Natasha's Dance полностью

Anyone who goes to a Russian church service is bound to be impressed by the beauty of its chants and choral song. The entire liturgy is sung - the sonorous bass voice of the deacon's prayers interspersed with canticles from the choir. Orthodoxy's ban on instrumental music encouraged a remarkable development of colour and variety in vocal writing for the Church. The polyphonic harmonies of folk song were assimilated to the znamenny plainchants - so called because they were written down by special signs (znameni) instead of Western notes - which gave them their distinctive Russian sound and feel. As in Russian folk song, too, there was a constant repetition of the melody, which over several hours (the Orthodox service can be interminably long) could have the effect of inducing a trance-like state of religious ecstasy. Churches famous for their deacons and their choirs drew huge congregations - Russians being drawn to the spiritual impact of liturgical music, above all. Part of this, however, may have been explained by the fact that the Church had a monopoly on the composition of sacred music - Tchaikovsky was the first to challenge it when he wrote the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 1878 - so that it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that the public could hear sacred music in a concert hall. Rachmaninov's Vespers, or All Night Vigil (1915), was intended to be used as a part of the liturgy. The summation of Rachmaninov's religious faith, it was based on a detailed study of the ancient chants and in this sense it can

stand not simply as a work of sacred art but also as the synthesis of an entire culture of religious life.

Russians pray with their eyes open - their gaze fixed on an icon. For contemplating the icon is itself perceived as a form of prayer. The icon is a gateway to the holy sphere, not a decoration or instruction for the poor, as sacred images became in western Europe from medieval times. In contrast to the Catholics, the Orthodox confess, not to a priest, but to the icon of Christ with a priest in attendance as a spiritual guide. The icon is the focal point of the believer's religious emotion -it links him to the saints and the Holy Trinity - and for this reason it is widely seen by Russians as a sacred object in itself. Even an 'outsider' like Kireevsky, who had been a convert to the Roman Church, felt himself attracted to the icon's 'marvellous power'. As he told Herzen:

I once stood at a shrine and gazed at a wonder-working icon of the Mother of God, thinking of the childlike faith of the people praying before it; some women and infirm old men knelt, crossing themselves and bowing down to the earth. With ardent hope I gazed at the holy features, and little by little the secret of their marvellous power began to grow clear to me. Yes, this was not just a painted board - for centuries it had absorbed these passions and these hopes, the prayers of the afflicted and unhappy; it was filled with the energy of all these prayers. It had become a living organism, a meeting place between the Lord and men. Thinking of this, I looked once more at the old men, at the women and the children prostrate in the dust, and at the holy icon - and then I too saw the animated features of the Mother of God, and I saw how she looked with love and mercy at these simple folk, and I sank on my knees and meekly prayed to her.⁷

Icons came to Russia from Byzantium in the tenth century, and for the first two hundred years or so they were dominated by the Greek style. But the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century cut off Russia from Byzantium; and the monasteries, which were largely left alone and even flourished at this time, began to develop their own style. The Russian icon came to be distinguished by qualities that guided the worshipper at prayer: a simple harmony of line and colour and a captivating use of 'inverse perspective' (where lines seem to converge on a point in front of the picture) to draw the viewer into the picture