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