L’eredità teatrale e artistica di Savva Mamontov: un ponte tra Oriente e Occidente

This paper tries to shed light on the reasons, which brought Savva Mamontov to become the main supporter of the rebirth of the arts in Russia and of the creation of a universal artistic and theatrical language, which could have been accepted in the Western world. The investigation has been brought in the field of archaeology. This allowed to find in the Sciamanism and in the cult of the mother goddess of the Shiite civilization, just discovered, a conjunction point with the Slavophilism and with the European pre-Helenic civilizations. This investigation allowed individuating the common roots to the Eastern and Western Civilization in the eternal feminine and in the sacredness of the artist’s gesture, which had to be recovered in a period of heavy materialism. The experimentation of the Mamontovian artists started from there and brought as a supreme result the creation of the spectacle of the synthesis of all arts – this generated direction, modern choreography, and non-figurative arts. These were the bases for everything the Russian Avanguard developed and that remained as an inheritance until the end of the 1980s.