Crafting Nation: The Challenge to Russian Folk Art in 1913

In 2007, the New York Public Library ran an exhibition, “Russia Imagined 1825–1925: The Art and Impact of Fedor Solntsev,” which provided an illuminating view of the beginnings of Russia’s folk art revival. Solntsev was best known for Antiquities of the Russian State (1853), a lavish illustrated catalogue of ancient and medieval artifacts from the Kremlin treasuries. Funded personally by Nikolai I, Solntsev’s catalogue pioneered the use of medieval forms as a means of articulating a distinct national culture. In his inventories and paintings, the artist combined such disparate elements as Scythian weapons, ancient Greek statuary, Byzantine regalia, and medieval manuscripts “into a single, palpable vision of Russian history, a cross section of culture, geography, and time.”¹

The curator of the exhibition Wendy Salmond convincingly argues that Solntsev created a unified synthesis of the cultures that existed before Peter the Great’s westernizing reforms of the eighteenth century. Moreover, as the basis for what became known as the “Old Russian” style, Solntsev’s revivalist vision was an enduring one. What was most striking, however, was how effectively Solntsev’s version of “Old Russia” served the interests of the imperial state, creating an ideological union of pre- and post-imperial Russia. As Salmond writes, Solntsev’s work betrays “an overwhelming emphasis on the hierarchy, symbols, and rites of the Orthodox Church and the Romanov dynasty,” that was designed to “[bind] the peoples of the Russian Empire together around a single ‘Great Russian idea’.”²

The seamless bond between “Old Russia” and absolute monarchy that Solntsev achieved for Nikolai I was often imitated, but by the twentieth century such an ideological synthesis was unsustainable. In 1913, Nikolai II presided over numerous lavish events planned to celebrate the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. One such event, the Second All-Russian Exhibition of Cottage Industries, notably echoed the ambitions of Solntsev’s albums by attempting to forge a connection, through visual and material culture, between the legitimacy of the autocrat and the authenticity of “Old Russia.” However, the negative critical response to the Second All-Russian Exhibition is evidence that the unified understanding of antiquity and nationality that was created under Nikolai I could no longer be maintained. While the preoccupation with antiquity as a medium of collective identity continued and even grew after Solntsev’s time, the question of what constituted antiquity, and whose traditions were represented, became a point of contention rather than unification.

The Second All-Russian Exhibition was an indication of the failure of the “Great Russian idea” attributed to Solntsev and Nikolai I. Despite its commercial and popular success, the exhibition garnered scathing reviews from both the liberal newspaper Speech and the modern art journal Apollo, both of which were important forums for progressive public opinion. In addition, other exhibitions of folk art that occurred at the same time, such as Mikhail Larionov’s Exhibition of Icon Patterns and Lubki, formed an implicit critique of the role of autocracy in “Old Russia.” While liberal and progressive critics outlined the glaring paradoxes of imperial folk revivalism, Larionov presented an alternative vision of “Old Russia” and its relevance to modernity.

The Folk Art Exhibitions of 1913

On the afternoon of 10 March 1913, the most powerful men in Russia (with the exception of the Emperor himself) gathered at the grand neoclassical halls of the Imperial Botanical gardens in Saint Petersburg to celebrate the opening of the Second All-Russian Exhibition.³ Under the patronage of the Empress Aleksandra and organized by the Grand Duke of Oldenburg, the exhibition was part of a series of public spectacles celebrating the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty.⁴ The exhibition’s pavilions were filled with all manner of luxury goods, from embroidery produced at the state-run School of Folk Art in Saint Petersburg, to toys from the private Sergiev-Posad workshops, to furniture and carpets produced by the workshops administered by regional councils (zemstva). (Fig. 1) Tsar Nikolai himself visited the exhibition on 22 March and was regaled with gifts, but the Emperor’s stamp of approval was not needed to prompt the public...