A Matter of Give and Take: Peasant Crafts and Their Revival in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

As we watch end of our century loom closer on horizon, discovery of broad historical and psychological parallels with last generation to undergo such an experience has become both a comfort and an object lesson. Among ways in which our contemporary fin-de-siecle angst echoes that of ca. 1900 is a shared forboding that world as we know it is about to disappear, and that a frustrating ambivalence as to what we can do about it. This sense of deja vu is particularly strong when we compare our present unabated enthusiasm for ethnic or crafts in this increasingly homogeneous world with arts and crafts revivals of late nineteenth century.] Revivals are almost, by definition, one-sided affairs, whereby living make their own selective use of past and its artifacts (e.g., neoclassicism, Gothic Revival). But or vernacular craft revivals that emerged throughout Europe, Great Britain, and United States at end of nineteenth century were exceptions in that they depended on conjunction of two living cultures-an educated, cosmopolitan intelligentsia (artists, philanthropists, entrepreneurs) and a romanticized but very much alive (peasantry, indigenous peoples). As heirs to cultural traditions threatened with extinction by modern age, latter were enlisted by former as partners in innumerable campaigns to save and resuscitate crafts that might otherwise have quietly disappeared onto dustheap of history. At once grandly utopian and eminently pragmatic in scope, such revivals went far beyond confines of borrowing design motifs from bygone eras and exotic peoples. Rooted in a belief that culture was a dynamic organism capable of growth and adaptation, rather than a dead style, they operated on quite a different model-one of give and take and mutual selfinterest. The process might begin, as in other revivals, with artists borrowing raw material from the folk (usually in form of ornament) for their own design experiments, but it rarely stopped there. Having passed these precious elements of a potential national design vocabulary through purifying filter of their own tasteinformed by a professional art education and a familiarity with European trends-artists and craft reformers felt morally bound to reinvest these borrowed cultural riches back into their source communities, by employing modern-day as producers of For a panoramic view of craft revivals, see Nicola Gordon Bowe, ed., Art and National Dream: The Search for Vemacular Expression in Tum-of-theCentury Design (Dublin, University of Dublin Press, 1993).