STUDYING LINE AND COLOUR IN RUSSIA
From Hungary we continued our quest of line and colour of folk costume
into Russia.
Strangely enough, Russia throws off the imperial yoke of autocracy,
declaring for democratic principles, at the very moment we undertake to
put into words the vivid picturesqueness resulting largely from the
causes of this astounding revolution. Have you been in Russia? Have you
seen with your own eyes any phase of the violent contrasts which at last
have caused the worm to turn? Our object being to study national
characteristics as expressed in folk costume, folk song, folk dance,
traditional customs and fêtes, we consulted students of these subjects,
whom we chanced to meet in London, Paris, Vienna and Buda Pest, with the
result that we turned our faces toward southern or "Little" Russia, as
the part least affected by cosmopolitan influences.
Kiev was our headquarters, and it is well to say at once that we found
what we sought,--ample opportunity to observe the genuine Russian, the
sturdy, dogged, plodding son of toil, who, more than any other European
peasant seems a part of the soil, which in sullen persistency he tills.
We knew already the Russians of Petrograd and Moscow; one meets them in
Paris, London, Vienna, at German and Austrian Cures and on the Riviera.
They are everywhere and always distinctive by reason of their Slav
temperament; a magnetic race quality which is Asiatic in its essence. We
recognise it, we are stirred by it, we are drawn to it in their
literature, their music, their painting and in the Russian people
themselves. The quality is an integral part of Russian nature; polishing
merely increases its attraction as with a gem. One instance of this is
the folk melody as treated by Tschaikowsky compared with its simple form
as sung or danced by the peasant.
PLATE XXVIII
A skating costume worn by Miss Weld of Boston, holder of
the Woman's Figure Skating Championship.
This photograph was taken in New York on March 23, 1917,
when amateurs contested for the cup and Miss Weld won--this
time over the men.
The costume of wine-coloured velvet trimmed with mole-skin,
a small close toque to match, was one of the most
appropriate and attractive models of 1916-1917.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of New York Herald_
_Modern Skating Costume 1917 Winner of Amateur Championship
of Fancy Skating_]
Some of the Russian women of the fashionable world are very decorative.
Our first impression of this type was in Paris, at the Russian Church on
Christmas (or was it some other holy day?) when to the amazement of the
uninitiated the Russian women of the aristocracy appeared at the morning
service hatless and in full evening dress, wearing jewels as if for a
function at some secular court. Their masculine escorts appeared in full
regalia, the light of the altar candles adding mystery to the glitter of
gold lace and jewels. Those occasions are picturesque in the extreme.
The congregation stands, as in the Jewish synagogues, and those of
highest rank are nearest the altar, invariably ablaze with gold, silver
and precious stones, while on occasions the priest wears cloth of gold.
In Paris this background and the whole scene was accepted as a part of
the pageant of that city, but in Kiev it was different. There we got the
other side of the picture; the man and the woman who are really Russia,
the element that finds an outlet in the folk music, for its age-old
rebellious submission. One hears the soul of the Russian pulsating in
the continued reiteration of the same theme; it is like the endless
treadmill of a life without vistas. We were looking at the Russia of
Maxim Gorky, the Russia that made Tolstoy a reformer; that has now
forced its Czar to abdicate.
We reached Kiev just before the Easter of the Greek Church, the season
when the pilgrims, often as many as fifty thousand of them, tramp over
the frozen roads from all parts of the empire to expiate their sins,
kneeling at the shrine of one of their mummied, sainted bishops.
The men and women alike, clad in grimy sheepskin coats, moved like
cattle in straggling droves, over the roads which lead to Kiev. From a
distance one cannot tell man from woman, but as they come closer, one
sees that the woman has a bright kerchief tied round her head, and red
or blue peasant embroidery dribbles below her sheepskin coat. She is as
stocky as a Shetland pony and her face is weather-beaten, with high
cheekbones and brown eyes. The man wears a black astrachan conical cap
and his hair is long and bushy, from rubbing bear grease into it. He
walks with a crooked staff, biblical in style, and carries his worldly
goods in a small bundle flung over his shoulder. The woman carries her
own small burden. As they shuffle past, a stench arises from the human
herd. It comes from the sheepskin, which is worked in, slept in, and,
what is more, often inherited from a parent who had also worn it as his
winter hide. Added to the smell of the sheepskin is that of an unwashed
human, and the reek of stale food, for the poorest of the Russian
peasants have no chimneys to their houses. They cannot afford to let the
costly heat escape.
Kiev, the holy city and capital of Ancient Russia, climbs from its
ancestral beginnings, on the banks of the River Dneiper, up the steep
sides and over the summit of a commanding hilltop, crowned by an immense
gold cross, illumined with electricity by night, to flash its message of
hope to foot-sore pilgrims. The driver of our drosky drove us over the
rough cobbles so rapidly, despite the hill, that we were almost
overturned. It is the manner of Russian drosky drivers. The cathedral,
our goal, was snowy-white, with frescoes on the outer walls,
onion-shaped domes of bronze turned green; or gold, or blue with stars
of gold.
We entered and found the body of the church well filled by peasants,
women and men in sheepskin. One poor doe-eyed creature crouched to press
his forehead twenty times at least on the stone floor of the church.
Eagerly, like a flock of sheep, they all pushed forward to where a
richly-robed priest held a cross of gold for each to kiss, taking their
proffered kopeks.
The setting sun streamed through the ancient stained glass, dyeing their
dirty sheepskin crimson, and purple, and green, until they looked like
illuminations in old missals. To the eye and the mind of western Europe
it was all incomprehensible. Yet those were the people of Russia who are
to-day her mass of armed defenders; the element that has been counted on
from the first by Russia and her allies stood penniless before an altar
laid over with gold and silver and precious stones. Just before we got
to Kiev, one of those men in sheepskins with uncut hair and dogged
expression, who had a sense of values in human existence, broke into
the church and stole jeweled chalices from the altar. They were traced
to a pawnshop in a distant city and brought back. It was a common thing
to see men halt in the street and stand uncovered, while a pitiful
funeral cortege passed. A wooly, half-starved, often lame horse, was
harnessed with rope to a simple four-wheeled farm wagon, a long-haired
peasant at his head, women and children holding to the sides of the cart
as they stumbled along in grief, and inside a rough wooden coffin
covered with a black pall, on which was sewn the Greek cross, in white.
Heartless, hopeless, weary and underfed, those peasants were taking
their dead to be blessed for a price, by the priest in cloth of gold,
without whose blessing there could be no burial.