y e otkytih 1983 (Leningrad: Nau ka, 1985) 98. The speech was delivered on April 14,1916, the first anniversary of Scriabin's death. V~vanov,"Natsional'noe" 101. M~vanov, "Natsional'noe" 102. 49See "Skriabin i dukh revoliutsii," Sobrunie sochinmii, vol. 3 (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chretien, 1979) 190-194; and "Vzgliad Skriabina na iskusstvo," Sobranie sochinenii. vol. 3. (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chretien, 1979) 171-189. Both articles along with a speech delivered before a memorial concert in 1919 are reprinted in Parnintniki kul'tury: Nonye otkytiin 1983 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985) 203-1 25.

Scriabin's "national" talent is messianic and universal, what Roerich would

call pan-human."
"

Perhaps Scriabin is singular in the sense that he succeeded in producing art that communicated the essence of his mysticism. He gave music a new language, and after a hiatus of some f&y years, scholars have once again realized that his mysticism is inseparable from his music, and they are exploring this relationship instead of sweeping the embarrassment of Scriabin's beliefs (some would call it his madness) under the rugs0 Taruskin,

for example, understands that Scriabin's mysticism is an integral part of his


music and therefore analyzes the music to discover how these ideas are manifested. He examines how Scriabin's harmony induces "a quality of

He hovering, of time-forgetful stasis, altered consciousness, or tran~e."5~ discusses the composer's elaborate methods of delaying harmonic resolution

oaiy by prolonging ambiguities of t n l t and by the use of dissonance. Speaking


of Le P o k e de I'extase, Taruskin concludes:

. . . Scriabin's symphony consists in most general terms of a single fundamental gesture, an agonizingly prolonged structural anacrusis that at the very last moment achieves cataclysmic resolution/consumrnation. . . . The functional relationships in the P o h e de I'extase are thus reduced to a single essential dualism: an almost infinitely extended, graded and variegated dominant that in its ceaseless flux and nuance is almost palpably sensuous, and a crushingly asserted tonic, tantalizingly glimpsed and tasted in advance, but for the most part withheld. Indeed the dualism is more than just a harmonic functional relationship; it is the interaction between two planes of consciousness.~2
50~aruskin's technical analysis of Scriabin's music in Chapter 13 of D e n i n g Russia Musically
integrates the composer's mystical ideas with his stylistic development. Taruskin gives a summary documentation of the dismissal of Scriabin's mysticism since ca. 1930. 51~arus Defining Russia Musically 330-331. kin, 52~aruskin, Defining Russia Musically 336.

While he may appear a unique genius in the world of music, Scriabin was not singular in the realm of ideas. His concerns mirrored those of numerous other intellectuals, including Ivanov, Roerich, and Stravinsky.
As I have demonstrated above and in Chapter 1 , Roerich was as much 1

a mystic as he was a archeologist and ethnographer, a fact that could not n

have been hidden from Stravinsky. This alone is sufficient grounds to take
Stravinsky's words at face value when in a 1912 interview he refers to Le

Sucre du Printemps as a mysterium and a c h ~ r e o d r a m a . ~ ~ In addition, recent


scholarship is reversing the trend of dismissing or completely ignoring

un various manifestations of the occult in the arts a t the t r of the century.


Where scholarship once had the tone of expose, not at all unlike accounts of

pagan practices told from a hostile point of view in The Russian Primary
Chronicle,54 there is now serious scholarly investigation of the imagery and influence of the occult evidenced in the works of many artists of this period
in Russia and elsewhere.55 Below I will demonstrate the widespread and

open interest in religious mysticism in Stravinsky's and Roerich's Russia.


53~travinsky'swords are taken from an interview in S t Petenburg. See M. Dvinskii, "U Igoria Stravinskogo," Birzheoye vedomosti 25 Sept. 1912: 5, quoted in Krasovskaia 2: 432. 5 4 ~ e e for example, the entry for the year 1071 in The Russian Primary Chronicle: Lnurmtian , k t , ed. S. H . Cross, (Cambridge, MA, 2953) 150-154, where pagan priests (oolkh.oy) conduct a ritual "stabbing" of the most distinguished women of Rostov. Christian &ronicIers, looking for ammunition against the still active pagan priesthood, sensationalize the account, concealing that it was, in fact, a ritual against k i n e . For a discussion of this account see Russell Zguta, "The Pagan Priests of Early Russia: Some New Insights," Shvic Revim33(1974): 259-266. A modem equivalent of this kind of hostite account can be found in Robert C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money 1900-1940 (Cambridge, M A : Haward UP, 1980). Chapter 1, "Mysticism and Money. NichoIas Roerich" begins with the words, "Nicholas Roerich always saw a close connection between art and money" (111). It appears that Williams' major source was U.S.State Department records. See also note 8. 55~ee,for example, Maria Carison's study of Russian Theosophy, "No ReZigion Higher than Truth,'' Richard Taruskin's chapter on Scriabin in Dening Russia Musically, and Leon Surette, The Birth of Modemism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult, (Montreal & Kingston: McCill-Queen's UP, 1993).

Theater, too, was part of this movement. At the t r of the century un there was a preoccupation with restoring the original religious function of theater as a potential solution to the problem of man's fragmented Life. Intellectuals envisioned a new theater that could take over the psychological and social functions formerly served by religion; they experimented with theater as ritual, theater as religion, theater as a d y i n g force in avilization, theater as transformation. One can see the attempt to put into contemporary practice the conclusions Ivanov reached in his studies of the cults of Dionysus, discussed above.

An apocalyptic movement called mystical

anarchism developed after the Revolution of 1905; it exemplifies the impulse


to create a new culture and a new society in which alienation would be transcended and conflict resolved.56 The social ideal was sobornost'; society would be ruled by aesthetic and religious principles including collective creativity, myth-creation, and participatory theater where, ". . . each participant in the rites had a dual role: to partidpate in the 'orgy of action' and the 'orgy of purification,' to make holy and to become holy, to attract the divine presence and to receive the divine @-a and a 'goal pathetic and passive.'"57 Characteristic of the times, the movement was eclectic; "The mystical anarchists. . . sought a broader 'religious synthesis of Life' and based their vague concepts of 'religious activity' and 'mystical experience' on a kind of pantheism in which the relation of Christ, Dionysus, and the World Soul was

'goal theurgic and active'

5 6 ~ o a detailed discussion of the development and theories of the mystical anarchists see r Bernice Rosenthal, "Theatre as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists," Russian History 4.2 (1977): 122-141, and Bernice Rosenthal, "The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revohtion of 1905," Slavic Rmiew 36 (1977): 608-624. 57~osenthal, "Theatre as Church" 128-1 29.

not at all dear."58 The mystical anarchists had planned to stage ancient myths

in a Theater of Dionysus, but those plans were never realized. They were,
however, able to spread their ideas; after university reforms following the Revolution of 1905, Georgii Chukov and Ivanov, the principal theorists of mystical anarchism, were able to lecture frequently to large audiences of

students and young workers. Ivanovfs Wednesday "salons," a focal point of


the S t Petersburg intelligentsia, provided a forum for discussing mystical

anarchism among other topics of current interest-59

In 1906 a Moscow art journal, The Golden Fleece (Zolofoe rzlno), began
publication, taking up where Mir iskusstva left off, although in a more avantgarde direction. The preface to the first issue reflects an attitude similar to

that held by the mystical anarchists; it proposes a healing role for art:
We embark on our path at a formidable time. Around us, like a raging whirlpool, seethes the rebirth of Me. In the thunder of the fight, amid the urgent questions raised by our time, amid the bloody answers provided by our Russian reality, the Eternal, for many, fades and passes away. We are in sympathy with a l l who work for the rebirth of life, we renounce no task of our contemporaneity, but we believe that life without Beauty is impossible, that together with our institutions we must attain a free and brilliant art for our descendants, one that is illumined by the sun and induced by tireless search; we believe that we must preserve for them the Eternal values forged by many generations. And in the name of this new life to come we, the seekers of the Golden Fleece, unfurl our banner: A r f is eternal for it is founded on the intransient, on that which cannot be rejected. Art is whole for its single source is the soul. A r t is symbolic for it bears within it the symbol, the reflection of the Eternal i the temporal. n

58~osenthal, Transmutation" "The

623.

5 9 ~ oar description of ivanov's salon see V. Piast, Vstrechi (1929; New York: Orfey, 1986).

135

Art is kee for it is created by the free impulse of creation.60

The idea that art is deeply c o ~ e c t e d religion was not confined to to


groups that could be considered marginal or extremist Ballet was also caught up in retrospectivism which manifested itself, in large part, in a turn toward hellenism and re-infusing dance with religious spirit. As in the other arts, the conventions of the academy were challenged; in dance they were replaced

by the "expressive omnipotence of the body,"61 the exploration of dance


traditions other than western European, and the use of choreodrama, the mass action of the entire corps de ballet.

I a 1908 volume of essays dedicated to the new theater, Benois wrote n


"A Conversation about Ballet" (Beseda o balete), where the voice of tradition,

"the balletomane," debates the future of ballet with "the artist," clearly Benois' o w n voice. The artist's arguments are not new to the balletomane; when he speaks of ballet's liturgical quality, its power to express without words, the balletomane responds, "I knew you would bring up liturgy, God,

sobornost '. Is it not possible to discuss art without touching on theological

60~reface Zofotoe mno, 1 (1906), attributed to the editor, Nikolai Riabushinsky. Quoted in to John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant Gnrde. Theory and Criticism (New York: Thanes and Hudson, 1991)8. 61~rnile Jacques-Dalcroze, Swiss movement theorist and originator of eurhythmics, a method for integrating the rhythms of music into bodily movement, recognized Russian dancers' contribution to "new" ballet. In early 2913 he wrote to Stravinsky, "What is necessary to create a consummate work of art is an intimate coupling of [plastique in motion] with [expressive dance music]. It is an art of sacrifice that requires in addition a special technique, a natural one, one of the mastering of oneself in the expression of simple emotions, one of the control of the body in all the nuances of time and space. As soon as-in the Russian ballet-the sacrosanct frenzy of movement intervenes, the dancers are as admirable as can be. As soon as the situation demands poses, gestures, outbursts of pure feeling, the conventional ballet technique paraIyzes the emotions and substitutes virtuosity for the spontaneous externalization of inner states." Robert Craft, Straoinsky: Selected Correspondence 3 voIs. (New York: Knopf, 2 982-1985) 2: 78.

question^?"^^ Indeed it is not. Benois couches his description of the new


ballet entirely in the context of religion; dance, a high art on the level of

music (116),has a role to play in the remaking of the theater into a temple of a
religion far broader than conventional Orthodoxy:

. - . [E]verything comes from God, and our one and only God . . .
embodies the diversity of ancient Olympus. Our God is not only Zeus, and Cronus, but Apollo, and Dionysus, and Ares, and Hermes, and Aphrodite, and Eros (109-110). Benois explains that in the temple of the ballet theater dancers become priests who make possible the powerful unity of ail present. Ballet is about divine truth:

A selection of artists [dancers] creates a theater, setting apart these priests from the masses of the devout. From the very moment of this selection a temple and liturgical service are created. The priests continue to delight in their own actions. . . but at the same time they are lifted and carried by a particular mood. . . that results from the prayerful ecstasy of the entire audience. . . . We must give heartfelt thanks to the divine presence for bestowing this supernatural joy (109).
Benois is careful to add that this divine truth must also include the truth of Slavic myth, especially at a time when c o ~ e c t i o n s it are threatened by to
14). encroaching industry (1

Benois' vision of new ballet was not wishful thinking; he described ideas that were widely practiced. Fokine staged "The Evening of Terpsichore" at the Mariinsky Theater in 1908; in the publicity he described a program of "dances of the past, present, and future" including dances from ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and ancient Rust, as well as dances in the style of Isadora

62~leksandr n u a , "Beseda o balete," Teatr. Kniga o nooom teatre (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, k 1908) 104. Further references to "Beseda o balete" in this section will be given in the text.

~uncm.63Her

dance was viewed by one critic as "coincid[ing] with the rather

simpIified and vulgarized hellenism of our day, whose banner is bodily freedom, the cult of plastic, tangible beauty-a museum recollections. "64 cult nourished on beautiful

Realism and historical authenticity were replaced This same critic commented that

by imagined worlds and new myths.

Duncan's dances were received as ancient artifacts by a public that preferred to ignore their implausible authenticity and the fact that Duncan preferred to

discuss them as dances of the future.65


Fokine's boisterous choreography of the Polovtsian dances in Prince

Igor (1909) took the traditional, measured farandole (a spirited circle dance)
no and transformed it i t "an orgiastic round-dance, [a response] to symbolist
'communality' in a theater that united performer and audience in dionysian ecstasy."66 One reviewer wrote: Here is the finale, when a l the lines of this severe design blend l into one no less well-formed, a stream; overtaking, seizing, outrunning, struggling, one jumping across another-everyone . . . rushing the h l with a thunder, crashing the footlights, al running in streams of complex figures, once again meeting and again, with more furious rejoicing, renewing their assault. If the curtain had been delayed for a second, it seemed that it couldn't have held and would have torn out into the hall, onto the square, the street, conquering and drawing everything with it.67

631nterview by "Teatal," Peterburgshin gazeta 21 January 1908: 4, quoted in Tim Scholl From Petipa to Balanchine. Classical Revival and the Modernization o Ballet (New York: f Routledge, 1994) 54. This evidence refutes Taruskin's statement that "...Russian ballet before Firebird (1910) was actually French, and only the circumstances of its reimportation to France forced it to become truly Russian." Richard Taruskin, "From Firebird to The Rite: Folk Elements in Stravinsky's Scores," Ballet Reuiezu 10 (Summer 1982): 74. 64~ndre Levinson, "0 novom balete," Apollon 8 (1911): 43, quoted in Schol152. 65~choll 52. 66~cho11 65. 67~ergei Auslender, "Tantsy v 'Kniaze igore,"' Apollon 1 (1909):30, quoted in Scholl 65.
..

In Russia the idea of new theater based on dionysian ritual was so widespread that the concept of Vesna sviashchennnin was quite dear. Sergei Vokonsky
wrote i Apollon: n

Le Same dn Prinfemps isn't a "ballet." It is a ritual, an ancient ceremonial rite. Nothing could be less appropriate to prepare one for this spectacle than the word "ballet" and all the associations it carries with it.68
This retrospectivism spread beyond the dance stage. There was considerable public interest in the past as evidenced in Petersburg charity balls on classical and neoclassical themes.69 The ball held at the Winter Palace to mark the bicentenary of the founding of St. Petersburg was attended by guests clad in rich costumes of late Muscovite Russia. Nicholas II wore the costume of Peter 1's father, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich.70 In the years between 1890 and 1917 one hundred eighty plays that can
be linked to the Russian symbolist tradition were published in Russian art

and literary joumaIs.7~ Mystery plays were an important part of this dramatic
Literature, although they proved far more interesting and important in theory

than they were in practice. They were seen as original form of drama, that is,
a form of religious worship that was integrated with daily life. In a 1902
article "The Forms of Art," Bely writes: Drama emerged out of the mystery play; drama is destined to return to it. When drama draws near to the mystery play, returns to it, then will it inevitably descend from the stage and move out into life. Do we not see in this an inkling of the transfiguration of life into a mystery play? Are people not
-

%ergei Volkonsky, "Russ kii balet v Parizhe," ApoNon (1913):72, quoted in M o l l 75. 69~choll 54. 70~ee Kirichen ko 258-259 for photographs. 7 1 ~ erge Ka lbouss, The Plays of the Russian Symbolists (East Lansing: Russian Language o Journal, 1982) n. pag. The discussion of mystery plays that follows is based on Kalbouss 23-26, 31-56.

preparing themselves right now to participate in some kind of multi-colored mystery?72 Mystery plays also depicted a neo-Platonic universe where the ideal, noumenal world is revealed to the real, phenomenal world through the imagery of poetry.

The central moment of the mystery play is usually

associated with a communion ritual with the other world. Fyodor Sologub's article "Theater of One Will" (Teatr odnoi voli) is an attempt to apply his concept of the Platonic universe to stage practice. The drama reveals the presence of the all-knowing "I" or "world will" to all of the participants through ritual and liturgy. "The only way for the resurrection lies in the spectator becoming a participant in the mystery, through the liturgical rite. . . -'f73 The stage was intentionally artificial, often presenting a stylized two dimensionality. Mystery plays were undramatic and pretentious with their poetic language; they were often unsuccessful, although they contributed to the overall experiment in theater. By 1908 symbolist drama was moving away from the mystery play to other forms of experimental theater.

In his survey of Russian symboList drama George Kalbouss states, "By 1906,
ritualistic and non-representational theatre was no longer regarded strange or threatening; in short, symbolism had found a place in the theatrical repert0ire."~4 Kalbouss states that experimental theatre did not attract large audiences; they attended cabaret-type performances instead. This does not

72~oris Bugaev, "Formy iskusstva," M r iskusstua 8 (1902): 360, quoted in Kalbouss n.pag. i Bugaev is better known by his pseudonym Andrei Bely. 73~yodor Sologub, "Teatr odnoi voli," Teatr, kniga o nooom teahe (St. Petersburg: Shipovni k, 1908) 185, quoted in Kalbouss 19. 7 4 ~ a ~ b o u12. ss

indicate an aversion to the ideas motivating symbolist theater, however- We recall Maria carlson's observation: The Russian Spiritualist journal Rebzts reported in 1906 that "according to our correspondent, all of Petersburg is caught up in an unusually powerful mystical movement and at the moment a veritable maelstrom of little religions, cults, and sects has taken shape there. This movement embraces both the upper and lower levels of society. Among the upper levels we find the Theosophic-Buddhist trend. Admirers of Theosophy are uniting and are even beginning to discuss the question of building a Buddhist lamasery (a dormitory) and a Theosophic-Buddhist temple." . . . And not only Petersburg was caught up in the trend. Moscow and the provinces buzzed with new secret societies, demonstrations of hypnotism, public Spiritualist seances, gypsy fortune-tellers, and secret sectarian ecstasies (radeniia). Every educated reader who was not a recluse had at least a nodding acquaintance with Theosophy and Spiritualism.. . . People knew about these things, even if their knowledge was based only on cafe gossip and sensational newspaper artides in Noooe Vren~in.~~ John Bowlt also documents the wide range of esoteric topics that were discussed at cabarets and dubs: The St. Petersburg cabarets, . . . especially the Stray Dog and the Comedians' Halt, attracted prominent intellectuals from all disciplines, commissioned lectures and recitations, and Led debates and polemics on "hot issues." They were at once more international and more provocative, even though they too were indebted to the new middle classes for financial support. The Stray Dog, for example, . . . hosted many important cultural events during its brief active life (1911-1915), and it encouraged discussions on a wide if esoteric range of issues, including the Tarot, theosophy, Alexandrian Christianity, the French magic revival, Russian Orthodoxy, Neo-Platonism, Jacob Boehme, and the monks of Athos. The Stray Dog did not espouse the cause of the avant-garde as represented by Malevich and Tatlin, but it was at the head of Russian intellectual life and counted Anna Akhmatova, Balmont, Diaghilev, Nikolai

Evreinov, [Boris] Grigoriev, Tamara Karsavina, [Mikhail] Kuzmin, Evgenii Lanc&ray, Olga Glebova, Pallada, Alexei Radakov, Savelii Sorin and [Sergei] Sudeikin among its habitues.76 The program of The Stray Dog reflects the eclecticism of the age. The ties that members of this constellation of artists and intellectuals had with one another and with "starss" not mentioned in this passage reveal the dose contact members of the creative intelligentsia had with one another. For example, Sergei Sudeikin, symbolist painter, active member of the World o f Art society, and designer of several of Diaghilevfs Ballets Russes productions, was married to Olga Glebova. Yet in 1908, the year after their marriage, Sudeikin began a homosexual affair with the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, who happened to be sharing their apartment.

In spite of this complication,

Sudeikin, Glebova, and Kuzmin continued to collaborate on plays, musical evenings, and poetry readings. Kuzmin was closely associated with symbolist circles; he also lived in two rooms that he rented in Ivanov's apartment, the site of the "tower" evenings.77 Nikolai Evreinov was one of the founders of The Antique Theater

(Starinnyi teatr), an enterprise that attempted to restore "pre-realistic" dramas


in their original settings and costumes. Their repertoire included Greek
tragedies, medieval morality plays, miracle plays, and the pastorale. Lanceray
was one of several World of Art artists connected with this theater; others

involved with the two seasons of this theater (1907-1908, 1911-1912) indude
7 6 ~ o h nBowlt, ed. and trans., The Salon Albom of Vera Sudeikin-Straoinsky (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1995) xiii - xiv. n~owlt, The Salon Albom 13-14. The web of connections continued even into exile: Sudeikin later married Vera Bossett, and in the years 1917-1920 they socialized with "leading representatives of Russian Symbolism and Cubo-Futurism." Vera met Stravinsky in 1921, became his mistress and companion, eventually marrying him in 1940 after the death of Stravinsky's wife, Catherine.

Benois, who was general artistic and historical consultant as well as designer, and the designers Dobuzhinsky and Bilibin. Roerich designed an eleventh century lyrical drama, The Three Magi (Tri uolkhva), in 1907, and in 1911 he designed Lope de Vega's Fuente ovejuna. 78 Tamara Karsavina was Diaghilev's first prima ballerina and sister of Lev Karsavin, historian of religious philosophy, professor at St. Petersburg University, and, in later emigration, "elder statesman of the Eurasianis t movement," a movement derived from nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury messianic and religious philosophy discussed earlier in this chapter.

Stravinsky knew both Karsavins well; h s family lived in an apartment below i


the Karsavins in St. Petersburg, and he spent the spring of 1911 in close

association with the Karsavins before the Rome premigre of ~ e f r u s h k n . ~ ~

Stravinsky had occasion to be familiar with Karsavin's messianic religious


philosophy during the period in which he worked on The Rife of Spring. Bal'mont leads us to a n important connection with Stravinsky. Essayist, novelist and prolific poet, Bal'mont influenced many other symbolist poets induding Bely, Blok, and Ivanov. In the early summer of 1911 Stravinsky set three of Bal'mont's poems to music, "The Forget-me-not," "The Dove," and "The King of the Stas" (Zuezdoliki). The last two poems are from Bal'montfs collection Zelenyi omtograd and are based on Russian spiritual verses and songs connected to Russian religious sects that practiced ecstatic ritual, for example, the khlysty and the skoptsy. This was not the only
7 8 ~ o r discussion of the activities of The Starinnyi Theater see R. I. Vlasova, Russkoe a teatral'no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo nachala u ueka (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1984) 28-44. See also John E. Bowlt, The Siluer Age 716-117. 79~aruskinf Dflning Russia Musically 400-401. Taruskin writes, "Not only these biographical circumstances but also many detailed and ideosyncratic ideological affinities identi+ Lev Karsavin as a thinker whose proto-Eurasianist 'ideocratic' impact on Stravinsky came early I11 enough to have affected both the conception [ 9 2 and realization of Suadebkn."

time Stravinsky employed Russian sectarian verse. In 1908 he composed "Mystic Song of the Ancient Russian Flagellants" (Khlystovskaia) based on one of Sergei Gorodetsky's poems from his collection fr. He used sectarian a' music and song in the final chorus of Khooanshchina (1913), in a song, "Sektantskaia" (1919) and in an incomplete work, " K h i y ~ t . " ~ ~ According to
Tar uskin:

Balmont removed most of the overt religious content from ["The Dove"], thus Stravinsky could treat it as a simple, pretty lyric. . . . The poem's relative "neutrality" was the result of its early appearance in Balmont's book, which, Like the radeniye [ecstatic ritual] itself, gradually gathered momentum toward a blazing "vision of the end of the world and eternal gl0ry."~1 He continues that the poem Zoezdoliki, "a masterpiece of eschatological imagery. . . inspired by and patterned on the apocalyptic songs of . . . [the]

skoptsy," was appealing not because of its esoteric subtext but because "it
managed to h e this lurid sectarian vision with the long-standing tradition of Promethean 'fire poetry' that had always been a hallmark of Russian Symbolism."82 I this analysis Taruskin arbitrarily d e s out the possibility n that S t r a v h k y had anv interest in the esoteric aspects of these songs; he concludes that it was simply the case that the songs were widely popular and lyrically appealing to numerous composers. Taruskin brings together important information in his discussion of Bal'mont; he shows the textual relationship of Bal'mont's poem to khlyst songs published in 1861, and he identifies the source of Bal'mont's poems that Stravinsky probably used: twenty-one poems from the forthcoming

socraft, ed., Straninsky. Selected Correspondence 1: 421-422. $l~arus Straoinsky 787. kin, 82~aruskin, Straoinsky 789.

volume Zelenyi uertograd were published in the September 1907 issue of Vesy, which Taruskin himself recognizes as the chief organ of the Russian Symbolist press.83 Taruskin explains the "code" contained in various titles: "White Doves" was the name by which sectarians referred to one another, and especially the way they were addressed as a congregation by their prophet-evangelists. . . . The title [Zelenyi vertograd] itself was a clue, for the word omtograd was not only an archaic poet's word for garden. . . ,it was also what the "white doves" called the circle in which they whirled as the radeniye came to its dimax (from oertet', to whirl) -84 Once again Taruskin f d s to see the sigruhcance of the information he has so carefully gathered. However, if we acknowledge the context of religious revival discussed above, we can argue that these poems were popular precisely because they recreated ecstatic ritual. Gorodetsky's and Bal'mont's poems are acts of restoring the power of myth to contemporary Life. These poets reshaped ancient spiritual poeby to create art that could provide a way for the spiritually impoverished intelligentsia to r e c o ~ e c t their lost, nonto western roots.

The image of Stravinsky as somehow "aloof from avant-garde literary


circles,"85 does not stand up to the evidence; it is dearly wrong. First, as Carlson, Bowlt, and others have documented, discussions of art and religion were everywhere in pre-war St. Petersburg, in journals, newspapers, cafes,

and cabarets, and not limited to groups too long perceived as marginal to
Russian culture. While Taruskin asserts that evidence does not support the assumption that "poets, artists, and composers traveled one path, arms
83~aruskin, Sraoinsky 784. The section "Bahont and Neonationalism" is on pages 780-791. 8 4 ~ a r ukin, Stravinsky 784-785. s 85~aruskin,D@ning Russia Musically 393. Here Taruskin uses "avant-garde" in a general sense that includes theurgic symbolists.

Linked, all fully conscious of each other's activity and joyously abetting it,"86
he often fails to interpret the sigruficance of evidence that he himself has

meticulously presented. If Shavinsky were uninterested i "avant-garde" n literature, or "the theurgic strain o Russian symbolism," why would he open f a copy of Vesy, "the chief organ of the Russian SymboList pressfWg7 then and find and be inspired by Bal'mont's poems printed there? Taruskin's argument draws unnecessary boundaries that create a false f impression; he sees both the journal The World o Art and the society named for it foIlowing an aesthetic path that is neodassical, Apollonian, individualist, and formalist, a path that steers dear of the obstacles of utilitarianism
and messianism. To support his view Taruskin quotes Diaghilevfs 1899

editorial statement, "The great strength o art lies precisely i the fact that it is f n self-sufficient, self-referential, self-purposeful, and above all, free."88 Bowltfs observation concerning the graphic and decorative art i The World of Art is n

also cited as evidence of the journal's emphasis on the forms of art:


The graphic expertise i the decorative pieces of these artists n might be seen, in broader terms, as the result of their nonphilosophical approach to art; because without definite n ideological justification, their art was left to turn i on itself, to manipulate to the fullest extent its own properties of line, color, mass.89

The journal's motto, "art is free, Life is fettered," did not mean the
absence of social, religious, philosophical, and ideological programs of any

kind, as Taruskin suggests, but rather that the journal did not promote any

8 6 ~ a r ukin, Straoinsky 780. s 8 7 ~ a r ukin, Straoinsky 784. s 8 8 ~ P- Diagilev, "Slozhnye voprosy," Mir iskusstva 1-2 (1899): 52, quoted in Taruskin, . Straoinsky 442. g g ~ u o t e d Taruskin, Stravinsky 447. in

one aesthetic or philosophical theory over all others.gO The journal was deliberately eclectic. We must keep in mind that the first principle governing the aesthetic stance of The World of Arf was to promote a new Russian art in direct opposition to the realism, social program, and the lack of artistic individuality in the art of the nineteenth-century peredvizhniki. Bowlt's

f complete discussion of the World o Art aesthetic begins with this point and indudes the following tendencies: re trospectivism, integrating the arts, and a cult of forrnegl In discussing each one of these tendencies Bowlt makes

strong co~ections the ideas of the Russian symbolists. to


The retrospectivism of The World of Art was directed toward the rediscovery and appreciation of bygone cultures which were seen to offer a wholeness and harmony to a modem civilization in crisis. This induded interest in specific historical periods such as Versailles and Classical Greece, and in the culture evidenced in popular myth and in the primordial state of

man. The efforts of Ivanov, Roerich, Scriabin, and others to restore religion
to life was part of this rehospectivism. Bowlt suggests that Diaghilev's

controversial use of Vasnetsov's art in the first issue of the journal, coupled
with his use of neo-nationalist art for minor decorations, is evidence that

"Diaghdev was, consciously or unconsciously, supporting basic principles of the European and Russian Symbolists: to attain the 'essencef of reality by

penetrating to the roots of natural, organic cultures and hence to rediscover

the real force and potency of Life beneath the conventions of ~ivilization."~~

90~. Filosofov made this observation in the journal Zolotoe run0 1 (1908): 71-72, quoted in
Kharitonova 131. 91~ee Bowlt, The Silver Age 69-85. 9 2 ~ o w ~The Silver Age 71. t,

147

According to Bowlt, synthesis of the arts as a principle of The World o f Art aesthetic can be partly attributed to the widespread popularization of Wagner's ideas, and to Benois' and Diaghilev's life-long interest in his works. Bowlt connects ideas on the collective nature of Greek drama and the relation

i of Greek drama to myth, expressed in a 1899 M r iskusstva article, "Wagner's


Views on Art,"93 to those held by Bely and Ivanov. Bowlt cites RimskyKorsakov, R a h a n i n o v , Nikolai Medtner, Ciuriionis, and Scriabin as artists who experimented with synaesthesia and other possibilities of total art, Gesamtkunstwerk.94 Scriabin was not alien to Diaghilev's world of art, "To Diaghilev. . . Skriabin's exotic and mystical music meant much, witness to

w i h was his invitation to him to appear as soloist at the season of Russian hc


Bowlt also discusses the presence of Russian music in Paris in 1 9 0 7 . ~ ~ symbolist "myth-making" and "god-seeking" in works of World of Art painters and poets.

Finally, the World of Art writers and artists did exhibit a concern for
the formal properties of art that "anticipated the distinct orientation towards form, peculiar to the Russian avant-garde after 1 9 1 0 . " ~ Bowlt's description of ~ the graphic and decorative arts, quoted above, is given as an example of the "creative apotheosis" of the tendency toward emphasis on form and composition coupled with emotional restraint. This, however, did not exdude the presence of philosophy:

9 3 ~ Likhtenberger, "Vzgliady Vagnera na iskusstvo," Mir iskusstua 7-8 (1899), quoted in .

Bowlt, The Siher Age 77. 9 4 ~ o r discussion of the synaesthetic experiences of Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, see a Charles S. Myers, "Two Cases of Synaesthesia," British lournal of Psychology 7 (1914): 112-117. 9 5 ~ o w l t The Silver Age 78. , 9 6 ~ o w l tThe Silver Age 81. ,

Still, the apolitical, asocial, even aphilosophical behavior of many of the World of Art members should not allow us to apply the label "art for art's sake" as a general and exclusive description of the direction favored by all of them. Indeed, together with its advocation of Ibsen, Nietzsche, Puvis de Chavannes, Vladimir Soloviev, etc., the World of Art publicized names such as Dostoevsky, Repin, Ruskin and Tolstoi. In this way, the World of Art acted as a junction of interests rather than as the champion of a single trend. As Filosofov remarked: "The World of Art never had a definite program. . . . it was the cult of dilettantism in the good and true sense of the word."97
By 1902 symbolist art and ideas were found more firequently on the pages of

M r iskzisstna, for example, in the art of Bakst and Vrubel; in Briusov's article i
"Unwanted Truth," a programmatic declaration of Russian symbolism;98 and
in Bely's discussion of theater as religion in "The Forms of Art."

Bowlt concludes his discussion with this observation:

. . . [Dlespite its admiration of Western culture, the World of Art remained at heart a Russian phenomenon. Wibess to this was its very aspiration towards artistic synthesism-since this, in many ways, was the direct result of its members' reaction to the social and political fragmentation evident during the last years of Imperial Russia. It is a sad paradox, therefore, that the grand, synthetic Ballets Russes, which owed so much to the World of &t, should have been seen and applauded only outside Russia.99
We can concur that Stravinsky was very much influenced by his association

f with Diaghilev and the World o Art artists; although we must condude that this influence was far broader than that assumed by Taruskin.

In this chapter we have seen how perceptions of social disintegration


and the breakdown of tradition, especially following the demonstrations and revolution in 1905, fueled an already growing nostalgia for an idealized,
9 7 ~ o w l t The Silner Age 55. , 98~haritonova54. 99~owlt, The Silver Age 84-85.

149

primordial state in which all aspects of man's life formed a harmonious whole. We have also seen how the healing power of primitive, ecstatic ritual was offered as a solution to the spiritually bankrupt, fragmented life of modern man The balance between chaos and order (as well as between a l l of the polar opposites of the neo-Platonic universe) could only be achieved by embracing chaos in ecstatic ritual. The idea was widespread that art and artists, especially i their efforts to achieve a synthesis of the arts, held a n

special responsibility for bringing about the transformation of civilization.


These ideas were not confined to Ivanovfs "tower," to a rarefied "avantgarde," or to the mystical delusions of a very marginal minority; they were "hot topics'' in the cafes, cabarets, and newspapers, as well as in the journals of art, literarature, and philosophy.

We have seen how Nijinsky's and

Roerich's art is a reflection of this cultural context. Next we will t u n to Stravinsky's music and Stravinsky's own dedarations as the work progressed to find evidence that he and Roerich shared one concept for The Rite of

Spring.

Chapter N Stravinsky's Mysterium


Previous chapters of this study have looked closely at the cultural and intellectual context that influenced Velikaia zherfna i an attempt to correct n the fdse impressions that have grown up around this work. Millicent

Hodson's work corrects Stravinsky's, Diaghilev's and others' fabrications about Nijinsky's lack of musical knowledge, his insanity, and his inability to do hard work.' The restored choreography invites us to look once more at

this pagan ritual i the f l context of music, decor, and dance. It suggests the n ul power of such ritual to affirm the collective nature of primitive society and to insure that man can appease the terrifying, chaotic, elemental forces of nature by becoming one with them. Nijinsky's work reflects this cultural context: his contemporaries recognized the ecstasy and terror communicated by his choreography;2 his paintings also suggest his awareness of the delicate balance between cosmos and chaos. Evidence presented i Chapter 11 corrects the commonly held view that n Roerich contributed only ethnographic detail and a idealized view of the n past. It clarifies Roerich's commitment to healing modern man's spiritual

n crisis by promoting the return to a way of life steeped i beauty and connected
to the elements of nature and to the spiritual world, especially through ritual. Chapter III places Roerich's work in the context of religious revival in turn-

l~ee Hodson, Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace vii-xix. 2 ~ e discussion of his choreography in Chapter I, Roerikh's letter to Diaghilev in Chapter U. e

of-the-century Russian culture and offers another interpretation for this ballet's sacrificial act, commonly interpreted by western scholarship as subhuman and therefore devoid of spiritual meaning. Given the weight of Hodson's work, given a more comprehensive understanding of Roerich's spiritual purpose, and given the broad prevalence of religious revival among
the Russian intelligentsia and across popular culture, we must reexamine

Stravinsky's participation in this creation of a commanding ritual that possessed the power to transform m&d. Because Stravinsky is known for manipulating his memories, we must restrict ourselves to comments he made contemporary to his work on
Velikaiu zhertoa if we want to come closer to an understanding of his artistic intent.

Even the "fleeting vision" that came to him in 1910 as he was

finishing The Firebird was first made public twenty-one years later.3 He "saw
in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a arde, watched a

young girl dance herself to death." They were "sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring." However, the direct sources we do have as evidence of

Stravinsky's concept of the ballet plus the circumstantial evidence of h s attraction to the mythographic, ritualistic poetry of Gorodetsky and Bal'mont, discussed in Chapter Kt, will be shown to support rather than contradict the idea that Stravinsky shared Roerich's vision. After a discussion of this

evidence, I will turn to the music itself, where analysis reveals Stravinsky's

3~his well-known version is from Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1903-1934) 31. Stravinsky told a somewhat different version to his biographer, Andre Schaeffner in 1931. "A ballet unfolded, consisting of nothing but a young maiden dancing to the point of exhaustion before a group of old men of fabulous age, dried out practically to the point of petrifaction."See Andrti Schaefher, Stmwinsky (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1931)35, quoted in Taruskin, Strauinsky 862.

expression of the synthesis of chaos and cosmos in ecstatic ritual that culminates with the union of all opposing forces. Stravinsky communicates his vision of Vesnn soiashchennaza in a letter to Nikolai Findeizen, dated December 15,1912.
In a few meetings with Roerich we worked out the libretto, which, roughly, takes the foliowing form:

"The first part, which bears the name 'The Kiss of the Earth,' is made up of ancient Slavonic rituals-the joy of spring. The
orchestral introduction is a swarm of spring pipes; later, after the curtain rises, there are auguries, khorovod rituals, a game of l abduction, a khorovod game of rival c1ar.s- Al of this is interrupted by the procession of the 'Oldest-and-Wisest,' the elder who kisses the earth. The first part ends with a wild dancing-out of the earth, the people intoxicated with spring.

" n the second part, at night, the maidens perform secret rituals I on a sacred h l . One of the maidens is doomed by fate to be il sacrificed. She enters the stone labyrinth from which there is no return; all the remaining maidens glorify the chosen one with a tempestuous, aggressive dance. Then the elders enter. The doomed one, left alone face to face with the elders, dances her final 'Sacred dancef - the Exalted Sacrifice. These last words are in fact the name of the second part The elders are witnesses to her final dance, which ends in the death of the doomed one."
Throughout the whole composition, through lapidary rhythms, I give the listener a sense of the people's closeness to the earth, of the commonality of their lives with the earth. The whole thing must be expressed in dance from the beginning to the end-not one measure is given to pantomime.4

In this summary there are three points of particular interest. First, the
"dancing-out of the earth" (oypliasyvanie zmli) is a neologism that suggests invocation by means of dance, a dancing forth. Translation of this title has been problematic; it has been rendered as a "stomping dance upon the
(~'iachkova 470. Vesna miushchennaia is the Russian translation of Le Sacre du Printemps.

153

earthfW5 the "wearing out of the earthfM6 an untranslatable neologism as as denoting the stamping nature of the dance,7 and "The Dance Overcoming the

Earth?

The emphasis on stomping has obscured the relationship of humans

to the earth that both Roerich and Stravinsky had in mind. Stravinskyfs words at the end of the letter clarify this relationship and his own purpose, "I give the listener a sense of the people's closeness to the earth, of the commonality of their lives with the earth." These words refer to a

relationship enriched by the ritual bestowing of a kiss upon the earth, followed by a celebratory, incantatory, intoxicated dance, and by the "lapidary rhythms" used throughout the music and dance. Second, the "stone labyrinth" is present in the ballet on many levels, although there is no such labyrinth on the stage in the literal sense. The image refers to the Chosen One's destiny, which is inescapable and prede-

n termined by the conventions of pagan society. I addition, Nijinsky's choreography for "Mystic Circles of the Maidens" (Act II, Scene 1 influenced by ) ' Roerich's ornamental designs on the costumes, is based on square maze patterns and "labyrinthine wanderings" in a circular form. Indeed, it is one maiden's failure to execute the intricate pattern of the labyrinth that sets her apart as the Chosen One? Stravinsky makes another reference to this

labyrinth in comments published on the day of the premike, "[the young girls] trace out with their formations the snares within which the Chosen One

5~aruskin,Straninsky 874. 6 ~ o a n n aHubbs, " W E RITE OF SPRING: Folklore, Woman, and the Ballets Russes," Unpublished manuscript. '~aruskin, "The Rite Revisited" 189. I)craft, "The Rite o Spring: Genesis of a Masterpiece" 31. f 9 ~ o d s o nNijinsky's Crime Against Grace xxv i, 130-137. ,

will be dosed at the end and from which she will be unable to escape-"l0 The

stones of the "labyrinth" echo Roerich's sacred and "enchanted stones," the "sacred signs" that preserve past memories and point the way to oneness with the spirit The boulder that occupies the center of Roerich's backdrop evokes his incantation, "Know the stone. Presenre the stone. . . ."I1 Shavinsky's final words reflect the desire that the ballet be an actual ritual rather than performed as some kind of dramatic spectacle for an audience; "The whole thing must be expressed in dance from the beginning to the end-not one measure is given to pantomime."

This is consistent

with the contemporary view of theater as temple, for example as Benois

described it in "A Conversation about Ballel"


A selection of artists [dancers] creates a theater, setting apart these priests from the masses of the devout. From the very moment of this selection a temple and liturgical service are created. The priests continue to delight in their own actions. . . but at the same time they are lifted and carried by a particular mood. . . that results from the prayerful ecstasy of the entire audience.12

Collectivity is achieved at a l l levels.


A second source o direct evidence is contained in a n interview f

published in St. Petersbug in September 1912 in which Stravinsky states: I have completed a rnysterium called "Le Sacre du Printemps" ("Sacred Spring") . . . It has practically no plot; rather it is an outline of dances or ritual action in dance [fan tseoal'noe deisfoo]. How do I envision contemporary dassical ballet? In general I favor the so-called choreodrarna which must serve as a type of contemporary ballet.13 Stravinsky, "Ce que j'ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre du Printemps," Montjoie! I/8 29 May 1913: 1, quoted in Bullard 3: 6, English translation in 2: 8 . ll~erikh, "Zaldiatie," Tmety 18. The full incantation is quoted in Chapter 11. 12~enois, "Beseda o balete" 109. Dvinskii W.M. Berrnan], "U Igoria Stravinskogo," Binheuye vedomosti 25 Sept. 1912: 5, quoted in Krasovskaia 1:432.
'OI~OK

Why does Stravinsky choose to call this work a mysterium rather than simply "a ballet?" He is aware of the theurgic nature of the ritual he has envisioned with Roerich; in the intellectual context of Russia the term "mysterium" is a c~~unonplace, a anomaly. Stravinsky also supports not n
the tendency i ballet toward mass action of the entire corps de ballet, but n there is more to this than a different use of dancers. Stravinsky undoubtedly

understands the place of choreodrama i depicting the idealized past society n

i which the future of the individual is insured only by his becoming one n
with everything that exists outside himself. "tantseval'noe Further, the words

deistvo" (ritual action in dance) suggest Stravinsky's

awareness of the ballet as a act of worship i the same sense that classical n n

Greek drama was religious ritual. These words would have additional significance for Stravinsky's Russian contemporaries; the somewhat archaic word deistno connotes the performance of ritual worship, as i Dionisooo n deistoo, a term Ivanov frequently used i his discussions of dionysian ecstatic n ritual. In Stravinsky's sketchbook the word deisfuo is also used i the title of n the ritual dance of the elders, "Deist zto Startsev-Cheloaech'ikh Praottsev. "I
The third source of evidence, the notorious letter "Ce que j'ai voulu

exprimer dans Le Sane du Printmps," published i the May 29, 1913 issue of n Monfjoie! in Paris, is one which Stravinsky first disavowed within a week of
its publication, although it is dear horn contemporary documents that he did

indeed write it.15 It wl be helpful to quote the entire letter: il


--

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring Sketches, 1911-1913 (London, 1969). t5~travinsky's corrections to the Russian translation which appeared in the journal Muzyka in August 2913 reveal changes that are matters of word choice more than substance. Ln letters to Derzhanovsky, editor of Muzyh, Stravinsky refers to "my letter to Montjoie!" He adds, "The style of this letter disturbs me a great deal. It war written practically on the r n . " See Craft, u.. Strauinsky: Selected Correspondence 154-56. See also Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft,
14&or

In the last few years the Parisian public has kindly tendered a warm welcome to my Oiseau de Feu and Petrouchka. My friends have noticed the evolution of the animating conception which progresses from the fantastical fable in the first of these works to the fully human generalization in the second. I am afraid that Le Sacre, in which I make use neither of fairy tales nor of the themes of human sadness and joy, but in which I endeavor to portray a somewhat larger abstraction, may mislead those who have, thus far, shown me such sympathetic appreciation. I Le Same du Printonps I have desired to express the sublime n growth of nature which renews itself: the total Panic ascent of the universal sap.
In the Prelude before the curtain rises, I have entrusted to my orchestra [the expression ofj that great fear w i h weighs down hc every living spirit as it confronts things in their potentiality, the "thing in itself" which can grow, can develop itself indefinitely. A frail sound of the flute captures that capacity in its potentiality, which then spreads through the whole orchestra. It is that obscure and immense feeling shared by all things at the moment when nature renews her forms; and it is the vague and profound anxiety of a universal puberty. I have sought to evoke this in the orchestration and in the interplay of melodies. The entire prelude is based upon a steady unchanging "mezzo forte." The melody develops from this along a horizontal line, and the dynamics of it grow and diminish only through the changing masses of instruments, through the intense dynamism of the orchestra and not through the melodic curve itself. As a result I have in treating this melody, avoided the overevocative strings, representative of the human voice with their crescendi and diminuendi, and I have cast in the foreground the

Straninsky in Pictures and Documents 522-526, which includes Edward Hill's 1916 English
translation. See also Bullard 1: 133-135,2: 4-9,3: 3-6. Stravinsky recants this letter, not because he wrote something "wrong" about his creation, but more likely because he was unsure of Diaghilev's willingness to continue supporting the ballet. It was rumored that Diaghilev wanted to cut performances from both the Paris and London runs, and that he wanted to cut parts of the performance in London. Stravinsky undoubtedly wanted to moderate his own comments on the ballet, since the more conservative Diaghilev was worried at the time about box office revenues. Stravinsky was particularly vulnerable at this time; he contracted typhus and spent five weeks out of circulation from June3 to mid-July, 1913. See Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents 100. 514-518.

woodwinds, more dry, more distinct, less rich in facile expression, and for that very reason, more moving in my view. In short I wanted to express in the Prelude the Panic awe of nature, of the beauty which arises, a holy terror of the midday sun, a sort of cry of Pan. The musical material itself swells, grows large and bursts foIth. Every instrument is like a new bud which sprouts upon the bark of a venerable old tree; it is a part of a larger whole. And the whole orchestra, all the ensemble, should sigrufy the birth of Spring.

In the first act, some young people are seen with an old, a very old woman; no one knows her age nor the century in which she learned the secrets of nature or taught her sons prophecy. She runs, bent over the earth, half-woman, half-beast. The young men beside the girls represent the auguries of spring who, standing in place, beat out with their steps the rhythm of Spring, the beating pulse of Spring. During this time the young girls come from the river. They form a crown which mixes with the uown of the boys. These are, then, the steps of those beings already formed; their sex is unique and double, like that of a tree. They mix but in their rhythms one can sense the dashing of groups which are being shaped. Indeed they divide to the left and to the right. This is the new form which emerges, a synthesis of the rhythms; and the thing thus formed produces a new rhythm. The groups separate and begin to battle; spokesmen run from one group to the other and quarrel among themselves. This signifies the definition of different forces through struggle, that is to say, through the game. But presently we hear the approach of a procession. It is the Saint who arrives, the Sage, the High Priest, the eldest of the clan. A great shudder of fear passes through the crowd. And the Sage, stretched out on his belly, with his arms and legs extended, blesses the earth, becoming himself one with the soil. His benediction acts as a signal to [the start ofl a rhythmic outpouring. Everyone covers his head and runs in spirals; [people] gush out ceaselessly in great numbers like the new h energies of nature. It is t e Dance of the Earth.
The second a d begins with a mysterious game of the young girls. At first a musicai prelude is heard based upon the mysterious change which accompanies the dance of the maidens. They trace out with their formations the snares within

which the Chosen One will be dosed at the end and from which she will be unable to escape. The Chosen One is she whom S p ~ must consecrate, who must render to the Spring the force g which il2r youth has taken from him. The young maidens dance a kind of glorification around the Chosen One. Then comes the purification of the ground and the evocation of the ancestors. The ancestors cluster around the Chosen One as she begins the Sacrificial Dance. When she is at the point of falling in exhaustion the ancestors see this and, creeping around her like greedy monsters so that she will not touch the earth as she falls, they lift her high in the air and offer her to the sky. In these essential rhythms the annual cycle of the forces which are renewed and decayed in the bosom of nature is portrayed.

And I am happy to have found for this work of faith M. Nijinsky, the ideal choreographic collaborator, and M. Roerich, the creator of the pictorial atmosphere.16 Sh.avinsky devotes five paragraphs to the brief Prelude to establish the context for the work which follows. He is describing the abyss itself, that terrifying, yet essential dement of primitive man's reLigious experience from
which order (here in the forE of beauty) will emerge. ". . . I have entrusted to

my orchestra [the expression 04 that great fear which weighs down every living spirit as it confronts things in their potentiality, the 'thing in itself'
which can grow, can develop itself indefinitely." Phrases Stravinsky uses in

this section, "the Panic awe of nature," "a holy terror of the midday sun, a sort of u y of Pan," directly evoke Ivanov's image of the abyss discussed in the previous chapter: There is ecstasy in battle, And on the edge of the glowing abyss. . . Everything, everything that threatens destruction conceals from the mortal heart
16~travinskyI que i'ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre du Printemps," quoted in Bullard 2: 5-9. "Ce Bullard's translation varies only slightly from Edward Hill's. The bracketed words are BuIlardfs.

inexplicable delightsPerhaps a pledge of immortality.l7 At several points in this text Stravinsky refers to the unity or collectivity that is achieved through the music, the orchestration, the choreography, and the ritual itselk Every instrument is like a new bud which sprouts upon the bark of a venerable old tree; it is a part of a larger whole. And the whole orchestra, all the ensemble, should sigrufy the birth of SD&E.

In the games of the first act groups are formed and re-formed, and, following
the Sage's "becoming one himself with the soil," all are united in the frenzied dancing-forth of the earth. The formation of something new out of the dash of opposites is the founding principle of the choreography and the music, just as it is the nature of the ritual itseLf:

. . . They mix but i their rhythms one can sense the dashing of n
groups which are being shaped. Indeed they divide to the left This is the new form which emerges, a synthesis of the rhythms; and the thing thus formed produces a new rhythm.

and to the right.

I have shown that such synthesis or reconciliation of opposites was a


common image i turn-of-the-century Russian thought, citing examples n

from work of both Solov'ev and Ivanov. Roerich, too, described the role of

synthesis i producing beauty, and it is no surprise that he called upon the n


vocabulary of music to best express his idea. We recall his essay "K prirude"

i which he offers synthesis as a solution to the dash of man-made, urban n


beauty with the beauty of nature:

I7v.Ivanov, "Religiia" 6: 196.

Just as beautiful contrasting tones do not annihilate one another, but give forth a strong chord, so, in their opposition, urban beauty and the beauty of nature go hand in hand, intensifying the mutual impression, creating a strong mediant, the third note through which the beauty of "the mysterious" resounds.'g Stravhsky's description o the Chosen One's role underscores the ecstatic f union accomplished by the ritual sacrifice; "The Chosen One is she whom Spring must consecrate, who must render to the Spring the force w i h her hc youth has taken from him."
As a surrogate for the entire community she

dies in order to insure the promise of life in the form of Spring. Death precedes Life, life and death are one. Echoes of Roerich's deep spiritualism resonate in Stravinsky's summary. First, this ancient ritual is made ecumenical by the titles

Stravinsky gives to the elder who blesses the earth: "the Saint," "the Sage, the
High Priest, the eldest of the clan." This resembles Roerich's striving for the

universal through the synthesis of the best examples of beauty and piety. Second, future harmony and prosperity depend on deep connections to the past, a synthesis of the past and present, "In the first act, some young people

are seen with an old, a very old woman; no one knows her age nor the
century in which she learned the secrets of nature or taught her sons prophecy." It is the eldest of the dan who performs the ritual kiss that brings about the ecstatic union of man with the earth, and finally it is the ancestors
(in Russian pmottsy, "forefathers," and startsy, elder^"'^) who, with their

Lifting the Chosen One high in the air, complete the clan's ritual union of the
Earth and Sky.

18~erikh, prirode," N.K.Rerikh. Claz dobyi 73-74. "K 19stravinsky, The Rite of Spring Sketches.

The next short paragraph captures the essence of this and every ecstatic ritual, "In these essential rhythms the annual cyde of the forces which are renewed and decayed in the bosom of nature is portrayed." Essential rhythms

n are the powerful elements of nature, the stikhiia, conveyed i Strrtvirsky's

changing and dashing rhythms, i the conbapuntal rhythms of the dance, n


and i the massive presence of Roerich's stone and sky. n

Man is not

dehumanized by adopting the elemental rhythms; instead, he is able to find order and preserve his humanity by embracing and becoming one with the chaotic forces which surround him. Even Stravinsky's language reflects the synthesis he describes; words denoting chaos (forces, essential, decayed) become attached to words denoting the cosmic (cycle, rhythms, renewed)?' Stravinsky concludes his letter with a brief reference to Le Sacre dzi Printemps as a "work of faith," a remark that could be easily ignored by readers not familiar with the intense religious revival that had occupied Russian minds for more than a decade, and a remark that is totally unnecessary to those familiar with the Russian intellectual dimate, for they have already recognized Stravinsky's many allusions. Analyses of Stravinsky's music support the conclusion that Vesna soiashchennaia is ecstatic ritual, written and performed with the intent to

lead all who participated-audience,

orchestra, and dancers alike-to

revelation of the Divine Unity through ecstasy. Boris Asaf'ev, a product of

the same intellectual climate in Russia, couched his commentary on


Stravinsky's music in the same religious context that I have put forth in this

2 0 " ~ ecycle annuel des forces qui renaissent et qui retombent dans le giron de la nature est

accompli, dans ces rythmes essentiels." Stravinsky, "Ce que j'ai voulu," quoted in Bullard 3: 6.

study. Asaf'ev's work on Stravinsky was largely ignored by the West because it ~nderestimatedthe composer's ability to adapt to his new homeland. I n
1929 AsaYev foresaw a crisis for Stravinsky, the "urban western European

composer" who relied on Russian content, because "the essence of this content, industrialized by [Stravinsky, was] what secured and maintained his position as the darLing of the European snobs;" Asaf'ev adds that Stravinsky may have exhausted the epoch and the musical culture.21 Ironically Asafev's work was ignored in The Soviet Union as well, at least u t l Stravinsky ni returned for a concert tour in 1962, when the volume was re-issued. Today Asaf'ev's work is recognized as insightful; for example, the following observations made by Asaf'ev recognize aspects of Stravinskyfs stylistic development that Taruskin later analyzes in very great detail: Stravinsky had made himself a master of native Russian art, not just a dever stylist who knows how to conceal quotations, not just a native ethnographer who is unable to assimilate materials and make artistic use of them, but a master of the speech of Russian. In this sense Stravinsky had become the Pushkin22 of Russian music (6).

For Stravinsky. . . Russian folk music was not just something to which he could apply principles of development that were alien
to the material itself. . . the fofk music actually became a part of his organically developing language. His taste and technical facility made it unnatural for him to foist onto this music characteristics that were a i n to it--on the contrary: by letting le the folk art reveal its own qualities, vitality, and forms, he found the key to its proper artistic- transmutationn(51).

2 1 ~ o r i Asaf'yev [Igor Glebov], A Book About Stmuinsky, trans. Richard F. French (1929; Ann s Arbor: ClMI Research P, 1982) 2. Further references to A Book About Strauinsky in this chapter will be given in the text. 22~lexanderPushkin (1799-1837) was instrumental in legitimizing Russian as a literary language, thus freeing Russian literary culture from French dominance.

Perhaps the highest recommendation for AsaPevfs work is Stravinsky's own response, made sometime in the 1960s; he filled the margins of his copy with protests and dismissals.23 This is no surprise, for A s a f ' i ~ ' ~ analysis is based on images similar to those that Stravinsky himself used in his letter to Montjoie!, which the composer repeatedly disavowed. This does not imply that Asaf'ev had Montjoie! in hand as he worked. Rather, it is evidence of

the widespread presence of these ideas in pre-Revolutionary Russia.


AsaYev communicates his musical analysis primarily in verbal images alongside quotations from the score. He is quite conscious of his method; in his analysis of The Ritual Action of the Ancestors in the second act he writes:

'The color again becomes dark, sinister, suggesting otherworldly apparitions. . . . Important and essential elements of Stravinsky's music are terrifying and unusual sounds that can be described by such terms as "winds of autumn," "breaths of cold air," "muffled crashes," "slippery, noiseless rustlings," "muted peals," "the twinklings of silent flames." . . . I might have found other terms more exact, but the most that I want to point out is that awareness of such areas of sounds, whatever may be its biological or psycho-physiological basis, lends an added dimension to our perception of music. . . . My use of the term "otherworldly apparitions," for example, was an attempt to make the listener's ear aware of the undercurrent of sound in silence, much as the trained eye might see details of a landscape that would appear barren to the uninitiated (46-47).
Asaf'ev, l k Shavinsky, uses the image of growth to describe the Prelude, ie "The 'form' of this introduction to Sacre must be understood as a musical texture in process of growth. The sensation of growth is achieved. . . by two

means: by varying the densities of the texture, and by introducing new


melodies as offshoots of the old" (31). Asaf'ev praises the transition
23~ichard French discusses Stravinsky's response in his preface to A Book About Strminsky.

Stravinsky makes with the change in instrumentation at the end of the Prelude, "The trill of the clarinet and the violin motive (from the next dance) imply an impending change: the symphony of nature's vernal regeneration gives way to human revelry, dance, play. The transition is masterful" (32). Stravinsky commented on this instrumentation in Montjoie!.
In describing The Dance of the Rival Cities, Asaf'ev underscores the

dashing of groups:
The basic dynamic presence of this dance is the conflict between the fast tempo and the weight of the massive layers of sound, in which the tempo i s always trying to overcome the inertia of the sounds. The element of struggle is also conveyed by the collisions of dissonant sonorities. . . The rest of the dance consists of variations, juxtapositions, and collisions of the diatonic and altered versions of this basic material. Through the harshness and severity of the confrontations, Stravinsky conveys the impression of elemental force, concentrated in itself and not yet differentiated into the fluency, elasticity, and suppleness of human movement (36). Asaf'ev's image of The Adoration of the Earth and The Dance of the Earth reveals the same closeness of people to the earth that Stravinsky emphasized
in his letter to Findeizen, Asaf'ev writes:

The movements [of the first act] provide a sequence of contrasting rhythms, melodies, and tempi. . . the texture gradually becomes fuller and more encumbered. Indeed, it is by the very cumbersomeness of the materials that Stravinsky is able to evoke an image of pagan life in distant antiquity, of man inseparable from and dependent on the earth that nourishes him. . . . Arranged as it is in massive, hard complexes, the material makes its heaviness increasingly felt, so that one is even led to wonder what colossal forces must be expended merely to propel the sounds.

heavy mass quivers-and begins the [ t e m p e s t u ~ u s ] ~ ~ Dance of the Earth, which is the final action of the first part. This dance is of elemental primitiveness and solidity: there are no melodic forrnations, only a cumbrous figuration suspended naked over a whole-tone bass. It is not melody that reigns here, but ponderous rhythms. . . . [This dance is] a heavy mass that not only makes no attempt to free itself from the earth, but actually lusts to blend with earth, to become earth itself. This is the orgy of earth-worship, the Spring dance of hope, the trampling of the grain (39). Asaf'evfs analysis of the Introduction to the second part notes the change of atmosphere from human revelry, dance, and play to the dark side of human life, what we recognize as Ivanov's abyss:
The music of Part Two is not so much concerned with the externals of primitive Slavic man's attitude toward nature, as it is with his subconscious, emotional attitudes: the sense of mystery, horror, and panic in the face of the unknown to w i h hc he has for so long made so many sacrifices as propitiation. . . . The atmosphere is one of fumbling, groping, as if it were snow, or semi-darkness. Stravinsky, whose music embodies to a masterful degree human gestures and bodily movements, shows himself here a sensitive poet and symphonist in the realm of the subconscious, that area of feeling where the palpable and the tangible disappear, and where man, in a gloomy, shadowed world devoid of objects, moves timidly and with the caution of uncertainty and fear (40-41). In the Mysterious Cirdes of the Adolescents Asaf'ev notices what Stravinsky

. . . The

described as the "stone labyrinth." "Minus the last measure, the episode as a whole conveys the magic, the fascination, and the web of panic from which
the maidens cannot escape" (43).

Asaf'evfs familiarity with the purpose of ecstatic ritual is apparent in his analysis of the final Sacrificial Dance:

24~saf'evuses the word "buinoe" which can be translated as "violent" as French does, but it has the connotation of "wild," "turbulent," "tempestuous," rather than "bloody."

The exaltation and fanatic enthusiasm of this dance . . . are marvelously expressive of the ecstasy and nervous animation of any individual whose fate turns on the accomplishment of a great deed, even at the risk of life itself. Even if we reject the entire set of archaic premises on which Sucre is based, two themes remain: personal sacrifice, and the impossibility of h separating personal life from t e Life of the masses. These two ideas are the ineluctable conclusion of the whole sequence of dances and events. The music itself, quite apart from the props, costumes, or rites, cornmunicates this also (49-50). I hope I have gone sufficiently into detail to show the inner logic and order of the conception of the dance. Only if one refuses to examine the new means of expression can one speak of them as chaotic and confused. As a finale, the dance brings the second part and indeed t e whole action to its highest h intensity. It is also the logical conclusion of the symphonic plan of the whole, and it conveys in sound the ultimate overcoming of the "feeling of panic" through sacrifice, exaltation, ecstasy (57).
It is dear to Asaf'ev that Stravinsky's music most effectively portrays man's

ritual embrace of chaos as a way of insuring order or cosmos.


Other musical analyses of The Rite of Spring support the context of ecstatic ritual that Stravinsky himself described. For example, ScbJoezer writes of the synthesis of individual instruments into a unified whole:

I the Sacre the composer temporarily re-establishes timbre as a n self-sufficient element. . . again handling the orchestra not as an ensemble of different elements, . . . but as a single, multiregistered instrument open to exploitation in order to obtain specific, independent effects.25

I discussing the "Formal, Real, and Problematic Unity" of this work, Andre n
Boucourechliev articulates a feature of the music that perhaps played the greatest role in transforming the audience into participants in the ritual:

2 S ~ o r ide Schloezer quoted i Andre Boucourechliev, Straoinsky, trans. Martin Cooper (New s n York: HoIrnes & Meier, 1987) 71.

As far as form is concerned, the Sacre is a discontinuous, compartmentalized work. . . . How, then, does Stravinsky achieve that astonishing unity of which the listener is immediately aware? . . . The unity of the Sacre is, therefore, to be sought neither in existing or traceable formal schemes nor in any theory of formal organization, but in persistent characteristics of style and technique that, as it were, impregnate the multifaceted and heterogeneous elements of the work. The listener has therefore a task to perform, which is fundamental-a rewarding activity inseparable from all musical Listening worthy of the name, but which in the case of the Sacre, is one of the main unifying agents, inasmuch as the score exhibits this unity only i a n problematic form. Instead of explicit or conventional formal schemes the score provides the listener with the material necessary (though not in itself sufficient) for a creative participation of this kmd.26

Taruskin's study of The Rife of Spring is primariiy comprised of his


meticulous collection of Stravinsky's musical sources from both folk and art music traditions plus his thorough analysis of the composer's transformation of those sources into a new musical language. From this formal framework he sees what he calls "Stravinsky's antisymphonic zgenda," or the "apparent

I subversion" of the German tradition in Russian art r n ~ s i c . 2 ~ have argued


f elsewhere that while it is dear that subversion may have been the result o
Stravinsky's music, there is no evidence that it was his primary goal. While Taruskin allows the model of subversion to lead h m into declaring that the i ballet is "Scythian," his musical analysis can and does support the concepts set forth by Stravinsky in the sources cited above. First, Stravinsky's transformation of the style, rhythms, and harmonies of his source material into something totally new, but still recognizable to

both artists and his Russian contemporaries, is the very resurrection of


26~oucourechliev 72-73.
2 7 ~ m skin, Straoinsky 955. a

ancient ritual engaged in by Roerich, Gorodetsky, Bal'mont, Ivanov and many others. Speaking of the elemental force of the rhythms of this r.ew ritual, Taruskin notes that Stravinsky was not alone in attempting to unleash these forces, "but all alone in the r e a l i z a t i ~ n . " ~ ~ Taruskin is correct that Stravinskyfs work had a singular impact, although in many ways it was an impact dictated more by the circumstances of the premiere and French reception than by Stravinsky's and Roerich's intentions. Second, Taruskin's analysis offers another explanation for the sense of unity that is perceived in spite of the score's lack of formal unity. He identifies a "tetrachordal partition" or "source chord" that:
i c in e i tc a ~ - - - -- -- h r t tho r l n s e s t c,h&r6"= ~ ~ 3 f fi unifier of this tonally enigmatic score. And such a nominee is indeed an analytical necessity; for while no obvious surface harmony, no theme, no progression, no key can be said to unify The Rite over its entire span, its tonal coherence and integrity are impressively evident to the naivest ear?
---c
u.
U W

Taruskin also recognizes the effect of Stravinsky's rhythms: The rhythmic novelties i The Kzte are of two distinct types. n One is the hypnotic type: the "immobile" ostinaro, sometimes quite literally hypnotic, as when the Elders charm the Choseit. One to perform her dance of death. That is what their Ritual Action is all about, and that is why . . . the beat-rhythm of this dance is the most rigid and relentless, and the most undifferentiated as to stress . . . The other is the "invincible and elemental" kind, and it was truly an innovation-for Western art music, that is; in Russian rm folklore it had been a fixture f o time immemorial.30 Taruskin relates this rhythm to the rhythm of the elements, the chaotic
stikhiia ever present in the world of ancient man.

28~aruskin, Stmuinsky 958.


2 9 ~ a m s k i nStrnvinsky 939. , 3 0 ~ a r ukin, Stravinsky 958-959. s

Taruskin's conclusion about The Rite o Spring, while framed f primarily in the history and language of music, comes dose to the line of thought he has studiously ignored throughout his research; "The Rite, Russian as no music before it had ever been, made the Russian universal-

w i h is to say, it Russianized the musical universe-and hc

thus transcended

~ the R u ~ s i a n . " ~AsaPev alluded to the same accomplishment when he daimed that "Stravinsky had become the Pushkin of Russian Had

not Stravinsky voiced "the word," anticipated by Dostoevsky decades before?

. . . the solution to Europe's anguish is to be found in the panhuman and all-unifying Russian soul, to enfold all our brethren within it with brotherly love, and at last, perhaps to utter the ultimate word of great, general harmony, ultimate bra&cr+J --nrA ~f all tribes. . - 3 3
ULLuLU

Stravinsky came close to realizing this universal through V e s n n

soiashchennaia. It is a great loss that the original was never performed in


Russia where it could have been received by an audience that would have recognized it for what it was. Separated from its religious contents, removed from theaters-become-temples, Stravinsky's work achieved a different kind of universalism, one defined in musical terms. This study has corrected misconceptions in western scholarship about

Vesna saiashchennnia. Evidence demonstrates that it was conceived and


executed as ritual worship in dance, a restoration of the power of primitive

man's art and religion used then and now to one end-to

insure and

preserve harmony through ritualistic entry into disharmony. Evidence also reveals that Stravinsky, Roerich, and Nijinsky shared a common vision of
31~arus Struvinsky 965. kin, 32~saf'ev 6.

33~ostoevsky 1294.

170

this ballet; the observations of their contemporaries, their own commentaries, and the art each one contributed to the project all attest to the

hs presence of this vision in the ballet as it was performed on May 29, 1913. T i
study has also established that similar endeavors were commonplace i n Russia at that time. Vesna soiashchmnaia was not unique in its concept, nor can it be solely explained as an anomaly of Stravinsky's genius. The impulse to restore spiritual life i Russia, combined with the conviction that Russians n had a messianic calling to rescue modern man from the dominance of spiritually impoverished rationalism, had fueled intellectual and artistic endeavors since the 1880s and would continue to do so for at least another decade.

Conclusion

At the turn of the twentieth century European artists and intellectuals responded to the fragmentation they acutely felt in their own lives and observed in their environment with this particular question: Whnt is real?

The worlds of empirical science, rationalist philosophy, and realist art and
literature were being replaced by theoretical physics and analytical psychology, philosophical inquiry into non-rational modes of cognition, and the appearance of abstract and modernist art, x-rays, and the cinema. Non-

objective, spiritual reality was felt to be more real than material reality. Analysis, dassification, and naturalistic representation were rejected as artists and thinkers followed paths that paralleled Viacheslav Ivanov's a realibus ad

realiora,
k t

Riissia this,

qursliun was

addressed with parricuiar seriousness.

Russians' traditional experience with non-rational ways of knowing through mysticism and the veneration of icons, plus their strong identification with
the East, the antithesis of the rational West, made them more confident in

t e r ability to find a solution. When open discussion was censored, Russians hi


had commonly turned to art, especially painting and the literary arts i the n

nineteenth century, as a platform for political and philosophical argument

and propaganda for social reform. At the turn of the century writers and
artists were even more convinced that art could and should become a powerful solution to the problems facing mankind. Philosophers, poets,

painters, and composers offered their answers, often using each other's media

172

as they worked to create a Grand Synthesis of science, religion, the senses, and aesthetic consciousness. They valued and promoted the artist's ability to bring expression to non-objective, spiritual reality. By separating itself from the conventions of realism, art was more able to express the inner spiritual
h t h s that all were seeking to renew in their Lives. By approaching art as one

would approach an icon, that is without the tools of analysis and dassification, but open to the message in the art, the viewer could experience an intellectual transformation. Abstract painting was closely connected to the spiritual in the first decade of its development. Theosophical works that explored the mysticism of form and color and their use in expressing "inner truth" were widely circulated among avant-garde artists- It is critical that scholars not lose sight
of this essential component of the creative imp-dso I 1912 in Munich the n

abstract painter Vasilii Kandinsky published a treatise iiber das Geisiige i dm n

Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) that is a representative description of


what artists were now trying to achieve in their art. Kandinsky and others considered art a form of religious action; artists could give material torm to their own comprehension of the "essential." The spiritual could be expressed

in art that renounced all considerations of external form, including


naturalism on the one hand, and the arbitrary use of color and form in pure
patterning on the other.

Whether or not Stravinsky and Roerich were acquainted with


Kandinskyrs ideas, which were widely circulated among the Russian intelligentsia, their work nevertheless seems to be exactly what Kandiwky prescribed for the new art:

In dancing as in painting we are on the threshold of the art of the future. . . . Conventional beauty must go by the board and the literary element of "story-telling" or "anecdote" must be abandoned as useless. Both arts must learn from music that hc every harmony and every discord w i h springs from the innes spirit is beautiful, but that it is essential that they should spring from the inner spirit and from that alone.

The achievement of the dance-art of the future will make possible the first ebullition of the art of spiritual harmony-the true stage-composition. The composition for the new theatre will consist of these three elements: (1) Musical movement (2) Pictorial movement (3) Physical movement and these three, properly combined, make up the spiritual movement, which is the working of the inner harmony. They will be interwoven in harmony and discord as are the two chief elements of painting, form and colour.1

Kandinsky recognized that his ideal was s t i l l in its budding stage; both artists and audiences need to learn the language of pure art. He realized that r;?drstanding the new art would be especially difficult for audiences. "To those who are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity i general indines to the outer and knows nothing of the n *nerY2 New art cannot be approached w t old expectations: ih

The speaatcz is too ready to look for a meaning in a picture-i-e., some outward connection between its various parts. Our materialistic age has produced a type of spectator or "co~oisseur," who is not content to put himself opposite a picture and let it say its own message. Instead of allowing the inner value of the picture to work, he worries himself in looking for "closeness to nature," or "temperament," or "handling," or "tonality," or "perspective," or what not. His eye
lwassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977) 51. l~andinsk~ 16.

does not probe the outer expression to arrive at the inner meaning? Kandinsky's caution to the spectator must be heeded by all scholars who investigate the arts created in this time of renewal of spiritual life. Kandinsky, Berdiaev, and others warned against the loss of the
spiritual in a r t They were critical of art forms that abandoned man in favor

of the forms and colors of the material, a tendency they observed in Cubism

and Futurism. Abstract art did move away from the spiritual, yet, in the very
brief interlude following the rejection of the conventions of rationalism, a body of art was created and offered as a solution to m n s loss of spiritual L f . a' ie It is a mistake to experience t i art with eyes and ears attuned to criteria hs

more appropriate to the art that preceded or followed; by dwelling solely on


the outer expression one cannot reach the inner meaning.

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Vita

Marilyn Meyer Hoogen

Born: September 18, 1945, in Seattle, Washington.

Education:
B.A. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, 1967

M.A. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, 1971

M S . State University College, Buffalo, New York, 1974


Ph-D. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, 1997

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