Recently one American student has told me that his jogging shoes are made in some Taiwan village.
Even before that I knew that Southeast Asia is the workshop where they produce electronics and all sorts of stuff,
but I was surprised to learn that villagers make digital cameras, videos, and jeans. But we also had villages, where they produced stoneware,
or painted trays, or bone-lace. All these were popular arts. Why can’t we now and here, in Russia, make modern times closer to the countryside?
Here villagers would paint plastic cards, and there they would lathe baroque furniture decorations, and over there they would sew leather bags,
porte-monnaies, portfolios, etc. And surely, one should not forget our own traditions, our native and beloved materials: hemp,
unwoven felt, birch bark. So I decided to create something folky, and made a book cover of felt muffles.
I wrote the book myself, printed it myself, and bound it in the muffles. Once, when I showed this book in Germany,
I was told by my German colleagues: «Actually, unvowen felt was invented by our Joseph Boiss in the middle of the 60s».
I think, it’s time for us to right the historical wrong.
Mikhail Karasik,
16.08.2003
A spade, a moil, an axe are totemic symbols of the Russian soul used to build izbas, cut down trees, dig graves, work in the mines.
A spade, a moil and axe are held in hands with gloves, or (here) muffles or mittens…
Muffles blur the boundary between the city and the countryside, a worker and a professor…
Hands in muffles built communism, broke virgin soil; scientists used them to master peaceful atoms (rubber muffles) and the space.
Muffles have no sizes, nor any special cut. They are the same for men and women. A muffle is a rough mould of a hand: a palm and five fingers.
All the fingers held together is a symbol of the patriarchal, collective nature of the Russian man.
In ancient times the palm was a measure of space and weight: five palms, ten palms… Muffles are our history, our culture, our revolution.
It is known that when young Joseph Dzhugashvili (Stalin) escaped from Siberia, he met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Shushenskoye.
At parting Lenin presented him with his own winter muffles… Lenin liked to give their muffles as presents… he presented them to freezing workers,
to sentries in the Smolny Palace, to kids during his walks in Gorki, to peasants’ foot-messengers, which were coming from afar to get his advice.
In Ilyich’s study in the Kremlin there was an old Italian wooden carved chest made in the first quarter of the 15th century, and Lenin always
had a few pairs of muffles for the guests there…
(Mikhail Karasik. From the book «The muffle»).
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