Natasha's Dance полностью

importance placed on keeping the head still and on subtle doll-like movements by the rest of the body. All these cultural forms were seen by Trubetskoi as the Russian manifestations of a distinctively Eastern inclination for schematic formulae. This 'Eastern psyche' was manifested in the Russian people's tendency to contemplation, in their fatalistic attitudes, in their love of abstract symmetry and universal laws, in their emphasis on religious ritual, and in their 'udal' or fierce bravery. According to Trubetskoi these mental attributes were not shared by the Slavs in Eastern Europe, suggesting, in his view, that they must have come to Russia from Asia rather than from Byzantium. The 'Turanian psychology' had penetrated into the Russian mind at a subconscious level and had left a profound mark on the national character. Even Russian Orthodoxy, although superficially derived from Byzantium, was 'essentially Asiatic in its psychological structures', insofar as it depended on 'a complete unity between ritual, life and art'. For Trubetskoi this unity explained the quasi-religious nature of state authority in Russia and the readiness of the Russians to submit themselves to it. Church, state and nation were indivisible.¹⁵⁸

Such ideas had little in the way of ethnographic evidence to support them. They were all polemic and resentful posturing against the West. In this respect they came from the same stable as that notion first advanced by Dostoevsky that the empire's destiny was in Asia (where the Russians could be 'Europeans') rather than in Europe (where they were 'hangers-on'). Yet because of their emotive power, Eurasianist ideas had a strong cultural impact on the Russian emigration of the 1920s, when those who mourned the disappearance of their country from the European map could find new hope for it on a Eurasian one. Stravinsky, for one, was deeply influenced by the mystical views of the Eurasianists, particularly the notion of a natural Russian ('Turanian') inclination for collectivity, which the music of such works as The Peasant Wedding, with its absence of individual expression in the tinging parts and its striving for a sparse, impersonal sound, was Intended to reflect.¹⁵⁹ According to Souvchinsky, the rhythmic immo-bility (nepodvizhnost') which was the most important feature of Strav-insky's music in The Peasant Wedding and The Rite of Spring was 'Turanian' in character. As in the Eastern musical tradition, Strav-insky's music developed by the constant repetition of a rhythmic

pattern, with variations on the melody, rather than by contrasts of musical ideas, as in the Western tradition. It was this rhythmic immobility which created the explosive energy of Stravinsky's 'Turanian' music. Kandinsky strived for a similar effect of built-up energy in the geometric patterning of lines and shapes, which became the hallmark of his abstract art.

'In their primitive habitat I found something truly wonderful for the first time in my life, and this wonderment became an element of all my later works.'¹⁶⁰ So Kandinsky recalled the impact of his encounter with the Komi people on his evolution towards abstract art.

The link between the 'primitive' and modern abstract art is not unique to the Russian avant-garde. Throughout the Western world there was a fascination with the life and art of tribes in distant colonies, of prehistoric cultures, peasants and even children, whose primal forms of expression were an inspiration to artists as diverse as Gauguin and Picasso, Kirchner and Klee, Nolde and Franz Marc. But whereas Western artists had to travel to Martinique or other far-off lands for their savage inspiration, the Russians' 'primitives' were in their own back yard. It gave their art an extraordinary freshness and significance.

The Russian Primitivists (Malevich and Kandinsky, Chagall, Gon-charova, Larionov and Burliuk) took their inspiration from the art of Russian peasants and the tribal cultures of the Asiatic steppe. They saw this 'barbarism' as a source of Russia's liberation from the stranglehold of Europe and its old artistic norms. 'We are against the West,' declared Larionov. 'We are against artistic societies which lead to stagnation.'¹⁶¹ The avant-garde artists grouped around Larionov and his wife Goncharova looked to Russian folk and oriental art as a new outlook on the world. Goncharova talked about a 'peasant aesthetic' that was closer to the symbolic art forms of the East than the representational tradition of the West. She reflected this symbolic quality (the quality of icons) in the monumental peasants, whom she even gave an Asiatic look, in such works as Haycutting (1910). All these artists embraced Asia as a part of Russia's cultural identity. 'Neoprimitivism