A primary stimulus to Russia's cultural renaissance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the rediscovery and promotion of forms and motifs in vernacular architecture, ceramics, textiles, and furniture. Eager to preserve an artistic legacy vanishing in the face of modernization, enlightened critics, historians, and collectors such as Savva Mamontov, Vladimir Stasov, and Princess Mariia Tenisheva set about acquiring, evaluating, and annotating indigenous artifacts such as distaffs, peasant clothing, wooden decorations, even pot and pans. Thanks to their noble initiatives, a heritage of extraordinary beauty was propagated, rescued, and perpetuated.

But as Dzhesko Ozer demonstrates in his magnum opus on the wooden objects produced at the Talashkino workshops, Maecenates such as Princess Tenisheva were often not only cognoscenti and collectors, but also astute businesspeople, interested in the national and international commercial distribution of Russian peasant wares. To this end, for example, Tenisheva turned her country estate, Tatalshkino near Smolensk, into an arts colony, commissioning both local artisans and professional artists such as Sergei Maliutin, Nikolai Rerikh, Dmitrii Stelletskii, and Mikhail Vrubel΄ to help revive the popular handicrafts through reinterpretation and reproduction. In his exhaustive monograph Ozer reveals how Tenisheva's workshops were established, how they functioned, how hand craftsmen and craftswomen examined and embellished traditional ornaments and patterns especially from vestments and woodwork so as to manufacture all manner of chairs, tables, boxes, picture-frames, closets, and toys.

Advancing by detailed assessments of the many facets of the Talashkino project, the first volume of Talashkino, Dereviannye izdeliia masterskikh kn. M, Kl. Tenishevoi contains essays on Tenisheva as designer, the Moscow outlet Rodnik, Vrubel΄ and Maliutin, connections with the World of Art group and others, as well as vintage photographs and numerous full and half-page colored illustrations of items originating from the workshops. The second volume, on the other hand, presents the chronology of Talashkino, an anthology of critical responses, and the catalogue raisonné—with full curatorial data—of the objects in wood produced between 1903 and 1909. Bearing an admixture of Art Nouveau (the stil΄ modern), historicism, and the fundamental “primitive” vocabulary of flowers, siren birds, owls, and other exotic species, the artifacts were both functional and esthetic, and in the 1900s–10s attained wide visibility owing to the Rodnik store, exhibitions, and publications.

For decades Tenisheva and her brain-child, Talashkino, suffered gross neglect at the hands of historians and collectors. Reduced to a ruin after riots during the 1905 revolution, the October Revolution, Tenisheva's emigration, German occupation during World War II, and Soviet ideological disdain (only now is the Church at Talashkino being restored), the attainments of Tenisheva's cottage industry were compromised, decimated, and scattered. Piecing together the jigsaw puzzle, Ozer embarked upon an arduous and complex venture so as to undertake long and painstaking research in public and private art collections, documentary and photographic archives, auction records, and provenance indices, both Russian and western. As a result, Ozer located and evaluated numerous examples of wooden objects, presenting them in Volume Two with an excellent concordance of full bibliography, chronology, critical digest, and exhibition list, together with “A Historical Account of the Talashkino Workshops” in English.

In many ways, this work is a monument not only to Tenisheva and Talashkino, but also to the art of the book. The Moscow publishing-house, Dom Rudentsovykh, is to be commended for its observance of the highest typographical, decorative, and editorial traditions of the Russian de-luxe edition. We should be grateful for this model of perfect harmony between author's intent and publisher's mission that restores a foremost heroine of the Silver Age to the pantheon of Russian patronage.