Men’s costume. The Russians. Early 20th century. Kursk Province

Russians

Costume

A good number of resettlers in Novorossiya came from the adjacent territories of southern Russian provinces, with Kursk Province among them. Often, peasants resettled with their families, since a lack of land was felt in their home country. Such resettlements were unauthorized or at the discretion of those recognized as the peasants’ owners, i.e. the State or the squires. Russian settlements in Novorossiya often neighbored on Ukrainian ones, or those of other ethnic groups (Bulgarians, Greeks, Moldavians, Germans etc.), each trying to retain its own tradition, including the costume, although some interaction of cultures definitely existed. At the same time, the urban fashion had an impact on traditional cultures. The traditional men’s clothing of Russian peasants, unlike the women’s one, did not display plenty of local characteristics. In most cases, such objects as trousers, hats, or leather boots from different territories of inhabitance of the Russians actually did not have any distinctive features. Some features could be noticed in the shirt and belt. The peasant clothes most often occurring in the Russian people’s settlement territory were kosovorotka (skewed-collar) shirts, which became an emblematic object of the Russian culture over time. The Kursk peasants resettling in Novorossiya wore shirts with the collar slit at the left side, while their Ukrainian neighbors usually wore shirts fastening at the front. The characteristic features of the Kursk shirts that survived in new settlement localities are white-and-red woven designs with a geometrical ornament, which decorated the collar, hem, and sleeve cuffs; sometimes, shirts were decorated with sewn-on braid instead of woven stripes. Unlike their Ukrainian neighbors, Russians wore their shirts untucked, tying them with thin braided belts with many color tassels or little balls. With time, the kosovorotka trend came to the Ukrainians too, and they began to wear them over the trousers, just like the Russians. The costume of a Kursk peasant was acquired by the RME collection as a result of the expedition G. N. Babayants, researcher of the Russian People’s Ethnography Department, in 1961.