Searching for Shambala

hen Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made his historic space flight in April 1961, he became the first human being ever to gaze upon the fullness of the planet Earth from above.  Asked to describe the sight, Gagarin struggled to find just the right words.  Finally, he said, the view of Earth from space “reminds me of a painting by Nikolai Roerich.”  Gagarin’s analogy was particularly apt, because Roerich dedicated much of his art and life to the cosmic, in every sense of the word.

Nikolai Roerich was born on October 9 [September 27, old style], 1874, into the family of a prominent St. Petersburg notary.  A gifted student, the young Roerich developed not only an early taste for painting, music, and theater, but also a lifelong interest in archaeology and folklore, as well as a deep love of nature, cultivated during regular visits to the family estate, Isvara, approximately 60 miles outside St. Petersburg.  Indeed, versatility became one of the hallmarks of Roerich’s career.  Before his long and active life came to an end in 1947, Roerich painted or sketched more than 7,000 works; designed sets and costumes for over a dozen plays, operas, and ballets; explored Tibet, Central Asia, and the Himalayas; received two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize; and, finally, attracted both controversy and admiration by founding, with his wife Helena, a popular mystical tradition known as Agni Yoga.

After completing secondary school in 1893, Roerich took on a double educational burden.  His parents, wishing him to pursue a legal or civil service career, insisted that he study law at the University of St. Petersburg.  Roerich himself yearned to enroll in the Imperial Academy of Arts, and solved the dilemma by agreeing to take courses at both institutions.  He earned his law degree in 1898, but had already fulfilled his real dream by graduating from the Academy with the title of “artist” in the fall of 1897.  While at the Academy, Roerich studied with Arkhip Kuindzhi, the landscapist famous for The Birch Grove (1879-1882) and Night on the Dnieper (1880-1882).  Roerich remained devoted to Kuindzhi until the latter’s death in 1910.  Under his teacher’s guidance Roerich completed his graduation piece, The Messenger (1897).  This was Roerich’s first major work; it was purchased by the Tretyakov Gallery, praised by Leo Tolstoy, and noticed by the royal family.

Over the next few years, the journeyman artist plunged himself into a whirlwind of activity.  At the Academy, Roerich’s classmates had teased him for his diligence: “we sit around at home before class, drinking tea and gabbing with one another, but you always seem to be working, thinking somehow.”  During the rest of what fellow artist Igor Grabar – director of the Tretyakov Gallery and, under the Soviets, head of the Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Art History – called his “hectic, vital life,” Roerich never slackened the pace of this impressive work ethic.  In addition to painting, he penned articles and essays for some of Russia’s most prestigious artistic and literary journals.  He also began a long affiliation with the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, a progressive body that provided artistic education to men and women of all social classes.  Over time, Roerich became director of the Society’s school.  His most famous student there was Marc Chagall, who, as an émigré, later became internationally renowned for his whimsical fantasies and his scenes of Jewish life in Russia.

During the first decade of the new century, Roerich made two long trips to Western Europe – one to Paris, another to Italy and Switzerland – to refine his painterly technique and acquaint himself with new trends in turn-of-the-century art.  Archaeological and literary research on what he considered to be Asian sources of Russian culture sparked a growing interest in eastern religions and Indian philosophy.  He also started a family.  While traveling through Russia in the summer of 1899, Roerich met and fell in love with Helena Shaposhnikova, a cousin once removed of the composer Modest Mussorgsky and a descendant of the military hero Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who drove Napoleon from Russia in 1812 (see Russian Life, October 1995).  Although her family hoped to marry her to someone with a more distinguished background, Helena was attracted to the shy, but intense, young artist, with his penetrating gaze and serious mind.  The couple wed in October 1901; their two sons – Yuri and Sviatoslav – were born in 1902 and 1904.

From his graduation in 1897 to the beginning of World War I in 1914, Roerich staked out a place for himself in an art world that was constantly in flux.  Inspired by Symbolist painters in Russia – like Mikhail Vrubel – and Europe, especially France’s Paul Gauguin, he abandoned the strictly realist style in which he had been trained.  Thanks to the influence of his wife, as well as friends in the St. Petersburg intelligentsia, he began to plunge headlong into a lifelong fascination with mysticism and the occult.  His expertise in the fields of archaeology and ethnography gained him a reputation as the most skilled interpreter of Russia’s ancient and prehistoric eras.  Roerich’s most famous canvases from this period – such as Idols (1901), Overseas Visitors (1901-1902), Slavs on the Dnieper (1905), Treasure of the Angels (1905), The Dragon’s Daughters (1906), Heavenly Battle (1909 and 1912), Human Forefathers (1911), and The Last Angel (1912) – all reflect a desire to combine historical accuracy with experimental, non-realistic styles and the exploration of spiritual questions.

The same can be said about Roerich’s other pre-war projects.  For a time, he was a favorite of one of Russia’s most famous cultural patrons: Princess Maria Tenisheva, who provided at her Talashkino estate, near Smolensk, the funding and support to create a haven for many of the country’s most talented, forward-looking artists.  At Talashkino, Roerich designed furniture, craftworks, and, especially, the “Queen of Heaven” mosaic for the church Tenisheva built on the estate.  He was also drawn to the renowned “World of Art” Group, founded by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois.  Roerich worked with the group in Russia, but his most important contributions came when Diaghilev embarked on his great campaign to introduce Russian art and music to Western Europe.  In May 1909, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes staged its first performance in Paris.  The highlight of the show was the “Polovetsian Dances” sequence from Borodin’s Prince Igor.  The production sent the Parisian audience into a delirium of excitement, guaranteeing as nothing else could the astounding success the Ballets Russes enjoyed over the next half-decade.  It was universally recognized that the set and costumes – designed by Roerich – had played an enormous role in Igor’s triumph.  Like most of his “World of Art” colleagues, Roerich dabbled in stage design for many years, working on many operas, plays, and ballets.  From 1910 to 1913, he worked once more for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, designing the sets and costumes for – and co-writing the libretto of – Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, whose evocation of Russia’s pagan past owes much to Roerich’s knowledge of folklore and archaeology.  The premiere of The Rite in May 1913 ranks as one of the most important, and certainly one of the most explosive, moments in the birth of modern art.  Roerich’s role in making that moment happen is incalculable.

In 1914, Roerich turned 40.  He had reached the height of his powers, and he was respected in Russia and throughout Europe, not only as a painter, but also as a theoretician of art.  War and revolution, however, shattered this comfortable position.  A severe case of pneumonia wore down his body.  At the same time, Russia’s declining fortunes in WWI caused him great mental anguish.  His despair was deepened by the German destruction of cultural monuments in Belgium and France.  In later years, this would fire him with a lifelong determination to fight for stronger legal measures to protect art treasures during wartime.  At the time, it sharpened his sense that WWI was an apocalypse, a cataclysm signaling the end of an age.  With Helena and his sons, he spent most of the war years at an island villa in Finland, recuperating, brooding, and pessimistically pondering the vast, epoch-destroying struggle narrated in the Bhagavad-Gita, the classical Indian epic.  The revolutions of 1917 roused him from his torpor.  For a brief time, he served on the famous “Commission” that proletarian writer Maxim Gorky formed during the spring and summer to hammer out a working relationship between Russia’s intellectuals and Kerensky’s Provisional Government and the left-leaning Petrograd Soviet, the two political bodies that jointly ran Russia’s government between the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the Communist uprising in October.  By the fall and winter, however, Roerich feared Russia’s imminent military collapse – not to mention the rising political star of the Bolshevik Party (which he detested, despite its attempts to recruit him to serve in a proposed Ministry of Arts) – and chose to stay in Finland.  When Lenin’s revolutionaries seized power and, some months later, closed the borders of the new Soviet Union, Roerich and his family found themselves cut off from their homeland.

From 1918 to the fall of 1920, the Roerichs drifted through Europe, from Scandinavia to London.  The émigré experience was easy for no one, but it came especially hard to the intelligentsia, whose ability to make a living depended on having an audience grounded in one’s native language and able to appreciate one’s cultural tradition.  For middle-aged artists, whose approach to painting was now noticeably out of step with the radical, avant-garde styles of the 1920s, it was doubly difficult to trade on one’s pre-war reputation.  Roerich was able to arrange a few exhibitions, sell a few paintings, and work on a few theatrical productions.  But making a living took more and more effort.

By now, Roerich’s overriding goal – driven by his growing occult convictions – was to travel to India.  He and Helena became members of the British branch of the Theosophical Society, while his paintings began to feature Asian landscapes and figures from eastern myth and religion.  Financial and political troubles prevented the journey to India, but the Roerichs did receive an invitation from Robert Harshe, director of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and, later, the Chicago Art Institute, to come to the United States and stage a retrospective exhibition.  In September 1920, the whole family set sail for New York City.

Roerich’s career took on new – and controversial – dimensions upon his arrival in America.  In 1920-1921, the traveling exhibition he arranged with Harshe took him to more than two dozen cities and secured for him much popularity.  He received several commissions to design sets and costumes for operas and plays in New York and Chicago.  But three other passions would preoccupy him and shape his artwork over the next two and a half decades.  First and foremost was mysticism.  For years, Nikolai and Helena had been devotees of the occult, with a particular interest in Theosophy, the esoteric tradition founded in the 1890s by Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky.  While in London, then in the U.S., the Roerichs began to claim that Tibetan spiritual masters were revealing to them a body of occult wisdom called Agni Yoga.  In a remarkably short time, the Roerichs were able to attract an inner circle of loyal adherents, who helped to build an extensive network of cultural institutions, printing presses, and economic concerns in Europe and America.  The crown jewel of the Roerich enterprise was the Master Institute in Manhattan, which housed apartments, instructional facilities, sizable collections of European paintings and Asian artefacts, and a large museum dedicated to Roerich’s art.

A second interest involved international law.  As a young artist, Roerich had pledged himself to fight for the protection of artworks and cultural treasures during times of combat.  Since WWI had clearly proven existing conventions and resolutions to be weak and toothless, he determined to draft a new treaty, the “Roerich Pact,” and agitate for its passage by all the nations of the world.  Roerich proposed that a “Banner of Peace” – consisting of a red circle surrounding three red orbs, all on a white field – be created as a cultural-heritage equivalent of the Red Cross flag.  Any site flying the Banner was to be protected by the treaty, which Roerich wrote with the assistance of international-law professors at the University of Paris.  During the 1920s, the “Roerich Pact” movement gained the support of such celebrities as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, and George Bernard Shaw.  It also gained Roerich the first of two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1928 (he lost out that year to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, whose jointly proposed treaty, signed by sixty-five countries, purported to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy).  By the early 1930s, Iowa politician Henry A. Wallace – Franklin Roosevelt’s Agriculture Secretary, and later Vice-President – became one of the treaty’s most ardent boosters.  By April 1935, Wallace had persuaded the Roosevelt Administration, as well as the leaders of twenty-one Latin American nations, to sign the Pact into law.  That year, Roerich received his second nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize (this honor was quickly withdrawn, thanks to financial and political scandals described below).

Third, Roerich turned explorer during the 1920s and 1930s.  In 1923, he fulfilled one of his fondest dreams by visiting India, headquarters of the worldwide Theosophical movement and source of the eastern traditions which had become so dear to him.  Shortly after his arrival, Roerich started to plan a mammoth journey that would take him through the Himalayas, the Altai Mountains, the Gobi Desert, and Tibet.  This expedition – the first of two he would make to the region – was funded by his supporters in New York City and, therefore, traveled under an American flag.  Its purpose remains shrouded in mystery.  Ostensibly, the expedition was intended to promote cultural unity and allow Roerich (and his son Yuri, by now a Harvard- and Sorbonne-educated linguist) to conduct archaeological and ethnographic research.  Equally important was Roerich’s goal of “proving” many of his and his wife’s occult theories.  The most important of these included a conviction that the current cosmic cycle was coming to an end and that a new era was about to dawn.  The arrival of this “new age” would be preceded by the appearance of a great spiritual leader: Maitreya, the “Buddha of the future,” who Roerich felt was reflected in the messiah images of all the world’s myths and religions.  The Roerichs expected Maitreya to appear in Shambhala, the lost and fabled land described in many Asian legends and religious traditions (and inspiration for the equally fabled land of “Shangri-La” created by James Hilton in his best-selling novel, Lost Horizon).  The Roerichs believed that, through a careful study of myth and folklore and actual field research, they could pinpoint the real-life location of ancient Shambhala, somewhere in the Altai Mountains, the Himalayan highlands, or the wastes of the Gobi.  Beyond all this, however, the family and its followers may have had an even more secret plan in mind: recent scholarship has unearthed a compelling body of evidence indicating that the Roerichs hoped to establish an independent – or at least quasi-autonomous – state in Tibet and the Himalayas or, alternatively, in southern Siberia and the Altai.  In this “Great Country,” the Roerichs would construct a magnificent temple, preserve the cultural treasures of the world, and await the coming of Maitreya.  How Russia, China, and Mongolia – the nations in whose territory this latter-day Shambhala was to be reborn – might react to these plans seems not to have worried the Roerichs overmuch.

These wider spiritual goals and political aspirations aside, the actual expedition was, physically and practically, an impressive undertaking.  Departing northern India in March 1925, Nikolai, Helena, and Yuri, traveling with a cavalcade of friends, servants, and supply trucks, traveled through Ladakh and Sinkiang (then Chinese Turkestan).  In 1926, the Roerichs – in a move they kept hidden from the media, since theirs was nominally a U.S. expedition – entered the territory of the USSR and made a brief detour to Moscow, consulting with Soviet authorities and reuniting with friends.  This was the only opportunity Nikolai and Helena had to visit their native land after 1918, and it is almost certain that one of their goals was to gain Soviet support for their political plans.  Both sides came away disappointed.  Roerich, who had been a law-school classmate of Georgii Chicherin, the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, apparently expected that the government would take his proposal seriously, particularly if he portrayed it as an opportunity to export revolutionary, anti-imperial (especially anti-British) ideology to the colonized peoples of Asia.  For their part, Soviet foreign-affairs and intelligence operatives, viewing Roerich as “half-communist, half-Buddhist,” were partly suspicious of him, partly amused by beliefs they considered eccentric, to say the least.  Calculating that those beliefs were harmless – and that the artist’s plans might indirectly further the USSR’s strategic goals in this geopolitically entangled part of the world – the Soviets agreed to let him continue on his way, although what kind of active assistance they provided, if any, remains unknown.

The Roerichs’ journey resumed with an extended meander through the Altai Mountains.  From there, they went on to Soviet Buryatia, then Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.  By October 1927, the party had reached Tibet and was on the road to Lhasa.  Up to this point, the journey had been arduous enough, but it now turned deadly.  For reasons that remain obscure – but probably involve political interference on the part of authorities in Britain’s India Office, convinced that Roerich was a communist spy – the Tibetan government ordered the caravan to halt.  The Roerichs were taken into custody for five months, but not provided with shelter or extra provisions.  The Himalayan winter took a terrible toll on the expedition: caught out in the open on the Tibetan plateau, the party lost ninety-two pack animals and suffered five deaths.  Finally, in March 1928, the Roerichs received permission to leave Tibet.  Skimming the Nepalese border and crossing through Sikkim, the expedition straggled back to India, returning to Darjeeling in May.

Although he maintained ties with his New York followers and continued lobbying Western governments on behalf of his Pact, Roerich now established a permanent residence in the Kulu Valley, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas.  For the next twenty years, the Roerichs’ estate, Urusvati – Sanskrit for “morning star” – doubled as a Himalayan research center, dedicated to the study of the region’s folklore, linguistic traditions, and natural environment.  Roerich continued to produce paintings at an incredible rate (during the 1925-1928 expedition, he had completed 500 canvases, despite the trials and tribulations of travel).  By now, his subject matter consisted principally of mountainscapes, figures from eastern mythology and legend, and images of meditation and enlightenment.

Nikolai and Yuri returned to Central Asia and Mongolia in the mid-1930s.  Even more so than the first expedition, this journey was entangled in political schemes and scandal.  The expedition was sponsored by the Roosevelt Administration: Henry Wallace – by now thoroughly enthralled by Roerich’s spiritual teachings – arranged for the Roerichs to accompany a Department of Agriculture task force attempting to find drought-resistant grasses that could be transplanted from the Central Asian steppes and Mongolian desert to the “dust bowl” of the American Midwest.  However, the Roerichs’ mystical and political goals appear to have become even more ambitious since the 1920s.  In May 1934, claiming to have the backing of the U.S. Government, Roerich and son dashed to Japan and Manchuria ahead of the Agriculture Department’s botanists.  After a stopover in Harbin, home to Asia’s largest community of Russian exiles and émigrés, they plunged into the wilderness.  With them was an armed band of Cossacks and White Russians, assembled by Roerich’s younger brother Vladimir.  Since Vladimir had served during the Civil War under Baron Roman von Ungern-Shternberg – notorious as one of the most vicious generals to fight for the White forces – one can only guess at the personal and political profiles of the retainers he chose for the expedition.

Exactly what the Roerichs intended to do in the Mongolian-Manchurian hinterland remains unknown.  Whatever the case, within a matter of weeks, they had succeeded in convincing the British Foreign Office, the U.S. State Department, the Soviet secret police, and Japanese intelligence that they were spies.  Of what type, or working for whom, nobody could decide.  By the summer of 1935, the Roerichs’ sojourn through the borderlands of China, Russia, and Mongolia – one of the most politically sensitive regions of the globe at the time – was causing the Roosevelt Administration a substantial amount of embarrassment.  At the same time, Wallace began to shake off his infatuation with Roerich’s occult theories.  In September, he ordered the Roerichs to halt all operations, cease claiming the support of the U.S. Government, and return to India.

The collapse of the second expedition also spelled disaster for the Roerichs’ American movement.  Wallace abruptly disowned the family – but the relationship, revealed to the public in the form of his letters to Nikolai (addressed to “Dear Guru”!) would later haunt him and, in the late 1940s, spoil his presidential aspirations.  Disillusioned followers in New York sued the Roerichs over hundreds of thousands of dollars in IOUs, just as the Internal Revenue Service began a lengthy audit into their financial arrangements.  The IRS accused the family of failing to file tax returns in 1926, 1927, and 1934; it also claimed that the Roerichs owned back taxes on all paintings sold in the U.S.  The great conglomerate – the Master Institute, the Roerich Museum, and so on – was dismantled, and many of the Roerichs’ assets in the U.S. were stripped.  (A reconstituted, but smaller, Nicholas Roerich Museum currently operates in New York City).  Ironically, all these troubles followed almost immediately upon the Roosevelt Administration’s signing of the Banner of Peace Pact and Roerich’s second nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Roerich spent the remaining twelve years of his life in northern India, running the Urusvati research center, painting scenes of India and the Himalayas, and discussing philosophy with the poet Tagore, as well as rising political star Jawaharlal Nehru.  He agonized over the death and destruction caused by World War II, especially after the Germans attacked Russia.  During the war years, he lent his name to several charities and cultural associations that supported his homeland’s struggle against the Nazis.  He also painted many patriotic scenes from Russian history and legend.  After WWII came to an end, Roerich lived long enough to see his beloved India free itself from British rule.  Unfortunately, he also lived long enough to see the Kulu Valley – his home since the late 1920s – tear itself apart during the travails of Indo-Pakistani partition.

As early as 1939, Roerich had been diagnosed with heart disease.  He continued to hike, practice archery, and ride horseback.  But, by the end of 1947, shortly after his seventy-third birthday, Roerich was failing.  While putting the finishing touches on his last painting, The Master’s Command (1947), his heart gave out: he died on December 13.  Two days later, his body was cremated.  The eulogy was spoken by Nehru, a longtime family friend and, by now, one of the leaders of free India.  As Roerich’s ashes were consecrated, Nehru proclaimed that “I am astounded at the scope and abundance of his activities and creative genius.  A great artist, a great scholar and writer, archaeologist and explorer, he touched and lighted up so many aspects of human endeavour.”

The Roerich legacy continues, although Nehru’s words of praise touch on only one facet of it.  Partly due to a shift away from Stalinist cultural values, partly due to the USSR’s desire to cultivate India as an ally during the Cold War, Soviet cultural authorities and art historians restored Roerich – whose metaphysical leanings had not fit in well with the Socialist Realism of the 1930s and 1940s – to the officially-approved canon of Russian painters during the late 1950s and early 1960s.  His work hangs in all of Russia’s major museums and galleries – including the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Hermitage – and he is recognized as an important figure in the history of Russia’s artistic tradition.  In the West, wider awareness of the crucial, but largely forgotten, role he played in the co-creation of The Rite of Spring was rekindled in 1987, when New York’s Joffrey Ballet staged an acclaimed version of the ballet, complete with Nijinsky’s choreography and sets and costumes based on Roerich’s original designs.  As for his mystical ideas, they remain popular worldwide, especially in Russia.  Since the late 1980s, the Agni Yoga movement has gone through a tremendous revival, particularly after 1987, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev publicly endorsed Roerich as a valued artist and great humanitarian – and gave his approval for the construction of the International Center of the Roerichs in Moscow.  (In recent years, this Center – and the Roerich movement in general – has become the focus of much governmental and spiritual controversy in Russia).

During the course of his eventful life, Roerich traveled many paths – that of painter, stage designer, explorer, archaeologist, political agitator, amateur ethnographer, and, of course, mystic.  Without a doubt, this breadth of purpose and accomplishment lends much spice to his life story.  But does it – especially the extent of his occult activities – diminish his stature as an artist?  His admirers insist that it does not.  Indeed, one of the great literary voices of fin-de-siècle Russia – the macabre, pessimistic Leonid Andreyev, author of He Who Gets Slapped and The Seven Who Were Hanged – argued that it was precisely Roerich’s spiritual outlook that gave his painting its special flavor.  In an oft-quoted article entitled “The Realm of Roerich” – which was eventually translated into English and published in the December 1921 issue of The New Republic – Andreyev declared that “The genius of Roerich’s fantasy reaches the border of clairvoyance…. To see a Roerich picture means to see something new, something you have never and nowhere seen…. This joy is given only to him who has been able to penetrate into Roerich’s world, into his great realm…. Yes, it exists, this beautiful world, this realm of Roerich.  Though charted on no maps, it is real and exists no less than the province of Orel or the kingdom of Spain.  [This] world of Roerich – it is a world of truth.”

Conversely, Roerich’s detractors, including many Western historians of Russian art, are less charitably disposed toward the non-painterly aspects of his career.  Some are hostile enough to his beliefs and actions that they – somewhat unfairly and unobjectively – dismiss altogether the worth of his artistic output.  Others simply regard Roerich as naïve and contend that his work, especially his paintings of the mid-1920s and afterward, suffered as a result of his spiritual and political preoccupations.  The erudite and influential Alexandre Benois, Roerich’s onetime colleague in the World of Art Group and the Ballets Russes, falls into this category.  Initially ambivalent about Roerich’s style, Benois had come to respect the work his compatriot produced before WWI.  During the 1920s and 1930s, however, he became increasingly disappointed by Roerich’s later paintings.  In a widely-circulated essay from 1939, he maintains that the sheer volume of Roerich’s output – not to mention the fact that the bulk of it resonated so loudly with mystical overtones – diluted the value of his artwork and, in the end, his creative force.  As Benois writes, “I absolutely do not believe in these conferences, pacts, leagues, speeches, jubilees, and apotheoses.  Oh, if only instead of these thousands of paintings, we had a ‘normal’ quantity of them, and if only each painting were in some way exhaustive – if we were able to ‘enter’ it and ‘live’ there for a while – how differently Roerich’s artistic mission might have turned out!  Perhaps it would have been more limited in a geographic or planetary sense, perhaps it would have been less striking in its ‘universality.’  But it would have been more genuine, and then apologists would not have to present it as some kind of miracle about which they are obliged to speak in the language of the holy books.  It would have spoken for itself.”

However, to separate Roerich the painter from Roerich the wanderer, the dreamer, and the occultist is impossible.  For good or for ill, his art, his beliefs, and his political skullduggery are all inextricably intertwined.  Roerich has been damned as a charlatan and praised as a visionary.  Whether he was either or both remains unknowable – or at least depends on one’s tastes and one’s perspective.  Ultimately, all that can be said for certain about Roerich is that he left behind an immensely striking – and highly popular – artistic style, a unique worldview, and a career that has to rank among the most colorful in the history of modern art.  RL

John McCannon is assistant professor of history at Long Island University.  He is the author of the award-winning Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932-1939 (Oxford, 1998).  His current research project is a biography of Nikolai Roerich.