Natasha's Dance (34 page)

    *The word
Peredvizhniki
came from the
Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykb khu-dozhestvennykh vystavok
(Collective of Travelling Art Exhibitions).

    taught in country schools or set up their own art schools and museums, usually with the support of liberal noblemen in local government (the
zemstvos)
and the Populists. The impact of their tours was enormous. ‘When the exhibitions came,’ recalled a provincial resident, ‘the sleepy country towns were diverted for a short while from their games of cards, their gossip and their boredom, and they breathed in the fresh current of free art. Debates and arguments arose on subjects about which the townfolk had never thought before.’
⁹³
Through this mission the Wanderers created a new market for their art. Local merchants funded public galleries that purchased canvases from the Wanderers and their many emulators in provincial towns. In this way the ‘national style’ of Moscow became the idiom of the provinces as well.

    Another merchant patron who helped to define the Moscow style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the railway magnate Savva Mamontov. A Siberian by birth, Mamontov had moved as a boy to Moscow, where his father was involved as the principal investor in the building of the railway to Sergiev Posad. He fell in love with the place. Its bustling energy was the perfect complement to his creativity and go-ahead panache. Benois (the voice of refined St Petersburg) described Mamontov as ‘grandiose and vulgar and dangerous’.
⁹⁴
He might have been describing Moscow, too.

    Mamontov was not just a patron of the arts but an artistic figure in his own right. He studied singing in Milan, acted under Ostrovsky’s own direction in
The Storm,
and wrote and directed plays himself. He was strongly influenced by the Populist ideas which circulated around Moscow in his youth. Art was to be for the education of the masses. As a monument to this ideal, he commissioned the artist Korovin to decorate his Moscow railway station (today the Yaroslav) with murals showing rural scenes from the northern provinces where his trains were bound. ‘The eyes of the people must be trained to see beauty everywhere, in streets and railway stations,’ Mamontov declared.
⁹⁵
His wife Elizaveta was also influenced by Populist ideas. In 1870 the couple purchased the Abramtsevo estate, set amidst the birchwood

    forests near Sergiev Posad, sixty kilometres north-east of Moscow, where they set up an artists’ colony with workshops to revive the local peasant crafts and manufacture artefacts for sale in Moscow at a special shop. It is ironic that these crafts were dying out as a result of the spread of factory goods by rail. For this was what had made the Mamontovs so rich.

    Abramtsevo was located in the heartland of historic Muscovy. It had previously belonged to the Aksakovs, the leading clan of the Slavophiles, and as an artists’ colony it attempted to restore the ‘authentic’ (that is, folk-based) Russian style which the Slavophiles had prized. Artists flocked to it to learn from the old peasant handicrafts and assimilate their style to their own work. Korovin and the two Vasnetsovs, Polenova, Vrubel, Serov and Repin were all active there. Gartman spent a year there before he died, building a workshop and a clinic for the village in the neo-Russian style. Alongside its mission to the peasantry, Abramtsevo was, like everything in which its merchant founder was involved, a commercial enterprise. Its workshops catered to the vibrant market for the neo-Russian style among Moscow’s fast expanding middle class. The same was true of other centres, like the Solomenko embroidery workshop, the Talashkino colony and the Moscow
zemstvo
studios, which all likewise combined conservation with commerce. Moscow’s middle classes were filling up their houses with the folk-styled tableware and furniture, the embroidery and
objets d’art
that workshops such as these were churning out. At the top end of the market there were spectacular interior designs. Elena Polenova (at Solomenko) built a dining room with elaborate folk wood carvings for the estate of the Moscow textile baroness Maria Yakunchikova (where Chekhov spent the summer of 1903 writing
The Cherry Orchard).
Sergei Maliutin (at the Moscow
zemstvo
studios) designed a similar dining room for the merchant Pertsova. Then there was the folk style, slightly simpler but equally archaic, favoured by the Populist intelligentsia. The artist Vladimir Konashevich recalled having learned to read from a special ABC designed by his father in the 1870s. ‘The book was crammed with cart axles, scythes, harrows, hayricks, drying barns and threshing floors.’

    In my father’s study in front of the writing table stood an armchair whose back was the shaft bow of a harness, and whose arms were two axes. On the

    seat was a knout whip and a pair of bast shoes carved in oak. The finishing touch was a real little peasant hut which stood on the table. It was made of walnut and full of cigarettes.
⁹⁶

    Chekhov liked to poke fun at this ‘folksy’ craze. In his story ‘The Grasshopper’ (1891) Olga is the wife of a Moscow doctor. She ‘plastered all the walls with
lubok
woodcuts, hung up bast shoes and sickles, placed a rake in the corner of the room, and
voila
!,
she had a dining room in the Russian style’.
⁹⁷
Yet Chekhov himself was a purchaser of arts and crafts. At his Yalta house (now a museum) there are two cupboards from Abramtsevo and an armchair like the one described by Konashevich.*

    From these arts and crafts, Moscow’s artists developed what they called the ‘
style moderne
‘,
where Russian folk motifs were combined with the styling of European art nouveau. It can be seen in the extraordinary renaissance of Moscow’s architecture at the turn of the twentieth century, and perhaps above all in Fedor Shekhtel’s splendid mansion for Stepan Riabushinsky, which managed to combine a simple, even austere style with the modern luxuries expected by a rich industrialist. Discreetly hidden from the lavish
style moderne
of its living rooms was an Old Believer chapel designed in the ancient Moscow style. It perfectly expressed the split identity of this merchant caste - on the one hand looking back to the seventeenth century, on the other striding forward to the twentieth. Here indeed was Moscow’s paradox - a progressive city whose mythic self-image was in the distant past.

    The fashion for old Moscow was also cultivated by the silversmiths and jewellery shops that catered to the city’s prosperous merchant class. Craftsmen such as Ivan Khlebnikov and Pavel Ovchinnikov (a former serf of Prince Sergei Volkonsky) produced silver tableware and
samovars,
dishes shaped like ancient Viking ships (
kovshi
),
drinking vessels, ornaments and icon covers in the ancient Russian style. These firms were joined by Carl Faberge, who set up separate workshops in Moscow to produce goods for the rising merchant class. In St Petersburg the Faberge

*
There are several similar examples of the armchair in the History Museum of Moscow. All of them were designed by the artist Vasily Shutov.

    workshops made gems in the classical and rococo styles. But only Tsars and Grand Dukes could afford to buy such jewels. The Moscow workshops, by contrast, turned out mainly silver objects which were within the financial reach of the middle classes. These Moscow firms all had some artists of extraordinary talent, most of them unknown or neglected to this day. One was Sergei Vashkov, a silver craftsman who made religious objects in the Moscow workshops of the Olovyanishni-kovs - and later by commission for Faberge. Vashkov drew from the simple style of religious art in medieval Russia but he combined this with his own unique version of the
style moderne,
creating sacred objects of a rare beauty and (in a way that was important to the Moscow revival) reuniting church art with the cultural mainstream.

    Nicholas II was a major patron of Vashkov and the Moscow workshop of Faberge.
⁹⁸
Vashkov designed the silver objects for the mock medieval church in the Fedorov village at Tsarskoe Selo, a sort of Muscovite theme park constructed for the Romanov tercentenary in 1913. This was the high point of the cult of Muscovy. It was engineered by the last Tsar in a desperate effort to invest the monarchy with a mythical historical legitimacy at a time when its right to rule was being challenged by the institutions of democracy. The Romanovs were retreating to the past, hoping it would save them from the future. Nicholas, in particular, idealized the Tsardom of Alexei in the seventeenth century. He saw in it a golden age of paternal rule, when the Tsar had ruled in a mystical union with the Orthodox people, undisturbed by the complications of a modern state. He loathed St Petersburg, with its secular ideas and bureaucracy, its Western culture and intelligentsia, so alien to the ‘simple Russian folk’, and he tried to Muscovitize it by adding onion domes and
kokoshnik
pediments to the classical facades of its buildings. It was in his reign that the Church of the Spilt Blood was completed on the Catherine Canal. With its onion domes and colourful mosaics, its ornate decorations that contrasted so bizarrely with the classical ensemble in which it was placed, the church was a piece of Moscow kitsch. Yet today tourists flock to it, thinking they are getting something of the ‘real’ (exotic) Russia so evidently missing in St Petersburg.

    Like the church, the Muscovite renaissance in the arts conjured up a land of fairy tales. The retreat to Russian wonderland was a general

    trend in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when the increased censorship of Alexander III’s reign and the early years of Nicholas II’s made it hard for the realist school to use art for social or political commentary. And so painters such as Vasnetsov, Vrubel and Bilibin turned to Russian legends as a new way to approach the national theme. Viktor Vasnetsov was the first major artist to make the transition from realist genre painting to fantastic history scenes. He graduated from the Petersburg Academy, but it was his move to Moscow which, by his own admission, accounted for the switch. ‘When I came to Moscow, I felt I had come home’, he wrote to Stasov. ‘The first time I saw the Kremlin and St Basil’s, tears welled in my eyes: so forceful was the feeling that they are a part of me.’
⁹⁹
Vasnetsov depicted monumental figures from the epic folk legends like Ilia Muromets, presenting them as studies of the national character. Nobody in Petersburg would countenance his art. Stasov condemned it for departing from the principles of realism. The Academy denounced it for rejecting classical mythology. Only Moscow welcomed Vasnetsov. The leading Moscow critics had long called on artists to take inspiration from legendary themes, and the Moscow Society of Lovers of Art proved an important outlet for Vasnetsov’s epic canvases.
¹⁰⁰
Mikhail Vrubel followed Vasnetsov from Petersburg, moving first to Moscow and then Abramtsevo, where he too painted scenes from Russian legends. Like Vasnetsov, Vrubel was inspired by the Moscow atmosphere. ‘I am back in Abramtsevo’, he wrote to his sister in 1891, ‘and again I am enveloped. I can hear that intimate national tone which I so long to capture in my work.’
¹⁰¹

    Vasnetsov and Vrubel brought this land of fairy tales to their colourful designs for Mamontov’s Private Opera, which had its origins at Abramtsevo. There was a strong collective spirit within the Abramtsevo circle which expressed itself in the amateur productions at the colony and at the Mamontovs’ house in Moscow. Stanislavsky, who was a cousin of Elizaveta Mamontov, recalled that during these productions ‘the house would become a tremendous workshop’, with actors, artists, carpenters, musicians hurriedly preparing everywhere.
¹⁰²
At the heart of this collaboration was the ideal of artistic synthesis. Vasnetsov and Vrubel joined with composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov in a conscious effort to unify the arts on the basis

    of the folk-inspired ‘Russian style’. Wagner’s idea of the total work of art, the
Gesamtkunstwerk,
was a major influence. Rimsky even planned a Russian version of the
Ring
cycle based on the epic Russian folk legends - with Ilia Muromets as a sort of Slav Siegfried.
¹⁰³
But Mamontov had also come quite independently to the idea of a total work of art. As he saw it, the opera could not succeed on the basis of good singing and musicianship alone; it had to unite these with its visual and dramatic elements in an organic synthesis. Mamontov established his Private Opera in 1885, three years after the state monopoly of the Imperial Theatre (already an anachronism when private theatres were outlawed in 1803) had finally been lifted by the Tsar. It immediately became the focal point of Moscow’s opera world, eclipsing the Bolshoi with its innovative productions of mainly Russian operas. Vasnetsov brought the vibrant primary colours of the folk tradition to the stage for Rimsky’s
Snow Maiden,
the big success of the first season. The bulky bulbous form of Tsar Berendei’s palace, with its lavishly ornate folk-style decorations and fantastic columns shaped and painted like Russian Easter eggs, was inspired by the wooden palace of Kolomenskoe just outside Moscow. The whole scene conjured up a magic Russian realm, and it left the public, which had never seen such folk art on the stage before, enraptured and amazed. The height of the company’s success came after 1896, when the great bass Shaliapin, still only a young man of twenty-four, signed with Mamontov. Shaliapin’s rise had been blocked at the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg by senior singers such as Fedor Stravinsky (the composer’s father), but Mamontov believed in him and put him in the role of Ivan the Terrible in Rimsky’s
Maid of Pskov,
the Private Opera’s main production of the 1896-7 season at its new home in the Solodovnikov Theatre in Moscow. It was a sensation. Rimsky was delighted and, having just had
Sadko
turned down by the Marinsky at the express command of Nicholas II (who wanted something ‘a bit merrier’),
¹⁰⁴
he had no hesitation in throwing in his lot with Mamontov. Rimsky, the young
kuchkist
of the 1860s, had risen to become a pillar of the Russian musical establishment and a professor of the Petersburg Conservatory after 1871; now he too became a convert to Moscow’s neo-nationalist school. All his last six major operas were performed by the Private Opera in its distinctive neo-Russian style, including