Introduction

Looking closely at this little spoon reveals a story of synthesis, the harmonious blending of craft techniques and forms of expression practiced by refugees fleeing persecution and the locals who welcomed them, a style originating in settings both secular and sacred. The centuries-old technique known as khokhloma (accent on the last syllable) used to create this spoon, an ingenious art of illusion that transforms humble wood into precious metal, is a key example of art arising under harsh conditions, in times of scarcity and official oppression; as such, it is a microcosm of Russian art throughout its history.

The colors of the spoon evoke the “gold in azure” of religious icons as well as the flora and fauna of the natural world. The blue color flows around the gold designs akin to the rivers that were crucial for the creation of khokhloma: the workshops where the style arose were situated along rivers in the trans-Volga region of Russia whose water powered the lathes used for turning the wood; rivers then served as trade routes along which khokhloma wares traveled (khokhloma is named for the settlement that served as the starting point for its trade). The gold designs depicting plants, berries, and woodland creatures celebrate the natural bounty of the forests along those rivers where the craftspeople who first created khokhloma found refuge and sustenance, both physical and spiritual.

Description

This wooden spoon is 5.5 inches long, a bit larger than an average teaspoon. The rounded handle is straight and has a pointed end; it narrows slightly as it approaches the rounded oval bowl of the spoon. The color scheme is deep blue and light-catching gold: the handle is mostly gold, with the end of it painted blue; the bowl of the spoon is blue, covered with delicate gold flower, leaf, and berry designs. Looking closely reveals a bird perched on the plant stem that runs diagonally across the bowl of the spoon. The designs on the front and back are virtually identical, with the one on the inside of the bowl just a bit smaller given the smaller space that it occupies. That distinctive floral design is instantly recognizable to Russians as the khokhloma style. Yet the color scheme of this spoon swaps blue for the expected red, so the object is traditional and innovative at the same time.

How Are These Objects Made?

Elena, who sold this object to us at the Vernisazh market, is a retired teacher of Russian from Nizhegorodskaia oblast, a region surrounding the town of Nizhnii Novgorod, about 240 miles from Moscow. Her table included many colorful wooden housewares painted in the khokhloma style, including a swan-shaped serving bowl, all of them made by Elena and her neighbors. In her town, the men hollow out and carve the wood using a special curved knife—she demonstrated with a crooked finger how it looks—and the women paint the surface. (This division of labor echoes what we found with the making of matryoshki.)

Birch, linden, and maple are most frequently used in khokloma wares. In 1855, the Nizhni-Novgorod Provincial News described how several villages in the Khokhloma region coordinated with one another: the residents of one village prepared wooden blocks, those of a second village turned the blocks into bowls with a lathe, and those from the third village painted the bowls. Many of the lathes in the five hundred or so wood-turning workshops located in the region were powered by the Kerzhenets and other small, swiftly flowing rivers; horses and humans pitched in as well.

Elena told us about the work that goes into painting the dishes: artisans rub liquid clay mortar into the wood, followed by many layers of flaxseed oil –used to treat wooden dishes in this region for centuries to add beauty and durability—along with powdered aluminum (earlier, tin and occasionally silver were used), to create a silvery layer. Adding more oil and applying high heat in a furnace turns the surface gold; thus, what looks like gold paint is actually the metallized wood reacting with the oil. The gold surface is then painted. Nowadays, Elena said, people use petroleum–based oil, but that is not food safe, so in her region, they stick to flaxseed oil.

On the topic of food-safety: Elena told us that in olden times, the boyars (nobility) often tried to poison each other, so at gatherings they would all drink from the same swan-shaped vessel using little dippers—that way, anyone not drinking would look suspicious. (Fittingly, the swan-shaped vessel recalls the swans served at table in the lavish banquet scenes in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Parts I and II, whose plot features palace intrigues and murderous boyars who use poison in their attempts to bring down the tsar.) Nowadays these swan-shaped dishes are reserved for festive occasions. These vessels typically hold the rich sour cream called smetana to accompany bliny (pancakes) at the festival of Maslenitsa; three people at a time can scoop up the smetana with the little dippers surrounding the swan bowl.

Origins

The word khokhloma, deriving from a Finnish word meaning “ford of a river,” was the name of a rural trading settlement in the Nizhnii Novgorod region; three hundred years ago, artisans began to bring their wooden wares painted in this style to be sold here. The style itself originated not in Khokhloma, but rather in villages deep in the woods; it arose among people seeking refuge in the forest who crafted dishes from the wood of the sheltering trees and adorned these wares with nature motifs inspired by their surroundings.

Below we will provide several different narratives that circulate about the origin of the khokhloma painting technique. The most well-known origin story, which Elena shared with us, ascribes the invention of the technique to Old Believers (starovery), worshippers who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the wake of seventeenth-century reforms to ritual and liturgy that were promoted by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and enforced by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow. The schismatics refused to accept these changes, often at the cost of their lives.

The most famous image of an Old Believer in Russian culture is Vasily Surikov’s 1887 painting Boyarina Morozova, depicting an Old Believer who was arrested by authorities in 1671. We see her remaining defiant as she is being transported out of Moscow. She makes the sign of the cross with two fingers, rather than the three mandated by the reforms. At the same time, she makes eye contact with the Mother of God icon seen in the upper right-hand corner, while a seated holy fool [iurodivyi] in the lower right-hand corner echoes Morozova’s two-fingered sign of the cross; both elements suggest the Old Believer’s special relationship with the divine.

A well-known lubok (a broadsheet-like print, often satirical in nature, that enjoyed great popularity in tsarist Russia) is referred to as “Peter the Great cuts off the beard of an Old Believer.” Tsar Peter was known to be very tall—he was 6’8”— but in this image he is depicted, in the guise of a barber, as smaller than the Old Believer whose beard he shears. The lubok alludes to Peter’s decree that members of the nobility cut off their beards in order to resemble their Western European counterparts. For many, this branded Peter as the Antichrist, as devout Russian Orthodox men viewed their beards as essential to their piety.

Lubki often adopted elements of the icon, and this one features stylized plant imagery akin to that in icons. Chris Ely notes that icons situated “figures in a flattened, stylized pictorial world…the iconic presentation of physical space intensified the sacredness of the spiritual sphere by reconstructing the familiar physical world as an idealized holy space removed from and superior to earthly existence.” In the pre-Petrine era, lubki likewise portrayed the natural environment in a decorative rather than naturalistic way (This Meager Nature, 29-30).

Fleeing from state persecution, the Old Believers left Moscow and other urban centers and hid in isolated communities deep in forests; many of them settled in the Trans-Volga, a forested area around Nizhnii Novgorod, bringing with them antique icons and miniature illuminated manuscripts, as well as painting and calligraphy skills, and other techniques for making these precious objects. The refugees had to hand-make everything they needed, from clothing to tableware; they also needed to support themselves financially. They began to apply their skills, from delicate brush painting to creating the illusion of gold, to everyday items. The most successful among them began to trade in these objects, which had no equal at markets and fairs. What resulted was a synthesis of peasant and monastic cultures and techniques. The local artisans, skilled at woodturning, and the new arrivals, who had mastered freehand brush painting and possessed the secret of making gold effects without gold, learned from one another.

Elena comes from a family of Old Believers. She told us that one day, Old Believers visited the market wearing traditional costumes but speaking English, and explained to her that they were from the United States. In North America, there are Old Believer communities in Canada and the U.S., in states including Oregon, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Alaska, where linguists recently discovered a new dialect of Russian.

Oral legends circulating among the Old Believers about the invention of khokhloma tell of a gifted icon-painting monk named Andrei Loskut, who rejected Nikon’s religious reforms and, facing persecution, settled in a forest community near the Volga River, where he created traditional icons as well as household objects. One day soldiers, dispatched by the Patriarch, came to the village in pursuit of the monk. As a final act of defiance, Andrei burned himself alive in his hut; but before he did so, he bequeathed the secrets of his art to members of his community. Andrei’s body, it is said, was consumed by fire and dissipated in a shower of sparks. Ever since then, the bright colors of khokhloma burn with the same scarlet flame and shimmer like gold.

A milder version of the Loskut legend tells of a master artisan who lived in an exiled Old Believer community. He built a house on a riverbank and began to paint wooden chalices that resembled gold, which he sold with the help of trusted assistants. The authorities in Moscow traced these golden dishes back to the artisan, and the tsar’s soldiers went in pursuit of him. When the artisan heard that the soldiers were on their way, he summoned a group of peasants from neighboring villages, demonstrated his technique, gave them his paints and brushes, and disappeared.

According to another version of the khokhloma origin story, the gold technique predated the arrival of the Old Believers. Archival documents show that artisans in the Nizhnii Novgorod region created gold-toned wooden dishes using powdered tin already in 1640-1640, prior to the arrival of Old Believers in their community. In this case as well, local dish-making traditions joined with icon-painting techniques. Tin, oil, and heat were also used to create the illusion of gold in icon screens and other furnishings of the spectacular interiors of 17^th and 18^th century cathedrals.

Нижний Новгород
Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

 

Gorodets, Gorodetsky District, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Volga Federal District, 606502, Russia

Saratov, Saratov Oblast, Volga Federal District, 410000, Russia

Astrakhan, Astrakhan Oblast, Southern Federal District, 414000, Russia

Arkhangelsk, Arkhangelsk Urban Okrug, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Northwestern Federal District, Russia

Semyonov, Семёновский городской округ, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Volga Federal District, Russia

The Volga River was the main trade route of the region, and boats loaded with colorful khokhloma wares traveled along the river to Gorodets and other towns known for their fairs, and from there to Saratov and Astrakhan provinces. The dishes also traveled along the Caspian steppes to Central Asia, Persia, and India, and via Siberia to Arkhangelsk, where English, German, and French customers eagerly bought them. For villagers living in a part of Russia where harvests were typically poor, folk crafts became another way to live off the land. Craft making also served to unite the centuries-old traditions of the local residents with those of the exiles who had recently arrived.

The khokhloma style began to wane by the early twentieth century, but saw a revival when practitioners united into cooperatives called artels in the 1920s and 1930s. Then in the 1960s the Khokhloma Artist factory was founded in the village of Semino, in the region where the style had originated, and the Khokhloma Painting Workshop was launched in the town on Semyonov; both have become leading centers of khokhloma production where dishes, furniture, and other things are manufactured today.

Design

The khokhloma design features natural motifs: flowers, grasses, and berries such as rowan and wild strawberries, as well as birds, fish, and other animals, all of them intertwined along the painted surface. The traditional colors are red, orange, black, silver, occasionally green or light blue, and always gold.

Trans-Volga artisans were likely producing painted dishware long before they devised the gold-illusion technique. Icon painters contributed to the development of that technique as well as a stylized way of depicting plants. The designs pay tribute to the forests that were more abundant than fields in providing what villagers needed to survive. In the richly forested Trans-Volga, wood was the most convenient and accessible material for creating dishes of various kinds, which then became sought-after objects of trade. In the words of one commentator, “the land was not fertile, and the harvests were not sufficient to last until spring. Only the riches of the forest and nimble hands saved people from hunger and need.”

The blue and gold spoon that we bought from Elena looks strikingly different from the traditional red, black, and gold combination. Elena told us that blue dishes are currently popular with homemakers who rejected red-hued khokhloma as potentially clashing with their interior décor, and requested decorative objects that would match; in the past few years, artisans have responded— as Elena put it, demand shapes production. The blue spoon is a signifier of how traditions evolve.

The khokhloma design began with dishes, but nowadays it covers all sorts of surfaces, including human skin, as an expression of Russian pride par excellence. We spotted the khokhloma style adorning a variety of objects, from a limousine parked near the Izmailovo Kremlin and a cannon at the Kremlin’s gates, to a children’s arts and crafts kit sold in a gift shop in the center of town. The Moscow-based Art Lebedev studio, known for its stylish and tongue-in-cheek design, offers a khokhloma-adorned Russian passport cover.

Why did the khokhloma style become so popular among Russians? The combination of vivid colors and natural motifs in khokloma wares is evocative: a Russian website offering traditional crafts describes this style as embodying “both the tranquil strength and beauty of the summer steppes and the loud, bountiful festivities in the countless villages in the autumn.” According to Vera Bokova, a curator at the Historical Museum in Moscow, Russians favor the splashy and colorful –as an example, she pointed to the brightly-colored architecture of the Izmailovo Kremlin, a replica of the 17^th-century architectural style—as a compensation for the sparse colors found in “our meager nature” [nasha skudnaia priroda] (a reference to an 1855 poem by Fyodor Tyutchev: “These poor villages/This meager nature,/Long-suffering land,/Land of the Russian people!”).

Historian Nicholas Riasanovsky underscores that while most of Russia is agriculturally at a disadvantage in terms of soil quality, it is rich in forests and all that they offer. Placing an emphasis on nature’s bounty, khokhloma wares always feature the flowers, leaves, and berries of local plants. This notion of nature as a benevolent force that will always provide is reflected in Russian folklore, which imagines the landscape of paradise as rivers of milk flowing past shores of kisel’ (a dessert made of thickened fruit juice). The passion for mushroom hunting that many Russians share, and the pet names they assign to the different mushroom varieties, expressing a great deal more affection than the cold Latin-derived names of the Anglophone world, likewise speak to the ideal of living off the land. Recall, too, that the gold in khokhloma originated in icon painting. In these painted dishes, nature merges with religion, evoking Russia’s pre-Christian, animistic past. The “meager nature” gets uplifted, spiritualized via that gold spark.

How Are Objects Such as These Used?

This spoon is a souvenir that is also food-safe. One of our émigré interlocutors told us that she recalled eating with such painted spoons as a child, so these ornamental objects were a part of everyday life. Silver spoons were already being used in Kievan Rus at the end of the tenth century. Soon after Prince Vladimir baptized his people in 998, he instituted the rule that his courtiers eat not with their hands, but with specially designated implements, as part of his overall campaign to raise their cultural level. The Primary Chronicle describes the Prince’s retinue (druzhina) complaining about having to eat with wooden rather than silver spoons.

It became customary to carry one’s own personal spoon (sometimes a knife as well) in a special case or simply tucked inside one’s belt or boot. This practice gave rise to numerous sayings, such as “a thrifty guest never goes anywhere without a spoon.” Another saying, “one with a plow and seven with a spoon” (odin s soshkoi, semero s lozhkoi) referred to the peasantry feeding the parasitical upper classes, and inspired a revolutionary poster depicting the beleaguered peasant and his exploiters.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the protagonist, a savvy peasant trying to survive the gulag, has a spoon that he carries inside his boot and uses it to get every last drop of life-sustaining prison porridge: “That spoon was precious, it had traveled all over the north with him. He’d cast it himself from aluminum wire in a sand mold and scratched on it [the name of the prison camp]: ‘Ust-Izhma, 1944.’”

Spoons are not only used for eating in Russia; wooden spoons in particular play a crucial role in khokhloma icon painting, an art form suppressed in Soviet times but now revived in the town of Semyonov. Elena Komarova writes: “the paints are ground by hand, a process in which the famous Semyonov wooden spoon is essential. Neither porcelain nor plastic vessels are suitable for pulverizing the pigments, because the surface of the spoon must be rough. A natural dye is placed into the spoon; the painter adds a mixture of water and egg yolk, then mixes everything with her finger.”

For centuries, spoons have also served as musical instruments in Russia. The Eastern Slavs may have come up with the idea of using spoons in this way during holiday festivities when guests would grab whatever potential noise-maker was at hand—spoons but also forks, pots, pans, basins, or samovar pipes. (The scythe and the saw took on a musical function as well.) Spoons were widely used as instruments among the peasantry, and some scholars speculate that Russians using spoons to produce music found inspiration in Spanish castanets. Lubki from the 18^th and 19^th centuries depict the wandering minstrels known as skomorokhi wielding musical spoons embellished with jingle bells.

Another lubok, depicting a goat and a bear merry-making with musical instruments, shows the goat holding bell-adorned spoons.

Musical wooden spoons are made from more durable types of wood than those used for eating; they also have longer handles that are sometimes decorated with bells. Typically a performer will secure two spoons between the fingers of the left hand and strike them with the third spoon. Sometimes the technique is more elaborate, involving five spoons, including one tucked into a boot top, all played by a single performer. By the 19^th century, spoons were widely featured in choruses and folk ensembles.

Video of a Russian spoon player (lozhechnik, from lozhka= spoon)

Among Russians, spoons have such a strong association with music that a lawyer named Rustam Nugmanov from the town of Elektrostal’ invented a musical instrument he called “victory spoons” that were manufactured to be used by Russian soccer fans during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Nugmanov wanted Russians to have their own “national fan accessory” akin to the vuvuzela whose sound was inescapable during the 2010 World Cup matches in South Africa. He said, “in Russia we have no national musical instrument or craft object designed for fans that would reflect the extraordinary richness of Russian culture.” Nugmanov’s instrument takes the form of a letter V-shaped holder into which two wooden spoons are inserted that can then be clacked together. Nugmanov was pleasantly surprised to receive a million-ruble (around $17,000) grant from President Putin to help him develop the invention. It is a curious object, but maybe less so when one considers the hybridity that is essential to much of Russian culture. The wooden spoons appear emblematically Russian; yet it is an international object as well—as Nugmanov says, “this instrument is a symbol of victory because its shape recalls the Latin letter V, from the word “victoria.”

Reflections

The Old Believer origin story of khokhloma is about artists fleeing faith-based prosecution and finding a secular outlet for icon painting techniques, and thereby discovering a visual style that has enriched the world of design. Icon painters facing an analogous predicament under the enforced atheism of the Soviet regime discovered another way to channel their techniques into a new a new art form, the black lacquer boxes named palekh for the village where the craft originated. Igor, the wood sculptor and amateur historian, shared the latter story with us at the Vernisazh. It is a narrative that many Russians hold dear about art evolving and even flourishing under oppressive conditions.

Elena told us that nowadays young people come to the market not planning to buy anything, but find themselves attracted to the khokhloma wares, themselves not knowing why; it is that gold glow that draws them in. She said that the gold color was used in icons so that viewers could feel warmth coming from them. We had not thought of that before, having always just associated gold with wealth. But then, gold signifies both: warmth and wealth. The Russian word for the latter, bogatstvo, means both financial wealth and natural abundance—the riches of the earth. (Indeed bogatstvo derives from the same root as bog, “god.”) And that is appropriate, as the natural motifs on khokhloma wares celebrate the gifts of the earth, specifically the forest that sustains humans when agriculture comes up short. The forest has also sustained them spiritually by giving shelter from persecution, allowing people to worship as they choose.

In her book Heart-Pine Russia, Jane Costlow details how Old Believers, outlaws, and others found refuge in forests. In her account, Russians’ relationship to the forest—which we could extend to nature as a whole –was that “of both affection and need, in which humans’ dependence on resources (for fire, warmth, building materials) often exists in uneasy tension with more obviously emotional or symbolic associations” (7) [emphasis in original]. Costlow speaks of the forest as an icon of Russian national identity, as attested by cultural production from classic novels of the nineteenth century to the late Soviet village prose and Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1999 blockbuster film The Barber of Siberia. The opening credits of the latter work show “endless woodland,” while the plot “imagines Russia’s vast natural resources as prey to conniving Americans” (214). The film’s title refers both to the profession that the patriotic protagonist takes up at the end of his narrative arc—he becomes a barber after being exiled to Siberia—and to an American-invented tree cutting machine seemingly inspired by the rapacious “super axe hacker” in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax which we see devouring a Siberian forest in a horrific sequence.

Costlow cites an 1844 account of a Russian estate that “enumerates fifty-one categories of products … from local forests –everything from linden bark stripped for peasant shoes and birch for canisters, to tar, elm ashes, and willow bark. Game, honey, berries, mushrooms—all were essential and sustaining ‘gifts’ of the forest economy… The symbolic rituals of rural life also depended on woodlands, including seasonal rites [that] involved gathering the boughs of young birches to decorate homes and the village church.” (87) This ritual use of the trees underscores the intertwining of nature and spiritual expression whose emblem we can see in the khokhloma icon-and-nature inspired design.

The color scheme of our khokhloma spoon brings to mind a juxtaposition in the title of a 1904 book of poetry by Russian Symbolist Andrei Bely: Gold in Azure—two colors prominently featured in sacred icons that represented exuberance and affirmation for the poet. In 1933, Bely glossed the colors in the title as follows: “Standing amidst hilly plains and seeking oblivion, I spent hours studying the colors of the fields, and wrote verse about them. I called my book of poems Gold in Azure. ‘Gold’ refers to the ripened grain fields, and ‘azure’ to the air.” In his formative years as a poet, Bely believed that art should not merely depict the world, but that the world should strive to resemble art; that the poet glimpses the mythical in the everyday, and can see the world in its ideal, transfigured state. That is why the sky in his verse is not merely blue, but “azure”—the color of the transcendent realm. The sun in some of Bely’s poems, and fields of grain in others, are not simply yellow, but gold—the color of haloes signifying divinity in icons.

Russian has two opposed words for existence that lack analogues in English. As Svetlana Boym explains in her book Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, byt refers to everyday, earthbound life (at times it has a pejorative connotation and translates as “the daily grind”) while bytie signifies a more lofty, spiritual form of being. The spoon, a quintessential object of byt, has been elevated by Elena’s design. Elena said that she was catering to her customers in creating the blue/gold color scheme of her spoon, and yet that choice led her back to the color juxtaposition of religious icons that inspired the Symbolist poets and, before them, the icon painters who had developed the khokhloma style 300 years ago. In this humble little household implement designated for the most basic of human activities needed for survival, we catch a glimpse of sky and sun, of sacred painting, and of the desire to transcend mere material existence.

Sources

• Stuart King, “Khokhloma Ware: Folk Art for the Masses”: https://www.stuartking.co.uk/index.php/khokhloma-ware-folk-art-for-the-masses/.
• Russia I-C: Khokhloma Painting: http://www.russia-ic.com/culture_art/visual_arts/967/#.WYmqgIjys2w.
• Sources on Old Believers in the U.S. and the dialect of Russian discovered in Alaska:
  • https://www.languagemagazine.com/2013/07/alaska-home-to-rare-russian-dialect/
  • https://ria.ru/20130527/939773935.html#ixzz2UZQTX8gI
  • https://www.languagemagazine.com/2013/07/alaska-home-to-rare-russian-dialect/
  • https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/a-17th-century-russian-community-living-in-21st-century-alaska/275440/
• Undergraduate senior thesis on Russian language evolution in Alaska: http://www.ninilchikrussian.com/documents/Alaskan%20Russian_Final%20draft.pdf.
• Article depicting a variety of khokhloma tattoos; includes a two-minute video showing more examples: https://tattoosalon.moscow/stili-tatu/hohloma.
• Spoons as a musical instrument: http://folkinst.narod.ru/lozki.html
• Victory spoons:
  • https://daily.afisha.ru/news/6758-v-rossii-pridumali-nacionalnyy-instrument-bolelschika-lozhki-pobedy/
  • Article with brief video about the production and use of the victory spoons: https://360tv.ru/news/kultura/lozhki-pobedy-kak-vygljadit-ofitsialnyj-muzykalnyj-instrument-chm2018/
• Andrei Bely on the origin of “Gold in Azure”: http://biography.5litra.ru/8-andrej-belyj-biografiya.html.
• Boym, Svetlana. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Harvard UP, 1994.
• Costlow, Jane T. Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest. Cornell UP, 2012.
• Ely, Christopher. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois UP, 2002.
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Translated by H.T. Willetts, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014.