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.
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'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
is a profoundly national phenomenon', wrote the painter Shevchenko. 'Russia and the East have been indissolubly linked from as early as the Tatar invasions, and the spirit of the Tatars, of the East, has become so rooted in our life that at times it is difficult to distinguish where a national feature ends and where an Eastern influence begins… Yes we are Asia and are proud of this.' Shevchenko made a detailed case for Russian art originating in the East. Comparing Russian folk with Indo-Persian art, he claimed that one could 'see their common origin'.162
Kandinsky himself was a great admirer of Persian art and equated its ideals of simplicity and truth with 'the oldest icons of our Rus' '.163 Before the First World War, Kandinsky lived in Munich, where he and Marc were the co-editors of The Blue Rider almanac. Alongside the works of Europe's leading artists, The Blue Rider featured peasant art and children's drawings, folk prints and icons, tribal masks and totems - anything, in fact, that reflected the ideal of spontaneous expression and vitality which Kandinsky placed at the heart of his artistic philosophy. Like the Scythians, Kandinsky at this time was moving to the idea of a synthesis between Western, primitive and oriental cultures. He looked to Russia as the Promised Land (and returned to it after
1917). This search for synthesis was the key theme in Kandinsky's early (so-called 'Russian') works (which were still pictorial rather than abstract). In these paintings there is in fact a complex mix of Christian, pagan and shamanic images from the Komi area. In Motley Life (1907) (plate 19), for example, the scene is clearly set in the Komi capital of Ust Sysolk, at the confluence of the Sysola and Vychegda rivers (a
small log structure in the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, just below the hilltop monastery, confirms the locale: the Komi used these Inns on stilts as storage sheds). On the surface this appears to be a Russian-Christian scene. But, as Kandinsky suggests in the title Motley
Life, underneath the surface there is a collision of diverse beliefs. The red squirrel in the tree, directly at the visual centre of the painting and
echoing the golden dome of the chapel to the right, is an emblem of the forest spirits, to whom the Komi people offered squirrel pelts as a
sacrifice. The old man in the foreground may have the appearance of
a Christian pilgrim, but his supernaturally coloured beard (a pale
green) may also mark him out as a sorcerer, while his stick and musical
accomplice, in the form of the piper to his right, suggest shamanic lore.164 Several of Kandinsky's early works narrate the story of St Stephan's confrontation with the Komi shaman Pam on the banks of the Vychegda river. According to legend, Pam led the resistance of the Komi people to the fourteenth-century Russian missionary. In a public debate by the riverside Pam based his defence of the pagan religion on the notion that the shamans were better than the Christians at hunting bears and other forest animals. But Stephan challenged him to a 'divine trial by fire and water', inviting Pam to walk through a burning hut and dive into the icy river. The shaman was forced to concede defeat. In Kandinsky's version of the legend, as portrayed in All Saints II (1911) (plate 20), Pam escapes from persecution in a boat. He wears a pointed 'sorcerer's hat'. A mermaid swims alongside the boat; another sits on the rock to its right. Standing on the rock are a pair of saints. They, too, wear sorcerer's caps, but they also have haloes to symbolize the fusion of the Christian and the pagan traditions. On the left St Elijah rides his troika through a storm - blown by the piper in the sky - a reference to the Finno-Ugric god the 'Thunderer', whose place Elijah took in the popular religious imagination. St Simon stands on a column in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. He is another compound figure, combining elements of the blacksmith Simon, who builds an iron pillar to survey the world in the Russian peasant tale of 'The Seven Simons', and St Simeon the Stylite, who spent his life in meditation on top of a pillar and became the patron saint of all blacksmiths. Finally, the figure in the foreground, seated on a horse with his arms outstretched, is the World-watching Man. He is seen here in a double form: as the shaman riding his horse to the spirit world and as St George.165 This figure reappears throughout Kandinsky's work, from his first abstract canvas, Composition II, in 1910, to his final painting, Tempered Elan, in 1944. It was a sort of symbolic signature of his shaman alter ego who used art as his magic instrument to evoke a higher spiritual world.
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