Part I Geometric ornament of North Russian embroidery and weaving its possible origins and analogues in ancient cultures of Eurasia
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An outstanding researcher of the Russian North A. Zhuravsky wrote in 1911: “In the” childhood “of mankind – the basis for knowledge and direction of the future paths of mankind. In the eras of the” childhood of Russia «– the path to knowledge of Russia, to control knowledge of those historical phenomena of our modernity that it seems to us fatally complex and not subordinate to the ruling will of the people, but the roots, which are simple and elementary, like the initial cell of a complex organism. The embryos of social “evils” are in the personalities of everyone and everyone. the experiences of the grizzled past, and the closer we get to the embryos of this past, the more consciously, more truly and more confidently we will go forward… It is the history of “childhood of mankind”, namely ethnography, that will help us to know the logical laws of natural progress and consciously, and not blindly, go forward and to move our people forward ourselves, for ethnography and history are the ways to know that “past”, without which it is impossible to apply the knowledge of the present to the knowledge of the future. Turning to the millennial depths of the historical memory of the people, we, first of all, will try to reveal, more objectively, those similarities and analogies in the sphere of the spiritual life of the Slavs and Indo-Iranians that go back deep into these millennia. I would like to start the analysis from the works of folk arts and crafts-weaving, embroidery and woodcarving that existed in the Russian North, on the one hand, and similar works of folk art of modern Indo-Iranian peoples, on the other. The connecting thread between these two regions, so remote today, will be that numerous archaeological materials, starting from the Upper Paleolithic period and ending with the developed Middle Ages, from the vast territories of Eurasia, which modern historical science has. The basis for such comparisons is that ethnographic materials, in particular abusive weaving, embroidery, and woodcarving, which existed in the Vologda and Arkhangelsk provinces until the beginning of the 20th century, indicate the preservation, albeit in a relict form, of the memory of ancient Slavic-Indo-Iranian contacts, or rather – kinship. Analogies of ornamental compositions characteristic of the mentioned types of folk applied art can be found, on the one hand, in the extreme south of the Slavic area: in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, as well as in Western Ukraine and the Dnieper. On the other hand, such ornamental complexes are characteristic of the folk art of Ossetians, mountain Balkarians, Armenians, Tajiks of the Pamirs, Nuristanis of Afghanistan, the peoples of North India and Iran. In addition, as noted earlier, the specific hydronyms, dialectological archaisms present in the Russian North, have numerous analogies in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Western Ukraine and the Dnieper, on the one hand, and in Central, South-West and South Asia, on the other.
The Russian North owes such a good preservation of the deeply archaic elements of traditional folk culture to a number of historical reasons. First of all, it should be borne in mind that Christianity came to these parts quite late. So, around 1260, the chronicler of the Spaso-Kamenny Monastery testified that: “you don’t receive the holy baptism, but you don’t open many many unfaithful people to Kubensky.”
It is interesting that even in the second half of the 19th century, in such counties as Ustyuzhsky, Nikolsky, Solvychegodsky, which occupy most of the province, there were one Church in 150—200 populated areas. To a considerable degree, the relics of pre-Christian beliefs, and therefore traditional folk culture, were well preserved due to the fact that here, in the Russian North, there were no sharp ethnic shifts and the associated population changes, practically no wave of conquerors reached here, here there were devastating wars. Most of the Russian North did not know serfdom, and the peasants were personally free, and as a result of this, both the institution of the traditional peasant community and the ancient ritual-ritual practice were preserved for a very long time.
We can assume that the preservation of the elements of folk culture in the Russian North in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often archaic not only of the ancient Greek, but also recorded in the Vedas, is due to the fact that the population of these places was largely descendants of the ancient population, formed here as a result of advances until the Bronze Age, a time when, perhaps, many social structures, mythological schemes, and those ornamental forms that were common to the vast Slavic-Indo-Iranian region and were preserved in relict form until our days. V. V. Stasov, a well-known researcher of Russian culture, wrote about such relic ornamental forms: “In the ornament of Russian embroidery are precious and as yet untouched materials for studying different sides of ancient Russian nationality.” Indeed, for more than a century, Russian embroidery and abusive weaving have attracted the closest attention of researchers. At the end of the last century, a number of brilliant collections of works of these types of folk art were formed. The studies of V. V. Stasov, S. N. Shakhovskaya, V. Ya. Sidomon-Eristova and N. P. Shabelskaya laid the foundation for the systematization and classification of various types of Russian textile ornaments; they also made the first attempts to read complex “plot” compositions especially characteristic of the folk tradition of the Russian North.
The sharp rise in interest in folk art in the 20th century brought to life a whole series of works devoted to the analysis of subject-symbolic language, technical features, and regional differences in Russian folk embroidery and weaving. However, most of the works focused on anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images, archaic three-part compositions, which include a stylized and transformed image of a female (more often) or male (less often) pre-Christian deity. It is this group of plots that has so far caused the greatest interest among researchers. The geometric motifs of the North Russian branded weaving, as a rule, accompanying the main detailed plot compositions, are somewhat different, although very often in the design of towels, belts, hem, sleeve and mantle shirts it is the geometric motifs that are the main and only than they are extremely important for researchers.
I must say that, along with the consideration of complex plot schemes, serious attention was paid to the geometric layer, as the most archaic in Russian embroidery, in the well-known articles of A. K. Ambrose. In the fundamental monograph by G. S. Maslova, published in 1978, the problem of the development and transformation of geometric ornaments is widely considered from the standpoint of its historical and ethnographic parallels, but, unfortunately, do not go deeper than the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. B. A. Rybakov paid and pays exceptionally great attention to archaic geometrism in Russian ornamental creativity. And in his works of 60—70 and in studies on paganism of the ancient Slavs and Ancient Russia published in 1981 and 1987, the idea of the endless depths of folk memory that preserves and carries through the centuries in images of embroidery, weaving, painting, carving, toys, the oldest worldview patterns, leaving their rooted in the millennia. B. A. Rybakov believes that the origins of many ornamental motifs that survive in Russian art until the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century should be sought in the depths of the Eneolithic and even Paleolithic, i.e. at the dawn of human civilization. Of exceptional interest in this regard are the collections of museums of the Russian North, i.e. those places where the Slavs lived already in the first centuries of our era, long before the baptism of Russia. Remoteness from state centers, relatively peaceful existence (the Vologda region, especially in its eastern part, practically did not know wars), the abundance of forests and the protection of many settlements by swamps and impassability – all contributed to the preservation and preservation of patriarchal forms of life and economy, careful attitude to the faith of the fathers and grandfathers and, as a consequence of this, the preservation of ancient symbols coded in embroidery and weaving ornaments.