Denshin, Alexei. Vyatskaya
glinyanaya igrushka v risunkakh: raskraska risunkov ruchnaya, yachnymi
kraskami, tochno skopirovannymi s podlinnikov. Moscow, 1917.
Folk art, and artistic style itself, bends over time to the
weight of cultural change, its authenticity eroding until a new style rises up
to take its place. It takes deep traditional roots and regional resilience for
a method to withstand such pressures; such is the case with Russian Dymkovo
toys. The small figurines were first explicitly mentioned in 1811, but were
noted as key parts of a celebration to commemorate a battle some four hundred
years prior. Made from clay and river sand and whitewashed with chalk diluted
in milk, the toys take on grotesque, almost amoebic shapes. The limbs of men
and women extend only vaguely out from their ill-defined torsos, and the legs
of cows, deer, and rams are often only half-realized curves protruding from
their bodies. All are decorated in geometric patterns in bright colors – a duck
may be covered in green dots, a ram’s horns may be a brilliant orange, a woman’s
skirt checked in blue and yellow. To this is sometimes added gold leaf, giving
the rustic figures a strange richness. They depict not only real creatures, but
also fanciful ones, such as horses with two heads or winged beasts.
The 1811 mention of the Dymkovo toys occurs in the writing
of Major General Khitrovo, who had been sent into exile to the region of Vytaka.
There, at the village of Khlynov, he learned of the legend of the Khlynovo
massacre, an event unconfirmed but seared into the collective memory of the
town. Each year the villagers gathered to commemorate the bloodshed, and here
Khitrovo noted that brightly colored and gilded clay dolls were sold to honor
the widows left after the battle. The gathering, called Svistoplyaska, functioned not only as a remembrance of the past,
but also as a festival to celebrate spring fertility. The festival required
participants to whistle in the new season with pennywhistles, and this ritual
was performed by women. Women also were the only ones who created the Dymkovo
toys, thus asserting themselves as the heralds of springtime and the bearers of
renewal and continuity in the land and among the people.
As time passed, the toys became more sophisticated. Ladies
might bear parasols or wear bonnets, men might sport top hats and cloaks, after
the fashions of city-dwellers. Toys might display multiple figures – a woman
riding a horse, or a couple holding hands – and separate toys might be arranged
into tableaux. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century,
mass-manufactured porcelain and plaster figurines were threatening the
traditional handmade crafts. The Svistoplyaska
festival still existed, although now known as the Svistunya, but had been reduced to a children’s party. However, in the
Soviet era, the old ways were revived; in 1939, masters of the Dymkovo craft
were commissioned to create a panneau for that year’s agricultural exhibition.
Now, students may travel to the Vytaka (or Kirov) region, where the Kirov
Artist Union closely monitors the use of traditional methods to create the
toys. Though the field is still small, it trudges onward in the hands of eager
young artists who learn the old ways from village women.
The revival of the tradition of the Dymkovo toys relied not just
on the few old women who exhibited their handiwork at the agricultural
exhibition; it also owes its success in part to Alexei Denshin (1893-1948), a
Moscow artist fascinated with the craft. Denshin published a series of
monographs on the toys, and in his later career taught at the Vytaka Art
College. His interest in the tradition began early on, as exemplified in this
1917 volume of hand-colored drawings that reproduced original figurines. In
them, Denshin well-represents the abstractness of the toys, and his colors
glint off the pages as they would off the originals. The volume has a stated
limitation of three hundred copies, but the amount of work required to produce
it – the drawings are hand-done and glued to each page, the introductory text
has been lithographed in sepia from Denshin’s own calligraphy, the book itself
is carefully stab-bound with string – suggests that the actual number published
is not so high. It retains its original board slipcase, which had hand-done ornamentation
in red and black. The volume itself is a work of art, a book of careful
construction and whimsical artistic style, but its significance lies in its
testament as a man’s consideration of a woman’s art, its recognition of the
resiliency of cultural custom, and its celebration of the rural arts that speak
to the soul of the Russian countryside.(27602)
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