The semiosphere – a concept that the twentieth-century cultural theorist Yuri Lotman worked out in the last decade of his life – is one of those capacious neologisms that characterise the Russian humanities. It denotes the ‘vast intellectual mechanism’ of which we are all ‘both part and likeness’, and which contains and brings together everything from the religious ideas of archaic cultures to the advertisements of our modern age. For Lotman, the ‘universum of culture’ is analogous with the ‘biosphere’ of the planet. ‘Thought is within us,’ he wrote, ‘but we are within thought.’
In his essay, ‘Symbolic Spaces’, Lotman described the ‘medieval thought-system’, in which locality had a religious and moral significance ‘unknown to modern geography’. Travel was a way to sanctity; to move from a city to a monastery or skit was, like pilgrimage or death, to unburden oneself of sin, to come to a sacred place. In the pre-Enlightenment semiosphere, says Lotman, countries themselves were classified as pagan, heretical or holy. Social ideals were imagined as existing in geographical space. ‘Paradise is in the East … while Hell is in the West over the roaring seas, and many of my Novgorodian children will see it,’ wrote the medieval Bishop Vasili. In one medieval Russian tale, Utopia is in India, and the traveller to that land will attain goodness as a prize. The Chronicles of ancient Rus also tell of Moislav, a sailor from Novgorod, who reached Paradise in his boat, a place of ‘high mountains’, where he heard ‘much merrymaking’.
Nailed to the wooden gates of the Peryn skit was a notice in deep-pressed ballpoint, wrapped in polythene against the weather. ‘Remember that you are entering a place of repentance and prayer,’ it said. Then: ‘do not befriend your enemy, but pray for him unceasingly!’ Leaning against a wall of the first building at the end of the long, ascending path was a pallet bearing a shining drum of ‘USA OIL’. An Alsatian barked and pulled at its chain. A monk came out of the tiny whitewashed church. He turned to us as we came up the hill, then disappeared into one of the low red-painted cells that surrounded it on three sides.
From our north-east approach, on this monochrome winter day, the tiny Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, with its single cupola and corniced trefoil gables, looked just as it did when I first admired it in a black-and-white photograph taken in 1910 by the archaeologist, painter and guru Nikolai Roerich. The picture hung in the first room of the Roerich Museum, a palace (once a Marx–Engels museum) behind the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Its serene monochrome geometry calmed the rampant swirl of Roerich’s early paintings of pagan idols and solitary holy men alone in wild landscapes. Further along the wall, grainy photos of the Imperial Archaeological Society’s 1903 excavations of Neolithic burial mounds around Novgorod, in which Roerich took part, broke the spell cast by the dioramas of his set-designs for the ‘Adoration of the Earth’ scenes in Stravinsky’s ‘stone-age’ ballet, The Rite of Spring. It was the only corner of the strange exhibition that was not a shrine to its subject, giving refuge to a visitor like myself who found more to contemplate in the mess and precision of historical remains than in aids to cosmic understanding like the immense, purple-lit crystal on the pedestal at the top of the stairs.
Roerich’s archaeology, his painting and his travels all originated in a single impulse: to make Culture sacred, Science spiritual. The largest room in the Moscow museum was filled with mystical paintings of hermits and mountain peaks hazed in Indian-kitsch rainbow colours. Its centrepiece was a relief map, dotted with coloured lights, of the Central Asian Expedition of the 1920s, when, with permission of the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Roerich led a caravan from Moscow to the Himalayas in search of the ‘common source’ of Slavic and Indian cultures and the legendary subterranean city of Shambhala. It is rumoured in Moscow – though no one can say it in print – that Putin, who takes an interest in ‘Eastern wisdom’ of this kind, has assigned money from the national budget to be spent on another search for the doorway to Shambhala in the Altai region of Siberia, a cosmic energy centre where he likes to pose for photographers, seated half-naked on a horse, like some latter-day Mongol khan. Like the Russian Theosophist Madame Blavatsky, who brought the symbol of the swastika into European culture, Roerich believed in a hierarchy of Hidden Masters living in Tibet, bearers of the ancient race wisdom of the Aryan tribes.
I knew some of this when I saw Roerich’s photo of the little church. I did not know, though, until I came to the place, how perfectly the little hermitage at Peryn can be made to embody his guiding idea: namely, that pagan and Orthodox Christian Slavdom are a spiritual and cultural unity, whose primordial origins, in many contemporary books of popular history and archaeology, are openly called ‘Aryan’. For Roerich, archaeology was not a secular science, but an ecstatic earth cult. In India in the late 1930s, he heard about the Novgorod digs organised by the Institute of Material Culture, and hailed the Soviet archaeologists as a vibrant young tribe, like the prehistoric Indo-Europeans who had migrated to Russia, bringing their gods and their cults with them. ‘Every expedition, every dig, every act of attention to the national epic speaks of new possibilities,’ he said. ‘They are building a city that will have no end. Novgorod at its origins and Novgorod in its future have been winnowed by science and creative work.’
As we tried the church door, the young monk reappeared, pulling on a dirty black sheepskin coat, carrying a heavy key. He had a long beard and a square receded hairline, just like Dostoevsky in devout mid-life. Without eye contact, he gestured us into the church, where, with one finger raised, he related how, in the tenth century, Peryn was converted from a pagan to a Christian sanctum, and the wooden effigy of Perun thrown into the Volkhov. The Novgorod Chronicles tell of a passer-by who saw the sacrifice-hungry idol trying to reach the shore, and shouted, ‘You have eaten your fill, Perun, now swim away.’ (Herzen had his own wry liberal joke about the place, saying that his home on the Volkhov was ‘opposite the very barrow from which the Voltaireans of the twelfth century threw the wonder-working statue of Perun into the river’.)
According to ethnographers who chart Russian dvoeverie (double-faith), Perun did not swim away. Instead, he blended in iconography and the popular imagination with the fiery-charioted prophet Elijah. Medieval amulets have been found in Novgorod with Perun on one side and a Christian saint on the other. Even now, apparently, when they pass Peryn, locals throw coins into the river to propitiate the pagan god. For the Roerich Movement, which has been active all over Russia since 1991, dvoeverie is a treasured sign of primordial Slavic ‘spirituality’. Russian syncretic spirituality is the essence of race memory, harmony with nature and the ‘energy of the cosmos’, and freedom from the taint of Western urban ‘civilisation’ and the ‘dollarocracy’.
The monk at Peryn was appeasing a deity more jealous than the thunder god. When I asked him whether the icons missing from the church were destroyed or looted during the war, he took the notebook from my hand. Jotting down dates and numbers as he went, he expounded a philosophy of history as Dostoevskian as his beard. For many in the Russian Orthodox Church, Dostoevsky is a kind of prophet, who revealed the underlying unity of papalism and socialism and foresaw their ultimate merger in the reign of Antichrist. In the eighteenth century, the monk said, Holy Russia was corrupted by the European Enlightenment and turned away from God. Socialism, another Western import, was precisely the metaphysical freedom which Russia had demanded from God two hundred years earlier. It led to bloody self-punishment. Of the 150,000 icons in Novgorod before 1917, he noted for me, the God-defying Bolsheviks left only a few thousand for the Germans to steal. His own monastic calling was to offer a lifetime’s atonement for his nation’s apostasy, and to help rebuild Holy Russia.