Folk furniture of Canada's Doukhobors

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.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

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.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

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:

[FIGURE 4A OMITTED]

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

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.