SOURCE: "Kandinsky's Ethnography: Scientific Field Work and Aesthetic Reflection," in Art History, Vol. 17, No. 2, June, 1994, pp. 182-208.

This article explores how, in two essays written at separate moments of his adult career, Wassily Kandinsky represented the same ethnographic fieldwork experience in quite differing terms. The first of these essays is a scientific one: Kandinsky's 'From Materials on the Ethnography of the Sysol and Vechegda Zyrians: the National Deities (According to Contemporary Beliefs)' appeared in 1889 in the Ethnographic Review, a newly established forum for Russian ethnographic studies.¹ This was based on fieldwork research which he undertook in the late spring of 1889, whilst a student at Moscow University. 2 This ethnographic treatise is the main object of my initial investigation, and I consider it as an historical document, one produced outside the 'history of art', but with reverberations within it. The first and main section of my article attempts to locate Kandinsky's ethnographic training and his 1889 publication within the prevailing discourses of the discipline at the time.³ The later part of my article has a different focus, its aim being to compare and contrast this scientific essay with an 'artistic' one: with Kandinsky's autobiographical 'Reminiscences' published in 1913 by Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm press, where he presented a distant recollection of his youthful ethnographic researches. 4 The initial analysis of his ethnographic essay in the first part of my article, in other words, will constitute the framework, the perspective, for my narrowly focused reading of those passages in 'Reminiscences' which give a strongly poeticized and personalized account of his 1889 field work,⁵ where 'science', passing through the filter of memory, is transformed into 'art'. The purpose of this comparison, however, is not only to highlight the discrepancies between Kandinsky's two ethnographic representations; more interestingly, it also allows me to suggest some surprising points of contact between the apparently discrete discourses of art and science.

KANDINSKY AS ETHNOGRAPHER

The main goal of Kandinsky's ethnographic research was to document any remaining traces of old Zyrian religious conceptions. The first section of my analysis focuses on this aspiration, combining close reading of Kandinsky's treatise with wider inspection of the disciplinary context in which it was researched and published. Firstly, however, I would like to step back a little, to consider why Kandinsky's relatively obscure scientific essay merits attention at all by art historians. My turning to his article was, of course, mediated by something else: in this instance, by my understanding of recent critical work which explores the 'textuality' (the 'poetics') of twentieth-century ethnographic writing. James Clifford's introduction to the series of essays collected in the volume Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography summarizes the principles behind much of this work. These authors, he writes:

See culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes. They assume that academic and literary genres interpenetrate and that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental and ethical . . . (they draw) attention to the historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures.⁶

From such a perspective, the boundaries of science and art are unstable, and ethnographic writing as much as literary writing is open to textual and historical analysis. The work of Clifford and others, whilst primarily concerned with twentieth-century ethnographies, has prompted me to consider Kandinsky's Zyrian essay as embedded in the academic politics of the time and place in which it was produced, and as shaped by specific institutional constraints. Moreover, it also suggested that Kandinsky's scientific article could be approached in the same way as his artistic writings, employing the same critical apparatus. Kandinsky's essay appeared in Ethnographic Review, a newly established forum for ethnographic studies published under the auspices of the Imperial Society for the friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology and Ethnography.⁷ The ethnographic section of the society was centred at Moscow University and, as witnessed by its publications, it brought together students of diverse disciplines: legal historians as well as linguists, anthropologists alongside archaeologists.⁸ In the Russian version of 'Reminiscences', Kandinsky recalled the help and support he had received as a student from A. N. Fillipov. More than an academic mentor, Fillipov was also a colleague in the Imperial Society for the friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology and Ethnography, and his influence on Kandinsky's ethnographic research was certainly pervasive.⁹ The year prior to Kandinsky's publication, the ethnographic section of the Imperial Society had published an extensive appendix in Volume VIII of its journal;¹⁰ this addendum claimed to be a major contribution to the institutional development of ethnography as a scientific discipline. It consisted of two elaborate programmes of questions and guidelines, designed to aid empirical researchers engaged in ethnographic field work. Both programmes were dated 1887, though the second was prefaced by an introduction dated 1886. This second programme was the more specialized of the two, being a set of guidelines specifically for assembling legal customs. The introduction, written by N. M. Charusin, the secretary of the ethnographic section, acknowledged a number of members who had contributed in devising the projects, giving special thanks to A. N. Fillipov.¹¹

The first version in the appendix appeared under the general title 'Programme for Collecting Ethnographic Information'; it was based on Western models such as the so-called Circular of Enquiry, published in 1884 by the American Bureau of Ethnography, or the equivalent British programme of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, the first edition of which appeared in 1874 but which was subsequently much up-dated and frequently re-issued.¹² The 1874 British compilation was edited by the eminent Victorian, General Pitt-Rivers, and contained contributions from such evolutionary cultural theorists as E. B. Tylor. The preface to this British volume set out the ambitions of the programme, unconvincingly submerging imperialist and racial sentiments in a call for increased scientific exactitude and objectivity:

Travellers have usually recorded only those customs of modern savages which they have chanced to observe; and, as a rule, they have observed chiefly those which their experience of civilised institutions has led them to look for . . . owing to these and other causes the imperfections of the anthropological record surpass those of other sciences, and false theories are often built upon imperfect bases of induction. . . .

It is hoped that the questions contained in the following sections . . . may be a means of enabling the traveller to collect information without prejudice arising from individual bias. To this end it is particularly requested that he will endeavour to answer the questions as fully as possible. .. .¹³

Like its models, the Russian questionnaire was divided up into a series of sections, in accordance with natural scientific principles of taxonomic classification. It encompassed sections dealing with geography and history, for example, as well as sections on physical anthropology, architecture and technology, dress, food and drink, occupations, etc. Yet the most comprehensive classification, with internal subsections, focused on religion and beliefs. And the latter, of course, was precisely the category of Kandinsky's ethnographic investigation. His field work took him to the fringes of Western Siberia, where the immediate object was to study:

the national deities of the Sysol- and Vechegda-Zyrians. When I chose this subject out of the field of general research into religious conceptions, it was with the intention of reconstructing as far as possible traces of the pagan past, insofar as these traces can be established in the chaos of presentday religious ideas, which are so strongly influenced by Christianity.¹⁴

Kandinsky's fieldwork research was part of a systematic Russian programme of ethnographic inquiry, a programme which coincided with a period of accelerated change in the theory and practice of the anthropological sciences.¹⁵ The last decades of the century bore witness to growing dissatisfaction with the conventional nineteenth-century division of work, between academic theorists, on the one hand, and practical collectors of cultural and anthropological data on the other. In the British context, for example, stereotypical nineteenth-century 'armchair' academics (described by one historian, referring to the likes of Herbert Spencer, as 'evolutionary titans'¹⁶), rarely if ever undertook empirical research in the field or even among archival data. On the other hand, amateur research in the second half of the nineteenth century comprised a wide range of individual contributions from people with quite different interests and experience. Before the 1880s the scholars' 'evidence' might consist of notes and memoirs of explorers, travellers or tourists, the data compiled by government officials and colonial administrators, or supplied by private traders, merchants and missionaries. Such second-hand material did, in fact, remain important for ethnographic studies beyond the nineteenth century, and provided important precedents for later institutionally trained or guided field workers. However, the British, American and, later, the Russian programmes all evince a growing impetus to achieve more satisfactory integration of the empirical and theoretical components of anthropological inquiry. In Russia, the programmes produced by Fillipov and his colleagues took on board the example of Western projects which attempted to implement more rigorous measures to control the collection of cultural data. The ideal was to establish objective scientific research practices in order to ensure socio-academic respectability for the anthropological sciences. This was stated, for instance, by a leading Russian anthropologist, Professor D. N. Anutschin, in his opening contribution to the first number of Ethnographic Review, also in 1889.¹⁷

One persuasive image, then, might be of Kandinsky as an eager young academic, setting off on a voyage of cultural exploration, armed with his diary and notebooks and also equipped with a copy of the brand new Russian research programme. He was taking part in a co-ordinated project aiming to document, describe and classify the variousness of ethnic groups comprising the Russian Empire. However, this image needs to be handled with caution, as it can lead to associations with Western-style imperialism, and with a view of the researcher as colonial explorer and perhaps also governor or administrator.¹⁸ In the Russian context, this aspect of the nineteenth-century ethnographic disciplines was out of step with that other function of the 'intelligentsia', as critic of Russian imperial autocracy.¹⁸ The next section of my article will argue this latter point in more detail, considering the ideological complexities of Kandinsky's publication, whilst suggesting how, in particular respects, it reflects the transitional state of ethnographic scholarship in the late nineteenth century. In other words, I will endeavour to show how Kandinsky's research brought together what at the time were contradictory perspectives: namely, that of evolutionary anthropology and that of political history.

Kandinsky's treatise unites, on the one hand, a marked concern for the systematic morphological derivation of the names of Zyrian deities, with, on the other, a highly coloured rendition of the substance of Zyrian legends. The latter, as I demonstrate shortly, was partly shaped by earlier historical accounts of the Zyrians and also by the underlying political message of Kandinsky's essay. The former, his interest in the etymologies of words, is apparent throughout the Zyrian article, and might be considered in the light of Foucault's analysis of the human sciences in the nineteenth century. Focault identifies a 'vast shift' away from biological models, with their hypotheses of instinctual force, leading to 'the reign of the philological . . . when it is a matter of interpretation and the discovery of hidden meanings . . . '.¹⁹ We might suppose this refers, for instance, to the importance of linguistic analysis in Franz Boas's work on North West Coast American Indians.²⁰ Of more immediate relevance for Kandinsky is the example of the linguist V. F. Müller, a leading member of the ethnographic section of the Imperial Society, whose work in the Caucasus was widely reported, for instance, in the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, the same international journal which also referred to Kandinsky's work in its bibliographical roundup of 1891.²¹ As the evidence of his essay indicates, Kandinsky was aware of the importance of linguistics in ethnographic investigation, viewing words, proverbs and sayings as puzzles in need of decoding. He was particularly fascinated by the way in which linguistic signs could remain constant, changing only slightly in form over history, while their conceptual meanings varied independently. At the end of the article, for example, he considered two old Zyrian terms for gods: Forest-Man [lesak-mort] and Poloznicha.²² The latter, the name of a protector of the rye, was of Russian origin, stemming from poludnica [midday], and hence the further meaning of 'midday-goddess'.²³ From the same root, he noted, was derived the term for cornflowers: Poloznicha-blue, or 'eye of the midday-goddess'. More fantastically, he also explained that, at one time, the power of Poloznicha was so revered that no one dared to cut the rye until after St Elijah's day, for fear of retribution. This superstition had almost vanished, except among children and some local elders, who, for his benefit, reminisced about the golden old days of Poloznicha when the corn was much better, whilst blaming Zyrian unbelievers for driving the goddess away in anger.²⁴

Lesak-mort was more mysterious still. While some Zyrians still believed that lesak-mort had once been a fierce god, no one could offer an explanation for this definition. Kandinsky claimed that the term was now often used to designate particularly heroic and fearless men, though until comparatively recently it had been a term of abuse. Typically, he also looked for an historical and sociological explanation of this conceptual turn-around:

Perhaps the influence of Christianity was responsible for changing the name of the old Deity into an insulting term; this commonly occurs with religious upheaval. .. .²⁵

With this latter remark, Kandinsky linked his closing observations back to the beginning of his article, where he investigated a local saying: 'churki never die.' The proverbial village elder of ethnography offered guidance, explaining that the word churka derived from Churila, an old Chud name for their principal god (the Chuds being original occupants of the lands currently inhabited by Zyrians). The sage's information was fittingly ancient. According to Kandinsky, the grand old man had heard the story as a child from his own elders.²⁶ At the same time, however, Kandinsky observed how churka had completely changed meaning; in bastardized form, it now signified 'illegitimate child'.

These observations in turn acquired considerable imaginative force thanks to Kandinsky's initial consideration of Chud history, which he represented romantically as a history of indigenous struggle for cultural independence. According to Zyrian legend, he noted, the Chuds had been wiped out in the thirteenth century, after valiant but futile resistance to a combination of St Stephen of Perm's missionary fervour and Russian territorial expansionism²⁷. Kandinsky seems to have derived much of his information about the rapid conquest and conversion of the region from a long account of the Zyrian peoples published earlier in the century by the Finnish phililogist and historian J. A. Sjögren.²⁸ Influenced by Herderian ideals, Sjögren specialized in the diverse Finno-Ugric languages and cultures of northern Russia, including Zyrian, and in his numerous publications he paid particular attention to the pre-Russian history of the north.²⁹ Kandinsky repeated from Sjögren the legendary story about the Chuds' final solution in defence of their own religion and culture, as they thwarted St Stephen by burying themselves alive with their possessions. These burial spots, he noted, became known to the Zyrians as 'Chudtrenches'. Although many of the older people claimed to know the sites of these graves, they were fearful of excavating them because they were 'impure'. The Zyrians, according to Kandinsky, were sure of one thing about their own history; they knew their ancestors had not followed the Chud example. The Zyrians had survived, as they saw the light and were converted.³⁰

Kandinsky, however, also obtained an alternative 'onthe-spot' ethnographic insight from an elderly informant, who claimed that the Chuds and the Zyrians were originally one and the same people, the Komi. According to this venerable sage, the conquering Russians, because they could not understand the language of the indigenous people, enforced the name Chud, derived from the Russian word for 'incomprehensible'.³¹ In Kandinsky's work, then, etymological investigation coupled with investigative field work illuminated a suppressed history of cultural resistance. Moreover, as I demonstrate below, he believed that the complex Zyrian/Chud history of subordination to an invading power and enforced religious conversion explained why present-day Zyrians had repressed virtually all memories of their earlier religious conceptions.

I have been suggesting that Kandinsky's Zyrian essay reveals heterogeneous loyalties. This is also indicated in the way he shaped his article according to recognizable criteria of scientific objectivity. The meticulous academic followed his programmatic guidelines thoroughly; his essay endeavoured to fulfil the requirements not only of the Russian questionnaire directions but even those of its English research paradigm. In his contributions to the 'Cultural' sub-section of Notes and Queries, E. B. Tylor offered instruction on how to gather information relevant to the history of ethnic groups. Whilst reminding future researchers to take heed of oral legends and myths as well as written records, Tylor offered specific questions:

What account do they give of themselves, and their connexion with other nations, wars, alliances, etc? . . .

What names does the tribe, nation, or race go by? and which are native names used by themselves and which terms given by other people? ... Do they consider other tribes related to them by language, as having branched off from them, or vice-versa, or all from some other national source? . . .

What do they have to say as to the introduction and change of their religion, invention of new ceremonies, etc? . . .

Have they traditions to account for monuments, such as old graves, mounds, sites of villages, etc? . . .³²

My earlier discussion suggests Kandinsky pondered such precise questions at length—even if some of his answers came courtesy of earlier investigators like A. J. Sjögren. Moreover, as investigating 'man-on-the-spot', he not only sought to align his investigation with a preexisting programme, but he also recognized a given set of methodological assumptions. These assumptions as to historical reconstruction are indicated by Kandinsky's remarks on what he believed to be the scientific function of his ethnographic task; he wished to peel back the layers of historical accretion to reconstruct, as far as possible, the original pre-Christian belief system of the Zyrians.³³ If, as a number of historians have noticed, nineteenth-century students of ethnography were obsessed with the development of religious ideas,³⁴ then Kandinsky was no exception. He adhered to the familiar conceit of ethnography as a form of historical detective work, with the ethnographer teasing out and tracing back surviving clues to the past, such clues being the remains of the past in the present. As the published essay demonstrates, he believed such useful cultural clues were to be found in unusual customs and practices, in the testimonies of village elders, as well as in proverbs and sayings.

The precedents for this way of conceiving cultural practices were legion. Tylor, for one, had urged ethnographers to attend to 'peculiar forms of language' as well as to any remarkable ceremonial customs or ritual prohibitions, all of which could be 'in various ways instructive' in throwing light on the past.³⁵ Moreover, according to this Victorian theorist, gathering information on religious beliefs demanded particularly acute detective skills on the part of the ethnographer:

It is often a matter of difficulty to obtain precise information on the religion of uncivilised people, who conceal their doctrines for fear of ridicule, and will purposely put the inquirer off the track. After long and friendly intercourse, however, a clue might generally be obtained; and when something is known, it serves as a means of raising farther questions. . . . Information should be obtained from as many sources as possible. .. .³⁶

This was a model procedure and Kandinsky even employed it when setting out parts of his essay. In one section, he considered the possibility of an original sun cult, which was, of course, something to which he would have been alerted by his guidelines. Until Elijah's day in July, he noted, the Zyrians superstitiously refrained from transporting ice uncovered. As for the reason, he offered an unattributed Zyrian statement: 'To ensure that the sun cannot see it; otherwise the sun will send hail.'³⁷ The present Zyrians, especially those in outlying areas, he argued, still attributed anthropomorphic qualities to the sun, believing that he could see and grow angry or jealous. Ever the good researcher, Kandinsky reported that he had attempted to pursue the origin of the idea further, though, as a result of the resolute nature of peasant faith, this proved unavailing. When he pressed the Zyrians with the implausibility of the concept,

Many simply answered that they had heard it from their fathers and grandfathers; therefore it had to be true that the sun can see.³⁸

According to Tylor's classificatory principles, this was superstitious belief of an absurd kind. Kandinsky followed the trail through by noting evidence for other Zyrian animistic beliefs. The wind was thought to be male, he recorded, citing how old women would exhort the wind to blow; when such entreaties came to naught, they might say: 'He is angry.' Always mindful of his research guidelines, Kandinsky attended to other 'tell-tale' ritual habits, such as those which seemed to indicate early fire-worship: for instance, it was taboo to spit into the hearth.³⁹ As with his interest in the conceptual vagaries of words, he was also attentive to the way in which cultural practices varied. One custom, again linked to fire-worship, regulated the extinguishing of fires. In its most common form, the practice demanded the fire be put out with water, and never by an 'impure' person trampling on the flames. Yet in a few places the prohibition was turned on its head and the opposite was the case. According to Kandinsky, this indicated that the custom was now merely a matter of form, a mere cipher; the original ritual context that gave the practice meaning had vanished.⁴⁰

Kandinsky's indebtedness to existing patterns of cultural analysis is also indicated in the section of his essay covering Zyrian respect for the souls of their ancestors, which he linked to their adoration of hearth and home.⁴¹For some Zyrians, he claimed, the whole of the house adjacent to the hearth was sacrosanct. He discovered a remarkable indicator of such reverence, in that numerous new houses in the town of Ust-Sysol'sk remained unoccupied, testimony to Zyrian fears that a move might raise the wrath of the house spirit, that ancient protector of hearth and family.⁴²

Characteristically for nineteenth-century ethnographers, Kandinsky declared that all the signs amassed were fragmentary traces of a rapidly disappearing non-Christian culture. Less characteristically, however, he judiciously avoided the loaded terms 'primitive' or 'savage'. For his Western evolutionist exemplars, such terms embodied the assumption of 'civilized' Christian superiority—and that hardly fits with the ideological complexities of Kandinsky's essay. Only once, in fact, did he use 'primitive'; remarkably, he did so at the one point, falling in the second half of his essay, where he referred directly to a paradigm of Western theoretical synthesis, namely the philosophical sociology of Herbert Spencer.⁴³ This was the point where, in turning his attention fully to Zyrian concepts of 'the soul', he addressed one of the biggest issues for nineteenth-century students of pre-industrialized peoples.⁴⁴ The central theme of E. B. Tylor's widely admired Primitive Culture (1871), for instance, was the evolution of 'Animism', which Tylor identified as the revering of souls, ghosts and the like.⁴⁵ He traced the root of such concepts to belief in the human soul, which in turn derived from the subjective experience of dreams or visions. Tylor's rational exegesis of 'primitive' soul concepts was an exemplary one for contemporary scholars, similar in a number of respects to Herbert Spencer's handling of the theme in the Principles of Sociology.⁴⁶ Tylor, at least indirectly, provided the empirical guidelines for Kandinsky's own study of Zyrian soul concepts, whilst Spencer's Principles was the more immediate theoretical scheme: the debt to Spencer is most marked, perhaps, in Kandinsky's ambitions to understand religious phenomena 'holistically', in their relationships to specific historical—social and political—factors.⁴⁷

Kandinsky focused on the Zyrian concept of Ort, which he theorized as a non-Christian soul concept. He argued that the concept was peculiarly and originally Zyrian. This claim, though, was scarcely justified by the evidence he offered, as more recent studies have demonstrated,⁴⁸and at best it can be taken as a creative misrepresentation on his part. The claim, nonetheless, enabled him to point an accusing finger at the twin forces of enforced Russification and religious conversion, which, he argued, had disrupted the authentic 'native' belief system. This is a case of inventive interpretation, yet one tempered by the nature of the empirical investigation. Tylor's propositions lie behind Kandinsky's approach to Ort, as can be seen from a sample of Tylor's instructions for uncovering concepts of the soul:

Is something of the nature of a human soul believed in? . . . What is its name? is it associated with the breath, shadow, etc? . . . does it depart when the body dies? ... What is the soul considered to be? what is its form, substance, voice, power, etc? . . .⁴⁹

Kandinsky's investigation of Ort amounted to a sustained discussion along these lines, as he considered and juggled the possibilities. For instance, he disavowed conventional equations between the concepts of Ort and of Christian 'spirit', the opposite of matter. While allowing that, in modern Zyrian usage, Ort usually meant spirit (dukh) or soul (loi), nevertheless he argued that one should not conclude that the 'substance' of Ort was of the nature of spirit:

Even today the Zyrians are possessed of a completely unclear conception of spirit, and undoubtedly they can thank the processes of Russification and Christianisation for this. All their Forest and Water Deities, etc., have a substantial form. All these beings can be seen and they can incur physical injury. Even their concepts of the human soul are extraordinarily unclear, or are entirely absent . . .⁵⁰

If this was cultural relativism on Kandinsky's part, it was of a highly ambiguous kind, as he assumes in this passage that a clearer—and presumably superior—'conception of spirit' was to hand. The ambiguity is hardly surprising, though, given the diverse models on which his socio-cultural investigation depended.

Kandinsky also marshalled evidence of contemporary Zyrian practices in order to support his contention that 'Ort is a material thing';⁵¹ this, he implied, distinguished the Zyrian conception from Christian dualism. Dealing with Zyrian notions of the deceased, he noted a peculiar twist in the Zyrian belief in ghosts; they believed that the dead could wander in this world in their same corporeal form. This was particularly the case, according to the Zyrians, when the dead person was a magic-man or shaman. Kandinsky described a peculiar burial custom, whereby if the deceased was a shaman, the body would be shackled. The desired effect was to prevent the dead shaman from returning to disturb his relatives; no one, he noted in some surprise, doubted that the 'soul' could be bound in this way.⁵²

At the same time, Kandinsky endeavoured to make his empirical investigation of Zyrian soul concepts conform to a Spencerian theoretical model—though without great success. Focusing on Spencer's idea that evolution in religious ideas entailed progressive differentiation of the notions of Mind and Matter, he cited from Spencer's chapter 'Ideas of Death and Resurrection' in Principles of Sociology, vol. 1.⁵³ This chapter was part of Spencer's large sub-section 'Primitive Ideas', forming one category in his so-called synthetic philosophy. Religious concepts, according to Spencer's classificatory principles, were, like all ideological forms, subject to hierarchical laws of developmental progress. This schema was supposedly not arbitrary but natural; ideas were subject to 'natural' evolutionary processes in the same way as all biological and sociological forms. On the basis of empirical evidence amassed and supplied by numerous travellers and men on the spot, Spencer had classified 'Primitive Man' under separate headings: 'Physical', 'Emotional' and 'Intellectual', on the basis of which he developed his sociological study, outlining laws of mental development according to his 'psychological principles'. In all three categories of the system articulated in his Principles of Sociology, the 'primitive' was considered inferior to the civilized Westerner; only members of civilized Western nations could ideally exemplify his principles of psychology.

Spencer's ideal psychological condition was twofold: it required both a highly developed moral faculty and a rational, reflective consciousness, an abstract Mind. In the circuitous arguments of his philosophy, psychological 'progress' was in turn dependent on the stage of social evolution attained; it required social stability and systematic state regulation. Only such an order of things ensured those immensely desirable Victorian sentiments of duty, responsibility, industry and, above all, justice.⁵⁴ In his sociological and psychological principles, Spencer spoke a pre-eminently Victorian language of power and control, and the Principles of Sociology which Kandinsky read were imbued with an evolutionary ideology justifying imperial superiority:

Throughout long past periods . . . there has been going on a continuous differentation of races, a continuous overrunning of the less powerful or less adapted by the more powerful or more adapted, a driving of inferior varieties into undesirable habitats, and, occasionally, an extermination of inferior varieties.⁵⁵

Kandinsky learned from Spencer that many 'primitive' peoples had a more advanced conception of the duality of matter and spirit—and therefore clearer concepts of the soul—than the Zyrians.⁵⁶ Yet he clearly had some trouble reconciling this with his sense that, in other respects, the Zyrians had travelled far along the evolutionary ladder: he could only postulate that enforced Russification and conversion to Christianity explained Zyrian backwardness in their soul concepts.⁵⁷ With this suggestion he attempted—unconvincingly—to marry Spencer's principles of scientific classification with his own historical critique of the 'survival of the fittest': the cultural suppression of one people by a more powerful neighbour.

Thus, despite Kandinsky's having recourse to a Spencerian model and to precise programmatic guidelines, his published ethnographic essay does not conform straightforwardly to a 'scientifically' evolutionist pattern of sociocultural investigation. I am suggesting, in other words, that Kandinsky's 1889 essay was shaped by specific disciplinary precedents, yet also 'escaped' them. The next section attempts to add substance to this argument, by considering the way in which his Zyrian essay qualified one set of conventions by means of another. Kandinsky's powerful authorial presence, a traveller on a mission of discovery, filtered into his ethnographic essay, undermining the 'norm of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject'.⁵⁸ M. L. Pratt has demonstrated how pre-scientific ethnographic writings, including travelbooks, personal memoirs and explorers' tales, continued to inform the language of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnography, effectively undermining the paradigms of objective fact-finding and impersonal reportage. Characteristic of all such 'pre-scientific' writings, she argues, is the combination of narrative and descriptive modes, and at the same time she demonstrates how personal narrative was never fully excluded from formal 'scientific' ethnographies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Personal narrative, as a convention of ethnographic writing, 'plays the part of anchoring the "scientific" description in the intense and authority-giving personal experience of fieldwork'.⁵⁹ Pratt's analysis is particularly apt as a characterization of Kandinsky's ethnographic publication, and this is hardly surprising, as we know that he also read and used exemplary 'travel-accounts' in preparation for his field trip, such as the one by A. J. Sjögren.⁶⁰

From the outset, Kandinsky's 'personal voice' erupted in his article, as he declared his reasons for undertaking the research and also endeavoured to establish the originality and reliability of his 'on-the-spot' work in comparison with existing studies:

Anyone who happens to be familiar with the existing literature on the Zyrians is bound to be astonished by the numerous inaccuracies and frequent contradictions. These shortcomings are due to the fact that many investigators do not specify their area of investigation, but speak of the Zyrians in general terms. Such generalizations are inadmissable because the various clans of the Zyrian people are quite distinct one from the other. . . .64 Therefore, I firmly stress that, when I refer to the Zyrians in this article, I mean specifically the Sysola and Vychegda Zyrians. .. .⁶¹

Throughout the first part of his article Kandinsky repeatedly asserted his personal experience, as if to establish the validity of his field work and of his eclectic observations ('I know, because I was there'). He related anecdotally, for instance, how he had made the mistake, as an alien, of carrying ice uncovered before Elijah's day, suggesting that this subjective experience, and particularly the warning it earned him, was yet another telltale sign of the Zyrians' original sun cult.⁶² Moreover, he appealed to personal dialogue as a means of adding weight to his more contentious observations, such as the one about invading Russians enforcing the 'alien' term Chud on the native Komi, this being a story he heard directly from a wise old informant.⁶³ Kandinsky's article, then, indicates important tensions between empirical field work on the one hand and theoretical synthesis on the other, and he might have been indicating as much when, in concluding his article, he noted that the materials he had amassed were still 'unsystematic.'⁶⁴

ARTISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY

My analysis so far has attempted to identify some of the complexities (historical and disciplinary) of Kandinsky's ethnographic writing. From this, I have shown that Kandinsky's ethnographic work cannot be fitted into a single theoretical paradigm. The scientific framework for his ethnographic research comprised questionnaire-type guidelines for interrogating an unfamiliar research object and thus collecting relevant cultural data. I now want to develop my suggestion that this framework suppressed many aspects of his fieldwork experience; these 'suppressions', I will argue, were given expression in his semifictional 'Reminiscences', published in 1913. Here, instead of following a written questionnaire in order to hunt out remnants of indigenous religious concepts, he focused on things that he saw, specifically material culture, art and architecture. As recent scholars have recognized, the study of art and aesthetics continues to be marginalized within cultural anthropology, and this was even more the case at the turn of the century.⁶⁵ I will attempt to understand Kandinsky's move from an ethnographic study of religious conceptions to an aesthetic appreciation of traditional artistic cultures within this disciplinary context. Hence the following section concentrates on the visualist quality of his ethnographic remembrances, whereby Kandinsky foregrounded the aesthetic/sensory aspects of his field work and, in particular, focused on his experience of colour. At the same time, I consider how, in the process of rewriting his ethnographic experiences within 'Reminiscences', Kandinsky abandoned his earlier aspirations for scientific objectivity. He represented his ethnographic work instead as a first-person narrative of subjective enlightenment, one embedded within a series of revelatory artistic experiences: 'Reminiscences', in other words, emphasizes the reflexive, experiential dimension of his ethnographic work.

The ethnographic references in 'Reminiscences' are woven into the fabric of an essay which, like most of Kandinsky's contemporary writings, aimed to elucidate his sense of the autonomous power of art. I will consider Kandinsky's ethnographic memories, therefore, in so far as they epitomize his notion of a universal 'language of colour'.⁶⁶ The culminating passage in his account of his trip to the province of Vologda, 'where .. . I was sent by the Imperial Society for Science, Anthropology and Ethnography', is characteristically ecstatic:

I shall never forget the great wooden houses. . . . In these magical houses I experienced something I have never encountered again since. They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture. I still remember how I entered the living room for the first time and stood rooted to the spot before this unexpected scene. The table, the benches, the great stove (indispensable in Russian farmhouses), the cupboards, and every other object were covered with brightly coloured, elaborate ornaments. Folk pictures on the walls; a symbolic representation of a hero, a battle, a painted folk song. The 'red' corner (red is the same as beautiful in old Russian) thickly, completely covered with painted and printed pictures of the saints, burning in front of it the red flame of a small pendant lamp . . . existing in and for itself. When I finally entered the room, I felt surrounded on all sides by painting, into which I had thus penetrated.⁶⁷

I want to consider this account of his experience of 'folk' art, and specifically his reference to the 'red' icon-corner, in comparison with the work of the Russian Byzantist and historian N. P. Kondakov. This passage from 'Reminiscences' can be matched almost point for point with Kondakov's discussion of the same icon-corner in traditional Russian houses, in his widely admired study of the Russian icon.⁶⁸ Both Kandinsky and Kondakov stressed how the icon-corner was completely covered with painted and printed pictures of the saints, and both drew out the semantic dimensions of the Russian term for this icon oratory ('fair corner'), noting that the etymological root kras signified both 'beauty' and the colour red.⁶⁹ We know from references in On the Spiritual in Art (1911) that Kandinsky read Kondakov's publications with considerable enthusiasm.⁷⁰ This enthusiasm is significant precisely because Kondakov approached art 'scientifically', as a form of cultural anthropology. In other words, Kondakov's work was exceptional for its time. My reconstruction of Kandinsky's interest in Kondakov's work begins, therefore, with this 1911 reference, and my overarching aim is to demonstrate the extent to which Kandinsky's art-theoretical formulations were intimately bound up with the concerns of his earlier ethnographic studies.

As an archaeologist and an historian, Kondakov was concerned to elucidate cultural objects—Byzantine miniatures and Russian icons—in terms of their socio-historical and religious functions: at the beginning of his Histoire de Fart byzantine considéreé principalement dans les miniatures he pointedly rejected formal and stylistic versions of art 'history'.⁷¹ In his chapter on 'The Languages of Colours and Forms' in On the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky quoted a passage from the French edition of this work by Kondakov, which discussed colour symbolism in Byzantine miniatures of the tenth century.⁷² Kondakov explained the conventional meanings of the colours used, noting that the Emperor was signified by his gold halo in contrast to the blue haloes of 'les personnages symboliques, comme pour indiquer leur origine céleste'. Kandinsky was quoting from the second volume of Kondakov's work, where the author dealt with the so-called second 'Golden Age' of Byzantine art, designating this as some three centuries, from the end of iconoclasm until the late twelfth century. Kandinsky's enthusiasm for Kondakov is hardly surprising, given Kondakov's argument that Byzantine art in this period was remarkably unified, extending across the whole of the Byzantine world, and that this unity could be understood in terms of the 'tendance à l'abstraction' in the art of the time.⁷³ The 'Golden Age' of Byzantine art was veritably universal, indeed was capable of uniting diverse cultures and peoples. It was based, he suggested, on a common system of formal and colouristic significance, and on firmly established levels of technical attainment.⁷⁴

Of particular interest to Kandinsky was Kondakov's discussion of the 'popular' characteristics of both miniatures and icons. In his discussion of the earlier period of Byzantine miniature painting, for instance, Kondakov stressed a continual intertwining of art, popular culture and religion. He believed that a history of Byzantine art should be based on an understanding of the theological underpinning of culture: complex moral and spiritual ideas inevitably lay behind the production of both texts and images.⁷⁵ Miniature painting tended to be cultivated in monasteries, by monks who, he suggested, created the intellectual and philosophical energy of society. This vigorous art he contrasted with that of the imperial courts, which tended to be 'elegant and brilliant', but short on ideas.⁷⁶ That produced by the miniaturists, on the other hand, fulfilled the 'true religious needs of the people'.⁷⁷ In other words, Kondakov suggested to Kandinsky an extraordinary instance of a spiritual culture produced by an 'intelligentsia' for 'the people'. He even suggested that the monastical centres were major sites of opposition during the period of iconoclasm, an era which witnessed a sustained and effective attack on images, supported by a succession of emperors. The strength of the resistance was marked, for Kondakov, by the subsequent popularity of illustrated psalm books in the post-iconoclast period. The triumph of the orthodox faith was assured and a free religious-artistic culture 'served to instruct the ignorant masses, to explain the faith, to act on the heart, to develop the love of God and of man'.⁷⁸

In other publications, Kondakov also analysed the 'popularity' of the Russian icon, again in terms which Kandinsky could appreciate.⁷⁹ As in his study of Byzantine art, he emphasized Pagan-Christian continuities of religious and ritual practice, in which images played a central role. In particular, he stressed the non-Christian origins of icon worship, using terms quite familiar to Kandinsky:

The Church accepted the use of the icon as a pious popular custom, which helped faith and gave it general support among the people, and she allowed the icon to establish itself and spread, like some other customs. .. . All this arose and developed on soil saturated with survivals of the ancient and oriental worlds.⁸⁰

The study of Russian icons was a logical progression for Kondakov, as he stressed their Graeco-Byzantine origins. He even traced the pious popularity of icon worship back to ancient Egyptian burial and mummification practices, and he explicated this non-Christian ideology of soul-life. The similarity with Ort would not have been lost on Kandinsky:

According to the sepulchral inscriptions, a man at death is divided into body, soul, and the bright essence of the double ('Ka'), which was the link between the corruptible body and the soul. The 'Ka' is a coloured shadow, a bodiless shape.⁸¹

The substance of Ka, as coloured shadow, supposedly partook simultaneously of the nature of matter and spirit, and Kondakov also contended that, in the immediately pre-Christian era, Ka became identified with the painted images or icons of funerary furnishings. These, he argued, 'retained the powers of a mystic and vivifying image which maintained the link between the departed soul and the deserted body preserved in the form of a mummy.'⁸² This mystic popularity of the image continued into the Christian period:

When the pictured portrait of a saint became an icon the position it took was that of a devotional icon . . . that voiceless friend in the faith to whom people turned with their prayer. . . . As they prayed they made the sign of the cross upon the breast and kissed the icon and this became the regular practice. . . .⁸³

Kondakov argued that the icon retained its quasi-magical and popular function as sanctified matter, partaking directly of the spiritual essence of that which was represented. Indeed, as more recent Byzantine historians have noted,⁸⁴ in Eastern Orthodox religion the iconic image was in some sense a sacrament or emanation of the thing represented; in Orthodox liturgy the icon became the primary access door through which man could behold the holy and the holy could descend on man. In his demonstration of Pagan-Christian continuities, moreover, Kondakov presented icon worship as a manifestation of cultural flexibility as well as of religious faith. At the same time, he emphasized that icons were integral forms of popular folk culture; the devotional icon, for example, was also a household protector and defender against evil spirits. As already indicated, Kondakov's discussion of the 'icon-corner' in traditional Russian houses⁸⁵ is uncannily similar to the passage in Kandinsky's 'Reminiscences' in which he described his first encounter with folk art in traditional Russian houses.

Having identified some links between Kondakov and Kandinsky, I will now address points of contrast; despite his quoting and paraphrasing of Kondakov, Kandinsky's notion of a universal 'language' of colours was quite at odds with the cultural relativism central to Kondakov's historical methodology. In his pre-war writings, Kandinsky argued that art forms created in socially distinct cultures shared a trans-historical form of aesthetic meaning, having a direct inner effect on the sensitive soul. In On the Spiritual in Art, for instance, he maintained that the purely artistic effects of an art object gained in strength the more it was removed from its historical and social origins. Egyptian sculpture, for example, had a more powerful aesthetic effect for 'us' than for its contemporaries, because 'we' are immune to the particular socio-cultural symbolic meanings of Egyptian sculpture;⁸⁶ the further removed in time and space, supposedly the greater was the possibility of immediate rather than mediate pure art experience. In the third chapter of On the Spiritual in Art, he also offered musings on the possibility of immediate—non-conventional—aural sensations, this time with 'pure sound' transcending the arbitrary limitations of the spoken word, to return to a realm of universal inner affectiveness:

Words are inner sounds. . . . Skilful use of a word (according to poetic feeling).. . manifold repetition of a word (a favourite childhood game, later forgotten) makes it lose its external sense as a name . . . and only the pure sound of the word remains . . . this pure sound comes to the fore and exercises a direct influence upon the soul. The soul experiences a non-objective vibration that is more complex . . . than the effect on the soul produced by a bell, a vibrating string, a falling board, etc. Here, great possibilities open up for the literature of the future.⁸⁷

This was an aesthete's aesthetic if ever there were one, grounded in Symbolist principles. It defined artistic excellence as that which transcended cultural relativism to partake in a realm of natural, and therefore universal, human sensitivity.

In the process of expounding his theory of the 'inner' power of art, Kandinsky borrowed ideas from Kondakov. In doing so, however, he effectively undermined Kondakov's insistence on socio-cultural relativism. His was never more than a partial reading of Kondakov; he interpreted the latter's explication of the ritual and symbolic meaning of icons and miniatures in his own terms, according to his own modernist ideals of universal aesthetic experience. This is especially clear in one of the essays Kandinsky wrote for the St Petersburg journal Apollon. In his 'Letter from Munich',⁸⁸ of October-November 1910, he reviewed an exhibition of Eastern art in the city, conflating miniatures with icons in his discussion of it. He explicitly compared Persian miniatures to 'the old icons',⁸⁹ rhetorically evoking his 'inner experience' of miniatures and structuring his account of aesthetic experience as a form of direct spiritual revelation. His sensation was of being inwardly uplifted, like a believer before an icon:

And suddenly, I seemed to see before my eyes the embodiment of that dream, that reverie I had long carried around with me, unknowing. . . . Standing before it, I felt it had come into being of its own accord, as if it had come down from heaven, like a revelation. This was one of those occasions when the spirit partakes of spiritual refreshment for which it has been waiting, searching, without knowing where to find it. It was as if a curtain had parted before one, revealing new depths of happiness. . . .⁹⁰

In discussing the linear and colouristic qualities of these images, Kandinsky evoked Kondakov's stress on the ornamental abstraction of Byzantine art in the second 'Golden Age':

Its simplicity is almost barbaric, its complexity bewildering. .. . It has a seriousness, a strength, and occasionally a crudity of draughtsmanship such as one finds in the old icons. And a gentle, pliant, at times cunning beauty of line. The primitive use of colour appears an added adornment. And so keen is the understanding of, so delicate the feeling for, the combination of different tones, so inevitable their unification and division that this primitive ornament suddenly turns into the highest form of painting.⁹¹

According colour primary significance, he imagined an animate force engendering quasi-ecstatic resonances in the sensitive beholder: 'The colours sing, the costumes, flowers, turbans, rocks, shrubs, palaces, deers, butterflies, horses resound with colour.'⁹²

This 'revelation' of the power of Persian miniatures, we might say, prompted his subsequent literary memory of the way in which he had experienced ethnographic art during his 1889 field trip. In both cases, Kandinsky's account of his responses to strange cultural artefacts echoes Kondakov's more objective explication of the mysteries of miniature painting and devotional icons. However, Kandinsky transformed Kondakov's discourse into something more subjective, more artistic. This 'subjectifying' of science is the key theme finally in my more focused reading of 'Reminiscences'. In this next section, I suggest that Kandinsky's belief in a universal language of art should be seen as a response to his earlier ethnographic dilemma: how to transcend social and historical barriers in order to participate sympathetically in other, unfamiliar cultural experiences?

ETHNOGRAPHY IN 'REMINISCENCES'

Within anthropological discourse, Johannes Fabian has identified, 'a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse'.⁹³

In evolutionary systematics, for instance, the investigative ethnographer was not only travelling in geographical space (away from—and then back to—the metropolitan centre); he was also travelling backwards in time, via a putative evolutionary ladder. Being based on the epistème of natural history, evolutionary anthropology is, according to Fabian, founded on distancing and separation:

[It] . . . promoted a schema in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time.⁹⁴

In my reading of Kandinsky's 1889 essay, I suggested that his 'on-the-spot' fieldwork experience undercut such hierarchical separation. I will now argue that in his 'Reminiscences', written more than two decades after his initial ethnographic encounter, Kandinsky again imagined the bridging of temporal and spatial distances—this time by means of his heightened artistic sensitivity.

'Reminiscences' is structured as a series of remembered tableaux which are thematically interwoven but not chronological. In a number of places these tableaux move repeatedly from ethnography to art and back again, in such a way that the boundaries of each—science and art—are undermined. Likewise, 'Reminiscences' calls into question the categories of objectivity (science) and subjectivity (art). As a literary synthesis of personal experiences, 'Reminiscences' purports to uncover the natural 'archaeological' layering of Kandinsky's modernist artistic persona; it juxtaposes and correlates comforting childhood memories and remembrances of student days in Moscow with experiences from the more recent past in Munich, presenting all of these as but stages in the inexorable development of an artistic initiate. But 'Reminiscences' is much more than artistic biography; it is also a modernist eulogy to the unifying power of aesthetic experience. Kandinsky structured the whole of the essay as a series of 'revelations' of synthesis. The first narrative section immediately cuts through barriers of time and geography, establishing a continuity between a vanished idyllic past in 'old Russia' and modern urban Munich. The magical connecting powers are colouristic sensations, of course, and also remembrances of horses. Suitably, in fact, for this self-conscious Blaue Reiter, this modernist St George, horses are a deliberate thematic leitmotif throughout Kandinsky's 'Reminiscences'. A child's toy, a wooden hobbyhorse carved out of a stick by 'our coachman', is remembered as a secular transubstantiation; while natural material, in the form of a stick with its bark stripped away to give a spiral pattern of layers, turns animistically into a primal synaesthetic experience:

My horses usually consisted of three colours: the brownish yellow of the outer bark .. . the juicy green of the second layer of bark (which I loved most particularly and which, even in a withered state, still had something magical about it) and finally the ivory-white wood of the branch (which smelt damp, tempting one to lick it, but soon withered miserably and dried . . . ).⁹⁵

This image of the horse-stick conflates biography, ethnography and aesthetics. It echoes, for instance, an essay published in 1892 by Kandinsky's fellow Russian ethnographer V. M. Mikhailovskii. In this study of Siberian Shamanism, Mikhailovskii graphically described how, in shamanistic practice, the shaman's instruments, including his horse-stick, were replete with ritual significance.⁹⁶ Like the child Kandinsky's horse, the shaman's stick was usually carved from the sacred birch tree and, according to Mikhailovskii, supposedly turned into a living horse, which then carried the shaman off on his creative flights beyond this world.⁹⁷

'Reminiscences' has yet another colourful toy horse, this time a piebald stallion from a childhood racing set with yellow ochre on the body and a bright yellow mane, which turns into a 'real' horse in modern Munich. Kandinsky combines memory, imagination and reality, recalling one of his 'first impressions' in Munich, when he encountered such a piebald horse in the streets of the city. In self-imposed exile, he was yet able to identify with his new home through the familiar power of aesthetic remembrances: 'A half-conscious but ebullient promise stirred in my heart. It brought to life the little lead horse within me, linking Munich to my childhood.'⁹⁸ His childhood in Old Russia is one of the focal points for Kandinsky's synthesizing project in 'Reminiscences'. He suggests that, even as a child, he possessed remarkable credentials for a future ambassador of modernist abstract art, especially as he was accustomed from a young age to a trans-cultural and bi-lingual role in speaking German with his maternal grandmother and aunt. Around these childhood remembrances Kandinsky elaborated a magical amalgam of fiction and reality. The German fairytales he loved as a child came to life, so he claimed, when he moved to Munich, with powerful colour experiences once more facilitating the conflation:

The blue trams threaded their way through the streets like an incarnation of the air of a fairy-story, which one inhales with delightful ease. The yellow mailboxes sang their shrill, canary-yellow song from the street corners. I . . . felt I was in the city of art, which for me was the same as being in fairyland.⁹⁹

This literary amalgamation of past and present, dream and reality encapsulates the whole syncretic message of 'Reminiscences'.

As a piece of literature, 'Reminiscences narrates one thing in order to tell something else. Thus, the remembered 'story' of his 1889 field trip is here also a fable about self-transcendent aesthetic (specifically colouristic) experiences, as Kandinsky presents the transforming power of art through two narratives of artistic-ethnographic trips.

Within the structure of 'Reminiscences', the more recent of these 'transports' is presented first, in a recollection of a visit to the old town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber during his early years in Munich. Kandinsky the intrepid modernist venturer vacated the metropolis for a voyage across time and space. Leaving behind the modern fast train, he experienced progressively more archaic conveyances, firstly a slow train, then a stopping train:

with its overgrown tracks, the thin whistle of the long-necked engine, the rattling and squeaking of the sleepy wheels, and the old peasant with big silver buttons, who insisted on talking to me about Paris, and whom I had great difficulty in understanding. It was an unreal journey. I felt as if a magic power had, contrary to all the laws of nature, transplanted me from century to century, ever deeper into the past.¹⁰⁰

This was, indeed, a peculiar experience. Far from the madding city, fixed barriers of reality and illusion were occluded. He remembered 'gateways, ditches, narrow houses, bending their heads across the narrow streets and gazing deep into each other's eyes . . . ';¹⁰¹ from a suitably distant vantage-point at his bedroom window, this animistic townscape was further transformed into living colour, into a 'sea of bright red rooftops'.¹⁰² It rained all the time he was there, he recalled, this adding an aesthetic twist to his attempts at plein-air landscape painting:

Big, round raindrops fell on my palette, shook hands waggishly from afar, shook and shivered, suddenly and unexpectedly uniting to form thin, cunning threads, which scampered quickly and boisterously between my colours and now and again ran up my sleeves.¹⁰³

He finally managed to paint a sunny Old Town from memory, making the 'roofs just as bright a red as I then knew how',¹⁰⁴ but only after returning to the metropolis. This particular literary-artistic anecdote of travel (temporal and spatial) ends with a transcontinental flourish. Kandinsky's colouristic memories transported him back to an idyllic Moscow. Even while struggling with the Rothenburg studies, his unconscious artistic goal was to capture Moscow's sunset hour, which he recalled in a startling passage:

The sun is already getting low and has attained its full intensity. . . . This image does not last long: a few minutes, and then the sunlight grows red with effort, redder and redder, cold at first and then increasing in warmth. The sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one's soul vibrating. No, this red fusion is not the most beautiful hour! It is only the final chord of the symphony, which brings every colour vividly to life, which allows and forces the whole of Moscow to resound like the fff . . . of a giant orchestra. Pink, lilac, yellow, white, blue, pistachio green, flame red houses, churches, each an independent song—the garish green of the grass, the deeper tremolo of the bare branches, the red, stiff, silent ring of the Kremlin walls, and above, towering over everything .. . the long, white, graceful, serious line of the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great. And upon its tall, tense neck, stretched up toward heaven in eternal yearning, the golden head of the cupola, which among the golden and coloured stars of the other cupolas, is Moscow's sun . . . These impressions were repeated on each sunny day. They were a delight that shook me to the depths of my soul. . . .¹⁰⁵

These magical colours, he claimed, were so powerful that they even 'raised me to ecstasy'.¹⁰⁶ Throughout 'Reminiscences', Kandinsky related a series of similar aesthetic experiences, where colours enabled his transportation beyond empirical reality.

The second journey of 'Reminiscences' was even more extreme than the first, taking the artist-ethnographer on a voyage out of present time and space and also beyond the conventional categories of art and science. He reminisced specifically about his trip to the province of Vologda. Modes of time travel took him even further into the past, almost out of the world, through a primeval, surreal landscape, with colours again contributing to the transport:

I travelled initially by train, with the feeling that I was journeying to another planet, then for several days by boat along the tranquil and introverted Sukhona river, then by primitive coach through endless forests, between brightly coloured hills, over swamps and deserts.¹⁰⁷

This time, with no distracting strangers to disrupt the experience, he was able to effect a two-fold absorption 'in my surroundings and in my own self'.¹⁰⁸ Repeating a device used elsewhere in the essay, he wrote of his field trip as if it were a mystery initiation. The journey itself was an ordeal:

It was often scorching hot during the day, but the nights, despite the almost complete absence of darkness, were so cold that even the sheepskin coat, felt boots and Zyrian hat, which I had procured on the way . . . sometimes proved not entirely sufficient. . . .¹⁰⁹

The tribulation was well worthwhile, at least from his subsequent perspective as a modern colourist, for he journeyed to places remote enough for colours to have their own reality and force. The populace, in this memory, dissolved into animated colours:

I would arrive in villages where suddenly the entire population was clad in grey from head to toe; with yellowish-green faces and hair, or suddenly displayed variegated costumes that ran about like brightly coloured, living pictures on two legs.¹¹⁰

But, above all, it was the magical colouristic spaces inside old Russian peasant houses which prophesied his future ideals of transcendent aesthetics. As he remembered it, the living spaces of these strange people provoked extraordinary aesthetic experience. He stepped into these unfamiliar folk environs and found their colour and decoration so overwhelming that henceforth he wished to make his own modern spectator '"stroll" within the picture, forcing him to become absorbed in the picture, forgetful of himself (my emphasis).¹¹¹ The lesson' of this ethnographic encounter, then, is one of self-transcendence through aesthetic contemplation. Kandinsky was conveying an image of himself as artistic-ethnographer, his heightened artistic perception enabling him to cross cultural and historical barriers, to participate in an aesthetic realm of universal oneness.

CONCLUSION

This artistic memory seems remote from my starting point in the disciplinary complexities of Russian ethnography. In the first part of my article, I argued that Kandinsky's 'on-the-spot' investigation was thoroughly textual, at a time when the basic procedures and methodologies of professional ethnographic field work were not fully established. He left Moscow equipped with questionnaire-type guidelines for interrogating an unfamiliar research object and thus collecting relevant cultural data; on his return, he wrote up his findings, editing his field-work notes according to existing exemplars of scientific presentation, though tempered by the modes of earlier historical narratives. My aim was to demonstrate the critical complexities embedded in his 1889 treatise, especially the contradictions between empirical fieldwork experience on the one hand and theoretical synthesis on the other. The boldest result of this section would be to question the 'radical orthodoxy' which views nineteenth-century anthropology as typically evolutionist/colonialist/racist (pace Clifford et al.)."¹¹²

The second section on 'artistic ethnography' raises other issues. On the one hand, Kandinsky's aestheticizing of traditional material culture in his own modernist terms is precisely what recent anthropologists have been keen to avoid in their attempts to 're-centre' art as a legitimate topic of anthropological study.¹¹³ Within an art-historical framework, however, I will restate my argument that we should consider Kandinsky's artistic theories partly as a response to his earlier ethnographic dilemma of how to participate sympathetically in other, unfamiliar cultural forms. I am suggesting, in other words, that the current critical perception of all 'universalizing' artistic aspirations as forms of cultural colonialism needs to be tested (and contested) more rigorously.

NOTES

¹ 'Iz materialov po etnografii sysol'skikh i vychegodskikh zyryan—natsional'nye bozhestva (po sovremennym verovaniyam)', Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 3, 1889, pp. 102-110. ['From Materials on the Ethnography of the Sysol-and-Vechegda Zyrians: The National Deities (According to Contemporary Beliefs)', Ethnographic Review, no. 3 (Moscow, 1889), pp. 102-110] (henceforth 'Zyrian Ethnography').

This essay is most easily available in German translation. See J. Hahl-Koch and H. K. Roethel (eds.), Kandinsky: Die Gesammelten Schriften, Band 1 (Bern, 1980), pp. 68-75 (henceforth Schriften).

² Some of Kandinsky's fieldwork notes, in the form of a diary, are preserved in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou Centre, Paris. It forms part of Nina Kandinsky's bequest, acquired by the museum in 1981. As yet the notebook is unpublished.

³ Recent publications by Peg Weiss have already established the importance of Kandinsky's ethnographic work as a shaping influence on his later painting.

See P. Weiss, 'Kandinsky and Old Russia: An Ethnographic Exploration', Syracuse Scholar, Spring 1986, pp. 43-62. Also, idem., under the same title, in G. P. Weisberg and L. S. Dixon (eds.), The Documented Image: Visions in Art History (Syracuse, 1987).

⁴ 'Rückblicke', in Kandinsky 1901-1913 (Der Sturm, Berlin, 1913). I am using the translation in K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (eds.), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (2 vols., London, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 357-82 [henceforth, CW].

⁵ For these recollections, see 'Reminiscences' in CW, op. cit., pp. 361-3; 365; 368-9; 379.

As a student, he was 'strongly attracted' to ethnography amongst other disciplines:

Apart from my chosen specialization (economics . . . ), I was strongly attracted .. . by various other disciplines. Roman law . . . criminal law .. . the history of Russian law and peasant law . . . ethnography . . . which, I promised myself initially, would reveal to me the soul of the people . . . (ibid., p. 362).

⁶ J. Clifford, 'Introduction: Partial Truths', in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), p. 2.

⁷ The Ethnographic Section of the Imperial Society for the Friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology and Ethnography was based at Moscow University. Ethnographic Review, which published Kandinsky's Zyrian essay, appeared under the auspices of the Imperial Society. Kandinsky published a second article in 1889, in yet another Imperial Society journal, namely, 'O nakazaniyakh' po resheniyam' volostnykh sudov Moskovskoi Gub[ernoi]', Trudy etnograficheskago otdela lmperatorskago, obshchestva lyubitelei estestvoznaniya, antropologa, i etnografii, vol. 9, 1889, pp. 13-19. ('On the punishments meted out in accordance with the decisions of the district courts of the province of Moscow', Works of the Ethnographic Section of the Imperial Society for the Friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology and Ethnography, vol. 9 (Moscow, 1889), pp. 13-19. This article is also translated into German in Schriften, op. cit., pp. 76-88.

I consider Kandinsky's legal studies in detail in 'Kandinsky: The Sciences of Man and the Science of Art' (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1992).

⁸ Something of the flavour of Russian ethnography can be gleaned from the Russian literature reviews in the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie through the 1890s. In particular see vol. 3 (1891), pp. 45-7; 135-6; 163-4 and 247-9.

⁹ In the Russian version of 'Reminiscences', published in 1918, Kandinsky recalled that he had received support and encouragement in his study of customary law from Fillipov who, at the time, was a privat-dozent in Moscow University Law Faculty. For the relevant addition to the published Russian version of 'Reminiscences' (1918), see CW, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 888, n. 20.

¹⁰Trudy etnograficheskago otdela lmperatorskago, obshchestva lyubitelei estestvoznaniya, antropologa, i etnografii (Works of the Ethnographic Section of the Imperial Society for the Friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology and Ethnography), vol. 8 (Moscow, 1888), Appendix.

¹¹ ibid., p. ii.

¹² See J. Urry, 'Notes and Queries on Anthropology and the Development of Field Methods in British Anthropology, 1870-1920', Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1972, pp. 45-57.

¹³ Quoted in the 1912 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology (London, 1912), B. Freire-Marreco and J. Linton Myres (eds.), pp. iv-v.

¹⁴ 'Zyrian Ethnography', in Schriften, op. cit., p. 68. All English translations are my own.

¹⁵ I use 'anthropology' and 'anthropological sciences' as generic terms referring to the putative 'sciences of man'. See G. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968).

¹⁶ The term is Stocking's. See 'The Ethnographer's Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski', in Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, vol. 1 in the series History of Anthropology (Madison, 1983), pp. 70-120.

¹⁷ See the report of Anutschin's article, 'The Work of Russian Ethnography' in the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographic vol. 3, 1891, pp. 45-6.

Anutschin argued that:

'die Unbekanntschaft mit ethnographischen Fakten, die Unkunde des inneren Lebens, der Zustände und Bedürfnisse des Volkes in Russland häufig zur Ursache vielfacher administrativer und legislativer Fehler, wie in Bezug auf die fremden Völkerschaften, so auf das eigentliche russische Volk selbst ward. Dank ähnlichen Fehlern wurden die Buriäten aus Schamanisten zu Buddhisten, die Kirgisen aber zu Mohammedanern gemacht und ihnen solcherweise, vielleicht auch immer, der Weg zur Verschmelzung mit dem russischen Volke abgeschnitten . . . ', ibid., p. 46.

¹⁸ I pursue this line of argument in more depth in my thesis, op. cit.

¹⁹ M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970), pp. 359-60.

²⁰ See R. Jakobson, 'Franz Boas' approach to language', International Journal of American Linguistics, 10, 1944, pp. 188-95.

Also, G. W. Stocking, The Boas Plan for the Study of American Indian Languages', in D. Hymen (ed.), Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms (London, 1974), pp. 454-84.

²¹ See note 8 above. Müller's studies of Iranian myths in the Caucasus, published in 1889 and 1890, are reviewed in the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, vol. 3 (1891), pp. 135 and 247. Kandinsky's research is mentioned, ibid., pp. 247-8.

²² 'Zyrian Ethnography' in Schriften, op. cit., p. 74.

²³ ibid., p. 74.

²⁴ ibid.

²⁵ ibid.

²⁶ ibid., p. 70.

²⁷ ibid., pp. 68-9.

²⁸ Among the bibliographic notes in Kandinsky's travel notebook (see note 2 above), I found his reference to an 1861 edition of Sjögren's work edited and introduced by the Estonian linguist F. J. Wiedemann. Joh. Andreas Sjögrens Gesammelte Schriften (new facsimile edition, 2 vols, in 3, Leipzig, 1969. Originally, St Petersburg, 1861).

Sjögren's long essay was entitled 'Die Syrjänen, ein historisch-statistisch-philologischer Versuch', ibid., vol. 1, pp. 230-461.

For further details, see my article, 'Modernist Primitivism?: The Case of Kandinsky', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, pp. 21-36.

²⁹ On Sjögren, see in particular M. Branch, 'A. J. Sjögren's Studies of the North', Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne (Helsinki, 1973).

³⁰ 'Zyrian Ethnography' in Schriften, op. cit., pp. 68-9.

³¹ ibid., p. 69.

³² In A. H. Lane-Fox (General Pitt-Rivers) (ed.), Notes and Queries on Anthropology (London, 1874), p. 27.

³³ 'Zyrian Ethnography', in Schriften, op. cit., p. 68.

³⁴ M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (London, 1968).

I. Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology. W.H.R. Rivers and his Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1893-1931 (London, 1981).

³⁵ In Notes and Queries (1874), op. cit., pp. 66-7.

³⁶ ibid., p. 50.

³⁷ 'Zyrian Ethnography', in Schriften, op. cit., p. 70.

³⁸ ibid.

³⁹ ibid., pp. 70-1.

⁴⁰ ibid., p. 71.

⁴¹ ibid., p. 73.

⁴² ibid., p. 73.

⁴³ ibid., p. 72. The editors of Schriften are misleading in their transcription of Kandinsky's footnote. Kandinsky refers to Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology, originally published in London in 1876-96 (3 vols.), and not to Spencer's Descriptive Sociology (London, 1873).

⁴⁴ ibid., p. 72.

⁴⁵ E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1871, n.ed., New York, 1958).

⁴⁶ Spencer, op. cit., vol. 1, 1876.

⁴⁷ In his wide-ranging and suggestive study, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London, 1981), C. Herbert discusses Spencer as an early champion of the functionalistic interpretation of culture.

See also G. W. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968), and idem., Victorian Anthropology (New York and London, 1987).

Kandinsky published another ethnographic essay in 1889, this being a study of customary law (see note 7 above). This essay clearly demonstrates his understanding of the integral nature of 'culture' and of the need to understand customary practices not as isolated data, but 'holistically'. He specifically warned against seeing the widespread practice of corporal punishment as evidence of distorted or regressive moral values and instead argued that the practice was normal and sociologically positive, being linked to the whole configuration of the society in question, and in particular to the economic determinants of peasant life (Schriften, op. cit., pp. 87-8). In my thesis, op. cit., I argue that Kandinsky examined legal institutions and customs in the light of rapid change in rural organization, and in the light of widespread economic distress; his essay demonstrates the historical and sociological approach to the study of legal institutions encouraged by the Moscow Juridical Socïety, of which he was a member.

⁴⁸ See, for example, U. Holmberg, Finno-Ugric Siberian, vol. 4 of The Mythology of All Races (Boston, 1927), and also P. Hajdu (ed.), Finno-Ugrian Languages and People, trans. G. F. Cushing (London, 1975).

⁴⁹Notes and Queries, 1874, op. cit. p. 50-1.

⁵⁰ 'Zyrian Ethnography', in Schriften, op. cit., pp. 71-2.

⁵¹ ibid. p. 72.

⁵²Ort, it seems, was like a tutelary spirit, but of a material nature. Kandinsky recorded some differing ideas about forms Ort took. Some Zyrians believed that Ort accompanied each person from birth; others held that a person obtained his Ort shortly before his death. In all cases, though, Ort became important at times of impending death. According to one version, the Ort of a sick individual appeared to the person's relatives by night, as a deathly portent. In another version, Ort appeared to the ill-fated person, leaving behind a very physical calling-card: the Ort would pinch and bruise the doomed individual, and the portentous signs could appear up to three years before the event. Ibid., pp. 71-2.

⁵³ ibid., p. 72. See note 44, above.

⁵⁴ See also Spencer's The Study of Sociology (new ed., Ann Arbor, 1961).

⁵⁵Principles of Sociology, op. cit., vol. 1, part 1, chap. 1.

⁵⁶ 'Zyrian Ethnography' in Schriften, op. cit., p. 72.

⁵⁷ ibid., p. 71.

⁵⁸ M. L. Pratt, 'Fieldwork in common places', in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), op. cit., p. 32.

⁵⁹ ibid., p. 32.

⁶⁰ Sjögren, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 230-461.

⁶¹ 'Zyrian Ethnography' in Schriften, op. cit., p. 68.

⁶² ibid., p. 70.

⁶³ ibid., p. 69.

⁶⁴ ibid., p. 74.

⁶⁵ See, for example, the volume edited by J. Coote and A. Shelton: Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (Oxford, 1992).

⁶⁶ See chap. 6, The Language of Forms and Colours', in On the Spiritual in Art (1911/12), in CW, op. cit., pp. 161-95.

⁶⁷ 'Reminiscences' in CW, op. cit., pp. 368-9.

⁶⁸ N. P. Kondakov, The Russian Icon (Oxford, 1927). All quotes are from this English edition.

The original Russian studies were published between 1905 and 1915. For further details, see the posthumous collected publication in four volumes, N. P. Kondakov, Russkaya ikona (Prague, 1928-33).

⁶⁹ Kondakov, op. cit., also includes a chapter on 'The Use and Place of Icons in Russia'. See especially p. 34.

⁷⁰CW, op. cit., p. 182.

⁷¹ N. P. Kondakoff, Histoire de l'art byzantin considérée principalement dans les miniatures (Paris, 2 vols., 1886-91), vol. 1, chap. 1, especially pp. 30-1.

⁷²CW, p. 182.

⁷³ Kondakoff, op. cit. (vol. 2, 1891), p. 3.

⁷⁴ ibid., chap. 6, for example, pp. 3-4.

⁷⁵ Kondakoff, op. cit. (vol. 1, 1886), pp. 30-4.

⁷⁶ ibid., p. 33.

⁷⁷ ibid., pp. 42-3.

⁷⁸ 'l'art . . . servirait a instruire les masses ignorantes, a éclairer la foi, a agir sur les coeurs, a développer l'amour de Dieu et des hommes'; ibid., p. 195.

⁷⁹ Kondakov, op. cit.

⁸⁰ ibid., p. 18.

⁸¹ ibid., p. 12.

⁸² ibid.

⁸³ ibid., p. 18.

⁸⁴ See, for example, J. Eisner, 'Image and iconoclasm in Byzantium', Art History, vol. II, no.4, Dec. 1988, pp. 471-91.

⁸⁵ Kondakov, The Russian Icon, op. cit., p. 34.

⁸⁶CW, op. cit., pp. 173-4.

⁸⁷ ibid., p. 147.

⁸⁸ 'Letter from Munich', CW, op. cit., pp. 73-80.

⁸⁹ ibid., p. 74.

⁹⁰ ibid.

⁹¹ ibid.

⁹² ibid., p. 75.

⁹³ J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983), p. 31.

⁹⁴ ibid., p. 26.

⁹⁵CW, op. cit., pp. 357-8.

⁹⁶ V. M. Mikhailovskii's 'Schamanstvo' was published in the proceedings of the Imperial Society for the Friends of Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography in 1892. It was partially translated into English by Oliver Wardrop as 'Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia', Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 24, 1895, pp. 62-100; 126-58.

Weiss, in her study of the ethnographic aspects of Kandinsky's art (op. cit., 1986, p. 51), first suggested the importance of Mikhailovskii, who was vice-president of the ethnographic section of the Imperial Society.

⁹⁷ Wardrop, op. cit., p. 89.

⁹⁸CW, op. cit., p. 359.

⁹⁹ ibid.

¹⁰⁰ ibid.

¹⁰¹ ibid.

¹⁰² ibid.

¹⁰³ ibid.

¹⁰⁴ ibid., p. 360.

¹⁰⁵ ibid.

¹⁰⁶ ibid.

¹⁰⁷ ibid., p. 368. I discuss these 'ethnographic' passages from 'Reminiscences' in similar terms in my article 'Modernist Primitivism?: The Case of Kandinsky', op. cit.

¹⁰⁸CW, op. cit., p. 368.

¹⁰⁹ ibid., vol. 2, p. 891, n. 45.

¹¹⁰ ibid., p. 368.

¹¹¹ ibid., pp. 368-9.

¹¹² This 'radical orthodoxy' is represented by the volume edited by J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, op. cit., and by J. Fabian, op. cit. See also J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

¹¹³ Apart from the volume Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, edited by Coote and Shelton, op. cit., the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics also deals with these issues.