Text 11. Folk and native art

Isolated by vast distances and long winters, Russians evolved an amazing spectrum of richly decorated folk art. Perhaps most familiar are the intricately painted, enamelled wood boxes called palekh, after the village east of Moscow that’s famous for them; and finift, luminous enameled metal miniatures from Rostov-Veliki. Fron Gzhel, also east of Moscow, came glazed earthenware in the 18 c. and its trademark blue-and-white porcelain in the 19 c. Gus-Khrustalny, south of Vladimir, maintains a glass-making tradition as old as Rus. Every region also has its own style of embroidery and specialize in knitting and other fine fabrics.

The most common craft is woodcarving, represented by toys, distaffs (tool for hand-spinning flax) and gingerbread moulds in the museums, and in its most clichéd form by the nested matryoshka dolls - surely the most familiar symbol of Russia, although they actually only date from 1890. Overflowing from souvenir shops you’ll also find the red, black and gold lacquered-pine bowls called khokhloma. Most uniquely Slavic are the ‘gingerbread’ houses of western and northern Russia and Siberia with their carved window frame, lintels and trim. The art of carpentry flourished in 17-th and 18-th century houses and churches.

Раздел 5. Выдающиеся личности (outstanding personalities)

Assignment: Texts 1-7. Translate the text into Russian. Pay special attention to the personal names. Explain why most anthroponyms are implanted.

Text 1. Edvard munch

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Norway’s most renowned painter and one of Europe’s great masters, was a tortured soul. His acquaintance with the darker emotions began with his Christiania (Oslo) childhood: his mother died of tuberculosis when Edvard was just five, his elder sister likewise succumbed at the age of 15, and his younger sister was diagnosed with mental illness as a young girl.

Munch spent his early years as a painter in Paris where he was greatly influenced by the French Realist school, and there he produced his first great work, The Sick Child, a portrait of his sister Sophie shortly before her death. So provocative was the painting that professional criticism was largely negative.

After returning to Christiania, he fell in with a bohemian crowd whose influence exacerbated his natural tendency for darker themes. He returned to Paris, where he learned of the death of his father and, in 1890, he produced the haunting painting Night, depicting a lonely figure in a dark window. The following year he finished Melancholy and began sketches of what would be his best known work, The Scream, which graphically represents Munch’s own inner torment.

In 1892, Munch moved to Berlin where he buried himself in a cycle of angst-ridden, atmospheric themes that he would collectively entitle Frieze of Life - A Poem about Life, Love and Death. The series included Starry Night, Moonlight, The Storm, Vampire, Ashes, Anxiety and Death in the Sickroom. His obsession with darkness and doom went from dominating his work to casting a long shadow over his life. Alcoholism, chronic emotional instability and a tragic love affair culminated in the 1907 work, Death of Marat, and, a year later, he checked into a Copenhagen mental health clinic for eight months.

After leaving the clinic, Munch returned to Norway, where he settled on the coast at Kragerø. It became clear that Munch’s postclinic work was to be altogether different, dominated by a sunnier, more hopeful disposition dedicated to humans in harmony with their landscape. Perhaps the most emblematic of Munch’s paintings from this period is History, which portrays an elderly man beneath a spreading oak tree, relating the history of humanity to a young child.

Upon his death, Munch bequeathed his body of works to the City of Oslo, and they’re now on display at the National Gallery, the Munch Museum and Bergen Art Museum, although not always as securely as art lovers would hope.