Chronicle of My Travels

Chapter 2 Chronicle of My Travels 1. “It smells, literally smells, of Europe”. Warsaw, June 1897 Waiting, on the railway platform in St. Petersburg for the train to Warsaw, Ivan Konevskoi could hardly have been in higher spirits. A brand- new notebook, headed “Chronicle of Travels I,” soon held several pages of light-hearted observations of everything from his fellow train-passengers to the amount spent at various stops for refreshments (Luga — dinner, soup 25 kopecks. 2 veal sandwiches 10k. — 35k. Pskov — glass of tea with roll 15k.).1 His delight in detail, always wide-ranging, was now enhanced by an eagerness for new sights and experiences of every description. The overriding goal of the venture on which he was now embarked was shared by many Russian travelers before and after: to experience a new world and to make his own discoveries there. For him the first major moment of realization came when he reached Warsaw: “It smells, literally smells, of Europe.”2 But Warsaw was merely a signpost on the journey. Konevskoi’s planned route lay through Vienna and on to Salzburg for a dutiful visit to his father’s relative whom he called his “Austrian aunt.” Even before reaching Salzburg, he marvelled at a landscape totally new to him: “Mountains, entirely covered by thick forest, like green curls or fleece.”3 In a burst of boyish ecstasy, on 10 June he wrote: “One wants to climb trees, leap about under the heavens, run about, howl madly. The heart frolicks in the breast.”4 53 Chapter 2 Writing from Munich on 28 June to his friend the art student Ivan Bilibin, Konevskoi described his week-and-half in Salzburg as “the happiest time of my life” (AVL 152).5 However, he cut short his raptures, recalling that the Bilibins, summering in the Savoy Alps, were viewing scenes possibly even more majestic than those around Salzburg. Still, he enclosed two recent lyrics (his first since the previous December). Nor could he resist sharing his impressions of the road from Salzburg to Berchtesgaden, along which he felt at each step the approach of “ever greater and greater majesty” (AVL 152). The excursion to Berchtesgaden on 14 June included the nearby Koenigs-see, described in Baedeker as “clear, dark-green […] enclosed by grand mountains rising above it to a height of 5000 to 6500 feet. It is the gem of this region and vies with the finest of Alpine lakes.”6 Konevskoi’s impressions, saturated with color, sound, and feeling, hint also at the mystical mood that wafted over him in these splendid surroundings. A diary entry the following day suggests that these impressions did not fade overnight but deepened. Enchanted by beauty seen and felt, he nonetheless sensed that beneath all this there lay much more. Speculating on the mysteries concealed by surface phenomena, he employed an image suggested by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet “Memorial Thresholds.” Such outward appearances were likened to an ancient structure where a seemingly firm plank may give way, and “it was suddenly as if before us there opened unknown caverns and secret passages.”7 His expectation of — and readiness for — admission into a deeper reality clearly had reached a high point. The stunning scenes among which he had spent the last several weeks, profoundly as they moved him, derived their greatest appeal from the intimations of mystical power that emanated from them. 2. Munich: the art pilgrim’s shrine Following ten memorable days in Salzburg and environs, Konevskoi’s itinerary took him to Munich. In St. Petersburg (and elsewhere when the opportunity arose), at least for the past year, he had been an assiduous viewer of art exhibits. Now, like so many other Russian visitors to 54 Chronicle o My Travels Munich, he reveled in the city’s galleries, exhibits, and museums. The international exhibition at the “Glaspalast” offered a huge array of attractions, including the rich Dutch and Belgian sections.8 But best of all were the English Pre-Raphaelites. Of Burne-Jones’s sequence of paintings portraying the legend of St. George and the Dragon he wrote to Ivan Bilibin: “These seven pictures with imperceptible force carry you away into the soft magical air of a half-medieval, half-oriental dense, mysterious forest, full of quiet, light, and open revelations ” (AVL 154). While Konevskoi was far from insensitive to the aesthetic qualities of the paintings he saw, their interest and value for him were ultimately determined by what he termed their “mystical feeling.” Among those he singled out for this quality were certain works of the Dutch artist Jan Toorop. True, some of Toorop’s drawings he found repellent. However, others “reveal startling mystical feeling” (AVL 154). To both Ivan Bilibin and Sergei Semenov he wrote that these drawings recalled an article he had read about a Parisian exhibit of “Art Mystique.” There the French writer Henri Antoine Jules-Bois noted that some of the drawings resembled the automatic writing produced by mediums in trance. The drawings by Toorop, Konevskoi continued, appear to be “direct efforts toward embodiment by the wandering forces of the world soul that have not yet found the means to achieve this state” (162). Several short prose pieces composed during the earlier part of his journey were devoted to descriptions of art seen in Munich, for which parts of letters to friends obviously served as drafts.9 However, one important piece that, despite its title, fell outside this category was “Before the Paintings of Schwind (Pered zhivopis’iu Schwinda)” (SP 1904, 137-142.) The works of the early German romantic Moritz von Schwind that Konevskoi saw in Munich’s Schack-Galerie provided a useful point of reference in his continuing effort to define mystical trends in contemporary art. The works of Schwind’s illustrations of legends and fairy tales, which earned fame during his lifetime, struck Konevskoi as pardonably naïve, given the time they were created. “Romanticism of the beginning of the [nineteenth] century,” he exclaimed, “how childlike, how uncomplicated it seems, compared with the profound 55 Chapter 2 ambiguity and questioning of present day mystical art.” Both generations attempt to resurrect the mystical feeling of the middle ages, but what a difference! Earlier romanticism shared the simple Christian faith of those times, almost inseparable from belief in fantastic beings. In contrast, “[c]оntemporary mysticism attempts to look more deeply into the unconscious depths of the medieval worldview.” And in so doing, interestingly, it draws closer to “the most penetrating researches of contemporary science” (SP 1904, 137). A year earlier, in his draft article on Maeterlinck, Konevskoi had struggled to identify the features that differentiated the “new mysticism” from its predecessors. At that time he concluded that the newer version was marked by “philosophical and psychological generalizations.” Now he could distinguish other, highly significant features as well. In the article on Schwind he wrote: “A deep and dark shadow of incomprehensibility, or, at very least, doubt about the comprehensibility of being, has engulfed contemporary mysticism. In connection with the sense of incomprehensibility in contemporary mysticism there entered the leaven of pantheism” (137-138). The link made here between “pantheism” and “incomprehensibility of being” is intriguing. Its significance would become clearer as his own understanding of contemporary mysticism, the topic that so exercised him, was enriched by new experiences. Meanwhile, passing over German and French romantics, Konevskoi turned his attention to England’s five great romantic poets, and most of all Shelley, whom he ranked as “one of the greatest and most consistent pantheists of all time” (139). Taken together, in his scheme these five form the bridge between early German romanticism and the English Pre-Raphaelites and, most recently, the new French poets. The line between the innocent, and, in some instances, shallow and self- dramatizing earlier generation and the new mystic-artists was now sharply evident. Returning to the place where his meditation began, in a gently patronizing tone he summed up his thoughts and feelings. But most importantly, he established his own position: “We mystics of the end of the century, early grown old, gazing at the pictures of Schwind 56 Chronicle o My Travels with, as it were, painful affection, recall our childhood dreams” (142; ital. mine). One more artist who figured importantly in his journey remains to be accounted for: the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, whose seventieth birthday occasioned a wide display of his works in Munich, the city where his career had flourished. Böcklin’s acclaim came relatively late. However, Russian artists and art enthusiasts, especially modernists, had joined an international company who paid homage to Böcklin. Konevskoi’s pilgrimages to Böcklin, in summer 1897 and the following year, were of major importance in his developing worldview and will be treated more fully at a later point. Konevskoi had left Russia with a tentative plan of traveling on from Germany to join the Bilibins in Savoy. But after the exhilarating time in and around Salzburg, he began to wonder how many new impressions he could comfortably accommodate. Adding the Savoy Alps to his store now seemed a dubious undertaking. Moreover, he wrote to Sergei Semenov from Thuringia, the artistic experiences of Munich “have decisively overturned my original plan” (АVL 159). Finally, an opportunity to obtain a ticket to a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth settled the matter entirely, “owing to purely economic considerations” (160). Meanwhile, writing to Ivan Bilibin from Munich in late June, Konevskoi excitedly laid out his plans to explore the Thuringian forest. “I’ll try to seek out some remote spot (insofar as that is possible in Germany) in the area of Coburg or Meiningen.“ His “Austrian aunt,” whom he had once characterized as an eccentric individual of markedly “mystical” outlook, presumably during his stay with her, had encouraged him in this idea.

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