Читать книгу Malevich - Gerry Souter - Страница 3

Township, c. 1908. Gouache, Indian ink and paper glued on cardboard, 17.5 × 17 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts A. N. Radiscev, Saratov.

He walked next to the wagon in boots that came almost to his knees. He was a sturdy boy with a dark complexion beneath a shock of dark brown hair and dressed in the colours of the earth except for a red waistcoat picked out in his mother’s embroidery. When he travelled with his mother and father, the family should not look like field mujiks but like people of quality. They earned with their brains not their backs in keeping with his father’s work, a skilled chemist and quality supervisor at the next sugar beet mill and the one after that and the one after that. This was their life and the wagon was part of it. His mother, Liudvika (Liudviga) and his siblings travelled with his father, Severyn Malevich. That was the Ukrainian spelling of their names. The boy was named Kazymir. They were Poles descended from refugees who fled across the border from Poland to Ukraine when the Russians crushed the Polish rebellion in 1862. Their names had been the softer sounding Sewerin and Ludwika Malewicz.

Early on, home for Kazymir – later Kasimir in Anglicized Russian spelling – was the house of his aunt and godmother, Maria Orzechchowska, at 13 Kostiolna Street in the Zhytomyr district of the Volyn Province. He was born on February 11, 1878 and he was baptized in Kiev’s Roman Catholic parish church. He was the eldest son of fourteen children born to this couple (nine would reach maturity) who counted their lineage from respected and lettered pre-revolution Polish nobles. A search of Kiev’s Catholic cathedral records and the dusty archives kept by the Zhytomyr district reveals that Kasimir’s pedigree was splendid, with coats-of-arms and royal recognitions bestowed on the szlachta (Polish nobility beginning about the fifteenth century) of the Malewicz line.

Swirling in the body of the boy who clung to the creaking wagon’s tailgate chain were the genes of his great grandfather Ivan, an army artillery captain, and two cousins, one a parish priest and one a monsignor, who carried on a traditional attachment to the Church. The Malewicz clan formed a solid core of Polish bourgeoisie gripped by the righteous regimentation of both military and religious life into the nineteenth century. But all that play-by-the-rules sanctified bureaucracy had fled across the Russo-Polish border into Ukrainian exile and now Severyn Malevich worked for the owners of sugar beet mills.

“The circumstances of my childhood life,” Kasimir later wrote, “were as follows: my father worked at sugar beet processing mills that were usually built deep in the hinterland, far away from cities big and small. There were vast sugar beet plantations. These plantations required a large, predominantly peasant workforce. While the peasants, grown-ups and children alike, worked on the plantation all through the summer and autumn, I, the future artist, feasted my eyes on the fields and colourful workers who were weeding or digging up the beets.

“Platoons of colourfully dressed girls stepped in single file across the field. It was a war. The troops in multi-coloured dresses fought the weeds, preventing the beets from being smothered by harmful plants. I liked watching those fields in the morning, when the sun was still low and the warbling skylarks soared… There seemed to be no end to the sugar beet plantations which merged with the distant skyline…embracing the villages with their green hands. My childhood passed among all those villages that were located at good places and put together a wonderful landscape.”

But his memories turned grey and leaden when he wrote of his own life in the factory towns where money could be earned at shift labour.

“Another territory – the factory – reminded me of some sort of a fortress where people, under an influence of a siren, worked day and night. There were people riveted by time to an apparatus or a machine: twelve hours in steam, smells, and dirt. I remember my father when he stood near the big apparatus. That was a really beautiful machine with plenty of different sizes and bits of glass, small windows in which it was possible to look through and see how the sugar syrup boiled. There were several small bright taps near every window, a thermometer, and on the table a set of glasses for tests and determining the level of sugar crystallization. For hours my father stood and turned on and off taps, looked through the windows. From time to time he took a sample of sugary liquid in a glass and, attentively, examined it against a light to see the size of formed crystals.

Woman in Childbirth, 1908.

Gouache on cardboard, 24 × 25 cm.

Costakis Collection, Athens.

Self-Portrait (study for a fresco), 1907.

Tempera on cardboard, 69.3 × 70 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Very carefully, every worker watched the movements of machines as though they were the movements of a wild beast. At the same time, it was necessary to look after yourself, after your own actions. Any wrong movement could threaten either death or many kinds of injury. For me, as a child, all those machines always appeared like wild beasts. I looked on them as on wild relentless animals that only looked for any opportunities to knock down or injure their own enslavers. Enormous fly-wheels and belts always impressed me by their movements and structures. Some machines were fenced in behind metal rods and seemed as dogs in a cage. The other, less dangerous machines, were without fences.”[1]

Kasimir’s world was divided between two very distinct ways of life, the factory people and the peasant workers. The factory workers lived at or near the processing plant in company housing – if they had families – or had bunks in a barracks. They worked in shifts to service the machines and maintain the sugar refining process 24 hours a day during the harvest. The workers were a grey society, faceless labourers and technocrats – like his father – called to their shifts by the whine of the same siren that awakened them from their work trance to retreat to their meals and beds. The smells that haunted the corridors of heavy industry, besides the oil, hot grease, steam, sweat and the stench of the cooking beets were the dinner smells of sauerkraut, cabbage soup and porridge mixed with beef fat.

The stink from the cabbage-soup spread over the entire barracks and even out into the street. It wafted from the small houses rented by the technical workers and exuded from the men’s barracks along with the smells of unwashed sheets, sweat-stiffened clothes and the community privies.

Kasimir was part of this workers’ society and he did not like it. The peasant farmers, on the other hand, slept all night long, went into fields in the morning, and worked in the fresh air in a beautiful landscape brightened by morning, midday, and golden evening sun. Peasants ate strips of rendered pork fat – salo – with garlic and Ukrainian borscht made from freshly-dug beetroots, a cold green vegetable soup called botvinia made with fish, beans, potatoes and beets. They also enjoyed soured cream and dumplings with onion, palyanitsa, a flat cake, and mamalyga, a form of corn meal (polenta) with milk or butter, and cold buttermilk with potatoes.

“I preferred to have friendships with peasants’ children, considering them always free to live in the fields, meadows, and woods with horses, sheep and pigs. I always envied peasants’ children who lived, as it seemed to me, free in nature. They grazed horses or huge herds of pigs. In the evening, they came back home astride the pigs holding onto their ears. Pigs galloped with squeals, much faster than horses and raised plenty of dust on village roads.”[2]

His romantic vision of the world around him, written many years later in his 1918 autobiography, bears small resemblance to the reality of life upon the great flatness of the forest-steppe in 1890 Ukraine. This belt of natural savannah, a rich grassland left behind by the grinding retreat of the glaciers, cuts across the centre of the country covering about thirty-five per cent of the Ukraine. It stretches from the shores of the Black Sea to eastern Kazakhstan and is buried deep in chomozem, an extremely fertile black earth. This soil, complemented by a temperate climate ranging from 25 degrees Fahrenheit in January to 70 degrees in July, guarantees a generous crop cycle for both wheat and sugar beet – if the land is maintained.

The “colourfully dressed girls” who formed a file across the broad black field were part of the peasant “army” who fought his “war” against weeds and the thinning of the sugar beet to achieve larger, well-fed plants at harvest time. Dotted across the steppes were farms and small villages originally peopled by serfs brought into the area by nobles who had purchased vast tracts of land. Villages (selos) were built and the serfs worked the noble landholders’ acres. Each household owed their master a certain number of hours (a corvée) in the fields based on the family’s number of grown sons. When the serfs were emancipated in 1861, many of these peasants left the “company villages” and settled on individual farmsteads or Khutor. Some of the individual farms formed settlements known as vyselki (literally, “those who moved away from their village”).

Sugar was necessary in the life of Central Europe both as a sweetener and as a preservative. The sugar beet was a less efficient provider of this commodity than sugar cane from equatorial climates, but its refined product harvested in great volumes was very profitable and in constant demand. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the sugar beet’s care, harvest and refining was very labour intensive.

Oaks and Dryads, 1908.

Watercolour and gouache on cardboard, 17.7 × 18.5 cm. Location unknown.

Fruit Gathering/Abundance, 1909.

Gouache on cardboard, 52.7 × 51 cm.

Hardziev-Caga Foundation, Amsterdam.

Severyn Malevich was an itinerant mill employee; his travels took him across the steppes to the far-flung facilities. When young Kasimir travelled with him, the cycle of the earth and the culture of the peasant class became imprinted on the boy forever. The roads to the mills led through villages, down the dirt main streets and past the simple cottages equally spaced on either side. Each cottage had a small garden for vegetables and both dairy cattle and goats were kept for milk and cheese.

Animal dung was saved for fertilizer and to mix with the clay as a binder trowelled onto the cottage floors. Sewage disposal was handled by open-air cesspits. He could smell the town long before he saw it if the wind was in the right direction. Farmstead settlements were less rigidly defined, but gathering together allowed the community to share wood hauled from the distant pine forests that lined sandy river terraces. They portioned out animal feed for the winter when inches of snow clogged the roads and covered the islands of oak but melted quickly when the sun heated the black earth, leaving ebony patches against ivory whiteness.

How many times did the Malevich family pause in a village during a celebration, a wedding, a First Communion or a birth? The villagers seized upon any chance to depart from the daily trek to the fields. It was a time to eat and dance to the music of the banduras, stringed instruments unique to the Ukraine, and tsymbaly, a type of dulcimer played with small wooden mallets. They accompanied songs once made popular by Kobzars, travelling musicians who wandered from village to village singing about the feats of the Ukraine Cossacks, and other folk tunes and sentimental ballads. Men danced in their embroidered shirts and sharovary (trousers) made of blue wool and fastened with wrappings of a bright red sash tied at the side. Over this, they wore syyta (outerwear), a long open vest trimmed in black cord, and on their heads a Persian lamb hat. Their feet were shod with their finest tall red leather boots.

Single women danced and passed around trays of homemade treats, keeping their eyes on the unmarried sons of the farmstead holders. These sturdy girls also wore embroidered blouses, black velvet trimmed waistcoats (kerselka) over a woven plakhta (skirt), a wreath of ribbons in their hair and, like the men, high red leather morocco boots. The older married women, mothers, aunts and grandmothers, brought out their finest cross-stitched embroidery. They wore embroidered ochipoks (head coverings); coral necklaces decorated with dukachi (silver or gold coins) iupkas (coats) with kovtunts (scattered tufts on the fabric).

And besides the swirling colours of the costumes and the chink of the coins strung together as jewellery and the plucked strings of the banduras and complex patterns played upon the tsymbaly, there was the silent audience of icons looking down from the walls. Every house had at least one icon, sometimes as many as six or ten. They were the art and religion of the peasants. There were idealized faces, faces in rapture, faces squeezed tight by the pain of repentance, saints and apostles, scenes from the Bible and stylized folk scenes barely tolerated by the Church in this holy art form. All were painted on boards or on home-woven canvas. The “burning bush icon” kept fire away from the house and the health of domestic animals was in the hands of the “icon of Saint George.”

The icon artists were known as the bohmazy (“boh” means God and “mazy” means to paint on the surface). These peasants learned their painting skills through apprenticeship. The artist farmers and herders rarely left the settlement so each region on the steppes had its own “style” of bohmazy as the local designs and techniques were passed on to each generation.

To own a house, of course, was a symbol of prosperity for any peasant family and they displayed that pride of ownership on almost every interior surface with intricate colour designs and patterns. Walls, shutters, ceilings, doorways, chairs, stools and benches were the creative outlets for woodworkers and carpenters, each with their unique interpretation of traditional motifs. The women and girls in the family learned to paint as well as to weave and cross-stitch. It was their job to add colour to the log and clay walls.

Kasimir wrote of this time: “The villagers… were making art (I did not know the word for this yet). I was very excited to watch the peasants paint; I helped them cover the floors of their houses with clay and paint motifs onto the stoves.”

The Shroud of Christ, 1908.

Gouache on cardboard, 23.4 × 34.3 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

At the Dacha/Carpenter II, motif: 1911–1912, version: 1928–1929. Oil on plywood, 105 × 70 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Carpenter I, motif: 1911–1912, version: 1928–1929. Oil on plywood, 71.8 × 53.8 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

The local artists ground their own colours from available minerals but when Kasimir tried this process at home, he was chided for making a mess.

Kasimir loved the untutored wildness of his life away from the factory town. He attached unabashed sensual pleasure to the farm workers’ voluptuous lifestyle. He wrote: “All of the peasants’ life fascinated me. I decided that I would never look and work in factories; moreover, I would never study at all. I thought that peasants lived very well: they own everything they want and don’t need any factories or reading and writing. They produce everything for themselves, even paint. They also have honey, so it is not necessary for them to make sugar. Any village’s old men have an abundance of honey just sitting the entire summer at an apiary, located somewhere amidst a blooming garden, a beautiful garden full of pear trees, apple trees, plum trees and cherry trees. Oh, how delicious were those apples, pears, plums and cherries ripened in the gardens! I really liked to eat vareniky (small pies) with cherries and sour cream or honey.

I eagerly imitated the entire peasants’ lifestyle. As they did, I rubbed a piece of bread with garlic, ate salo (bacon) holding it up with my fingers, ran barefoot around the neighbourhood and considered wearing boots unnecessary. Villagers always seemed to me neat and well-dressed.”

But when the celebration fires were only fragrant smouldering ash, work boots were tugged on and teams of Russian heavy draught horses were led out of their stalls, sickles and billhooks were collected and loaded into the wagons with the weeding hoes and lunch baskets. The visitors climbed aboard their wagon and continued down the road toward the distant refining mill. A few friends in the village said a quiet prayer to the icon of St Nicholas who protected travellers.

From the wagon’s sprung seat, Kasimir watched the dancers and singers and musicians from the night before as they spread out across the fields, finding where they had left off and resuming their plodding march traversing the dew-steaming blackness. They followed the ploughs drawn by the huge chestnut horses with the blond manes, and the beets were uncovered, shaken loose of their soil coating and laid beside the row. The next worker carried a short sickle or a beet hook to sever the leaves and trim off the beet’s crown, making it ready to be forked into a following horse cart. And so went the endless stooped labour that broke their backs and aged them quickly as the sun rose, bringing with it the smells of the horses’ sweat and dung, the rising aroma of disturbed black earth and the nutty scent of the beets in the warmth of a late summer day on the steppe.

Being on the move rarely led to lasting friendships, so Kasimir was always the “new boy” in refinery town or rural village. His fearless curiosity often led to beatings from gangs of local boys:

“Once, I got very angry against the factory’s boys, so I declared a war on them. I hired an army from village children and paid them one piece of refined sugar per day. I stole a whole pound of the refined sugar from my house – a carton where there were fifty-four pieces of refined sugar. This pound provided me the army of fifty-four people. If the war would continue for two or three days, I should pay the piece of refined sugar per day to everyone. My army and I got ready to fight: we made bows from metal hoops that held together sugar barrels and arrows with tarred points from reeds. Every warrior had to have no less then seventy arrows. Factory boys didn’t doze either; they were all set too. In the evening, before the day of the battle, my army and I shot at passing factory boys one by one. One the next day, the fight continued for all day long until we kicked them out from their position behind the fence and just gained the rear of them through a firewood storehouse. The battle was ended when my arrow hit the factory leader in an eye, but his arrow passed over me. We fired point-blank at each other.

That was a true fight. When I came home at the end of that day, my father punished me very hard. I bore my disgrace, but, deep inside, I felt myself as a hero.”[3]

When Kasimir reached the age of eleven, the peripatetic life of the steppe roads and the company houses and apartments at the refining mills was becoming a strain. The family had grown and Severyn Malevich settled and worked at a plant in the village of Parhomovka, which bordered three areas, Kharkov, Poltava and Sumy, and was midway between two of the Ukraine’s most important cities: Kiev and Kursk. The village had a five-class school and Kasimir became a town boy going to school until 1894. The people in Parhomovka remember him as a poor boy who never stopped asking questions.

The Harvesters, motif: 1911, version: 1928–1929.

Oil on wood pannel, 70.3 × 103.4 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.