Natasha's Dance полностью

It all began at Abramtsevo, the artists' colony established by the Mamontovs on their estate near Moscow, which soon became the focus for the arts and crafts movement. The railway magnate's wife Elizaveta was a well-known sympathizer of the Populists and, soon after the estate was purchased in 1870, she set up a school and a hospital for the peasants in its grounds. In 1876 a carpentry workshop was added where pupils who had graduated from the school might learn a useful trade. The aim was to revive the peasant handicrafts that were fast disappearing as the railways brought in cheaper factory products from the towns. Artists like Gartman and Elena Polenova took their inspiration from this peasant art and, under Polenova's direction, new workshops were soon set up to cater to the growing middle-class market for pottery and linen in the peasant style. Polenova and her artists would go around the villages copying the designs on the window frames and doors, household utensils and furniture, which they would then adapt for the stylized designs of the craft goods manufactured in the colony's workshops. Polenova collected several thousand peasant artefacts which can still be seen in the Craft Museum at Abramtsevo. She saw these artefacts as the remnants of an ancient Russian style that was still alive, and which gave them, in her view, a value that was higher than the Muscovite designs that had inspired artists in the past. For the latter were a part of a dead tradition that was now as remote to the Russian people as 'the art of Africa or Ancient Greece'.¹¹² In her own pictures and furniture designs Polenova tried, as she put it, to express 'the vital spirit of the Russian people's poetic view of nature', using animal motifs and floral ornaments which she had sketched from peasant artefacts.¹¹³

15. Elena Polenova: 'Cat and Owl' carved door, Abramtsevo workshop, early 1890s

Urban fans of this 'neo-national' style took it as a pure and authentic Russian art. Stasov, for example, thought that Polenova's 'Cat and Owl' door could be taken for the work of 'some amazingly talented but anonymous master of our ancient Rus''.¹¹⁴ But in fact it was a fantasy. By the early 1890s, when the door was carved, Polenova had

moved on from copying folk designs to assimilating them to the art nouveau style, which made her work even more appealing to the urban middle class.

Other artists trod the same path from ethnographic to commercial art. At the Solomenko embroidery workshops in Tambov province, for example, the artists' designs were becoming increasingly attuned to the bourgeois tastes of the city women who could afford these luxury goods. Instead of the gaudy colours favoured by the peasants in their own designs (orange, red and yellow), they used the subdued colours (dark green, cream and brown) that appealed to urban tastes. The same change took place at the textile workshops of Talashkino, established by Princess Maria Tenisheva on her estate in Smolensk in 1898. The local peasant women 'did not like our colours', Tenisheva recalled, 'they said they were too "drab"', and she had to pay the weavers bonuses to get them to use them in their work.¹¹⁵

The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first matriosbka, or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow zemstvo's craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the matrioshka has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the matriosbka was an ancient Russian toy.¹¹⁶ At Talashkino Maliutin also applied his distinctive style to furniture, ceramics, book illustrations, stage designs and buildings. Urban admirers like Diaghilev saw his work as the essence of an 'organic peasant Russianness' which, Diaghilev claimed in one of his most nationalistic utterances, would herald a 'Renaissance of the North'.¹¹⁷ But the real Russian peasants took a different view. When, in 1902, Tenisheva put on an exhibition of the Talashkino products in Smolensk, less than fifty people came to see it and, as she recalled, the

peasants 'viewed our things not with delight but with dumb amazement which we found hard to explain'.¹¹⁸