Milovsky A. The Pure Spring. Craft and Craftsmen of the USSR

Translated by Jan Butler. Photographs by the author. — М.: Raduga Publishers, 1987. — 256 pp. — ISBN: 5-05-001181-7.Russian folk art is often compared to the Firebird, a favourite fairytale character which lights up everything around with its magnificently coloured plumage and makes life beautiful. And the poetic image indeed suits this remarkable phenomenon of folk culture, spiritual and material, which has enhanced people's lives for many centuries. Indeed, it still does so in as far as people nowadays are just as keen on decorating their homes with homespun embroidered towels, carved wooden birds, amusing clay toys and birchbark articles as they are with professional artists' paintings. Interest in folk art and the craftsmen's lives, works and problems is steadily increasing. Books and albums on folk art are quickly sold out; instead of spending their holidays on the Black Sea, students and people of the most varied professions, in no way connected with art eagerly go off to remote old towns and villages to admire the intricate carvings on village houses and meet with the masters still working in the cottage industries' age-old traditions; people looking for gifts for family and friends more often than not head for shops selling folk handicrafts. Is this nostalgia for a bygone rural way of life or, perhaps, mere conformity to a fashionable craze? Neither, to my mind, but a natural longing, a spiritual need even in this industrial and rational age of ours to commune with that wonderfully naive and magic world which vanished along with childhood.
This is the world of man's infancy when, with tremulous awe and delight, our far-off ancestors followed the good and bad omens of nature, and when the sun, fire on the land and in the sky, storm-clouds and winds gave rise to comprehensible mythological and fairytale images in people's primitive minds. Various peoples, for instance, imagined the sun as a beautiful golden-haired princess, the Firebird, a red horse, a wheel, a golden shield, and the clouds as heavenly herds of animals. Time out of mind man transferred these poetic images in symbols to the objects all around him such as spinning-wheels, towels, clay toys, crockery, furniture and the walls of houses. The dwelling of an ancient hunter, herdsman or tiller and all his everyday utensils and work tools were essentially miniature copies of his surrounding world. And what we now call folk art was once, and for certain peoples still is a natural and integral facet of life and just like any other ordinary work, such as sowing crops, harvesting or hunting sea-animals.
As the centuries rolled by and mankind advanced, the meaning of these ancient symbols was gradually forgotten by everyone and last of all by the high priests, shamans and magi. Separate parts of this integral picture of the world began slowly to slip away, and then the meaning of others was lost but the coded patterns and designs, displaying amazing vitality and tenacity, withstood the test of time without significant losses, presenting us today with the ancient artists' mysterious and at times still incomprehensible world of ideas. The world is now changing very rapidly and what until comparatively recently was considered ordinary and universal is now becoming rare and sadly vanishing. For example, a handicraft once in current use in a home is now a decorative piece of art on display in a museum show-case rather than a pantry This being said, there are still plenty of places in the multinational Soviet Union, in the North or Central Asia, the Baltic republics, the Caucasus, Siberia and the Carpathian Mountains where old folk arts and crafts have kept their seciets and succeeded in competing with much cheaper and more accessible mass-produced goods And there are still craftsmen working in remote Russian, Caucasian and Central Asian villages whose crafts automatically call to mind the images of the sun's magic spindle and golden spinning-wheel, and beautiful Firebird Nowadays not only professional artists, art critics and the public at large but also the Soviet Government is devoting considerable attention to the development of folk arts and domestic industries State resolutions are now being passed with an end to consolidating their material resources, increasing output and improving the quality of articles Imaginative research is being done into finding new ways of interacting old traditional art forms with modern ones In a number of republics prestigious honorary titles are awarded to master craftsmen who have won public acclaim.
It is to these folk artists that my book is dedicated.