BLACKENING ON SILVER

Like the city of Novgorod, the City of Ustug the Great was the center of Russian culture, commerce and industry for a few centuries. Ustyug could do everything: fight, trade, and farm...
    Many of its citizens came to Alaska and California and settled there, while others travelled through Siberia and traded with India, China, and other countries. But those who did not like to travel and stayed at home did not sit idly by.
The people of Ustug town knew almost all the trades that had flourished in Russia and medieval Europe.
A man with the divine spark in the soul could take on all kinds of available crafts, but it was impossible to do a little of everything and nothing for real. Usually, one would choose an ancestral trade, building and perfecting a tradition or ignoring it. In both cases, the craftsman or the artist could manifest himself fully as a person. But in the second case, the craft would go down quickly, and skills and professional taste for beauty would disappear. It was enough for one generation that a canon of high beauty and a particular aesthetic "ceiling" would be lowered to the extreme. This would destroy the craft's artistic and aesthetic foundation, which is the primary condition of its scale, fame, and economic survival. A craft perishes…
 On the approach to the XX century and early XX century, blackening on silver would suffer the same fate if a few enthusiasts' patience and energy had exhausted. Therefore, we should be thankful for preserving the city of Ustug's magnificent art.
    Its essence is that the artist initially engraves silver and then fills the engraving with a special compound - blackening. This "tattoo," so to speak, is fixed by high temperature, i.e. the usual fire.
Ustuyg's plant "Severnaya Chern" produces good products in high demand at home and abroad. This compels our economists to increase the output to promote uniformity. The danger for artistry lies in mass production. Previously, the artist worked by himself from beginning to end (trusting no one, even his tool, not only products), and now the product is touched by many indifferent hands. For art to survive in such circumstances is incredibly difficult. Yet it survives.