Kandinsky and the Russian Soul
Landscapes, Journeys, and Colours
by Mauro Corradini
1. 'At the time of a warm spring sunset there appeared near the Patriarsie pools ...' [two fundamental figures for the following events]: this is the opening of Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece. The description of the landscape in a late-Impressionist style, having introduced the protagonists of the dialogue that sets off the extraordinary and surreal affair, continues with further landscape description: the two 'arrive in the shade of the lime-trees that had begun to turn green... at an hour in which it seemed difficult to find the strength to breath, when the sun, that had been roasting Moscow, plunged down beyond the Sadovoe Avenue in a dry haze'. If the beginning of the novel is set in Moscow it could have been in 'Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg or Piter (it's all the same)', but the poetical conclusion and the landscape come from much further back, from the geographic vicissitudes of Russian iconography and literature. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Russian landscape was often expressed through a 'journey' and, as far as iconography is concerned, had the bright colours of traditional peasant costumes. The landscape expresses contemporarily the essence, the synthesis, and the roots of mother Russia; the landscape opens onto an infinite space and moves Elsewhere, towards the Finnish north or the Siberian east, over those endless planes towards which the Master and Margaret flew , detaching themselves definitively from the noise of the world: 'Listen to the silence', Margaret said to the Master, and the sand rustled under her bare feet. 'Listen and enjoy what has never been vouchsafed to you in life: silence'.
Even more than a geographical east we are dealing with a mental and ideal place: '"... that space", Zhivago noted to himself, "was Russia, his incomparable, celebrated mother whose name echoed beyond the seas, a martyr, hard-headed, extravagant, a rascal, created by God, with her notions that are always grandiose and fatal and unpredictable"'.
The spacious planes often represent the ideal roots of culture; they are agricultural places animated by the vivid colours of peasants' clothes seen in so many realistic evocations and that survive even when artistic trends changed, when avant-garde inquiries were suffocated by the bureaucratic orders of blind Stalinism. The long period from the end of the nineteenth century to the first two decades and beyond of the twentieth, formally died with a return to the past which, even so, in its best works still alluded to vast planes galloped across by horses and horsemen: it is enough to consider such a work as Red Cavalry by Kazimir Malevich (1932 circa) in which the plateau is a sequence of beautifully coloured horizontal lines, and in the white background in front of the intense blue sky, small red cavalrymen seem to evoke a medieval army.
2. The eastern roots do not represent a geographically defined area. Even though it is true that the view to the East often has its own geographical connotations, usually it signifies the view towards Siberia, considered as an integral part of Russian historical affairs, so much so as to become a geographically dilated and dilatable symbol. It is a research, not just a space. The eastern roots are a place halfway between reality and a symbol, one of peace and meditation, a crossroads between the physical and the real East of great Siberian Russia, and that ideological and moral place which is also a crossroads between revealed religion (Christianity) and eastern religion (Zarathustra): 'They flew for a long while in silence, until the landscape far below began to change. The sad woods drowned in earthly darkness and pulled down with them the opaque blades of the rivers. Beneath them boulders appeared and began to shine, and between them abysses glowered black and the moonlight did not penetrate into them'. Here are Margaret and the Master, at the end of their journey, when the events begun a year earlier were concluded, when the 'May sun shone'.
By way of journeys through the landscape, nineteenth century literature rediscovered its roots and found the colours of memory, the very ones that mark the works of a landscape painting tradition from its 'Western' borrowings at the end of the nineteenth century, to the momentum of an avant-garde that, in many cases and as a result of these roots, seems to be ahead of European artistic creation: we only need to recall the precocious intuition of Malevich and his Black Square on a White Background, 1915, or of his even more radical White Square on a White Background, 1918. Or we might remember that in 1921, in the exhibition 5 x 5 = 25, Alexander Rodchenko exhibited a triptych of monochrome pieces, the first red, the second yellow, and the third blue: 'I have led painting to its logical conclusion', the artist wrote, 'by showing three canvases: one red, one blue, and one yellow and, in doing this, I have discovered that everything is finished. They are the three basic colours. All the surface is surface and there is no need for any kind of representation'.
The bond between the landscape and the Russian earth is ancient: we can find it already in Alexander Pushkin, in his 'valleys where rise the proud poplars, /where sleep the myrtle and the black cypresses, /and the warm waves sweetly whisper' (The Evening Star), a bond that crosses the centuries and is found again in a similar form in the verses of the last peasant poet (the definition is to be found in the first verse of Last Mass), Serghei Esenin: 'I will not return too soon /the tempest's song is not brief. /I will keep my vigil over celestial Russia /the maple upright on one foot'.
The role of the landscape and the journey in Russian literature was transformed by the retrieval of popular traditions in painting from the first decades of the century, and not only in traditional or late Romantic painting. This retrieval was, in the avant-garde period, to obey the stylistic dictates of western poetics, above all French (Cubism) and Italian (Futurism); but chromatically its formal base is to be found in traditional values. This gap between acquired style and deep culture clarifies the contrasts, at times violent, between Russian Futurists (by now almost ex-Futurists) and Marinetti at the time of his journey in 1914 to Russia in order to spread the Futurist creed.
3. The idea of the East, the idea of the journey, the idea of Russia and of space appear as the matrices of a later return to primitivism, in part mediated through Western culture; furthermore, what in France, for example, is a return to primitivism, in Russia becomes a return to the people.
Let's try to follow Zhivago in his journeys: his thoughts on the landscape are both interior and impressionistic : 'The air was a counterpoint of sounds. The voices of the children playing were scattered in places at various distances, as though to indicate that all the space was soaked in life. That space was Russia'.
'Passing through them was the great road, old, in fact extremely ancient, the most ancient in Siberia, the old trail of the postal services. It cut the city in two, the way we cut bread, with a knife along the central road which flew through the village without turning, sowing in the distance to create a wing, the line of izby'. Russian history passes along that road. 'In one direction were strung out the lines of carts loaded with tea, wheat, and the iron worked in factories, while in the other there were pushed along on foot and under escort, from stage to stage, the contingents of deportees... And the forests all around rustled darkly, impenetrably...'.
The landscape is not only history and mood but an individual space for thought: young Yuri believed he recognised the landscapes: '... but every time he was mistaken. Fields followed fields then again were swallowed up by woods. The alternation of those tracts opened up the spirit. One felt the wish to dream, to become lost in the future': from the first pages the reader has the sense of the protagonist's defeat, but also of the regenerating force of natural space.
Zhivago's journey is the journey into Russia, and he discovers her history: 'To the right, behind the fence, shouts arrived from the street. A discharged man was making a row'. He discovers the eternal present in the world of peasantry: 'There was a cow, just bought from a distant village. They had made it walk all day, and it was tired, it was nostalgic for its herd and would not take food from the hand of its new owner'. The new industrial world which was raising its chimneys for a future in which basically he did not believe and with which he could not identify: 'Behind the depot of Meljuzeev the stars shone and between them and the cow there stretched the threads of an invisible understanding... Everything around fermented, grew, rose up through the magical yeast of existence. The ardour of life, like a silent wind, moved ahead in great waves...'.