ARCHAIC MOTIFS IN NORTH RUSSIAN FOLK EMBROIDERY
ARCHAIC MOTIFS IN NORTH RUSSIAN FOLK EMBROIDERY
AND PARALLELS IN ANCIENT ORNAMENTAL DESIGNS
OF THE EURASIAN STEPPE PEOPLES
S. Zharnikova 1985
For some one hundred years now Russian folk embroideries have attracted closest notice. Towards the close of the 19th century several magnificent collections of such embroideries were assembled. Further, researches conducted by V. Stasov,1 S. Shakhovskaya2, V. Sidamon-Eristova and N. Shabelskaya3 initiated the systematization and classification of the various types of ornamental designs in Russian folk embroidery. These same authors also made the first attempts to decipher the intricate narrative compositions so characteristic of folk tradition in Northern Russia.
The surging interest in the folk arts and crafts caused a series of notable studies to be devoted to analysis of the narrative and symbolical content, the specific techniques and the regional dissimilarities of Russian folk embroidery. However, most authors concentrated on the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations and the archaic three-element compositions incorporating stylized and transmuted representations of, more often, female and, less often, male pre-Christian deities. It is this group of motifs that has always fascinated students. A somewhat specific group consists of the geometrized motifs of North Russian embroideries, which, as a rule, accompany the basic elaborated narrative compositions - although frequently such motifs are exclusive in the decoration of towels, sashes, skirt hems, and shirt and blouse sleeves and shoulder yokes, which explains their importance for art historians.
It should be noted that along with an analysis of the complex narrative designs, greatest note was paid by A. Ambroz4 in his well-known articles to the geometrical symbolism as archaic in Russian embroidery. Further, in her fundamental monograph published in 1978 G. Maslova5extensively considered the evolution and transformation of geometrized ornamental motifs in terms of their historico-ethnographical parallels, which regrettably go no further back than the 10th-11th centuries.
B. Rybakov has always highlighted the archaic geometrized symbolism in Russian ornamental design. Thus, ever present in his writings of the 1960s and 1970s6, and, especially, in his 1981 treatise concerned with the paganism of the ancient Slavs is the point that the folk memory has preserved and carried through the ages in the ornamentation of embroidery, wood carving, and folk toys the profoundly ancient weltanschauungs rooted in the dust of the millennia.7
Most fascinating in this respect are the collections of Northern Russia museums especially from places that had been populated by the Slavs in the 9th and 10th centuries prior to the Christianization of Russia. To all practical intents, there were no large ethnic units, there that spoke a different language, while the remoteness from the central states, the relatively peaceful existence (the North-Eastern part of Vologda Province was hardly ever ravaged by war), plus the dense forests and the isolation of many inhabited localities due to marshes and the absence of roads, all served to preserve patriarhal mores, and economies, and also ensured a jealous affection for ancestral beliefs, thus implying the preservation of the ancient symbolism as encoded in the ornamental motifs of embroidery.
Of particular interest are the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, embroideries deriving from the North-Eastern sections of Vologda province and the neighbouring districts of Arkhangelsk province. Toponymical evidence shows that in those times these parts were hardly populated at all by Finno-Ugric tribes. Most of the names are of a Slavonic origin and furthermore most are extremely ancient, as for instance, Dubrava8 (which means forest). Thus, of 137 localities in the Tarnog district of the Vologda region only six have distinctly Finno-Ugric names. We may hence presume that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the population here was comprised of direct descendants of those Slavonic (Krivichi?) groups that had migrated to these parts in the 11th century, bringing with them the time-hallowed traditions in their ornamental designs, which succeeding generations brought down almost to the present.
The ornamental designs we shall describe below possess the following salient features. They were commonplace in the North-Eastern districts of Vologda region and current right up to the 1930s. Further they were employed to embellish exclusively articles of a sacral significance, such as women's blouses, notably the hems, shoulder yokes and sleeves, and also aprons, headdresses, sashes and towels. "The preservation in embroidery of the extremely early stages of human religious mentality... derives from the ritual character of the articles embroidered... the many that could be listed include the bridal kokoshnik diadems, shirts and blouses and mantles of wedding trains: One special ritual item, long dissociated from its. domestic twin, was the richly and intricately embroidered towel. Such towels were employed to offer the traditional bread-and-salt symbol of hospitality and welcome, to serve ns the reins of wedding trains, or to carry a coffin and let it down into the grave. They were also used to adorn the "beautiful" corner in the house where the icons were hung, while the icons themselves, were deposited on towels9 specially made for the purpose (my italics-S. Zh.)", writes Rybakov about this "Tinen folklore". It is precisely such sacred ornamental designs that are to be seen in the Russian folk embroideries from the ethnographical museum in Vologda, which, quantitywise, will further serve as the comparative material used in attempts to elucidate parallels between the ornamental designs of North-Russian embroideries and those of the peoples inhabiting the vast expanses of the Eurasian steppes and forest-steppes at different times in history.
The lozenge and the rhombic meander represent one of the oldest ornamental motifs of the Eurasian tribes. It is to be found in paleolithic times, employed for example, to decorate sundry artefacts of bone, that were recovered from the upper paleolithic Mezin site near Chernigov in the Ukraine. In 1965, paleontologist V. Bibikova surmised that the spiral meander, the broken bands of meander and the rhombic meanders on items recovered from the Mezin site originated as an imitation of the natural design on the ivory of mammoth tusks.10 She conjectured therefrom that for upper paleolithic man this motif symbolized the mammoth which in turn embodied, as the basic target of the hunt, the concept of plenty and power (Fig. l).This motif comprised of rhombic meanders, spiral meanders and zigzags or flashes survived over the millennia (Figs. 2, 3, 26 and 27) modifying, but retaining their time-hallowed substance. We encounter this symbol of good fortune and prosperity and as a protective totem on both religious items and on pottery, in other words storages of food and water, again in later cultures, as for instance, the Balkan cultures (Figs. 2 and 6), the South-East European culture, the 5th millennium B. C. Tripolye-Cucuteni culture, etc. Rybakov notes: "The rhombic meander motif is encountered on vessels, especially the lavishly ornamented ritual vessels, on anthropomorphic figures of clay, also of an unquestionably ritual character, and on the clay thrones of goddesses or priestesses".11
1985