Kandinsky and the Russian Soul
Kandinsky
by Vladimir Lenyashin
'Angelic holiness and bestial baseness: these are the obvious oscillations of the Russian people, unknown to the more balanced European populations'. This was the irritated exclamation of Nikolay Berdyaev in his article The Soul of the People, written in 1918 after the October revolution had forced every thinking person to look again at the centuries-old myth of the Russian soul. The sources of this myth go back to the time when Peter the Great, the 'miraculous constructor' according to Alexander Pushkin's description, spurred on Russia and, through the 'window onto Europe' brought orthodox culture into the heart of Western civilisation. This was a deeply dramatic process. Painting only rarely impinged in such an explicit way on the controversy about the destiny of Russia but, because of its very nature as art, it showed (and still shows) revelatory faces and images, torments and enlightenment: reflections of the Russian people. After the great period of icon painting before Peter the Great, Russian art soon arrived at a luminous unity inspired by the basic archetypes of life, of the earth and sky, of an uncontaminated primordial essence of the soul. And in its later developments it was to force itself constantly to show this harmony of soul and spirit: 'Paradise Lost', 'Celestial Russia'. The Russian soul began its Way of the Cross. And Pavel Fedotov, an inheritor of Romantic harmony, followed the programmatic formula of Nekolay Nekrasov: 'He will never learn to love a heart exacerbated by hate', which was also that of Fyodor Dostoevsky the author of White Nights and Insulted and Injured. One of the characters in these books resembles the curved figure wandering in the sticky fog in Fedetov's picture Winter Day. The formula also inflicts the soul of Vassily Perov's work Lonely Guitar Player. 'Can you understand, dear sir, when someone's got nowhere to go?' drunkenly exclaims the managing director Marmeladov. 'I drink just because I want to get drunk'. The Drunkards: this is what Dostoevsky wanted to call Crime and Punishment. 'The only thing left is the road to the pub' Nekrasov observes. Drunkenness is the sad celebration of Russia, 'the land of servants and masters' according to Lermontov: the only comfort of a socially tormented soul. 'Where the people are, there is lamentation' Nekrasov aphoristically concludes his Meditations Near the Main Entrance. And he adds: 'We call such lamentations songs: they are the burlaki who haul barges!'. These words seems to recall the famous picture by Repin, The Burlaki on the Volga. There is not just a place for purifying pathos in this soul but many other things. At times, one is tempted to say, too many things. 'Man is vast. I would reduce him' says Dmitry Karamazov. 'The devil fights with God and the battle field is the human heart'. The Trial of Pugachov by Perov, and Dark People by Konstantin Savitsky allude to the destructive energy ('all or nothing') inherent in the Russian character, to its tendency to cruelty, to senseless and ferocious revolt, as Pushkin said. From the tangle of dark pagan passions and vague impulses towards the light comes Verka by Filipp Malyavin, one of the unresolved secrets of the great and grim, sinful and frenetic Russia. With a strange smile she looks fixedly at one and only one visible thing: is it perhaps a fanatic 'upward tension', the glimmer of future fires? In the work of Vassily Surikov there are fused, in an even more complex and ambivalent manner, both the dream of world-saving beauty and a feeling of chaos that threatens to overwhelm it. The Conquest of the Snow Town, as Maksimilian Voloshin says, is full 'of familiar Siberian faces, strong, honest, extraneous to any kind of spiritual drama, disintegration, crisis'. The female figures of Surikov are the thread leading from the fragile and old-fashioned fascination of Andrey Ryabushkin's Merchant's Family in the XVII century and Boris Kustodiev's A Merchant's Wife, wonderful in their serene physicality, to the chaste nudity of the heroines of Zinaida Serebryakova's Bath and the insubstantial reflections of what the religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'yov called the 'eternal female' in the picture by Viktor Borisov-Musatov, By the Lake. If in The Conquest of the Snow Town there prevails an atmosphere of beauty, an unchained positive energy, in Suvorov Crosses the Alps we enter into the world of tragedy. Here there is not a crossing but, rather, a collapse, the shudder of heaven and earth, a descent into hell. The rock from which, in a mad rush, the warrior on his white horse 'overcome by military enthusiasm, throws over the precipice thousands of men happy to obey him', crumbles. In this attitude to life there is the conscious or intuitive certainty that 'everything is in the hands of God', as we say in Russia. In his study of the Russian character, the philosopher Nikolay Lossky, while underlining its goodness and cruelty, its love of freedom and submissiveness, placed in the foreground the personal relationship with God: 'The basic and most deeply rooted feature of the Russian people is its religiosity'. The search for God runs through the whole of Russian figurative culture, beginning with Feofan Grek, Andrey Rublyov, and Dionisy. The authority of the icon was so great that the priest and theologian Pavel Florensky actually said 'The Trinity of Rublev exists because God exists'. It is on both a real and metaphorical journey towards the temple that the interminable flood of people goes in Illarion Pryanishnikov's Procession. With cautionary severity the Evangelists of Natal'ya Goncharova look within the soul of the men who have forgotten God - and the First World War is at the gates. In a picture by Nikolay Roerich the pious Prokopy prays for the innumerable victims while in The Mother of God Kuz'ma Petrov-Vodkin tortures himself in his attempt to calm proud, evil hearts. Along the pilgrim routes, in a luminous silence or to the pure sound of bells, the devout, the monks, and the righteous stop in the ecstasy of prayer in Meditations and The Bells Ringing for the Service by Mikhail Nesterov, the painter of Holy Russia and The Soul of the People. In the landscapes of Fyodor Vasil'ev and Isaak Levitan, Aleksey Savrasov and Valentin Serov too, even though showing no exterior signs of religion, there hovers a melody full of humanity, inspired by the heavens. The symbolism of Mikhail Vrubel, alchemist and alien from some other esoteric dimension, represented the highest concentration of that spiritual tension and feeling of precariousness, of the deceptiveness of real life that enveloped the culture on the cusp of two centuries. The humanistic coherence of the conception of the world fell apart: 'O you, my foreboding soul ! /O heart full of tumult, /Oh how you struggle on the threshold, /it almost seems, of a double life!' Fyodor Tyutchev tormented himself, eaten away by that very spiritual thirst of which Pushkin spoke in his poem The Prophet: 'And a seraphim with six wings /At a cross-roads that opened before me'. The Seraphim with Six Wings is a painting by Vrubel that remembers the poet's duty to 'burn with words the hearts of men', to awaken them from a criminal indifference to destiny in a world that is dragging itself who knows where. And when words were lacking, when the prison of the body became too small for the soul, there arrived the pictures by Vassily Kandinsky. 'The darkness thickened, the air was poisoned, the doors were barred. And the misunderstood soul suffered', the painter recalled. It was then that there was born, not the 'dead word (labels)' but the fecund abstract spirit 'that discovered a form for revelation'. If Kandinsky's work is the triumph of mystic pictorial intuition, then Kazimir Malevich accomplished the 'liquidation' of painting: 'Painting has disappeared for some time now and the painter himself is but a prejudice from the past'. Kandinsky created a 'world without objects', and gave back the word's dominion over this world, and this word is Suprematism. Its creator became the demiurge of a new intellectual religion. We are dealing with the greatest incarnation of the fight against God that has always lain hidden in the Russian soul, overshadowed by the eternal search for God. In 1917 man overthrew God. Now he wanted to construct a new world by himself. The axe now hung over the icon. The faces of the constructors of the future are in front of us in Peasants' Land by Boris Grigor'ev. This is Everyman, similar to what we see in Peasant Family by Pavel Filonov, but now seduced by the idea of his own social mission. Soon this was to become a dangerous social force, even though without quite losing that soul so dear to Lev Tolstoy, 'Gentle, patient, illuminated by genuine Christianity, capable of promising much to those who can understand'. The soul cannot accept the fact that 'first there were men, now there are mouths', as a character from Andrey Platonov's Chevengur says. The protagonist of his tale Aphrodite 'gathers seeds to be sown afresh in Russia', and discovers the interior source which man must draw on in order to defend the heart unprotected by faith and tormented by conscience. The neo-realistic Lovers by Gely Korzhev do not want to know 'in which millennium they are', to use the expression of Boris Pasternak. Their difficult mute dialogue allows the tenuous voice of the soul to be heard. The Russian painter today, disowning the experiences of his fathers for whom 'We' was more correct than 'I', is trying to find his own identity. He has a different road to travel. He wanders around Borges's 'garden of forking paths', around the labyrinth of the soul, without knowing exactly if the soul is his or someone else's. He has to start from scratch. Il'ya Kabakov's Garden: 'What garden? Is it, perhaps, the garden of light?' Marina Tsvetaeva asks 'every epoch'. In the Garden of Eden man made his first steps. The disorderly patches that flower in blue are primordial imprints, the march towards a severe yet merciful soul. 'But is this the Russian soul? Do artists really live like this, suffering at every point of the earth's globe?' someone will ask. And quite rightly. However...