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This oriental element was one of the hallmarks of the Russian music school developed by the kucbkists - the 'Mighty Handful' (kuchka) of nationalist composers which included Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Many of the kuchkists' quintessential 'Russian' works - from Balakirev's fantasy for piano Islamei (a cornerstone of the Russian piano school and a 'must perform' at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition) to Borodin's Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade - were composed in this oriental style. As the founding father of the school, Balakirev had encouraged the use of Eastern themes and harmonies to distinguish this self-conscious 'Russian' music from the German symphonism of Anton Rubinstein and the Conservatory. The 'First Russian Symphony' of Rimsky-Korsakov -which was in fact composed more than twelve years after the Ocean Symphony of Rubinstein - earned its nickname because of its use of Russian folk and oriental melodies, which Rimsky's teacher, Balakirev, had transcribed in the Caucasus. 'The symphony is good', wrote the composer Cesar Cui to Rimsky in 1863. 'We performed it a few days ago at Balakirev's - to the great pleasure of Stasov. It is really Russian. Only a Russian could have composed it, because it lacks the slightest trace of any stagnant Germanness [nemetschina].'⁷⁸

Along with Balakirev, Stasov was the major influence on the devel-opment of a Russian-oriental musical style. Many of the pioneering kuchkist works which shaped that style, including Prince Igor and Scheherazade, were dedicated to the nationalist critic. In 1882 Stasov wrote an article on 'Twenty five Years of Russian Art', in which he

tried to account for the profound influence of the Orient on Russian composers:

Some of them personally saw the Orient. Others, although they had not travelled to the East, had been surrounded with Orienral impressions all their lives. Therefore, they expressed them vividly and strikingly. In this they shared a general Russian sympathy with everything Oriental. Its influence has pervaded Russian life and given to its arts a distinctive colouring… To see in this only a strange whim and capriciousness of Russian composers… would be absurd.⁷⁹

For Stasov the significance of the Eastern trace in Russian art went far beyond exotic decoration. It was a testimony to the historical fact of Russia's descent from the ancient cultures of the Orient. Stasov believed that the influence of Asia was 'manifest in all the fields of Russian culture: in language, clothing, customs, buildings, furniture and items of daily use, in ornaments, in melodies and harmonies, and in all our fairy tales'.⁸⁰

Stasov had first outlined the argument in his thesis on the origins of Russian ornament during the 1860s.⁸¹Analysing medieval Russian Church manuscripts, he had linked the ornamentation of the lettering to similar motifs (rhomboids, rosettes, swastikas and chequered patterns, and certain types of floral and animal design) from Persia and Mongolia. Comparable designs were found in other cultures of Byzantium where the Persian influence was also marked; but whereas the Byzantines had borrowed only some of the Persian ornaments, the Russians had adopted nearly all of them, and to Stasov this suggested that the Russians had imported them directly from Persia. Such an argument is difficult to prove - for simple motifs like these are found all over the world. But Stasov focused on some striking similarities. There was, for example, a remarkable resemblance in the ornamental image of the tree, which Stasov thought was linked to the fact that both the Persians and the pagan Russians had 'idealized the tree as a sacred cult'.⁸² In both traditions the tree had a conic base, a spiral round the trunk, and bare branches tipped with magnoliaceous flowers. The image appeared frequently in pagan rituals of the tree cult, which, as Kandinsky had discovered, was still in evidence among the Komi

25. Vladimir Stasov: study of the Russian letter 'B' from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Novgorod

people in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Stasov even found it as the calligraphic trunk of the letter 'B' in a fourteenth-century Gospel from Novgorod, where a man kneels in prayer at the base of the tree. Here is a perfect illustration of the complex mix of Asian, pagan and Christian elements which make up the main strands of Russian folk culture.