"Let the Ray of Mankind Take the Place of the Persian Carpet of Names, States". The Silver Age about the Homeland of Zoroaster
The quest for some synthetic style of the new art had put the Silver Age - the phenomenon of the Russian culture at the turn of the centuries experiencing its Renaissance at this time - before the solution of the historical and philosophical problem concerning the East and the West. The categories of "East and West" seem to be absolutely comprehensible, but at the same time they are so relative that it is difficult to define them. The European civilization ("the West") represents a greater unity because it came into being on the basis of one antique, partly Byzantian, culture. "The East", although it has one name, has different sources: Indian, Chinese, ancient Iranian and later the Arab-Moslem civilization. The notion of "East" has experienced many, often radical transformations in the mind of the "West"; it has been included in most different and even mutually exclusive, incompatible systems of views and ideas. From this also there comes the obscurity of the definition of the "East" itself, which has become one of the archetypes of Western mentality. The Silver Age was directed towards the original source, to antiquity remembering the Indo-Iranian roots of the Russian culture. In this connection indicative is the example of N. Rerikh who went the way from the Slavic antiquity to India. Persia, the original homeland of the Aryans, had become one of the poles of attraction in that period.