BY THE WAY

Southland Times, Issue 20664, 20 April 1929, Page 13

BY THE WAY

THE NAMELESS RUSSIAN

(By

Rowan.)

There is an intensive devotion to handicrafts in Russia which arises not only out of the natural desire to create beauty, but out of necessity, the period of inactivity during the snowbound winter. After the feverish toil of the sowing and harvest seasons, the Russian peasant practically hibernates. True, besides sleeping luxuriously on his stove, he eats and drinks, mends his harness and furniture, tends the animals, beats his wife, guzzles tea, talks and philosophizes in the melancholy way which is surely the Russian’s way of enjoying himself; but nevertheless the interminable winter evenings would tend to hang heavily on his hands had he not acquired the habit of centuries of whiling away the time by making little things out of whatever materials at hand. No one knows who gave the first patterns for the varied handicrafts in each locality of mighty Russia, or who moulded the traditions of the trade, but the nameless artists of the past, one building upon the work of the other like coral animals, have evolved designs, colouring and forms that have not yet ceased to amaze and delight the sophisticated eye of the Western World. It is as if the mind of the “dark peasant” were rich as a field long fallow.

The poorest peasants, of course, counted on the sale of their handiwork to buy food after the garnerings of their small patches of land were consumed. The whole, family took part, dividing the labour, and parents probably encouraged the children to rival each other in trying to acquire the skill of grown-ups. A little boy of six might nail together the straight pieces, a girl of seven smooth the figures with sand paper, and a boy or girl of twelve could already carve a very respectable frog or rabbit. In painted work, children could lay on the base colour, and older persons the designs.

The family would doubtless gather around the table, rough-hewn, the dim lamp flickering on gilded ikons in the shrine or “little god-corner”; the great, square clay stove, filling fully one-third of the room, radiating heat; the calf nodding gently under the bench. Perhaps the whole family would join in folk-tunes, of whose complicated harmonies the Russians seem to know quite naturally at birth. Besides this, every trade in Russia has its special ditty, like that, of the tailor who sits cross-legged on a stool and shrills, “My brain is drying up,” or the navvy on the Volga who grunts, “Again, Again!” The theme of the poor artisan, in good times and bad, is part sad, part merry: "Poverty leaps, poverty dances, poverty sings a song.” These simple, people used as their material whatever lay at hand. In Central Russia and the Ukraine these were linen and wood, from which the artisans of each district fashioned gay embroideries in their own style, wooden figures, brilliant painted toys, red-and-gold lacquered plates, boxes, buckets, chairs and tables, and generous wide-bowled spoons with which the peasants themselves use to dip their meals out of the common dish. The consumption of these lacquered plates and spoons in Russia amounts to 15,000,000 pieces every year. The peasant artists of Palekh formerly painted ikons on wood; now that there is no demand for ikons they have given their exquisite fancy free rein in decorating utilitarian boxes. In the north the material is fur and bone —especially the walrus tusk, which in the twelfth century caused a sensation from Tsargrad to Constantinople, Persia and Bukhara, as the famous “fish tooth.” All the older European antiques of this kind are of walrus tusk, as ivory was not introduced into Europe until the fifteenth century. The Samoyeds, akin to Eskimos, are the folk who carve this material into beautiful bas-reliefs, fret-work and figures. One of their modern triumphs is a chess set in which the King is an Eskimo, the castle a wigwam and the pawns Arctic flogs. The Eskimos in Siberia, called Chukchi and Yakuts, live even further north, within the Arctic Circle, where the night is months long, and these people work in* an even stranger medium. Thousands of years ago their material roamed the forests; now the mammoth has disappeared and only the petrified bodies and tusks remain to show how many of them took refuge in this northernmost tip of earth before they finally died out. In Turkestan, Uzbeckistan, Central Asia, the Turco-Asiatics print cottons as in India, or weave silks into strange patterns for robes and veils, or embroider the hangings of their huts with the famous Bukhara rose, or the Assyrian tree of life and love, putting into them their own original colours and details. In the Caucasus the shaggy dark-browed mountaineers make gold and silver and bone and jewels into buckles, daggers, belts for their slender waists, or trappings for their beloved companion, the horse. It is astonishing how differently the genius of different peoples expresses itself. These rough half-barbarians, who even have to make their own tools out of crude iron, produce designs of a beauty and delicacy that seem to take the best from the Russian and Persian cultures on their borders. For a long time these workers were more or less ignored; but in more recent times the value of their product has drawn people to take an interest in their work, encourage the best designs, and give technical assistance. In Central Russia there was a movement to organize technical schools. M. Borntsky, of the peasant handicraft section of the Amtorg Trading Company, has described how he went for this purpose into the Scrgcicv wood-carving district forty years ago: ‘’Here, thirty-eight miles from Moscow,” he says, ”1 found lusty centenarians who had never been Io the city. Though they could carve anything in the world, they had seen nothing but their own village. The city they feared as a den of cheating, misleading and robbery, and they distrusted city men accordingly. For weeks I walked with them, went to church with them, drank tea and talked with them. I attended all their weddings; I served as godfather to their children. At last they grew to trust me, and we organized a handicrafts training school. Later we established more, in Nizhni-Novgorod and other cities, and all our best graduates we sent to more distant districts to teach there.” By 1913 it was estimated that there were 3,000,000 producing goods, although only five per cent, of these were organized into co-operative groups at that time, the rest being “on their own.” War slowed down this great production. It killed most of the talented kustars (artisans) and drew others to essential factory work in the cities. Revolution brought production practically to a standstill, and in the first great surge mass production was the cry, to “free the people from drudgery.” “Handwork is (he scourge of the people.” The government said that workers should carry on under speedy, modern methods, among a proletarian group, not individually and by hand. It therefore did nothing to supply the kustars with paints, tools, or a sales outlet. In 1920, a year before the great reversal of the new economic policy, came the new slogan, “We turn back our faces to the kustars. "But the artisans have suffered

from their enforced inactivity, and restoration was a difficult matter. The government had to learn to make the paints and brushes formerly imported from abroad; to make the machines that manufactured the necessary tools, and to spread these supplies among the villages. It organized schools, with artists and the best remaining kusters, to train new workers in many regions, even one for the Samoyeds at Archangel and one for the Yakuts and Chukchis at Tobolsk, Siberia. It reorganized and enlarged the Kustarney Museum in Moscow and provided for the interchange of ideas among artisans of different regions. It sent out models of the kinds of objects that were likely to find a sale, leaving the artisan to decorate them according to his own taste.

The first attempt at export after the revolution was after the close of foreign intervention in 1920-21. It did not help to reopen the market that the quality of the goods was considerably below what the' old customers remembered. But gradually the work improved. At the‘Leipzig Fair in ■1923 the buyer of a large London store said of the ordinary peasant toys, “These, must have been the toys of the Tsar’s children.” In 1923-4 America and England bought more than 2,000,000 yards of Russian hand-woven linen. But the total handicraft exports are only 30 per cent.- of the pre-war figure. That is why, at long last (only this very year) all the producing and distributing organizations in the whole Soviet Union have joined together to push exportation, in one organization called the Kust export. It is estimated that 2,000,000 kustars are now working in the chief producing regions of Russia, the Ukraine and Siberia. Of these about 200,000 are organized in artels, ■'A’hich are in turn banded under a central head, the All-Union Co-operative Industries League. In the central regions 25 per cent, are organized; in the far illiterate parts as few as 2 per cent. The Central Co-operative Bank gave them credit in 1927 amounting to about 2,500,000 dollars. In the Caucasus and Central Asia there are few co-operative artels. But co-operation is growing in favour, since the members have profited by the aid of the government, and learned by experience to elect better presidents and maintain a more efficient administration; and the membership is increasing. With the growing exchange of ideas and the stimulation of new methods, this movement may easily swell to a real renaissance, developing more than nameless artists among the dark villagers, the Eskimos, and the mountaineers.