took their name from the ancient Scyths, the nomadic Iranian-speaking tribes that had left Central Asia in the eighth century bc and had ruled the steppes around the Black and Caspian seas for the next 500 years. Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals came to see the Scyths as a sort of mythical ancestor race of the eastern Slavs. In the final decades of the century archaeologists such as Zabelin and Veselovsky led huge excavations of the Scythian kurgans, the burial mounds which are scattered throughout southern Russia, the south-eastern steppe, Central Asia and Siberia, in an effort to establish a cultural link between the Scyths and the ancient Slavs. In 1897, the artist Roerich, who was a fully-trained archaeologist before he became famous for his Scythian designs for The Rite of Spring, worked with Veselovsky on the excavation of the Maikop kurgan in the Crimea. The gold and silver treasures which they excavated there can still be seen today in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.147
As a student of archaeology, Roerich had been deeply influenced by the ideas of Stasov on the Eastern origins of Russian culture. In 1897, he made plans for a series of twelve paintings on the founding of Russia in the ninth century. Only one of these paintings was ever completed - The Messenger: Tribe Has Risen against Tribe (1897), which Roerich submitted as his graduation project at the Academy -but it is a good example of the ethnographic programme which he planned to execute. Roerich checked on every minor detail of the way of life of the early Slavs by writing to Stasov. Not that much was known about the early Slavs. So there was artistic licence to extrapolate these details from the archaeology of the ancient Scyths and other Eastern tribes, on the assumption, as Stasov wrote to Roerich, that 'the ancient East means ancient Russia: the two are indivisible'.148 Asked about designs for window frames, Stasov replied, for example, that there was no record of Russian ornament before the eleventh century. He advised the artist to make friezes up from motifs found in ancient Asia and in the Near East.149
This imaginary quality was also to be found in Roerich's paintings
of the Stone Age in Russia. Roerich idealized the prehistoric world of
this Scythia cum-Rus' as a perfect realm of spiritual beauty where man
and nature lived in harmony, and life and art were one. In his essay
'Joy in Art' (1909), in which he describes the ancient Slav spring ritual
of human sacrifice upon which The Rite of Spring was based, Roerich argues that this prehistoric Russia could not be known thorugh ethnographic facts: it could only be approached through artistic intuition or religious faith. This was the spirit of his Stone Age paintings such as The Idols (1901) (plate 17), which, for all their look of archaeological authenticity, were really no more than abstract or iconic illustrations of his mystical ideals. The same was true of his designs for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. The Asiatic image of ancient Scythian Rus' was conjured up by Roerich in the set designs and costumes for The Rite of Spring and Rimsky's opera The Snow Maiden (plate 18). Set in the mythic world of Russia's Scythian past, the designs for both these works combined motifs from medieval Russian ornament with ethnographic details (such as the heavy jewellery or the Tatar-like head-dress of the village girls) to suggest the semi-Asian nature of the early Slavs. It is easy to forget that, in the controversy surrounding the first performance of The Rite of Spring, it was the Asiatic look of Roerich's costumes which was seen by many critics as the ballet's most shocking element.150
The Scythian poets were fascinated by this prehistoric realm. In their imaginations the Scyths were a symbol of the wild rebellious nature of primeval Russian man. They rejoiced in the elemental spirit ('stikhiia') of savage peasant Russia, and convinced themselves that the coming revolution, which everybody sensed in the wake of the 1905 one, would sweep away the dead weight of European civilization and establish a new culture where man and nature, art and life, were one. Blok's famous poem The Scythians (1918) was a programmatic statement of this Asiatic posturing towards the West:
You are millions, we are multitudes And multitudes and multitudes. Come fight! Yes, we are Scythians, Yes, Asiatics, a slant-eyed greedy tribe.
It was not so much an ideological rejection of the West as a threatening embrace, an appeal to Europe to join the revolution of the 'savage hordes' and renew itself through a cultural synthesis of East and West: otherwise it ran the risk of being swamped by the 'multitudes'. For
centuries, argued Blok, Russia had protected a thankless Europe from the Asiatic tribes:
