Tag Archives: Folk Culture

“Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”

This seems like a period where the originality of Russian culture is distinct. Perhaps because the music we’ve listened to in the past was religious music, all of it was highly influenced by European art, attempting more or less to imitate it. I don’t have a lot of knowledge about European folk music in the 19th century, but many of these folk songs had a distinctly ‘Russian’ sound to me.

The same thing was true of the Moiseyev dance. Instead of an attempt to imitate or borrow the classical forms of ballet and such from European culture, it was unique, different from any other sort of folk dancing I’ve ever seen. The costumes look almost stereotypically Russian, unmistakable. This could be another example of the divide between the peasants and their folk culture, and the nobles trying to emulate other forms of artistic expression. But these recordings demonstrate that folk culture was eventually recognized as being valuable as well. Moreover, it’s impossible to completely divide culture into ‘folk culture’ and ‘high culture’ with no overlap or influence in both directions (look at Gogol’s writing!). Just as pagan themes were adapted to fit the narratives of Christianity instead of destroyed completely, so ‘folk culture’ continued to have a strong influence on the Russian identity.

 

What Says the Izba?

As we consider Russian folk culture as reflected in Russian high culture, it is important to keep in mind the roots from which this ‘folk culture’ (whether authentic or reworked, presented or constructed) springs. What does the life-world of the Russian peasant look like? From what components is it constructed, and how do these components syncretize into a ‘folk culture’ ? Village culture would, naturally, center to a degree around the izba, the peasant hut. To draw a direct link between spatial features of the izba to the manifestation of folk belief in high culture is too big a jump, but I do think think that elaborating on a few aspects of the izba could be useful here.

Let us begin by looking at two sets of illustrations, that of the ‘signs’ (znaki) inscribed onto Russian peasant houses, and that of the doorway decorations. The znaki are divided into two types: signs of the sun, and signs of the earth. The motive behind decorating peasant houses with such signs can be guessed at: the symbols link the houses (and thus the peasant families living within them) both to pre-Christian beliefs surrounding the sun and earth (remember the Ukrainian Easter egg?), and, more directly, to the agricultural rhythms of village life: without sun, without earth, there is no harvest.

The effect of such symbols upon ‘folk culture’ as such, and its distillation into forms for consumption and reproduction in the form of ‘high culture’, should not be ignored. What does it mean that the lifeways of the Russian peasant are inscribed onto where he lives (which, followingly, is both the space in which he is imagined and the space from which he signifies his ‘essence’)? The izba becomes a multi-layered symbol: a place of residence, yes, but also a piece of ‘folk art’ signifying agricultural ties and a shrouded pre-Christian legacy.

The doorways, the physical entrance point to this ‘signifying’ space, are themselves covered in signs: chickens, the sun-the pre-Christian/agricultural vocabulary stays the same. Entering the izba, the peasant is reminded of the rhythms that structure his life, while the writer or artist passing or imagining the izba is reminded that there are proscribed symbols and rhythms linked with ‘folk life’. ‘Folk culture’ is given architectural unity in the form of the izba, thus creating a building block from which ‘high culture’ can begin to construct the image of the peasant village (and from there incorporate the song, the dance, the peasant himself, into a unity of allusions).izbadecorations3 izbadecorations2