About twenty-five years ago, the Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, making
a journey into the northern part of the Empire, chanced to visit the
lonely Solovetski Monastery on the shores of the White Sea. Among the
sacred painters of this monastery he found a young peasant who had
been sent there by his parents as a boy of fifteen. Duke Vladimir,
struck with his talent, shipped him off to St. Petersburg to study in
the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. The young Russian peasant was
Alexander Borissoff, the adventurous painter whose work in the last
few years has made the wonderful color scheme of the Arctic Circle for
the first time accessible to the eyes of the world.
His early years on the edge of the Arctic fired the imagination of the
youth, and directed the course of his whole future life. While he was
still a student he made a trip to England. "There," he says, "an idea
that had long been shaping itself in my brain took hold of me. The
polar regions fascinated me. My forefathers, I knew, hunted bears at
Spitzbergen; and as a boy I had heard all about the Arctic. I wanted
to see and paint that wonderful country. Travelers would write that
the Arctic nights were magnificent; but I wanted to give the colors
and lights themselves."
_Borissoff Becomes a Samoyed_
Borissoff shipped on a Russian boat from Newcastle for the Murman
Coast--Russian territory adjoining Norway--and from there sailed to
Nova Zembla. On the frozen island of the Arctic Sea, living among the
wandering Samoyed tribes, he began to paint under such conditions as
certainly no artist has ever painted before. It was the make-shift
expedition of a buoyantly adventurous and rough-bred young artist,
better furnished with canvases and brushes than with clothing,
instruments, and stores. He practically became a Samoyed; he adapted
himself to the tribal laws with good-natured tact, helping out the
native commissariat by shooting white partridges, wild geese, and
Arctic bear. He studied reindeer breeding; he took native baths in
steam-tents and ice-water; he attended weddings, funerals, and pagan
rites. Wherever the tribe traveled, he followed; and everywhere he
painted.
The movements of the Samoyed depend largely on the habits of the
reindeer. "In autumn the reindeer seeks the wooded zone," says
Borissoff. "He cannot stand the tremendous snowstorms that whirl in
the tundra; and he must live on lichen from the trunks and boughs of
fir-trees, or feed on the shoots of birch and willows, when the frozen
soil prevents him from browsing moss under the snow. But no sooner
does he sniff the polar spring, than he longs irresistibly to gallop
to the north to the open air of the Arctic, where there are no
tiresome gnats, no intolerable wasps to lay their larvae in his skin
and cause him torment."
The Samoyed keeps in this migrating animal's wake; and it was in one
of these migrations north that Borissoff first saw what he calls the
Realms of Death.
_Painting in a Temperature of 30 deg. Below Zero_
"The curious thing was that I found all as I had imagined it," he
says. "The knowledge of the icebergs and the snow seemed to have been
born in me. Vast stretches of glaciers with their yawning chasms of
death, icebergs mountain-high--I greeted them as old friends. Living
on native rations and enduring the most bitter cold, I made
landscapes--or rather, icescapes--in the open, with a temperature of
30 degrees below zero.
"Sometimes it was impossible to paint. Even the turpentine froze. The
paint congealed in lumps, whilst the hairs of the brushes snapped off
like brittle glass. I had to put on fur gloves to hold a brush, and
work with swift, energetic strokes--as the rough appearance of some of
my paintings bears evidence."
All of Borissoff's paintings were done in the ice zone beyond the 70th
parallel of north latitude, in the district between Archangel and the
Yalmal Peninsula. He never tires of telling of the peculiar
color-tones of this region, and the curious psychological effects of
its distance, silence, and isolation. Living amid its singular light
phenomena, where the spring-time snow turns pink against blue
icebergs, and the boggy midsummer tundra swims in a sea of orange-red
against a sky of aquamarine, even the Samoyed becomes a color
worshiper.
"Why does that man sit in a scarlet cloak on rose-colored snow against
a solid background of dark blue?" I asked, examining one of
Borissoff's paintings.
"The deep blue is an iceberg," he laughed. "Yes, and the snow is
really that color--by reflection. The man is a Samoyed who
bartered everything he owned--reindeer, walrus, ivory, dogs, and
sledges--to an adventurous dealer from the nearest settlements for
a robe of scarlet woolen stuff. Then, in his scarlet cloak, he
wandered about in the sunlight for ten days, in an ecstatic trance,
silent, good-for-nothing, living on his family, drunk with the glory
of that scarlet garment!"
_Traveling With a Woman Scout_
The man was Danillo, the brother-in-law of Ireena, a woman scout of
whom Borissoff speaks frequently in his reminiscences, and whose
wonderful gift of "seeing" by atmospheric signs the country beyond the
horizon and divining where the trails lay gave her a position of
peculiar dignity among her tribesfolk. This woman was their sole and
undisputed guide through the monotonous flat wastes of snow. Among the
last of the pagans of Europe woman's place is certainly higher than it
is supposed to have been before the dawn of Christianity. A woman like
Ireena may hold the tribal-family together; revive courage in dire
surroundings; decide momentous debates as to reindeer-speculation;
practise medicine and surgery; withstand the redoubtable devils of
blizzard and thaw; serve the bad Siadey in his bloody sanctuary; and
even dare the unmentionable good god's isolating stretches of white
cold, to serve an inquisitive painter from the South.
It was Ireena and Danillo who took Borissoff to the last pagan shrines
of Europe, never visited before by a European.
"In the background," says Borissoff, "one sees mountains of floating
icebergs of tremendous dimensions, prevented from approaching the
coast by submarine reefs. Here, on the edge of the Arctic, are the
cliffs containing the Holy Place, reached only after a terrible
journey over icy rocks and fearful ravines, through riverbeds stuffed
with snow, up snowy slopes in intricate zig-zags, where the reindeer
floundered and protested."
_Borissoff's Pilgrimage to the Last Pagan Shrines of Europe_
[Illustration: "THE COUNTRY OF THE DEAD"--A STUDY OF THE KARA SEA IN
AUGUST]
Three versts' distance from the shrine, they stopped on the threshold
of the Samoyed Mecca. Borissoff stumbled over huge mounds of idols
heaped between cliffs, one of them so great that forty sledges could
not have removed the idols. He passed mountains of deer-skulls,
antlers, and skulls of polar bears; and heaps of rusty axes, knives,
chains, fragments of anchors, harpoons, and parts of rifles brought as
offerings over weary leagues. The Samoyeds often drive here from a
thousand miles away, stop at the threshold of this dwelling-place of
the supreme Idol-God of the polar regions, and, killing a domestic
deer as the least sacrifice, besprinkle the shrine with its blood.
[Illustration: "SAMOYED LOVE OF COLOR"