Natasha's Dance полностью

The shaman's oval drum is another leitmotif of Kandinsky's art. The circle and the line which dominate Kandinsky's abstract schemata were symbols of the shaman's drum and stick. Many of his paintings, like Oval No. 2 (1925) (plate 21), were themselves shaped like drums. They were painted with hieroglyphs invented by Kandinsky to emulate

the symbols he had seen on the drums of Siberian shamans: a hooked curve and line to symbolize the horse, circles for the sun and moon, or beaks and eyes to represent the bird form which many shamans used as a dance head-dress (plate 22).¹⁶⁶ The hooked curve and line was a double cipher. It stood for the horse-stick on which the shaman rode to the spirit world in seances. Buriat shamans hit their sticks (called 'horses') while they danced: the tops were shaped like horses' heads, the bottom ends like hoofs. Among Finno-Ugric tribes the shaman's drum itself was called a 'horse' and was equipped with reins, while the drumstick was referred to as a 'whip'.¹⁶⁷

In eastern Europe the hobby horse has a preternatural pedigree which belies its benign status in the Western nursery. The Hungarian taltos, or sorcerer, rode with magic speed on a reed horse - a reed between his legs - which in turn became the model of a peasant toy. In the Kalevala the hero Vainamoinen travels to the north on a straw stallion - as emulated by generations of Finnish boys and girls. In Russia the horse has a special cultural resonance as a symbol of the country's Asiatic legacy - the suc-cessive waves of invasion by nomadic horsemen of the steppe, from the Khazars to the Mongols, which have shaped the course of Russian history. The horse became the great poetic metaphor of Russia's destiny. Pushkin started it with The Bronze Horseman.

Where will you gallop, charger proud, Where next your plunging hoofbeats settle?¹⁶⁸

For the Symbolist circles in which Kandinsky moved, the horse was a symbol of the Asiatic steppe upon which Russia's European civilization had been built. It featured constantly in Symbolist paintings (perhaps most famously in Petrov-Vodkin's Bathing the Red Horse (1912) (plate 25) and it was a leitmotif of Scythian poetry, from Blok's 'Mare of the Steppes' to Briusov's 'Pale Horseman'. And the hoofbeat sound of Mongol horses approaching from the steppe echoes throughout Bely's Petersburg. To attribute a 'dark side' to the hobby horse in Russia, where children no doubt rode it in all innocence, would be absurd. But from an early age Russians were aware of what it meant to 'gallop on a charger of the steppes'. They felt the heavy clatter of the horses' hooves on the Asiatic steppeland beneath their feet.

overleaf: Anna Akhmatova at the Fountain House

Akhmatova arrived at the Fountain House, the former palace of the Sheremetevs, when she went to live there with her second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, in 1918. The house remained as it had always been, a sanctuary from the destruction of the war and revolution that had transformed Petersburg in the four years since it had been renamed Petrograd;* but, like the city (which had lost its status as the capital), the beauty of the palace was a retrospective one. Its last owner, Count Sergei, the grandson of Praskovya and Nikolai Petrovich, had preserved the house as a family museum. He himself had written several books on the history of the Sheremetev clan. During the February Revolution of 1917, when crowds came to the house and demanded arms to help them in their struggle against the Tsar's last loyalist troops, the count had opened the collection cabinets of Field Marshal Boris Petrovich, the founder of the palace, and handed out to them some picks and axes from the sixteenth century.¹ To save his home from the violence of the mob, he turned it over to the state, signing an agreement with the newly installed Soviet government to preserve the house as a museum, before fleeing with his family abroad. The old Sheremetev servants were kept on, and Shileiko, a brilliant young scholar of Middle Eastern archaeology who had been a tutor to the last count's grandsons and a close friend of the family, was allowed to keep his apartment in the northern wing. Akhmatova had known Shileiko since before the war, when he was a minor poet in her bohemian circle at the 'Stray Dog' club with Mandelstam and her previous husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev. The Fountain House was more than just the scene of her romance with Shileiko - it drew her to him in a spiritual way. The Sheremetev motto, 'Deus conservat omnia' ('God preserves all'), inscribed on the coat of arms at the Fountain House, where she would live for over thirty years,