As the first painter to depict Russian peasant life in fine art, Alexei Venetsianov used certain visual cues to evoke ‘peasantness’-traditional dress, implements of rural labor, and pastoral scenes are all used to evoke a unitary and naturalistic peasant life-world. The semiotic universe of these works is fascinating in and of itself, but I would like to hone in on two paintings in particular- ‘Reapers’ and ‘Fortune-Telling.’ I hope to show that, by doing a brief ‘close reading’ of each of these paintings, it can be shown how themes of fate and human agency are evoked and encoded by the use of peasant motifs.

In ‘Reapers’, the peasant subjects are placed against a background of wheat, establishing their milieu and ‘natural’ environment as the realm of agriculture, of cyclical growth and production. Cyclicity is further produced by the positioning of the peasants’ sickles: implements of agriculture that enable the peasants to interface with the cycles of the land, the sickles themselves are positioned as to inscribe a circle around the peasant couple, further linking them to the aforementioned cycles. Moving inward from this ring, we arrive at the peasants themselves. It is unclear whether they are a young couple or siblings, but in any case the positioning of their bodies evokes images of reproduction, birth, and regeneration. The male peasant encloses the form of the female with his grasp, delineating the space she occupies. Simultaneously, the female peasant’s head overshadows that of the male-resplendent and elevated in bright colors, the image of the female seems to generate that of the male, ‘birthing’ her counterpart. The circle of life (and of peasant social relations) is inscribed onto the subjects. Finally, we arrive at the two butterflies on the female figure’s hand-evoking a predictable cycle of transformation and rebirth, the butterflies prove the capstone symbol to successive ‘circles’ inscribed around peasant life. 

The imagery used in the 1842 painting ‘Fortune Telling’ is of a drastically different nature. The Russian title of the painting, Gadaniye, implies a process (perhaps futile) of arriving at the future- the ‘fortune’ which is to be ‘told’ is semantically absent. The subjects are placed against a black and indefinite background-although they themselves evoke ‘peasantness’ by their dress, the series of regenerative circles structuring the life-world of the subjects in ‘Reapers’ is missing. Fate is no longer predetermined by the cycles of the natural world, but instead is made uncertain and shrouded. The act of ‘fortune telling’ with cards gives the illusion of a greater agency, but, detached from the cycles and meanings ‘meant’ to structure rural life, this agency is portrayed as vain grasping in the dark.

Thus two different modes of agency are presented. In the first, the peasants are both ‘in’ the land and ‘of’ the cycles of nature, of harvest and growth, birth and rebirth: placed into sharply delineated spatial and symbolic ‘places’, the subjects partake in a form of eternal life. In the second, agency through human means, detached from the life-cycles of the rural sphere, is made meaningless: wrenched from their ‘places’, the peasants are obscured and their ‘fate’ is left uncertain.

I am over my word count. But there is an ideological element here.