Art: Slav Epic

In Czechoslovakia there has just been completed The Epic of Slavic History, a series of 20 paintings so enormous that Alfons Mucha, the artist, has been as busy with stepladders as with lexicons. For more than 18 years the work has been under way. The subjects range from earliest Slavic history to allegorical, exuberant prophecy. Sages, religious leaders, rulers appear in glorious pageantry. The most magnificent picture of the series, a canvas as large as the façade of a sizeable barn, depicts the liberation of Russian serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. In a grey, snowy twilight a crowd of the poor are gathered in Moscow's Red Square. Looming through the soft fall of flakes is the ornate Cathedral of St. Basil, multicolored cupolas and towers bedizened with snow. Beyond lie the grim walls and towers of the Kremlin. The people have just heard the ukase. They stand in clusters, joyfully inarticulate, habitually stolid. The bizarre tints of the Cathedral glimmer like a huge lantern of faith above and beyond the awestruck host.

Only a man of prodigious historic imagination could picture to himself the entity of Slavic evolution. Centuries before the bright miracle of Bethlehem the Slavs were a nation of lithe, swarthy wanderers who cultivated the land northeast of the Carpathians. Fearfully they turned to dark hills for sullen, reverberating commandments of Perun the Thunderer. Patiently they awaited lustrous benevolences of Dazbog the Sun God. Then their sweating oxen strained over furrows; hives were loud with bees; joyous honeyed mead was brewed in the glades. With the arching zest of dolphins the Slavs plunged in the waters of the Vistula, Pripet, Upper Dniester rivers. At nightfall they huddled in their river bank encampments, shuddered at the moan of the werewolf, the fleet shadow of Baba-Jaga, man-eating witch. Meanwhile their more venturesome brethren, scowling pirates of the Aegean and Baltic, forgot their ferocity beneath a vibrant pattern of stars.