Folk furniture of Canada's Doukhobors
- By Fleming, John & Michael Rowan
- Published 1 March 2008
- Furniture
- Unrated
Fleming, John & Michael Rowan
John Fleming & Michael Rowan are the authors of Folk Furniture of Canada's Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites and Ukrainians (2004).
View all articles by Fleming, John & Michael Rowan
In recent years an influx of folk furniture imported from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, northern Russia in particular, has made it easier to compare the pieces made by Russian immigrants after their arrival in North America with examples that demonstrate the original context in which the forms, construction methods, and decorative motifs were born. This comparative approach also addresses the perennial issues of tradition, adaptation, and innovation in the transfer of these elements from the old world to the new. This article is an attempt to systematically examine the furniture made by one group of Russian immigrants, the Doukhobors who settled in the Canadian West, and compare it to Russian pieces. But to understand and interpret the objects the Doukhobors made, and the context in which these people began as a nonconforming religious sect, we must first return to their origins in eighteenth-century Russia and their arrival in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.
On January 20, 1899, the SS Lake Huron, thirty days out of Batum on the Black Sea, arrived off Halifax, Nova Scotia, and its passengers disembarked the following day at Lawlor's Island for quarantine inspection. The ship then proceeded on to Saint John, New Brunswick, where the settlers started their train trip west to Winnipeg in Manitoba and beyond. At Winnipeg, one group of men was sent ahead to begin preparations for the construction of houses and other necessary buildings. In the four months that followed, three other shiploads of immigrants arrived in Canada, bringing the total number of Doukhobors to about seventy-five hundred. James Mavor (1854-1925), a professor of economics at the University of Toronto and supporter of Doukhobor immigration to Canada, recorded on May 21, 1899: "At a station in the prairie last night there was an American Indian in his native costume, and with red paint or colour on his cheeks; also a crowd of Galicians who were coming in on the train, and a few Doukhobors: a very strange throng indeed." (1) This "strange throng" anticipated in microcosm the mix of ethnic identities that settled the Canadian prairies and British Columbia in the years that followed. The Europeans' arrival was facilitated by the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1885. With the exception of a few individuals, and various Doukhobor internal exiles held in Russia, Doukhobor immigration to Canada ended about 1905.
The origins and evolution of this religious reform movement in the eighteenth century were based on a sweeping double rejection of all organized and dogmatic forms of religion and external secular authority. This radical stance brought the group into immediate conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church and, of course, with the Russian czarist government. (2) In terms of spiritual belief and the ways in which that belief is practiced, the Doukhobors refused the external material manifestations and practices of the Orthodox Church, including the preeminence given to the Bible and the historical Christ. In 1785 Archbishop Ambrosius of Ekaterinoslav first used the term Dukho-borets (spirit wrestlers) to describe these outsiders, who struggled against the spirit of Christ. (3) The Doukhobors gave this pejorative designation a positive turn by declaring that it should mean those who wrestle with rather than against the spirit of Christ. The Doukhobors abandoned iconography, church buildings, artifacts, ritual, and the priestly class in a radical return to what they saw as the principles of early Christianity. They proclaimed God to be indwelling--that is, present within each person--thus making both priests and churches irrelevant to the spiritual life of the community. Similarly, printed biblical texts were replaced in Doukhobor social and religious life by their own oral psalms and hymns. Recounting his experiences crossing the Atlantic twice with the Doukhobors bound for Canada in 1899, Leopold Antonovich Suler-zhitsky (1872-1916) wrote:
The majority of the Doukhobors are convinced, to this day, that their psalms represent something original, having nothing in common with printed gospel. It seems to them that the unperverted teaching of Jesus Christ can be learned only from their psalms.... The Doukhobors never wrote down these psalms. They are passed on orally from generation to generation and are preserved only in the memory. (4)
The formalism and the authority of the czsarist empire were equally repugnant to the Doukhobors, who tried to avoid bureaucratic intervention in their lives by refusing to register births, deaths, and marriages, and, in particular, by steadfastly opposing military service. The implicit egalitarianism inherent in this rejection of authority, the assertion of personal freedom, and the beliefs in the presence of God in every individual and that all men are brothers attacked the very bases upon which church and state were founded, and caused the Doukhobors more than two centuries of official persecution.
As repression of the Doukhobors became more and more severe, a number of outside people stepped in to find a solution. Among the most important and influential was Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who found in Doukhobor beliefs many parallels with his own anarchistic and pacifistic views, as well as a living embodiment of early Christian communism. According to Sulerzhitsky, Tolstoy, "[m]aking an exception to his rule not to take royalties for his publications ... sold his novel Resurrection for the benefit of the Doukhobors." (5) In advocating the Doukhobors immigration to Canada as a solution to their repression at home, Mavor, in Toronto, wrote to James Allan Smart (b. 1858), deputy minister of the interior, on October 19, 1898: "I should mention also that their idea that they may as well be frozen to death in Canada as flogged to death by the Cossacks, is natural enough." (6)
As so many other immigrants in North America before the Doukhobors had discovered, the promise of a new land and a new life brought with it struggle and hardship and official persecution and support in unequal measures. The only possessions most new arrivals brought with them appear to have been trunks or chests containing clothing, domestic items, and tools--a fragile visual and material bridge between departure from home and arrival in North America, or, more specifically in the case of the Doukhobors, from the Russian steppes to the Canadian prairies. The chests' materials, construction, proportions and profile, colors and finish, decorative motifs, and overall aesthetic constitute a framework for analyzing the ways in which geography and Canadian society affected how the Doukhobors adopted and adapted these elements in their new environment. At the same time the reassuring presence of familiar forms and practices provided them with a stabilizing psychological underpinning.
Some elements require extensive consideration while others are simple and straightforward. The woods used, for example, were similar and vary little in physical composition. Pine, spruce, and birch were all commonly used in both Canada and Russia, but Russian pine and spruce have more well-defined graining and greater weight than their North American counterparts, facts that are further accentuated in a constructed state by the thickness of the planks used in Russia.
Like the materials, construction techniques are, with some variations, closely related in the Russian and Canadian pieces. In accordance with centuries' old traditions of good joinery, mortise-and-tenon techniques prevail in cupboards and tables, while dovetailed construction predominates in boxes of all sizes. Unlike the furniture made by the Doukhobors in the Canadian West, however, Russian pieces often use visible through-tenon joints, and cupboards have vertical-post tongue-and-groove joinery and horizontal backboards, while analogous North American forms employ blind tenons and vertically nailed backboards. With few exceptions, most nails used on Russian furniture have crosshatched heads, while those used by the Doukhobors in Canada do not.
In contrast to the material similarity between traditional Russian folk pieces and those of the Canadian Doukhobors, the decoration on the two types differs greatly. The range of colors employed was similarly broad in both places, but the decorative application and the motifs used are distinct and constitute defining characteristics. Our examination and analysis will be limited to three categories of furniture--cupboards, boxes, and tables--since few imported chairs, benches, beds, and small domestic pieces from Russia are available for comparative purposes at present.
Cupboards constituted a major item in the domestic interior and were therefore more subject to decorative elaboration. Generally of imposing size and proportion, cupboards in the Russian tradition are broad, deep, and relatively low in height, probably reflecting low ceilings and modest living spaces. Although often constructed in one piece, they appear as two-part storage units of balanced proportions, usually with fielded rectilinear panels that convey a sense of solidity and stability and a certain heaviness. Russian cupboards were frequently fastened to the walls and further integrated with the architecture of a room by having painted and decorated surfaces that echoed that of the wainscoting, moldings, and door and window frames.
Russian cupboards with multiple outlined panels, such as the one in Figure 6, seem to call for further decorative elements, perhaps a lingering reflection of traditional methods of icon production, in which several artisans were responsible for the decoration of a single object, a practice that encouraged a proliferation of visual effects. The roses, tulips, and other floral ornaments that embellish panels are treated in an iconic manner that emphasizes centrality and focus; another hand may well have applied the field colors and trompe-l'oeil graining that serve as background. The background color on most Russian cupboards ranges from shades of red-brown to orange, and is sometimes painted to imitate graining.
In contrast, the paint on Canadian Doukhobor cupboards is plain and simple. It invariably emphasizes the composition of the whole by making the component parts clear--cornice, top section, waist, lower doors, base, and foot. Doukhobor cupboards have single color fields, often outlined by another color in such combinations as blue and green, yellow and green, pink and green, or orange and green, with the darker color applied to moldings, cornices, and other edges. While floors, walls, and interior trim were almost always white or neutral in color in Doukhobor houses in Canada, in rural interiors in some regions of Russia, such as Vologda, (7) bright colors and often repeated motifs were used to create a blended effect between furniture, walls, and paneling.
Doukhobor cupboards, including hanging versions, occasionally have carved and shaped profiles. A few familiar animals such as horses and birds sometimes appear as silhouettes on cornices but seldom appear elsewhere. (8) In contrast, flowers and foliate imagery are common painted motifs on Russian cupboards and chests, along with symbolic animals: "lions, Bereginy [Slavic spirits of nature], and other creatures ... were often painted on cupboard doors, large storage chests, and even the floors." (9)
On January 20, 1899, the SS Lake Huron, thirty days out of Batum on the Black Sea, arrived off Halifax, Nova Scotia, and its passengers disembarked the following day at Lawlor's Island for quarantine inspection. The ship then proceeded on to Saint John, New Brunswick, where the settlers started their train trip west to Winnipeg in Manitoba and beyond. At Winnipeg, one group of men was sent ahead to begin preparations for the construction of houses and other necessary buildings. In the four months that followed, three other shiploads of immigrants arrived in Canada, bringing the total number of Doukhobors to about seventy-five hundred. James Mavor (1854-1925), a professor of economics at the University of Toronto and supporter of Doukhobor immigration to Canada, recorded on May 21, 1899: "At a station in the prairie last night there was an American Indian in his native costume, and with red paint or colour on his cheeks; also a crowd of Galicians who were coming in on the train, and a few Doukhobors: a very strange throng indeed." (1) This "strange throng" anticipated in microcosm the mix of ethnic identities that settled the Canadian prairies and British Columbia in the years that followed. The Europeans' arrival was facilitated by the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1885. With the exception of a few individuals, and various Doukhobor internal exiles held in Russia, Doukhobor immigration to Canada ended about 1905.
The origins and evolution of this religious reform movement in the eighteenth century were based on a sweeping double rejection of all organized and dogmatic forms of religion and external secular authority. This radical stance brought the group into immediate conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church and, of course, with the Russian czarist government. (2) In terms of spiritual belief and the ways in which that belief is practiced, the Doukhobors refused the external material manifestations and practices of the Orthodox Church, including the preeminence given to the Bible and the historical Christ. In 1785 Archbishop Ambrosius of Ekaterinoslav first used the term Dukho-borets (spirit wrestlers) to describe these outsiders, who struggled against the spirit of Christ. (3) The Doukhobors gave this pejorative designation a positive turn by declaring that it should mean those who wrestle with rather than against the spirit of Christ. The Doukhobors abandoned iconography, church buildings, artifacts, ritual, and the priestly class in a radical return to what they saw as the principles of early Christianity. They proclaimed God to be indwelling--that is, present within each person--thus making both priests and churches irrelevant to the spiritual life of the community. Similarly, printed biblical texts were replaced in Doukhobor social and religious life by their own oral psalms and hymns. Recounting his experiences crossing the Atlantic twice with the Doukhobors bound for Canada in 1899, Leopold Antonovich Suler-zhitsky (1872-1916) wrote:
The majority of the Doukhobors are convinced, to this day, that their psalms represent something original, having nothing in common with printed gospel. It seems to them that the unperverted teaching of Jesus Christ can be learned only from their psalms.... The Doukhobors never wrote down these psalms. They are passed on orally from generation to generation and are preserved only in the memory. (4)
The formalism and the authority of the czsarist empire were equally repugnant to the Doukhobors, who tried to avoid bureaucratic intervention in their lives by refusing to register births, deaths, and marriages, and, in particular, by steadfastly opposing military service. The implicit egalitarianism inherent in this rejection of authority, the assertion of personal freedom, and the beliefs in the presence of God in every individual and that all men are brothers attacked the very bases upon which church and state were founded, and caused the Doukhobors more than two centuries of official persecution.
As repression of the Doukhobors became more and more severe, a number of outside people stepped in to find a solution. Among the most important and influential was Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who found in Doukhobor beliefs many parallels with his own anarchistic and pacifistic views, as well as a living embodiment of early Christian communism. According to Sulerzhitsky, Tolstoy, "[m]aking an exception to his rule not to take royalties for his publications ... sold his novel Resurrection for the benefit of the Doukhobors." (5) In advocating the Doukhobors immigration to Canada as a solution to their repression at home, Mavor, in Toronto, wrote to James Allan Smart (b. 1858), deputy minister of the interior, on October 19, 1898: "I should mention also that their idea that they may as well be frozen to death in Canada as flogged to death by the Cossacks, is natural enough." (6)
As so many other immigrants in North America before the Doukhobors had discovered, the promise of a new land and a new life brought with it struggle and hardship and official persecution and support in unequal measures. The only possessions most new arrivals brought with them appear to have been trunks or chests containing clothing, domestic items, and tools--a fragile visual and material bridge between departure from home and arrival in North America, or, more specifically in the case of the Doukhobors, from the Russian steppes to the Canadian prairies. The chests' materials, construction, proportions and profile, colors and finish, decorative motifs, and overall aesthetic constitute a framework for analyzing the ways in which geography and Canadian society affected how the Doukhobors adopted and adapted these elements in their new environment. At the same time the reassuring presence of familiar forms and practices provided them with a stabilizing psychological underpinning.
Some elements require extensive consideration while others are simple and straightforward. The woods used, for example, were similar and vary little in physical composition. Pine, spruce, and birch were all commonly used in both Canada and Russia, but Russian pine and spruce have more well-defined graining and greater weight than their North American counterparts, facts that are further accentuated in a constructed state by the thickness of the planks used in Russia.
Like the materials, construction techniques are, with some variations, closely related in the Russian and Canadian pieces. In accordance with centuries' old traditions of good joinery, mortise-and-tenon techniques prevail in cupboards and tables, while dovetailed construction predominates in boxes of all sizes. Unlike the furniture made by the Doukhobors in the Canadian West, however, Russian pieces often use visible through-tenon joints, and cupboards have vertical-post tongue-and-groove joinery and horizontal backboards, while analogous North American forms employ blind tenons and vertically nailed backboards. With few exceptions, most nails used on Russian furniture have crosshatched heads, while those used by the Doukhobors in Canada do not.
In contrast to the material similarity between traditional Russian folk pieces and those of the Canadian Doukhobors, the decoration on the two types differs greatly. The range of colors employed was similarly broad in both places, but the decorative application and the motifs used are distinct and constitute defining characteristics. Our examination and analysis will be limited to three categories of furniture--cupboards, boxes, and tables--since few imported chairs, benches, beds, and small domestic pieces from Russia are available for comparative purposes at present.
Cupboards constituted a major item in the domestic interior and were therefore more subject to decorative elaboration. Generally of imposing size and proportion, cupboards in the Russian tradition are broad, deep, and relatively low in height, probably reflecting low ceilings and modest living spaces. Although often constructed in one piece, they appear as two-part storage units of balanced proportions, usually with fielded rectilinear panels that convey a sense of solidity and stability and a certain heaviness. Russian cupboards were frequently fastened to the walls and further integrated with the architecture of a room by having painted and decorated surfaces that echoed that of the wainscoting, moldings, and door and window frames.
Russian cupboards with multiple outlined panels, such as the one in Figure 6, seem to call for further decorative elements, perhaps a lingering reflection of traditional methods of icon production, in which several artisans were responsible for the decoration of a single object, a practice that encouraged a proliferation of visual effects. The roses, tulips, and other floral ornaments that embellish panels are treated in an iconic manner that emphasizes centrality and focus; another hand may well have applied the field colors and trompe-l'oeil graining that serve as background. The background color on most Russian cupboards ranges from shades of red-brown to orange, and is sometimes painted to imitate graining.
In contrast, the paint on Canadian Doukhobor cupboards is plain and simple. It invariably emphasizes the composition of the whole by making the component parts clear--cornice, top section, waist, lower doors, base, and foot. Doukhobor cupboards have single color fields, often outlined by another color in such combinations as blue and green, yellow and green, pink and green, or orange and green, with the darker color applied to moldings, cornices, and other edges. While floors, walls, and interior trim were almost always white or neutral in color in Doukhobor houses in Canada, in rural interiors in some regions of Russia, such as Vologda, (7) bright colors and often repeated motifs were used to create a blended effect between furniture, walls, and paneling.
Doukhobor cupboards, including hanging versions, occasionally have carved and shaped profiles. A few familiar animals such as horses and birds sometimes appear as silhouettes on cornices but seldom appear elsewhere. (8) In contrast, flowers and foliate imagery are common painted motifs on Russian cupboards and chests, along with symbolic animals: "lions, Bereginy [Slavic spirits of nature], and other creatures ... were often painted on cupboard doors, large storage chests, and even the floors." (9)