Word usage examples
As a student reading law at Moscow University, he had fallen ill in his final year, and to recuperate he had set off on a trip to the remote Komi region, 800 kilometres north-east of Moscow, to study the beliefs of its Finno-Ugric tribes.
Anthropologists had long marked out the Komi region as a meeting point between Christianity and the old shamanic paganism of the Asiatic tribes.
The Komi people had been forcibly converted to the Christian faith by St Stephan in the fourteenth century.
The area had been colonized by Russian settlers for several hundreds years, and the culture of the Komi, from their language to their dress, bore a close resemblance to the Russian way of life.
Some of the Komi people told Kandinsky that the stars were nailed on to the sky.
Nineteenth-century archaeologists in the Komi region had unearthed large amounts of ceramic pottery with Mongolian ornament.
Kandinsky: sketches of buildings in the Komi region, including a church with a Mongolian-type roof.
Kandinsky had returned from the Komi region he gave a lecture on the findings of his trip to the Imperial Ethnographic Society in St Petersburg.
Ostensibly a Russian-Christian scene, the painting is filled with pagan symbols from the Komi region, which Kandinsky had explored as an anthropologist.
So Kandinsky recalled the impact of his encounter with the Komi people on his evolution towards abstract art.