{"id":202,"date":"2016-10-06T20:09:37","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T00:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/?p=202"},"modified":"2016-10-06T20:09:37","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T00:09:37","slug":"peasant-life-and-fate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/russian-culture\/peasant-life-and-fate\/","title":{"rendered":"(Peasant) Life and Fate"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the first painter to depict Russian peasant life in fine art, Alexei Venetsianov used certain visual cues to evoke \u2018peasantness\u2019-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- \u2018Reapers\u2019 and \u2018Fortune-Telling.\u2019 I hope to show that, by doing a brief \u2018close reading\u2019 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

In \u2018Reapers\u2019, the peasant subjects are placed against a background of wheat, establishing their <\/span>milieu <\/span><\/i>and \u2018natural\u2019 environment as the realm of agriculture, of cyclical growth and production. Cyclicity is further produced by the positioning of the peasants\u2019 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\u2019s head overshadows that of the male-resplendent and elevated in bright colors, the image of the female seems to generate that of the male, \u2018birthing\u2019 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\u2019s hand-evoking a predictable cycle of transformation and rebirth, the butterflies prove the capstone symbol to successive \u2018circles\u2019 inscribed around peasant life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The imagery used in the 1842 painting \u2018Fortune Telling\u2019 is of a drastically different nature. The Russian title of the painting, <\/span>Gadaniye<\/span><\/i>, implies a <\/span>process <\/span><\/i>(perhaps futile) of arriving at the future- the \u2018fortune\u2019 which is to be \u2018told\u2019 is semantically absent. The subjects are placed against a black and indefinite background-although they themselves evoke \u2018peasantness\u2019 by their dress, the series of regenerative circles structuring the life-world of the subjects in \u2018Reapers\u2019 is missing. Fate is no longer predetermined by the cycles of the natural world, but instead is made uncertain and shrouded. The act of \u2018fortune telling\u2019 with cards gives the illusion of a greater agency, but, detached from the cycles and meanings \u2018meant\u2019 to structure rural life, this agency is portrayed as vain grasping in the dark.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thus two different modes of agency are presented. In the first, the peasants are both \u2018in\u2019 the land and \u2018of\u2019 the cycles of nature, of harvest and growth, birth and rebirth: placed into sharply delineated spatial and symbolic \u2018places\u2019, 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 \u2018places\u2019, the peasants are obscured and their \u2018fate\u2019 is left uncertain.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am over my word count. But there is an ideological element here. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the first painter to depict Russian peasant life in fine art, Alexei Venetsianov used certain visual cues to evoke \u2018peasantness\u2019-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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":372,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russian-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/372"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-fall-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}