Choose any color for yourself: physics and metaphysics of color in the history of Russian culture

Marina Golubeva's research on the most important colors for the Russian worldview is at the intersection of history and psychology. The author notes that such an attribute of any culture as color inevitably reflects the peculiarities of the national character and the associated value system — not only aesthetic, but also moral. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.

Marina Golubeva

"Color in Russian culture. White light, red maiden, golden heart"

Moscow: MIF, 2026. 224 p.

The colors found in everyday life, fine art, architecture, and heraldry (as well as emotionally colored vocabulary) not only diversify and beautify life: "Streams of color permeate fine art, pour from the domes of temples, and make our daily lives brighter and richer. Moreover, this is not said for a red word. We live in a world of color, and color vision is not just an important gift of nature — it allows us to distinguish the most subtle emotional nuances of reality."

Golubeva tries to model this emotional perception of reality by our distant ancestors in the first part of the book, "The Color Code of Ancient Russia." However, the difficulty of calculating this code lies in the fact that there is not much reliable information about the color preferences of the ancient Slavs and Russians. In the ancient Russian texts of the XI–XIV centuries, for all their poetry, there are almost completely no references to the colors of the surrounding world, where the main philosophical and psychological category is light rather than color: "At best, we are dealing with a monochrome picture of the world, which has the concept of light and reflects the confrontation white as a manifestation of light and black as an attribute of darkness. Thus, in ancient Russian written culture, light dominates as a category of the highest good."

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Nevertheless, despite all the poverty of colors in ancient Russian literature (Golubeva mentions "The Legend of Boris and Gleb" by an anonymous author, the instructive prose of Kirill Turovsky, "The Word about the Destruction of the Russian Land", "The Life of Alexander Nevsky", "The Tale of the Devastation of Ryazan", "The Legend of the Mamaev Massacre" as examples of color asceticism"and even the vivid fairy tale "The Tale of Babylon the City"), a diligent researcher can identify the three main Russian colors. These are red, white and black, which are also distinguished by the fact that their names have nothing to do with objects of the corresponding color (as in the case of cherry, raspberry or lilac). All of them play an important role in such a famous example of ancient Russian fiction as "The Word about Igor's Regiment", from where you can at least learn something in terms of coloristics: "... the color diversity in the text of the "Word" is relative, although in it, along with white, black and shades of red (purple, scarlet) gold, blue, green, and gray are also mentioned — the latter exclusively in relation to the wolf. And even such a limited number of colors distinguishes "The Word about Igor's Regiment" from numerous works that are almost completely devoid of color."

Sergey Solomonovich Kobuladze's illustration "The Eclipse of the Sun" for the poem "The Word about Igor's Regiment"

Photo: RIA Novosti/Sverdlovsk

Defining white, red and black as the three sacred colors, the author of the book calls white a symbol of purity, righteousness and freedom, black associates with the forces of darkness (folk etymology establishes a relationship between the words "black" and "devil"), and red also connects with the beloved Russian people category of light, however, it is necessary to take into account the nuance: "...white is the light pouring from heaven, and red is the brilliance and radiance of fire, including heavenly, solar. Therefore, the word "red" in ancient times meant "fiery", "shining", "bright" and, of course, "beautiful". The origin of the word itself was probably connected with fire: according to many linguists, it goes back to the ancient root "krѣc" — meaning "fire".

To the three basic, fundamental colors in the second part of the book — "Multicolored patterns" — other colors of medieval Russia are added: gold, yellow, blue, blue, green. Here you can learn interesting technological details about the work of Russian artists, whose methods of obtaining the desired color sometimes had to differ from European ones. For example, in Europe, green paint was obtained by soaking copper filings in vinegar, which we did not have in sufficient quantity: "The old Russian craftsmen, who did not have cheap vinegar from sour grape wine, made a substitute for more affordable sour milk. As a result, the green paint turned out to be dim and dirty, which can often be seen on antique icons and book miniatures. To improve the color of the paint, the old icon painters added yellow pigment to it — saffron or rhubarb." Russian Russian art is characterized by multicolored patterns, which best reflected the Russian people's characteristic craving for a joyful, even enthusiastic perception of the world around them, as noted by many researchers of medieval Russian art. However, the author of the book never forgets about the psychosocial significance of color: "An important part of the ancient Russian culture of this time is considered to be multicolored, multicolored patterns that best reflected the Russian people's craving for a joyful, even enthusiastic perception of the world around them. Viktor Vasilyevich Bychkov in his book "Russian Medieval Aesthetics. XI–XVII centuries" called it the aesthetics of joy.

Mikhail Shibanov's painting "The Celebration of the Wedding Contract", 1777

Photo: Global Look Press

Russian Russian society becomes noticeably easier technologically in the third part of the book, "Color in Russian Society of the XVIII—XIX Centuries," which begins with a social turning point that occurred at the turn of the XVII and XVIII centuries: "... the Russian Middle Ages ended with its ecclesiastical dogmatism, and a new, secular, fundamentally realistic culture was born. By "opening a window to Europe," Peter the Great not only tried to make Russia a part of the Western world, but also opened up new opportunities for Russian people to develop their own art, science, and national identity in general. The desacralization and secularization of art accompanying these social shifts has led, according to Golubeva, to the fact that the color palette of secular painting has become much broader than in traditional icon painting, and most importantly— more lively and realistic. The palette of Russian speech, enriched with interesting and original names of colors, is also becoming more vivid compared to the pre-Petrine era. Not only orange, purple, beige, pistachio, and chocolate gradually came into use, but also such 19th—century delights familiar to many from literature as the thigh color of a frightened nymph, puree ("fleas in labor fever"), oreille ("bear's ear") or merdua - yellow-green with a brown sheen of goose the litter.

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The originality and metaphor with which the human imagination searches for the most expressive names for certain colors best reflects the complexity of the human worldview, which is ambivalent in any era, as psychologist and historian Golubeva notes.: "People intuitively understood that the world is more complicated than it appears in fairy tales, and good and evil in it have never been absolute. That is why, in order to adequately reflect reality, it is necessary to see those phenomena and entities that may belong to both the world of evil and the world of good or be on the verge of these worlds. This is clearly visible through the prism of the inconsistency of color perception." The ambivalence and complexity of many phenomena of the surrounding world is reflected in the ambiguity and inconsistency of color characteristics.: positive white may have negative connotations (for example, related to death), while negative black may have positive ones (for example, the black color of Archangel Michael's wings "means submission to the will of God and Michael's dedication to fighting the devil").

The author of the book traces the rather rigid binding of certain colors to certain meanings in the last chapter, which deals with state symbols and heraldry, in particular, the colors of Russian flags ("Red is a symbol of bravery, courage, love, and blood shed in the struggle"). Nevertheless, in conclusion, Golubeva comes to a philosophical conclusion about the extreme subjectivity and variability of the interpretation of color and the individual sensations associated with it: "... despite numerous scientific studies, not only ordinary people, but also serious scientists still do not understand whether color is an objective property of reality or a subjective perception of a person. Everyone sees colors in their own way, although they often have the same names."