Stories from the East

I've been on a bit of a roll with my posts lately. There's just so much I feel like I want to catch up on! 

This here one is inspired by a research I did a couple of years ago on the Russian fairy tales of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful. I was read them as a child and they were quite chilling what with the witch who rides in a mortar steered by a pestle, and lives in a house made out of chicken bones that can run! The mad imagination and vivacity of the stories have stayed with me, and have inspired a love for all things Eastern European.

Baba Yaga as illustrated by Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin, riding her mortar back home.

Here is an image I found which I used as a character reference for the old grandmother - look at those eyes!

What I love about Baba Yaga is that she is not considered to be simply evil. She is also regarded with respect as a wise woman, despite her penchant for eating small children. Occasionally she will appear to be helpful, as a guider to lost souls, and seems to embody the saying "you reap what you sow".

Here is Vasilisa the Beautiful, a kind of Russian Cinderella. She is sent out by her wicked stepmother to visit the old grandmother witch Baba Yaga in the deep forest, to collect a flame so as to relight their fires and candles. The hut is built of dancing chicken bones, and a tall fence of human bones surrounds it, skulls glowing on staffs. After completing three impossible tasks, she is given a glowing skull to take home. She happily marries the Tzar of Russia after she weaves him the finest of cloths for a shirt. Yes. That's right.

Some beautiful maidens in their beautiful clothes. I learnt recently that the embroidery is focused on the collar, wrists and other spots likely to wear down as the thread work strengthens the cloth. I actually plan on making a simple blouse based these to wear hiking, as my shirts usually return absolutely shredded. And I want to look a little prettier than I normally do!

I found a website a long time ago (I'm afraid I could not find it again) with these collage/illustrations of the variations in peasant wear across the Slavic regions. They're so charming, and also really rather useful!

Abandoned Russia

Deep deep in the forests of Russia lie undisturbed remnants of another age and the very stuff of fairytales. Untouched and crumbling, these structures are returning to nature - the very force that has protected them for so long. What I like about these buildings is that they belong to no one and anyone who happens to stumble across them, much like the bombed-out houses we used to play with in Italy. Yet only in a country with a wilderness so intact such as Russia could a wonder like this be unaccounted for. The very last of Britain's forests were officially surveyed in time for the second world war, leaving us without any mysterious shadowy unknown landscapes to conceal such secrets as these...

With the collapse of the USSR this railway station in Abkhazia was rendered useless, leaving Soviet ruins to the luscious vegetation of the region. In other photographs, you can see a turquoise sea shimmering on the horizon.

Visions of the Empire

These photos are from the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection, taken between 1905 and 1915. Prokudin-Gorskii travelled around the Russian Empire taking thousands of snapshots of daily and often rural landscapes and people. His negatives are composed of three glass plates exposed in rapid succession through red, green and blue filters respectively (which we can see on the unedited borders of the following images.) He would then make his positive image by projecting the three slides at once via his triple-lens magic lantern to make these vibrant full-colour photographs. If it was a little less tricky I might attempt it myself... I can't get enough of the saturated colours and psychedelic borders - not unlike when you move an image on a colour photocopier when it's on its third scan...

Isn't his house AMAZING? Not to mention that dashing robe he's sporting so beautifully...

Lord knows why the sea is a determined violet in this one, but I think it's completely gorgeous and fantastical, and goes to show how important colour is in transforming the simple.