Kandinsky and the Russian Soul
The soul of Russia
by Giorgio Cortenova
It is difficult to find a culture and the art rooted in it in which the expressive plan of languages and feelings, of psychological and intellectual impulses, form a single and vast typology that might be termed "the soul". Quite simply, the Russian soul is all this. But such a combination of expressive and idealistic elements is not something fixed once and for all in the culture of the vast Russian territories, but is instead a diversified force of the spirit and the controversial research for an endangered identity, one that is always on the point of fragmenting in the immense silence and interminable steppes where voices are lost and images disappear.
Probably, while the Russians search for and refer back to this soul, as though it were both a hope and a prayer, we, who look at things from East and West, try to analyse and admire or even to deny this very soul. The fact is that it is our culture more than theirs which has underlined and established it, which has wanted to "name" and "define" it. But there, between the Volga and the Neva, it is the soul that gives life and takes it away, causes love and hate, is inebriated by light and drowns in darkness.
However this might be, the Russian soul exists, it is the inimitable and not to be ignored "place" for culture and feeling: it is both rooted in the prophesising of the spirit and in the powerful realism of thought. It would be easy to conclude that we are only dealing with visionary surrealism, which we see cyclically reborn in the aesthetic and intellectual experience of history. But this would be a mistake.
We are not, in fact, dealing with a process of contamination undergone by reality, nor with a raid by reality on the realms of the soul. Those feelings of disorientation, so dear to Western culture, which inject reality into the spirit and vice-versa, and which have, with various ups and downs, prolonged the life of Flemish fifteenth century art well into our own times, have no part in Russian culture. In order for such disorientation to occur an primary and radical separation is, in fact, necessary: on the one hand the soul, on the other the body; on the one hand intellect and reason, on the other faith, spirit, the soul and feelings. When in Western Gothic culture the soul wished, alone and individually, to dissolve itself in Divine Light and did so forgetting spirit and mind, intellect and reason, only God knew in which odour of heresy it would find itself. And not just the soul but even, however absurd it may seem, God, because He too, within the soul, would have ended up being dissolved.
Such a process of separation, and the eventual reunion deriving from it, has no correspondence in Russian sensibility. In fact, right from the beginning the soul annexes the body and vice-versa; and reason, spirit, and the intellect are intoxicated in it and in it coincide. And so Russian realism is born visionary and there is no vision of the soul that does not reveal itself in the form of reality. Often nineteenth century Russia is even histrionic in its emphatic way of stirring up the underground lymph of material and making it rise and explode into the light of day.
All Russian art is visionary and hence realist, and it is realist because it is visionary. Repin, Vrubel, Surikov and many others are obviously very different each from the other, but the basis of their dream of art and the emotional outcome it gives rise to is always a visionary one, quite apart from cultural or historical accidents, symbolism or populism. But just as visionary are the avant-garde artists Kandinsky, Malevich, Filonov, and Goncharova, to mention only a few. The unusual primitivism of Goncharova's 'portraits' of the evangelists is visionary: their haunted gaze breaks through the centuries and lights up before our own gaze; visionary too are the rhythmic waves of Filonov, pregnant with musical harmonies, that 'hypertextual' appearance his images have as they light up and die away together with the flicker of our fascinated yet contradicted retinas. And also visionary are the circular or square archetypes of Malevich, that icon in which everything in the world is concealed and latent but which, later, was to develop into people without faces but with long prophetic beards, 'other' inhabitants of an equally extraordinary planet in its daily rural or suburban geometry. Finally, visionary is Kandinsky's great abstract alchemy, the 'symphony' of his Moscow repeated in canvas after canvas, sunset after sunset, from excursions of lines and incursions of wandering marks on the surface.
And if these images, whether real or abstract, are visionary, then this happens because, in whatever way we wish to understand the context, it is the very Russian vision, I would almost say the 'visibility' the Russians have of the things of this world, that causes it.
It is, in fact, a vision of faith, and art itself is embodied in the form of faith. No westerner, in any museum whatsoever, would start to pray in front of a painting depicting a Madonna, Christ, saints or the protagonists of the scriptures. The Russians, on the contrary, pray to their icons even in museums. A western visitor leaves surprised and, if he has some sensitivity, is moved. And he should question himself. Why do Russians also stand, with just as much concentration, in front their 'sacred' painters, the burlakì of the Volga painted by Repin, the angels of Vrubel as much as Grigorev's working men and women? Because in every case faith lies at the heart of art. You do not paint the burlakì of the Volga if you do not have faith in the people and in what they stand for in the Russian soul, you do not place a black spot in a painting as did Kandinsky if you do not believe that the life of primary colours, born from goodness, might be able to bear the dark and black presence of evil. In Russia you do not paint if you do not have faith in Russia. In Russia devils exist. They are carved in the soul of the people: this is known by painters and writers, theatrical and musical people. Goodness does not exist if not in relation to evil. All this is part of a vague awareness found in all parts of the world. But for Russians this interior intuition runs in their veins, it is active and agonising as it was in the pages of Dostoevsky.
The way of understanding the people has, for the Russian cultural heritage, a completely original specificity. This is not the people as Enlightenment Europe understood it. The Russian people with all its poverty and humility is concretised in the sanctity that is symbolically attributed to it. It is sanctified because it safeguards traditions, increases the virtues of the spirit, witnesses with its poverty the Christian humility of human experience. And so the people are not part of a progressive development that might pollute their interior steadfastness. The search for profit which has characterised European development has been interpreted through the course of Russian history as a degrading principle for the moral integrity of society. Culture too, if it does not have its roots in the people, is, just like riches, considered a betrayal.
Such Russian artists as Tolstoy, Repin and many others, fled from the salons in order to share the humble life of the streets and popular eating places. Culture, genuine culture which does not betray the soul, is for them the live oral tradition, the tradition that does not speak 'futile' French or have contact with renaissance secularism.
For Russian culture the people represents salvation and damnation, hope and, at the same time, the nightmare of its own destiny. Considered this way it has no function if not to be the interpreter and protagonist of the divine message and outlook. The deep conviction that the people conserve within their soul the destiny of progressive sanctification of the world continues, right from the beginning, throughout the history of Russia. When Stalinism and its political and ideological heritage wanted to make the people act together with an aim of progress and of competitive production with Western capitalism it produced a disaster that is still not quantifiable.
The support, at first, and then later the Russian avant-garde movements' break with the Revolution while it was still in its settling down phase are the most flagrant evidence of a misunderstanding, one that was to be at its most hurtful in the case of Kandinsky and Malevich.
The progressive "triangle" of Kandinsky, as described by him in "The Spiritual in Art" (1910-1912), is a constant movement that greatly resembles the transmission of energy in the wavelike motion of the sea. It is only in appearance that the water moves at the same speed as the waves. Cork, which does not sink, is not washed up on the shore together with the waves. When the artist wrote these words he was in Munich, he had already visited Western Europe, and had already perceived that the principles of the people were waning and that the masses, instead, had arrived on the international scene. The mass is not the people which is a term the artist never uses in this context.
In a certain sense "The Spiritual in Art" is continually torn between Russian traditional culture with its Eastern sensitivity, and a Western outlook. There is no doubt that Kandinsky was in a certain sense fascinated by the Enlightenment-inspired progressive principles. But the absolute protagonist of this asceticism is the soul, interior beauty, anti-materialism: "one of the pioneers, one of the first spiritual composers of today from which the art of tomorrow will grow, Maeterlinck, says, 'There is nothing in the world that aches for beauty and knows how to become beautiful so much as the soul… And so very few can resist the fascination of a soul dedicated to beauty'. This property of the soul is the oil that makes possible the slow, imperceptible rise (and times blocked on the outside but always alive within) of the spiritual triangle".
These are the words of Kandinsky. But he had just said, "What comes from interior necessity is beautiful. Beauty is what is internally beautiful". And how can real poet, composer or painter be defined? In no other way than a 'visionary', and it does not matter much whether he follows the great abstractionist path or that of realism. Once again it is the ancient Russian visionary heritage that welds together the contrasting languages, the contradictions of the search for one's self that either today or tomorrow history will force you to follow in the depths when you go astray and the atmosphere darkens and is polluted.
Everything resonates like the tolling of a bell in the depths of the Russian soul.
Vassily Kandinsky is and always will be Russian. Because a Russian remains Russian even when exile might seem to have uprooted him from his origins. Quite the reverse in fact: the further he strays from his own land the more this will resonate in his soul like a vision that in time becomes more magical. He always painted Moscow, Moscow at dusk when its colours resound like an orchestra: Vassily's abstract belief is both a testimony of the sweet yet harrowing melancholy that roots the Russian soul to its homeland, that at times is both mother and a saint, just as the people are saintly and its artists are saints. Attention: not 'holy' but 'saint' because sanctified by God and by faith, by God and the suffering people. Melancholy resounds in the soul and from this echoes in both popular and so-called classical music. It feeds the oral tradition and the 'stories' it tells and also stimulates great literature. The Russian land too is a vision of water, earth, and of light. The land and the sky touch each other through the waters of the great rivers, the snow that slakes the earth's thirst and the puddles that soften it, making it tender like the placenta from the mother's womb.
Tarkovsky's great cinema develops within an agonising and silent melancholy score. This melancholy, that marks the Russian soul so deeply, is seen in Tarkovsky as an act of love and of sacrifice towards the mother earth, to the waters that feed her memory and keep it alive. The earth and its moods are the landscape of an eternal sacrifice through the bitter yet revivifying metaphor of life and death. Fire is thrust into the waters and gives back to us a light that is dull and dying. This is how the Russian soul penetrates into the immense steppes of silence without being extinguished.
Silence which cannot be stated but only indicated, is what really explodes within the tumult of the soul; and in the ruinous passing away of things it enfolds Russian art in the verses of the poets, in the colour of paintings, and now in the ghosts of film. It lies on the mirror in which Chagall's lamp burns itself out or among the poor things of his father's shop; and finally, like some secret elation, it is screwed into the supreme geometry of Malevich and into the harsh yet luxuriant material of Petrov-Vodkin's painting.
The silence of the Russian soul is full of sensuality in the highest sense of the term: in that naked display of vibrant material or, instead, annulled in flat washes of paint, there is concretised a search for martyrdom, almost the exhilaration that precedes a crisis, in that awareness of evil that characterised the life of Dostoevsky. It is as though Russian art searched within pain and the onset of all-destroying madness the deepest meaning of mystic pleasure and interior vision.
Russia is not Russia without those, anything but metaphysical or suffered silences, silences which are in fact implosive, engrossed in a history that s developed through the mute voice of God. When Peter the Great gave a voice to this silence through the reforms aimed at alphabetising and Westernising the culture and habits of his country, Russia defended that silence and held onto it as one holds onto an innocent person, a memory, an ancient but established pain within one's own conscience.
Since then artists and poets, writers and musicians have clasped that silence so as not to lose the word kept quiet within the exhaustion of memory. They made their own its contradictions and visions, its hopes and dark premonitions. They are the visionary custodians of the Russian soul and in the vicissitudes of history it is to them that the Russians turn, like a mother to the son who knows how to sing her praise.