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