Abramtsevo Worksheet
Name…………………………..
Due May 11 to K. Lahti
You may download this worksheet from the Blackboard Site
(“Course Documents”: Walking Tours: Abramtsevo)
and send it to K. Lahti over e-mail
Reading “The Abramtsevo Workshops” from Wendy Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late
Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
The reference to “emancipation” is the 1861 declaration that the serfs were no longer
property.
The German word Künstler means “artist.”
Part I Read the chapter from Wendy Salmond’s book, and answer the following
questions.
Kustar is a reference to people in the cottage industry the peasants had of crafting “folk”
items at home or in small workshops that they would sell to make extra money.
1.
How and why did kustar production suffer after the emancipation of the serfs?
Are you surprised to learn that the peasants economic situation worsened after the
emancipation? Who was at fault for that and how does this compare to the American
situation after our slavery was abolished?
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2.
Why did the kustar become a hero in the late nineteenth century? He was not a
hero to all; what political sides, with what beliefs, took him up as the ideal? [Answering
this question you are learning the basics about the major political debate in Russia at the
end of the 19th century.]
3.
There are two distinct generations of Russian nationalists at Abramtsevo.
Describe them.
4.
What did the Mamontovs do to further Russian art? What did they do to help the
local peasants? How would, say, founding a small opera and building a hospital for local
peasants fit into the same vision for a Russian in the 1870s?
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5.
For a peasant making “peasant art” may have been “just work.” (We’ll never
know, will we? What was going into the peasant mind to create a peasant work of art like
for an educated person such as Elena Polenova?
6.
Though the Abramtsevo kustar workshop was a remarkable success in most
respects, problems arose, especially toward the end. What were the problems? Why did
they occur?
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Last question for fun: The kustar industries were divided into five areas: wood, metal,
clay, fibers, skins and furs. What “kustar work” have you seen for sale today in Russia
that belongs to these categories? What have you bought?
Part II
1.
(to be answered as a combination of the reading and what you see at Abramtsevo)
Abramtsevo became a destination for many important Russian artists, who lived and
worked there, often trying to get in touch with something “peasant”, “natural,” and
“original” and in the early years without any contact with the real peasants doing real folk
crafts at the kustar factory on the property. What interplay between “high” and “low” art
in fact occurred at Abramtsevo?
2.
Given what you’ve read about it (and what you learned at the place), would you
say Abramtsevo was a civil society project by a rich Moscow merchant, parallel to the
civil society projects the Riabushinsky brothers engaged in? Why or why not?
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3. On the role of archaeology in all this: You read much about various forms of
archaeology contributing to the activities at Abramtsevo. Mamontov, Mamontova,
Repin, Polenov, Polenova, and Vasentsov could be said to have been doing a kind
of “archaeology” as they collected ornate wood carvings from the surrounding
area, Elena Dmitrievna was the daughter of the secretary of the Imperial
Archaeological Society, and you see at Abramtsevo a number of “kamennye
baby” (каменные бабы). Kamennye baby-- about which Katherine Lahti is
probably the foremost American expert--were primitive-looking statues ranging
from one to four meters in height. They were found on territory stretching from
the Dniester river to Mongolia, usually standing on burial mounds. Russian
landowners would bring them north to decorate their gardens and parks. It was
mistakenly thought that they were ancient Scythian funerary or fertility figures,
though in fact they were something else. The Scythians were the barbarians,
living around the Black Sea alongside Greek colonists, whom Herodotus wrote
about. Mamontov published a booklet on kamennye baby: he was into them. They
captured the Russian artistic imagination like little else. The avant-garde painter
Nataliia Goncharova did a series of paintings of them. The avant-garde Futurist
writers Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky both wrote plays in which
kamennye baby figured strongly. What’s going on with this? Go ahead, be
creative and thoughtful. Nobody (except KL) knows, and she’s probably wrong
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4.
You’ve seen the peasant outbuildings at Abramtsevo, which are not peasant at all
as they were ordered by a wealthy railroad magnate and designed by professional
architects. Professional architects at this time also designed a number of buildings for the
center of Moscow to look peasant-y. Name one, (Hint: they are not made out of wood,
but rather out of brick or stone.) Why did the wealthy Moscow merchant class build such
buildings in downtown Moscow? What were they trying to say by it? For that matter who
was buying the fancy carved peasant furniture from the workshop (in its second
incarnation)? What were they trying to say by decorating their homes with it?
5.
Much of the Abramtsevo thang is about the magic of the Russian countryside
(especially the countryside around Abramtsevo). Do you have anything to say about that,
having left Moscow to go there for a day?
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