Introduction

The objects in this exhibit, two small decorative boxes, are made of carved birch bark, specifically the upper layer of the bark. In Russian, the word for this material is beresta, with the stress on the final syllable, though some Russians pronounce the word as beryosta, with a stress on the second syllable. (The phrase for “carved birch bark box” is berestenaia shkatulka. The latter word means “box for small valuables” as opposed to a generic box, which would be korobka.) The word beresta comes from the same root as beryoza, birch. The English word “birch” derives from the same Indo-European root -bhereg, meaning “to shine; bright.” Fittingly, the birch tree has a distinctive, luminous presence within Russian culture.

The lids of each box have different images, but the sides of both boxes depict ships at sail; this journey echoes the one that the boxes themselves have taken from a Siberian forest to a Moscow marketplace to various points on the globe. Taking a cue from the bilingual etymology of beryoza/birch, this exhibit will seek to illuminate broader dimensions of Russian culture that become revealed when one scrutinizes the material from which these boxes are made and the images that they depict.

Description

Cathedral Box

This little circular box with a detached lid fits into the palm of your hand. It is lightweight, and when you hold it, you are tempted to run your thumb over the convex surface of the lid, feeling the texture of the carved designs. The box is made of light-brown material that is difficult at first glance to identify as wood or leather. That material is in fact carved birch bark, with a thin layer of light-colored wood placed over a darker, thicker layer. The design on the box is achieved through the contrast of lighter and darker shades of brown.The lid has a scalloped light-colored edge, which provides a frame for the depiction of an onion-domed cathedral resembling St. Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square alongside the Kremlin; it is one of the world’s most recognizable images of Russia. The onion domes on the box lid feature patterns echoing the ones on the St. Basil’s domes, while the crosses atop the domes on the lid are more prominent than in the original. There are wispy clouds in the background.

The opening of the box serves as a kind of circular window onto a woodland scene depicting the source of the material from which the box has been made. The image inside is a mix of nature and culture: a forest with a stream running through it and a footbridge spanning the stream. Evergreens with branches angled downward are interspersed with deciduous trees whose branches reach upward. The curve of the footbridge echoes the rounded form of the box, highlighting the affinities between these objects crafted from the same natural material.

The outside of the box reveals a panorama as you turn it: a rustic landscape of wooden huts below and a stately stone kremlin (walled fortress) above—suggesting a certain hierarchy—gives way to an image of graceful ships sailing on gentle waves; the ship’s sail closest to us bears an image of a sunburst. The same fir trees that we saw inside the box populate this landscape as well. Dramatic clouds, dark inside with luminous edges, fill the sky.

This tiny box has what design scholars call affordances, in that its physical properties activate something in their user: specifically, because it fits into your hand and is round, it encourages the person holding it to turn it, and as they do so, a visual narrative unfolds. The box seems to be telling a story in evocative pictures. We move from land to water, from a stone-bound stronghold to the open sea. These contrasts capture something fundamental about the dualities at the heart of Russia’s history and self-identity, and the choices it faces today: stasis or dynamism, isolationism or openness to the world. What is more, the dynamism of the ships at sail is in tension with the cathedral on the lid, which evokes an eternal and unchanging essence.

The image of the sailing ships on the lid of this box echoes that of the Viking ships in Nicholas Roerich’s 1901 painting Guests from Overseas (Zamorskie gosti), reproduced below. The box design is not a copy of Roerich’s painting, but rather evokes the vessels in their diagonal movement across the picture plane and the landscape in the background.

The painting depicts the arrival of the Viking Riurik and his retinue in the region of old Novgorod in the ninth century CE, part of the Russian origin myth rooted in the twelfth-century Primary Chronicle, according to which warring tribes of ancient Slavs invited the Varangians (Vikings) to come and peacefully rule over them. The “guests” image is thus foundational to Russians’ sense of self. As the Chronicle has it, the tribes (the Chuds, the Slavs, the Krivichians, and the Ves’) initially cast out the Vikings after refusing to continue paying tribute to them. When they attempted to govern themselves, “there was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe.” The tribes then appealed to the Vikings: “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.” This foundational narrative can be read as being about Russians’ desire for a strong ruler, but that is not the only meaning we can derive from it; the element of welcoming an outsider to transform and dynamize Russia speaks to Russia’s self-image as one of pluralism.

The décor inside of this box and along its outside edge is the same as the one inside the cathedral box: a Russian landscape on the outside, a woodland scene inside. That interior scene offers the special pleasure of peeking into your own private vista. The inside of the lid shows clearly the wood grain of the tree from which it was made, which heightens your sense of marvel at the artisan’s transformation of this material. The lid decoration this time features not an onion-domed cathedral but another quintessential Russian image: a family of bears enjoying a peaceful moment in a forest. As the mother looks on, the cubs frisk about amid trees, including two tree trunks that recline diagonally across the picture plane, adding dynamism to the composition.

It is a scene of nature undisturbed by human beings; however, the bear furthest to the right appears to be rising up to a standing position on its hind legs and thus begins to resemble a person. Indeed, the ancient Slavs believed in the close kinship between humans and bears, and (as the ethnographer Afanas’ev recorded in his classic Russian Folk Tales) even came up with a name for the bear—Mikhail Ivanovich Toptygin (the last name derived from the verb toptat’, to stomp around). “Mishka,” a diminutive form of Mikhail, has become a contemporary colloquial term for “bear.” The image that inspired the one on this box lid is one of the most popular paintings in Russia, Morning in a Pine Forest [Utro v sosnovom lesu] by Ivan Shishkin, 1889 (for information on this painting, see the Design section).

This box illustrates how craft objects designed as souvenirs primarily for foreigner consumers have allowed the imagery of classic Russian art works to circulate all over the globe. (Beresta boxes are a lesser known relative of another Russian handicraft that is just about as emblematic of Russia as the matryoshka: the black lacquer boxes with colorful folk subjects painted on their lids, often referred to as palekh, in reference to one of the major centers of this art form.

Origins

The birch tree can be found in many geographic locations (“approximately between the 45^th and 65^th parallel,” according to birch bark artist Valerii Efimov) and is admired by peoples the world over, but has a special status in Russian culture. For the ancient Slavs it was an object of worship central to many rituals and beliefs, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, an emblem of nature’s bounty, a beneficent source of useful materials. Peasants used birch bark in construction; they also gathered birch branches into leafy bundles called veniki that they used in the steam-sauna bathhouse (banya) to heat the interior and to flog one another in order to get their circulation going. They used the tar of the tree to make soap and medicine, and contemporary Russian sources continue to emphasize the birch’s medicinal value.

The ancient Slavs likewise drank the sap of the tree, which is known as beryozovyi sok (birch tree juice) and still consumed today. Efimov claims that the sap “that seeps from the trunk of the living birch tree is always cool because nature bestowed upon the birch a snow-white trunk that repels heat.” I recall enjoying birch tree juice as a refreshing treat during my Soviet childhood, and missing it in emigration when it turned out to be just about the only item not available in American grocery stores. When I tried to explain to my peers what this drink tasted like, “flat 7-Up” was about the best that I could do. In recent years, birch tree juice packaged in my hometown of Minsk, Belarus made waves as a trendy drink that for a time displaced coconut water in popularity and was consumed by such luminaries as actress and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow.

The Slavs used birch bark as a writing surface –in fact, their oldest writings have been preserved in the form of birch bark manuscripts that archeologists continue to excavate in the present day—and they fashioned it into objects such as furniture, tools, food containers, and shoes. Peasants throughout northern Russia learned to weave narrow strips of birch bark and make double-walled containers out of beresta. With time, they began to decorate their handcrafted birch bark containers in ways that became more and more elaborate.

Site of the Universal Exposition in 1900 where the beresta wares were first shown.

Velikiy Ustyug, Великоустюгский муниципальный округ, Vologda Oblast, Northwestern Federal District, Russia

By the eighteenth century, the northern town of Velikii Ustiug and its surrounding villages had become the center of beresta crafts; by the 1880s, 168 master artisans who specialized in this craft were working there. One of these artisans, Ivan Afanas’evich Veprev, whose family members had been skilled beresta carvers for generations, gained fame for his wares—boxes, cigar cases, and other containers covered with a delicate openwork ornament—when they were displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 along with other handicrafts, products of a folk-art revival in Russia. It was at this exposition that beresta made a splash on the global stage for the first time. As Hilton writes, Veprev’s work “attracted attention for its sophistication and elegance of form, in contrast to the general expectation of simplicity and naiveté in folk art.”

Subsequent generations of Veprevs continued to develop this craft, going on to found a craft school in the village of Pogorelovo in Vologda Oblast in northwestern Russia. After a period of decline during the Soviet period, beresta carving was reborn as a craft on a mass scale in Tomsk, in Western Siberia. The young artist Nina Lukmanova moved to the city in 1980 to work in the wooden toy factory there. Tomsk has been renowned for its wooden architecture since its founding in 1604; Lukmanova, enchanted by by Tomsk’s ornately carved facades, one day created a beresta box whose carved ornamentation echoed the cityscape in which she lived.

Lukmanova’s work went on to influence other artisans, who acquired apprentices and went on to organize themselves into crafts associations in the early post-Soviet period.

An additional significance of Tomsk is that exiles with diverse backgrounds—Dostoevsky the most famous of them—encountered one another there, which had an impact on the local arts scene: Efimov notes that “Siberia was where first the tsars, and later Stalin, exiled people from all different professions; here, many artistic forms interwove with local experience and traditions.” As we also learn from the origins of the khokhloma style, art and exile are sometimes intimately linked.

How are these objects made?

This 25-minute documentary film, The Light of Beresta (1992), shows leading beresta artist Nina Lukmanova at work and discussing her craft; we also see the ornate wood carving of the Tomsk architecture that inspired Lukmanova’s style.

In order to obtain the material for these boxes, artisans harvest the outer bark of a birch tree at just the right time of year. According to Siberian Times, such harvesting needs to take place in regions with “an annual temperature veering between extreme cold and heat […] otherwise a birch tree will not ‘give away’ its bark, as artisans say. Such climate features are inherent only in Western Siberia and some northern regions.”

When cutting sections from the upper layers of bark, artisans take care to leave a sufficient amount of bark on the tree in order not to harm it. After gathering enough bark to last a year, artisans soak the material in water, dry, smooth, and polish it. They then place one layer of bark inside the other; Hilton describes how artisans make a cylindrical container by fastening “the edges of the birch strips with an ingenious ‘lock,’ somewhat like a zipper, made by cutting slits into one edge of the bark and forcing projections of the other end into them (101).” After making the cylinder, they attach it to a birch wood base.

Next comes the surface decoration.

To create the elegant openwork ornament variously known as birch-bark lace, northern lace, or shemogodskaia rez’ba (“Shemogodskii carving”) and shemogodskaia beresta (“Shemogodskii birch”) named for the Shemogodskii region, home to the villages near Velikii Ustiug where the craft first developed, artisans carve the surface using such techniques as contour cutting and creating a hatching effect with thin parallel lines. Artists use a stylus to inscribe lines, an awl to punch holes in a pattern, or a small hammer to strike the bark while holding it against a metal or hardwood form to make stamped designs. These techniques allow artisans to create plant-like patterns, abstract forms, or more representational imagery. A thin layer of beresta is carved and then attached to a thicker and darker interior layer made likewise of birch, or another tree such as aspen; artists occasionally insert colorful foil or mica between the two layers (Hilton 33).

In this 23-minute video, Tatiana Viazova, an artisan based in Velikii Ustiug, talks about her creative process and demonstrates the beresta carving technique, starting with the collection of birch bark, which Viazova says has a vanilla scent when it is stripped from the tree (the demonstration itself begins at 13:45):

Prior to the development of beresta carving in Velikii Ustiug, the region was renowned for its metal work employing the parcel-gilt/niello (chern’) technique to embellish both sacred and secular objects. Scholars trace a connection between the two crafts both in terms of the visual effect and the imagery depicted on the metal and wooden wares. Hilton notes the proximity of the two crafts: “in the seventeenth century, large trunks made of wood with ornamental wrought-iron bands were sometimes decorated with panels of birch bark, cut in patterns echoing those of the ironwork.”

Another stylistic influence came the village of Kholmogory, located not far from Velikii Ustiug; the master carvers of that village turned animal bone and walrus and mammoth tusks into a delicate lace that they sometimes lined with lilac, green, and red foil.

In their resonance with crafts made of metal, bone, and lace, beresta wares exemplify the protean potential of wood. Russian artisans’ striving to make the material with which they work transcend its materiality finds a kinship with a 1912 poem by Osip Mandelstam that commands stone to become lace, as in the spire of a Gothic cathedral. That poem opens as follows:

I despise the light

Of monotonous stars.

Greetings, my old obsession,

The tower’s arrow-like spire!

Stone, be lace, and become a spider’s web;

Wound with your thin needle

The sky’s empty breast.

Я ненавижу свет

Однообразных звезд.

Здравствуй, мой давний бред, —

Башни стрельчатый рост!

Кружевом, камень, будь

И паутиной стань,

Неба пустую грудь

Тонкой иглою рань.

What is especially striking in these lines is the poet’s challenge to the stasis of the heavens—the monotonous stars, the empty sky, to which he juxtaposes the dynamism of artistic creation. He is focusing on a cathedral that reaches into the heavens, built to honor the divine, but Mandelstam attributes to human artisans the godlike ability to transfigure matter. As a poet who works with words rather than stones, he nevertheless takes on the persona of a divine creator by commanding the most resistant of materials –stone—to turn into lace (manmade) and spiderweb (nature- made); and of course, this is what the stone artisan has done by carving that spire, but Mandelstam gives that miraculous act a verbal expression. His poetic persona is saved from hubris through the word bred (translated here as “obsession,” more literally meaning “delirium/raving”) that seems to acknowledge his perhaps pathological fixation on the towering architectural achievement – but it is not (just) the grandiosity of this construction that enraptures him, but the fact that it is at once monumental and delicate, thus potentially vulnerable: it is lacy, spiderweb-like, and thin. So ultimately it is not big tall structures that Mandelstam is celebrating here, but human craft that allows for the creation of things that embody such contradictory elements.

How is this material used?

The uses of beresta encompass containers, decorative covers for small items like pocket mirrors and passports, shoes, medicine, and paper. The material found numerous uses in the forested and taiga regions of Eurasia among Slavs as well as indigenous peoples such as the Ostiaks/Khanty who made dishes, containers, baby cradles, and coverings for the deceased from the material; they also sewed pieces of beresta together to create covers for household supplies and yurts.

Contemporary Russian sources underscore the health benefits of beresta, an emphasis that seems linked with the ideal of living off the land (the Russian variant of “land of milk and honey” is a land “with rivers of milk and shores of kisel’”—the latter a dessert made from cooked and thickened fruit juice), abundant nature providing humans with everything they need. In his book Siberian Beresta, Efimov dwells on the warming and healing properties of the birch in his discussion of the tree’s importance in Russia, a country that he notes was largely agrarian for much of its history:

“For almost sixth months of the year Russia’s territory is covered with snow, and tens of thousands of peasant five-walled houses were heated, and are heated today, with birch logs. And what do you do when you are ill and the nearest medical center is dozens of kilometers away? Of course, you heat the bathhouse [banya] with a bundle [venik] of birch twigs… Nowadays it is well known that this is not just a ‘Russian tradition.’ The healing qualities of birch buds, leaves, the fungus that grows on birches, and birch tar are well known in official medicine (5).” (Other sources indicate that the tar of the tree was used as early as the Paleolithic or Mesolithic era.) Efimov likewise notes that birch leaves contain essential oils whose inhalation offers further benefits when they are released during a flogging session at the banya.

Contemporary Russian-language websites devoted to beresta echo Efimov’s claims, also emphasizing its environmental friendliness, durability, practicality, ergonomic qualities, and resistance to bacteria (from a substance called betulin to which the bark owes its white color; “research has shown that betulin has strong anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, and anti-viral properties”). Thanks to the latter quality, containers made of beresta are able to keep food such as milk, sour cream, butter, fish, meat, mushrooms, nuts, berries, and honey fresh for long periods of time; they are also said to prevent the growth of larvae from pantry moths in flours and grains.

The healing properties of birch bark combined with this material’s flexibility account for the ubiquity of lapti, shoes made of woven strips of bark (and rendered as “bast shoes” in translations of Russian literature) as the Russian peasant shoe par excellence. Russian sources attest to the lapti’s therapeutic qualities, the tar that the bark excretes serving as a balm for foot sores and other skin ailments. Lapti also make frequent appearances in Russian folk rituals; for example, one tradition called for peasants to offer numerous pairs of lapti to appease the house spirit known as the domovoi.

The website www.sibber.ru proclaims that beresta wares connect those who use them with the healing power of nature and the spiritual essence of the artist who collaborated with nature to bring the crafts into being: “Beresta is one of the few materials created by nature itself that gives a positive energy charge to the person who uses it. Objects made out of beresta embody the perfection of nature’s creation and the warmth of the artisan’s hands, of his handicrafts, as well as of the little bit of his soul that he imparts to them. Objects made from beresta are very beautiful—their delicate charm and patina of Russian antiquity compel people to reach out to such objects with their entire soul.”

If we develop the above idea that a hand-crafted object carries with it a particle of the artisan’s soul, we can draw a connection to the birch-bark documents that have preserved ancient writings—themselves serving as traces of selfhood. To date, archeologists working at excavations of the historic town of Novgorod have found nearly one thousand documents inscribed on birch bark dating from the mid-eleventh to fifteenth centuries. These include “tax documents, school lessons, wills, spells, I.O.U.s, marriage proposals, prayers, political commentary, records of legal conflicts, and orders for icons, as well as the names of people and nearby villages” (Blankoff 31). The documents are brittle and must be unrolled under water; the fact that they have survived at all is thanks to the “layer of clay beneath the city that prevents normal drainage, saturating the soil above it like a sponge and protecting organic matter from decay,” and possibly also the antibacterial qualities of birch bark itself, as Efimov argues.

Some of the documents provide vignettes of everyday life in medieval Novgorod, as when a husband writes to his wife, “‘When this letter arrives, send me a man on a horse, for I have many things to do here. And send me a shirt, I forgot my shirt (31-32).’” The documents attest to the widespread literacy among both the men and the women of Novgorod; the documents are written in a variety of hands, located in different sites around the town, along with “a very large number of wood, bone, and metal stylets (more than 70) for engraving on birch bark.” The ethnic diversity of Novgorod, a cosmopolitan center of trade during its medieval heyday, comes through in the various languages represented on these birch bark scrolls, from a magic formula that is “the oldest known document in Finnish” to texts written in Latin, Gothic cursive script, and Old Saxon dialect. (35)

Also found at the excavations of old Novgorod were fragments of birch bark containers known as tuyesy (accent on the first syllable) from the 10^th through 13^th centuries. (The word tuyes derives from the indigenous Komi word for birch bark. Tuyesy were also occasionally referred to as buraki.) These proto-thermoses were double-layered; the empty space between the layers served to insulate the food and drink inside, keeping milk and kvas cool and fresh for up to three days. These containers served as invaluable companions for sowers, reapers, hunters, and plowmen on their long workdays.

Design

In this section we will discuss in more detail the artwork that inspired the bear box design. To do so, we will need to dig down through several strata of history. Here is the bear box’s genealogy at a glance: first came Shishkin’s painting, which was then mass-reproduced on the candy wrappers, and now the image travels beyond Russia’s borders via these decorative boxes.

The original painting is actually the work of not one but two artists. The artist Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin chose to capture an early morning scene, with the first rays of sunlight breaking through the tree trunks and the fog rising from the lake; an uprooted and broken pine tree occupies the central picture plane. Shishkin showed this painting to his friend and fellow artist Konstantin Apollonovich Savitsky, who added the figures of three bear cubs playing on and around the fallen tree and their mother looking on. Savitsky then added his signature to the canvas, but when Shishkin brought the finished work to his patron, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, the latter demanded that Savitsky’s name be erased. The painting has been credited to Shishkin ever since, which is ironic given that Russians usually refer to it as “the three bears” (this in spite of there being four bears depicted; it may be the influence of the fairy tale about Masha—the Russian Goldilocks— and the three bears), i.e., the very element provided by the artist whose contribution Tretyakov obliterated. With these notes, we hope to do our part to give credit where credit is due.

The image of the bears on the painting migrated to the wrapper of a chocolate candy whose origins stretch back to Imperial Russia. This candy remains popular in Russia, and in the Russian-speaking diaspora, today. When I mentioned the wrapper image to my Soviet-born mother, she instantly recalled the taste of the candy within, which she described as consisting of light and crisp wafers nestled in chocolate.

The initial maker of the candy was the German-owned Einem factory founded in 1867 in Moscow. The factory produced high-quality candy, cookies, and other sweets. The owners came up with a successful marketing campaign that involved printing a dozen reproductions of famous Russian paintings on the candy wrappers, with information about the artworks on the reverse side. As early as 1896, the bear painting began to be featured on “Pigeon-toed bear [Mishka Kosolapyi]” candy wrappers; the candy inside contained an almond praline filling (praline had been a popular confection in Germany, the factory owner’s birthplace) inside two crisp chocolate-covered wafers, just as my mom remembers.

In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, the factory’s name was changed in 1922 to “Red October” and the candy wrappers began to feature not only the woodland creatures of yore, but also a verse by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who devoted a great deal of energy to helping the new Soviet state advertise its products (an urgent task in the mid-1920s during the New Economic Policy, when the state had to compete with the private enterprises that had been allowed a temporary existence at the time). Mayakovsky’s couplet urged consumers to save up in order to afford one of these costly (four rubles a kilogram) but delectable candies: “if you want to eat a Mishka, get yourself a savings account!” [Esli khochesh kushat’ Mishku, zavedi sebe sberknizhku!]

The candy enjoyed brisk sales despite its steep price. The artist Alexander Rodchenko, Mayakovsky’s partner in their Soviet advertising business, made a painting in 1925 that captured their advertisement for the candy, along with other state-manufactured products, on the side of the Constructivist-style Mosselprom (Moscow Association of Enterprises Processing Agro-Industrial Products) building.

The bear painting did not only circulate on candy wrappers in Soviet times; it was also a popular print, available for sale in bookstores and accessible to virtually all consumers. The bears also adorned the wall rugs that were a much loved attribute of Soviet apartment interiors, which provided an added layer of insulation, and muffled sounds to provide residents with a little extra privacy— a scarce item in those days.

Shishkin’s painting has reappeared in many different media, which speaks to the remarkable durability of this image in Russian culture. In 2019, the painting made a prominent appearance in a music video for the song “Vsyo kak u liudei” [Everything is as it should be] by the rap artist Noize MC. The song serves as a reaction to the political protests of the time and the state violence directed against them. In the video, Noize MC performs in front of a changing series of classic Russian paintings, each of which invites the viewer to consider the nature of the dialogue between these images and the song’s lyrics.

The video opens with a close-up of Vasily Vereshchagin’s Apotheosis of War (1871), which features a pyramid of skulls in an arid landscape, underscoring the song’s lyrics about the physical and psychological violence of the Russian police state. Shishkin’s painting has pride of place as the final one to appear in the video, with the camera zooming in for an extreme close-up that brings the viewer into the tranquil woodland scene as the song fades out. The triangular composition of this painting recalls the pyramid of skulls in Vereshchagin’s work, but at the same time, the tableau of nature awakening serves as a counterpoint to the song’s bleak lyrics in its representation of the hope for a new, more authentic and peaceful, life.

Design

In this section we will discuss in more detail the artwork that inspired the bear box design. To do so, we will need to dig down through several strata of history. Here is the bear box’s genealogy at a glance: first came Shishkin’s painting, which was then mass-reproduced on the candy wrappers, and now the image travels beyond Russia’s borders via these decorative boxes.

The original painting is actually the work of not one but two artists. The artist Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin chose to capture an early morning scene, with the first rays of sunlight breaking through the tree trunks and the fog rising from the lake; an uprooted and broken pine tree occupies the central picture plane. Shishkin showed this painting to his friend and fellow artist Konstantin Apollonovich Savitsky, who added the figures of three bear cubs playing on and around the fallen tree and their mother looking on. Savitsky then added his signature to the canvas, but when Shishkin brought the finished work to his patron, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, the latter demanded that Savitsky’s name be erased. The painting has been credited to Shishkin ever since, which is ironic given that Russians usually refer to it as “the three bears” (this in spite of there being four bears depicted; it may be the influence of the fairy tale about Masha—the Russian Goldilocks— and the three bears), i.e., the very element provided by the artist whose contribution Tretyakov obliterated. With these notes, we hope to do our part to give credit where credit is due.

The image of the bears on the painting migrated to the wrapper of a chocolate candy whose origins stretch back to Imperial Russia. This candy remains popular in Russia, and in the Russian-speaking diaspora, today. When I mentioned the wrapper image to my Soviet-born mother, she instantly recalled the taste of the candy within, which she described as consisting of light and crisp wafers nestled in chocolate.

The initial maker of the candy was the German-owned Einem factory founded in 1867 in Moscow. The factory produced high-quality candy, cookies, and other sweets. The owners came up with a successful marketing campaign that involved printing a dozen reproductions of famous Russian paintings on the candy wrappers, with information about the artworks on the reverse side. As early as 1896, the bear painting began to be featured on “Pigeon-toed bear [Mishka Kosolapyi]” candy wrappers; the candy inside contained an almond praline filling (praline had been a popular confection in Germany, the factory owner’s birthplace) inside two crisp chocolate-covered wafers, just as my mom remembers.

In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, the factory’s name was changed in 1922 to “Red October” and the candy wrappers began to feature not only the woodland creatures of yore, but also a verse by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who devoted a great deal of energy to helping the new Soviet state advertise its products (an urgent task in the mid-1920s during the New Economic Policy, when the state had to compete with the private enterprises that had been allowed a temporary existence at the time). Mayakovsky’s couplet urged consumers to save up in order to afford one of these costly (four rubles a kilogram) but delectable candies: “if you want to eat a Mishka, get yourself a savings account!” [Esli khochesh kushat’ Mishku, zavedi sebe sberknizhku!]

The candy enjoyed brisk sales despite its steep price. The artist Alexander Rodchenko, Mayakovsky’s partner in their Soviet advertising business, made a painting in 1925 that captured their advertisement for the candy, along with other state-manufactured products, on the side of the Constructivist-style Mosselprom (Moscow Association of Enterprises Processing Agro-Industrial Products) building.

The bear painting did not only circulate on candy wrappers in Soviet times; it was also a popular print, available for sale in bookstores and accessible to virtually all consumers. The bears also adorned the wall rugs that were a much loved attribute of Soviet apartment interiors, which provided an added layer of insulation, and muffled sounds to provide residents with a little extra privacy— a scarce item in those days.

Shishkin’s painting has reappeared in many different media, which speaks to the remarkable durability of this image in Russian culture. In 2019, the painting made a prominent appearance in a music video for the song “Vsyo kak u liudei” [Everything is as it should be] by the rap artist Noize MC. The song serves as a reaction to the political protests of the time and the state violence directed against them. In the video, Noize MC performs in front of a changing series of classic Russian paintings, each of which invites the viewer to consider the nature of the dialogue between these images and the song’s lyrics.

The video opens with a close-up of Vasily Vereshchagin’s Apotheosis of War (1871), which features a pyramid of skulls in an arid landscape, underscoring the song’s lyrics about the physical and psychological violence of the Russian police state. Shishkin’s painting has pride of place as the final one to appear in the video, with the camera zooming in for an extreme close-up that brings the viewer into the tranquil woodland scene as the song fades out. The triangular composition of this painting recalls the pyramid of skulls in Vereshchagin’s work, but at the same time, the tableau of nature awakening serves as a counterpoint to the song’s bleak lyrics in its representation of the hope for a new, more authentic and peaceful, life.

Beresta at the Vernisazh

The Vernisazh market was already operating in the 1980s, but it was not the bustling hub of handicrafts that it is today: there were just a handful of individuals selling such wares. Things changed dramatically in 1991, when the financial crisis that came in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution compelled many unemployed but enterprising individuals to reinvent themselves as dealers in folk crafts marketed to the affluent tourists who were now free to visit Russia. The Vernisazh market became filled with a dizzying range of traditional craft items, including birch bark wares from Western Siberia: containers including the tuyes discussed above, breadboxes, salt and pepper shakers, pocket mirrors, passport covers, lapti, jewelry, and more.

We bought our cathedral and bear boxes from Damira (a.k.a. Dzhamilia), who is originally from Tashkent, Uzbekistan.Damira had brisk sales going even on a Thursday morning. Her popular, centrally located stall features beresta designs including woodland scenes, sacred architecture (with the latter two often combined in one box), characters from folklore, and rural scenes. The boxes and other beresta items sold at this stall are handmade for a firm in Tomsk that employs artisans and their apprentices, all working from home. Both of our boxes feature the stamp of the artisan on the bottom—the initials IVT in Cyrillic with a stylized crown on top. The initials are those of Tomsk wood carving master Ivan Tarashkevich. This artist trained under master Andrei Glazunov, who has a predilection for animal subjects and whose work is likewise available at Damira’s stall.

Damira has been at the market for over ten years and very much enjoys her work. She told us that she has two names—the name Damira is listed on her birth certificate, and when she married she became Dzhamilia; her dad called her one name and her mom another. Damira’s embrace of her two names inspires us through its resonance with the pluralism that seems to be at the heart of the Russian-ness that we are striving to illustrate and illuminate on this website. Indeed, other elements of this exhibit echo the doubling of Damira’s name. The tuyes container goes by two names. The painting Morning in a Pine Forest has not one but two authors. The quintessentially Russian Mishka candy has a filling with German origins. As the latter two examples suggest, in Russian culture, collaboration and hybridity are key. This is not to say that such blending is unique to Russia, but rather to challenge essentialist narratives of purity that circulate within Russia and are not unknown to Westerners, too.

Reflections

In the Design section of this exhibit, we discuss how the use of Shishkin’s painting Morning in a Pine Forest, with its youthful bears at the center, in Noize MC’s music video can be read as alluding to a new beginning for Russia. The popular identification of Russia with bears extends to forests, and to wood itself. We encounter this association both within Russia and outside of it, as when the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about the Russian toys that he collected during his visit to Moscow in 1926-27; he called wood “the most important” among the materials used to make these objects: “There is an incomparable mastery in its handling—of carving, coloring, and lacquering—almost everywhere in this land of great forests.”

The pervasive association of Russia with forests and wood speaks to mixed feelings about Russian identity as aligned with nature on the one hand, or underdeveloped/uncivilized on the other. This ambivalence is illustrated in the multiple meanings of the adjective kondovyi (derived from a Finnish root referring to mature pine trees) which refers to solid, durable wood; to forests made up of trees whose wood has this quality; and, in a figurative sense, to that which is primordial or old-fashioned, with the latter usage sometimes taking on negative associations.

One of the best-known literary uses of the word kondovyi is the reference to “kondovaia Rus’” (with Rus’, a word that is gendered feminine, serving as the lofty invocation of medieval, holy Russia) in Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem “The Twelve,” written a few months after the Bolshevik coup, which the Red Guards use the word in a derogatory way to refer to Russia as backward and feminine (two attributes often viewed as synonymous in the War Communism period when Blok wrote this poem):

Comrade, hold your rifle, don’t be a coward!

Let’s shoot a bullet into Holy Rus’—

With her old wood [literally—into the old wooden one: v kondovuiu]

With her peasant huts

And her fat behind!


Товарищ, винтовку держи, не трусь!

Пальнем-ка пулей в Святую Русь —

В кондовую,

В избяную,

В толстозадую!

Later in the poem, the Red Guards talk of igniting a global fire in which old wooden Russia will burn away: “To the grief of all the bourgeoisie/We’ll fan the flames of a worldwide conflagration” [Мы на горе всем буржуям/Мировой пожар раздуем].

The Vernisazh as a cultural space embraces the wood/Russia association; indeed, wood is the material par excellence of this marketplace. In addition to the beresta boxes, the market features other wooden crafts that we exhibit on this website: matryoshki, decorative boards, and kinetic toys. In the post-Soviet period, the Vernisazh itself underwent a transition from tin sheds to wooden stalls, which made it more vulnerable: the market suffered a series of fires between 2004 and 2006. But it was rebuilt using wood rather than metal, which underscores the symbolic significance of this material in the construction of traditional Russian identity—and its links to folk ingenuity and nature’s plenitude—that this marketplace seeks to convey to all those who visit.

Sources

• Benjamin, Walter. “Russian Toys.” Moscow Diary. Ed. Gary Smith. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Harvard UP, 1986.
• Efimov, Valerii. Sibirskaia Beresta. Ofset, 2014.
• Hilton, Alison. Russian Folk Art. Indiana UP, 1995.
• Koshcheeva, Antonina. “Revival of ancient art of birch bark carving in Western Siberia.” The Siberian Times. 25 September 2015.

Bears in Russia:

• Czekanowski, Jan. “The Ancient Home of the Slavs.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 25, no. 65, 1947, pp. 356–372. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4203859.
• Prince, J. Dyneley. “The Names Troyan and Boyan in Old Russian.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 56, no. 2, 1917, pp. 152–160. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/984172.
• Seryodkin, Ivan V., et al. “Denning Ecology of Brown Bears and Asiatic Black Bears in the Russian Far East.” Ursus, vol. 14, no. 2, 2003, pp. 153–161. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3873015.

Birch trees in Russian folklore:

• Ignatieva, Maria E. “Music for the Eyes: The Historical Restoration of the White Birch Area of Pavlovsky Park in St. Petersburg, Russia.” Ecological Restoration, vol. 23, no. 2, 2005, pp. 83–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43442944.

Velikii Ustiug:

• “История Великого Устюга.” Вологодская Область, vologdaobl.ru/about/history_velikii_ustyg/.
• Website providing health claims about beresta: http://www.sibber.ru/chto-takoe-beresta.
• The use of beresta among the Ostiaks/Khanty: http://infonarod.ru/info/lekciya-4-hudozhestvennye-remyosla-segodnya-problemy-konflikty-perspektivy.
• Russian Wikipedia (etymology of tuyes).

Russian lace:

• “Art Needlework.” The Art Amateur, vol. 1, no. 3, 1879, pp. 62–62. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25626845. Accessed 23 June 2021.
• Harrison, Constance Cary. “Art Needlework.” The Art Amateur, vol. 6, no. 5, 1882, pp. 110–111. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25627617. Accessed 23 June 2021.
• Stowell, N. S. “Some New Things.” The Decorator and Furnisher, vol. 15, no. 3, 1889, pp. 93–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25585969. Accessed 23 June 2021.
• Sorokina, Anna. “Russian handicrafts: Why Vologda lace is back in style.” Russia Beyond. 19 October 2017.
• Kholmogory carving: https://www.perunica.ru/chistiy_ist/9556-holmogorskaya-rezba.html.

Novgorod birch bark documents:

• Blankoff, Jean. “Letters from Old Russia – Love, death, and taxes in medieval Novgorod.” Archaeology 53, no. 6, (2000).
• http://gramoty.ru/birchbark/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/world/europe/where-mud-is-archaeological-gold-russian-history-grew-on-treeshtml?auth=login-facebook&emc=edit_th_20141019&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=22809868.
• https://hyperallergic.com/157871/a-childs-drawings-preserved-over-the-centuries-by-magical-mud

Shishkin painting:

• «Три медведя в сосновом бору: как картина стала конфетой”: http://goodnew.ru/interesting/409-tri-medvedya-v-sosnovom-boru-kak-kartina-stala-konfetoy.html.
• И. Шишкин: «Утро в сосновом лесу», или картина «Три медведя» –  https://www.syl.ru/article/327969/i-shishkin-utro-v-sosnovom-lesu-ili-kartina-tri-medvedya.
• “Если хочешь кушать “мишку” – заведи себе сберкнижку” или богатая история любимых конфет.
• Wall rugs in Russia: https://www.remontbp.com/kover-na-stenu/.
• The “hipster takeover” of the Red October factory is documented in this travel guide entry about the various uses the factory has been put toward in the past decade: https://www.inyourpocket.com/moscow/red-october-chocolate-factory_58656v.
• Blok, “The Twelve:” side-by-side Russian original and English translation by Maria Carlson: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/6598/BlokTwelve_RusEngTxt.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.