© by Klaus Barthelmess, Cologne, Germany, 2000/2006
This little miscellany on Soviet scrimshaw is extracted (and slightly updated) from my handout accompanying the special exhibition on "Soviet Whaling", I arranged for the Fifth Cologne Whaling Meeting, an international whaling history conference hosted then by the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, on 10 – 12 November 2000. This exhibition – featuring 77 objects, 18 of which were scrimshaw pieces – attempted to shed light on some aspects of whaling technology and whaling culture in the USSR, in the hope to increase the awareness of the peculiarities of Soviet whaling and to stimulate the collecting of pertaining art and artifacts and thereby the scholarly study of an important – read: economically and ecologically very enlightening – chapter of world whaling history.
Scrimshaw, the avocational folk art of people associated with the whaling industry, has been practised in the Soviet Union as well. In most cases, Soviet scrimshaw can be distinguished from similar folk art made by whalers in other modern whaling cultures, even if kyrillic inscriptions - which invariably identify its origin - are lacking or have been abraded by subsequent owners. Colouring is often very distinctive. Much more prevalent than the black pigment found to colour the engraved pictorial scrimshaw of other whaling nations, is either brown or polychrome colouring.
In the German Maritime Museum, there is a sperm whale tooth with a picture made with a soldering iron applied to the polished tooth surface. Several other items on display have brown pigment in the lines incised with a pointed tool. Whether these lines were "coloured" with a hot needle burning the ivory, or if pigment was applied, has not yet been examined.
Another quite distinctive feature of Soviet scrimshaw is polychromy. Sometimes colours are very vivid, with blue, green, red and orange besides black and dark brown. Jan Oelker (who spoke on „present-day marine mammal hunting with the Chukchee“ at the 2000 conference) reports that the Chukchee ivory carvers and engravers (of the so-called „school of Uelen“) use standard colour crayon pencils to colour their engraved pictorial scrimshaw on walrus tusks and afterwards apply some fixative. The colour palette of engraved pictorial scrimshaw from modern Soviet whaling is somewhat more limited than that of Chukchee work, and the incised lines are frequently a little broader and deeper.
From the items that have come to light in Western collections (which possibly originate mostly from Kaliningrad, the home port of JURIJ DOLGORUKIJ), it appears that Soviet scrimshanders – when not designing their graphic layout for a tooth held sideways – may have preferred to mount their engraved sperm whale teeth in a position with the tooth tip pointing down, i.e. lower than the tooth root, giving the whole piece a fairly dynamic look. Most scrimshanders of other nations have usually chosen to display their whale teeth - if not sideways as well - in a more or less "natural" position - as found in the sperm whale’s lower jaw - with the root forming the base and the tip pointing up.
Last, some typical Russian or Soviet motifs help identify Soviet scrimshaw when inscriptions are lacking and the workmanship is indistinctive. Russian fashion or scenes from Russian fairy and folk tales, representations of MIRNIJ-class whale catchers, or icons from the Soviet revolution.
Two years after my little exhibition, the hitherto best or rather: only, book on Russian scrimshaw was published, a 100-page, bilingual (Russian-English), superbly illustrated catalog of master carvings of the so-called "school of Uelen", recounting its history since its beginnings in the 1920s until today (Bronshtein et al., 2002). Uelen is a village on the Chukchee Peninsula, Siberia, inhabited by a substantial proportion of aboriginal Chukchee marine hunters. Their avocational folk art is exhibited in a tiny museum crammed full of wonderful scrimshaw pieces. Unfortunately, the Bronshtein-catalog is immensely difficult to obtain.