SOURCE: "Three Sisters: The Battle between Carnival and Lent," in Canadian American Slavic Studies, Vol. 22, Nos. 1-4, Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter 1988, pp. 369-75.

In the following essay, Nilsson examines images of festivity and celebration counterpoised by images of abstinence and deprivation in Three Sisters.

One of the rooms devoted to modern pre-revolutionary art in the Leningrad Russian Museum is dominated by a large painting by Boris Kustodiev called Maslenitsa. It was first shown at the Mir iskusstva Exhibition in January 1916 where it attracted general attention. Although painted in the midst of the war and at a time when the artist was suffering from an illness which was to keep him handicapped for the rest of his life, it presented the light and timeless world of Russian provincial towns and national holidays, a theme which was a speciality of his art.

Using pure and bright colors and different perspectival planes, the picture...