Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 136 h Firuza Melville in his Tschelkunchik (‘Nutcracker’) introduced a divertissement of ‘colonial goods’, showing their musical ‘national identities’: Hot chocolate (for Spa­ nish) and Tea (for Chinese). For the Arabian dance Coffee , Tchaikovsky used the tune of a Georgian lullaby 8 , while the Russian male folk dance trepak was presented as yet another colonial good, as if Russia was its own colony. 9 The first Russian Orientalist productions in music, like Borodin’s Prince Igor, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov 10 , or Glinka’s Zhizn ’ za Tsarya (‘A Life for the Tsar’) and Ruslan i Lyudmila (‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’) 11 , accompanied the new wave of Russian nationalist fashion, reflecting contemporary events in Russian colonial history. Rimsky-Korsakov/Diaghilev’s Scheherazade, on the contrary, was already a generic representation of Orientals associated with the Russians in the West. Russian Orientalism as Russian cultural nationalism Needless to say that by this time, nationalistic ideas in rather an oriental ex- pression were extremely popular in Russia, from the court fashion to the com- mon culture. The peak of such a rise of the Russian nationalistic ideas was reflected in all arts and crafts of the fin de siècle period, ideologically sup- ported by the court. It would be enough to mention the 1903 ball in the Winter Palace to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanovs’ dynasty and the culture of the luxury products manufactured by the old and newly es- tablished but extremely fashionable jewellery companies (see Pl. 9). Among these rank the likes of Fabergé, Sazikov, Grachev Brothers and Khlebnikov, who were producing luxury goods from precious and semiprecious stones and metals using traditional techniques and decorative motifs carrying very na- tional and patriotic messages. It goes without saying that both the techniques and messages of the objects had strong Oriental and Orientalist connotations. 8 Макарова О. Национальный танец в современном балете. СПб.: Балтийские сезоны, 2012. С. 44. 9 To resolve this ambiguity, G. Balanchine in his New York production of 1954 replaced Tre- pak by a dance of Candy Canes (Zheng Y.-W. From Swan Lake to Red Girl’s Regiment: Ballet’s Sinicisation // The Cambridge Companion to Ballet. Ed. by Marion Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. P. 246–255, esp. P. 253). 10 Abbate Carolyn, Parker Roger. A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred years. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. P. 400–1; Frolova-Walker Marina. Russian Music and Nationa­ lism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 11 For example, Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, based on Pushkin’s first epic poem inspired by his travels through the Caucasus, has a strong nationalist flavour due to its very orientalist ap- proach. Orientals (Chernomor and Ratmir) are associated with lust, femininity and some sort of queer, and Ratmir’s role was designed to be performed by a woman with high contralto.