Pancake Week

Painted in 1916 and now in the Tretyakov Gallery, 'Pancake Week' is one of Kustodiev's earliest major treatments of the Maslenitsa theme that would preoccupy him for much of the next decade. Executed before his disability had fully confined him, the painting draws on direct observation of provincial Russian winter festivals alongside the decorative aesthetics of Russian folk art. Kustodiev was deeply invested in what he saw as the authentic visual culture of old Russia — merchant towns, church bells, snow-covered market squares — as distinct from both the Westernised elite culture of St Petersburg and the revolutionary internationalism then gaining momentum. In 1916, with Russia embroiled in the catastrophe of the First World War, a painting celebrating communal festive joy carried an implicit elegiac charge. The Tretyakov version established the compositional vocabulary — panoramic snow scene, racing troikas, golden domes, merry crowds — that Kustodiev would refine across subsequent Shrovetide canvases throughout the Civil War years.

The panoramic composition employs a steeply elevated viewpoint characteristic of Russian icon painting and lubki popular prints, flattening space and allowing dense figure groupings across the entire picture surface. Kustodiev's palette is deliberately folkloric: strong primaries and clean whites applied with smooth, opaque confidence. The troika horses in the foreground are rendered with more gestural freedom than the architecturally precise town buildings in the mid-ground.