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is a profoundly national phenomenon', wrote the painter Shevchenko. 'Russia and the East have been indissolubly linked from as early as the Tatar invasions, and the spirit of the Tatars, of the East, has become so rooted in our life that at times it is difficult to distinguish where a national feature ends and where an Eastern influence begins… Yes we are Asia and are proud of this.' Shevchenko made a detailed case for Russian art originating in the East. Comparing Russian folk with Indo-Persian art, he claimed that one could 'see their common origin'.¹⁶²

Kandinsky himself was a great admirer of Persian art and equated its ideals of simplicity and truth with 'the oldest icons of our Rus' '.¹⁶³ Before the First World War, Kandinsky lived in Munich, where he and Marc were the co-editors of The Blue Rider almanac. Alongside the works of Europe's leading artists, The Blue Rider featured peasant art and children's drawings, folk prints and icons, tribal masks and totems - anything, in fact, that reflected the ideal of spontaneous expression and vitality which Kandinsky placed at the heart of his artistic philosophy. Like the Scythians, Kandinsky at this time was moving to the idea of a synthesis between Western, primitive and oriental cultures. He looked to Russia as the Promised Land (and returned to it after

1917). This search for synthesis was the key theme in Kandinsky's early (so-called 'Russian') works (which were still pictorial rather than abstract). In these paintings there is in fact a complex mix of Christian, pagan and shamanic images from the Komi area. In Motley Life (1907) (plate 19), for example, the scene is clearly set in the Komi capital of Ust Sysolk, at the confluence of the Sysola and Vychegda rivers (a

small log structure in the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, just below the hilltop monastery, confirms the locale: the Komi used these Inns on stilts as storage sheds). On the surface this appears to be a Russian-Christian scene. But, as Kandinsky suggests in the title Motley

Life, underneath the surface there is a collision of diverse beliefs. The red squirrel in the tree, directly at the visual centre of the painting and

echoing the golden dome of the chapel to the right, is an emblem of the forest spirits, to whom the Komi people offered squirrel pelts as a

sacrifice. The old man in the foreground may have the appearance of

a Christian pilgrim, but his supernaturally coloured beard (a pale

green) may also mark him out as a sorcerer, while his stick and musical

accomplice, in the form of the piper to his right, suggest shamanic lore.¹⁶⁴ Several of Kandinsky's early works narrate the story of St Stephan's confrontation with the Komi shaman Pam on the banks of the Vychegda river. According to legend, Pam led the resistance of the Komi people to the fourteenth-century Russian missionary. In a public debate by the riverside Pam based his defence of the pagan religion on the notion that the shamans were better than the Christians at hunting bears and other forest animals. But Stephan challenged him to a 'divine trial by fire and water', inviting Pam to walk through a burning hut and dive into the icy river. The shaman was forced to concede defeat. In Kandinsky's version of the legend, as portrayed in All Saints II (1911) (plate 20), Pam escapes from persecution in a boat. He wears a pointed 'sorcerer's hat'. A mermaid swims alongside the boat; another sits on the rock to its right. Standing on the rock are a pair of saints. They, too, wear sorcerer's caps, but they also have haloes to symbolize the fusion of the Christian and the pagan traditions. On the left St Elijah rides his troika through a storm - blown by the piper in the sky - a reference to the Finno-Ugric god the 'Thunderer', whose place Elijah took in the popular religious imagination. St Simon stands on a column in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. He is another compound figure, combining elements of the blacksmith Simon, who builds an iron pillar to survey the world in the Russian peasant tale of 'The Seven Simons', and St Simeon the Stylite, who spent his life in meditation on top of a pillar and became the patron saint of all blacksmiths. Finally, the figure in the foreground, seated on a horse with his arms outstretched, is the World-watching Man. He is seen here in a double form: as the shaman riding his horse to the spirit world and as St George.¹⁶⁵ This figure reappears throughout Kandinsky's work, from his first abstract canvas, Composition II, in 1910, to his final painting, Tempered Elan, in 1944. It was a sort of symbolic signature of his shaman alter ego who used art as his magic instrument to evoke a higher spiritual world.