The co-founders of the World of Art saw themselves as cosmopolitans of Petersburg (they called themselves the 'Nevsky Pickwickians') and championed the idea of a universal culture which they believed was embodied in that civilization. They identified themselves with the aristocracy, and saw that class as a great repository of Russia's cultural
heritage. In a passage of his Memoirs that is crucial to an understanding of the World of Art, Benois underlined this point when he reminisced about the Filosofovs, one of Russia's ancient noble families:
Theirs was the class to which all the chief figures of Russian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belonged, the class that created the delights of the characteristic Russian way of life. From this class came the heroes and heroines in the novels of Pushkin and Lermontov, Turgenev and Tolstoy. This was the class that achieved all that is peaceful, worthy, durable and meant to last for ever. They set the tempo of Russian life… All the subtleties of the Russian psychology, all the nuances of our characteristically Russian moral sensibility arose and matured within this milieu.120
Above all, they identified with the artistic values of the aristocracy. They saw art as a spiritual expression of the individual's creative genius, not as a vehicle for social programmes or political ideas, as they believed the Russian arts had become under Stasov's leadership. Their veneration of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky stemmed from this philosophy - not 'art for art's sake', as they frequently insisted, but the belief that ideas should be integrated in the work of art.
Reacting against the nineteenth-century realist tradition, the World of Art group sought to restore an earlier ideal of beauty as the artistic principle of what they envisaged (and successfully promoted) as Russia's cultural renaissance. The classical tradition of St Petersburg was one expression of this ideal. The World of Art circle made a cult of eighteenth-century Petersburg. It was practically defined by nostalgia for a civilization which they sensed was about to pass away. Benois and his nephew Eugene Lanceray each produced a series of prints and lithographs depicting city scenes in the reigns of Peter and Catherine the Great. Benois lamented that the classical ideal of eighteenth-century Petersburg had been abandoned by the vulgar nationalists of the nineteenth century. In the revolutionary year of 1905, Diaghilev mounted an exhibition of eighteenth-century Russian portraits in the Tauride Palace, shortly to become the home of the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet. He introduced the portraits as 'a grandiose summing-up of a brilliant, but, alas, dying period in our history'.121
But peasant art could also be regarded as a form of 'classicism' - at least in the stylized forms in which it was presented by the neo-nationalists. It was impersonal, symbolic and austere, strictly regulated by the folk traditions of representation, a mystical expression of the spiritual world yet intimately linked with the collective rituals and practices of village life. Here was an ancient, a different 'world of art', whose principles of beauty could be used to overturn the deadening influence of nineteenth-century bourgeois and romantic art.
For Diaghilev, money played a part. Always keen to spot a new market opportunity, the impresario was impressed by the growing popularity of the neo-nationalists' folk-like art. Fin-de-siecle Europe had an endless fascination for 'the primitive' and 'exotic'. The savage of the East was regarded as a force of spiritual renewal for the tired bourgeois cultures of the West. Diaghilev had spotted this trend early on. 'Europe needs our youth and spontaneity', he wrote on his return from a tour there in 1896. 'We must go forth at once. We must show our all, with all the qualities and defects of our nationality.'122 His instincts were confirmed in 1900 when Russia's arts and crafts made a huge splash at the Paris Exhibition. The centre of attention was Korovin's 'Russian Village', a reconstruction of the wooden architecture he had studied on a trip to the Far North, complete with an ancient teremok, or timber tower, and a wooden church, which was built on site by a team of peasants brought in from Russia. The Parisians were enchanted by these 'savage carpenters', with their 'unkempt hair and beards, their broad, child-like smiles and primitive methods', and as one French critic wrote, 'if the objects on display had been for sale, there would not be a single item left'.123 There was a steady flow of peasant-crafted goods from Russia to the West - so much so that special shops were opened in Paris, London, Leipzig, Chicago, Boston and New York in the 1900s.124 The Parisian couturier Paul Poiret travelled to Russia in 1912 to buy up peasant garb, from which he drew inspiration for his fashionable clothes. The term 'blouse russe' echoed round the fashion halls, and models could be seen in clothes which bore the mark of Russian sarafans and homespun coats.125
But there was more than business to draw Diaghilev to the neo-nationalists. The fact that artists such as Polenova and Maliutin were increasingly rendering their 'peasant art' in the stylized forms of mod-
ernism brought them into line with the ethos of the World of Art. Diaghilev was particularly attracted to the paintings of Viktor Vasnet-sov, which displayed less folk content than a general sense of peasant colouring. Vasnetsov believed that colour was the key to the Russian people's understanding of beauty, and he developed his own palette from the study of folk art (the lubok woodcuts and icons) and peasant artefacts, which he collected on his tours of Viatka province in the 1870s. The artist brought these vibrant primary colours to his brilliant stage designs for Mamontov's production of The Snow Maiden (plate 15), a production that became the visual model for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
Vasnetsov's designs were an inspiration for the neo-nationalists who followed in his footsteps from Abramtsevo to the World of Art. Their fairytale-like quality was clearly to be seen in later stage designs for the Ballets Russes by Alexander Golovine (Boris Godunov: 1908; The Firebird: 1910) and Konstantin Korovin (Ruslan and Liudmila: 1909). Even more influential, in the longer term, was Vasnetsov's use of colour, motifs, space and style to evoke the essence of folk art, which would inspire primitivist painters such as Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. These artists, too, gravitated towards the folk tradition, to the icon and the lubok and to peasant artefacts, in their quest for a new poetic outlook on the world. Introducing an exhibition of icons and woodcuts in Moscow in 1913, Goncharova talked about a 'peasant aesthetic' that was closer to the symbolic art forms of the East than the representational tradition of the West. 'This art does not copy or improve on the real world but reconstitutes it.' Here was the inspiration of Goncharova's designs for the Ballets Russes, such as Le Coq d'Or of 1914.