How old are the dancing dolls cast

Where to go, what to see?

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The name of Ekaterina Medyantseva is almost forgotten today, but her dolls are still dancing on Earth.

Straw doll is fragile and delicate. The child will take it in his hands, a day - another will play - and that's it.
Is everything?
Not so easy. There remains a feeling of warmth, alive and something distant, coming from the gene memory, stored in the earth and in the sky. It is no coincidence that a doll can only be made from straw, compressed by hand. If the harvester has passed or the field has been fed with chemistry, there will be no more toys. There won't be a miracle. Straw breaks, hardens and is silent. This is what the legendary craftswoman Ekaterina Konstantinovna Medyantseva once told. A man who revived in the sixties of the last century the art of creating a straw toy, dating back to pagan antiquity and, as it was believed, already lost forever.
Her works are kept in the museums of Penza and Moscow, no one knows how many of them ended up in private collections in Russia and abroad. They were exhibited in the Hermitage and the Louvre. Central magazines and newspapers wrote about the grandmother from the village of Mikhailovka. For her toys went from all over the country.
And then came the sunset, which always comes when you don't expect it. Her earthly path ended in the Penza House of Veterans. By that time, 95-year-old Medyantseva was practically blind. Like an evil smile of fate. After all, once young, beautiful, full of strength, unexpectedly for many, she chose a blind musician as her husband. There are many such coincidences in her fate, most often tragic, as if time asked her for returning to us, it seemed, forever already belonging only to him.

House under the pines
When I finally decided to tackle the topic of Medyantseva, many people in Penza were surprised: “Why are you all of a sudden? Why?"
But in Mikhailovka, this interest did not surprise anyone. And the very first grandmother she met told in detail the way to the house of Ekaterina Konstantinovna.
- Go straight ahead, then through the dam, there you will see. Two pine trees grow side by side, do not get lost. Only she's been gone for a long time.
- Yes, we know.
- Is it true that she was buried there in Chemodanovka in Penza, you don’t understand how?
I just nod my head and feel an agonizing sense of shame.
- Surely it was impossible to bring here? We would do everything humanly.
Mikhailovka is not very big. We arrive quickly. Two pines turn out to be huge fir trees. Do not approach the rickety house. Everything has been overgrown for a long time. Only at the edge of the plot tends branches strewn with red fruits, an apple tree once planted by my grandmother. It was in winter and late autumn that she became a poet and artist, and in summer she was a gardener and beekeeper.
Behind her house there is only a yellowing endless field, from which the bread has already been removed. And in the farthest place, where the gold converges with the blue, a forest is guessed on a hillock. I want to sit in the grass, look into this distance to infinity, until my eyes water.
No, it's not true that a person doesn't care where to lie after death. His soul does not care where to fly. At least occasionally. Even if he knew here not only happiness.
To escape from despair
- Her personal fate did not work out, - Olga Dudarova, an employee of the regional museum of folk art, sighs. - The father was repressed. The mother could not bear the grief and died a year after that. In the arms of Medyantseva were four younger brothers and sisters. She lifted them all by herself. She gave everyone an education. She fell in love with a blind accordion player from her fellow villager, got married. And then he went to another. She managed to return it, but at that time their young child died. Then there was no husband. You know, maybe from here, from this disorder, as a protest, a breakthrough to the light from everything that did not take place, as a salvation from despair, all her work came out? She not only made dolls, and sang, and wrote poetry ...
I listen to Olga Viktorovna and involuntarily recall the fate and martyrdom of another almost forgotten now Penza grandmother - the poetess Matryona Smirnova from Russian Ishim. And what about our storyteller Ulyana Yezhkova, who ended her life in the same House of Veterans as Medyantseva?
Fates are different, but similar in one: an exorbitantly heavy price for entering culture, contact with the subtle, fragile and wayward world. Giving much and asking for much.

Broken thread
No one knows, of course, how the Medyantsev doll actually began. There is only a purely household version.
- In the mid-sixties, an exhibition of craftsmen was being prepared in the House of Folk Art, - says Olga Dudarova. - It was then that they remembered the straw dolls that were once made in Mikhailovka. They asked Ekaterina Konstantinovna to try to make one. At that time she was the leader of the Mikhailovsky folk choir, which she herself created. This choir thundered throughout the country, they even took them to Moscow on tour. For this choir, Ekaterina Konstantinovna was awarded the title of Honored Worker of Culture.
Medyantseva herself often recalled how difficult it was for her and how clumsy that first doll came out. And then it went... She stayed in Mikhailovka, and her dolls walked all over the world. They lived their separate lives, like children who flew away from their native nest, and there is no exaggeration in this. It is today, due to our thoughtlessness, that we perceive the doll exclusively as a toy. At a time when fairy tales were not yet fairy tales, but remained part of real life, the doll was an artifact being. Attribute witchcraft, shamanic. A being through which people communicated with forces that today we call unreal. It is no coincidence that it is the doll that is entrusted with first protecting us in the cradle, and then leading us through childhood to adulthood. The last time, seriously and absolutely consciously, the magicians and sorcerers of the Silver Age, led by Meyerhold, tried to breathe life into the doll. Yes, but they could not cope with the forces they had brought to life. The tragic ending of that story is known.
Medyantsev - the story, however, is somewhat different. There was no intellectual artificial cleverness here, and she worked with material alive. She simply wove her dolls, without thinking that she was weaving a path connecting the present with a truly deep primordial past, restoring the once broken connection of times. It didn't work out. This fragile thread broke, like many other things, in the 90s of the last century, which became cursed for Russia.
Before that, guests often came to her. Journalists, art historians, authorities. She welcomed everyone, made and gave dolls without fail. She asked for only one thing: to find students to pass on the secrets of craftsmanship. Don't let revived art die. Students appeared and disappeared. They mastered the basics, and then switched to something else. AT 90th, everyone was no longer up to dolls and not up to Medyantseva.
From mournful loneliness, humiliating helplessness, almost blind Ekaterina Konstantinovna asked to save herself. The village administration allocated a car to take the pride of the region to the House of Veterans. Did Medyantseva understand then that it was forever? For sure. And still, she could hardly see her Mikhailovka from the window of that car for the last time. And not just because of bad eyesight. After all, tears are useful only for the soul, but for the eyes it is akin to cataracts.

Dancing in the void...
- In recent years, Ekaterina Konstantinovna has learned to make special, dancing dolls. She called them “round dances,” says Kirill Zastrozhny, Deputy Minister of Culture of the Penza Region. - You put such a doll on the table, beat out the rhythm on it, and she starts to dance. An ordinary straw doll in Mikhailovka, probably, can still be made now, but no one seems to be dancing. We lost it.
In those years, we generally lost a lot, and I'm afraid we will count those losses for a long time to come. By the way, after that confusion, even experts today cannot name all the places where Medyantsevo dolls have settled and still live and dance for someone.
Fortunately for me, I have seen a real one, dancing, feel how this fantastic whirl is tightening, as if it was not you, but a doll that sets the rhythm and says something. But we don't understand her language.
In Mikhailovka, we meet Lilia Ivanovna Zubareva, the head teacher of the local school, who opens up a small room dedicated to the Medyantseva Museum for us.
I rummage through the drawer where Ekaterina Konstantinovna's correspondence is carefully stored. People wrote to distant Mikhailovka not only from all over the country, but also from abroad.
- Unfortunately, now, probably, it is already impossible to find out who these people were, - Lilia Ivanovna sighs. - We somehow recorded on a cassette how grandmothers sing, who is still alive from the Medyantsevo choir, we are now being told that we must definitely rewrite this on a disk. And where is the money to get it?
The museum is kept on bare enthusiasm. Except for the meager money allocated by the local administration.
Already saying goodbye, I ask Zubareva if they can now weave a real straw doll in Mikhailovka?
- I don't even know. Hardly. We usually teach children such applied things at labor lessons. We only try to make sure that these are things that are useful in the household. Well, judge for yourself, they will bring home, let's say, a stool. Everything is clear, the thing is necessary, it was not in vain that they sat at school. And if a doll ... Parents will say, they say, this is pampering. Not seriously.
How to know...
“The clue to the incomprehensible is located on the border between the living and the dead, there is also an animated doll,” wrote Irina Uvarova, an outstanding researcher and connoisseur of dolls, in her book “The sorcerer laughs in every doll”.
Nothing in this world happens by chance. And it is absolutely no coincidence that the revived Medyants doll came to us. She doesn't just dance. She says. About something, perhaps the most important for us.
But we still don't understand her language.

... and singing in the dark
Ekaterina Konstantinovna Medyantseva lived in a nursing home for about five years. She didn't make dolls anymore.
- She rarely had guests. She was not caressed with attention during these years, - recalls the psychologist of the House of Veterans Valentina Maslova. - I was very worried that everything turned out like this: I helped everyone, but in the end I was left alone. Sometimes I went into myself for a long time. And until the very last days she sang. In the corridor, in the room, in the hall. Most often, the songs that she wrote when she lived in Mikhailovka.
... She died in the summer of 2000. The quiet funeral at the Chemodanovskoye cemetery was completely taken over by the House of Veterans. Subsequently, at the expense of the same House of Veterans, a modest monument was erected on her grave.
- I was just afraid that they would completely forget it, - Anatoly Lomakin, director of the House of Veterans, told me.

Igor Kramskoy, Komsomolskaya Pravda - Penza

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