I love 19th century Russian painting, especially the work of the Peredvizhniki ("Wanderers"), and one of my favourites is Vasnetsov's "Alionushka":

http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vasnetsov/vasnetsov31.html

(sorry, bad repro -and you could say "mediocre artist", too -I know that Repin was the best!)

What this work illustrates is, that under the Tsar you had ordinary country women go barefoot all the time in summer. They simply did. On Sunday they would dress up for church in their embroidered dresses and headscarves, even an occasional kokoshnik, but stayed barefoot! I've seen the photos to prove it. (My mother's family were landowners under the Tsar, and I think that it's true that it was paradise back then for such people -and I've heard all the nostalgia.)

So, question: Are people going back to a barefoot lifestyle in the Russian countryside nowadays?

Hi Timonenkarkku

That's an interesting historic fact, thanks a lot for bringing it to the forum. I think that during the XVIII, XIX and maybe early XX century it was common for country girls all over the world to go barefoot. It was something practical and of course cheap. In Peru, my country, there's a beautiful folk dance called "Marinera Norteña" in which the man represents the rich landowner and the woman represents the peasant girl. Thus he wears shoes and she is barefoot. It is a sensual, joyful, elegant dance in which the woman conquests the man. There's more information in Wikipedia and lots of videos in YouTube in case you want to watch it.

I would also like to bring attention to Svenko

http://english.svenko.net/

a site dedicated to Russian romani people and their dances, with lots of photos and paintings by the great Nicolay Bessonov.

Another fascinating dance is Bulgaria's Nestinarstvo, in which the dancers dance barefoot on red hot coals. You can check http://nestinari.eu/indexEN.html and also see the beautiful and talented Desislava Jekova here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ajdbvfmDlo

Maybe other users from different parts of the world could let us know about dances in their countries in which women dance barefoot.

Thanks for the links. The Svenko site is charming, with beautiful photos of beautiful people.

I've had an interest, which I've alluded to on this forum somewhere else, about the selection of foot type for dancing. The most obvious to moderns is the standard foot that most women gymnasts seem have, which involves long metatarsals, low arches and a straight outer edge to the sole. Conversely, girls with long metatarsals really need to lose dreams about being ballet dancers because their feet are liable to suffer from stress fractures.

Also interesting are the sonic aspects of dancing barefoot. Clapping is obvious, but if one is dancing on a stone floor then sole-slapping could be an important part of the choreography. I've flagged up the possibility that the apsaras carved on the walls of the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia might have been deliberately selected to have flat feet for this purpose:

https://enthusiastical.wordpress.com/category/hindu/

However, I've had a reply that flat feet are probably an artistic canon in Khmer civilisation anyway. (BTW, this particular culture was 100% barefoot. I think that I am still correct in saying that no depiction of footwear has ever been found.)

This segues onto another question. The prevalence of high foot arches seem to be a feature of cold climate zones, most obviously the European. Low arches and flat feet seem commoner in, say, Africa. I do wonder why -did high arches evolve to minimise contact with cold ground, or were they an evolutionary response to wearing footwear in winter after the earliest colonisation of such zones?

You might want to check out the Russian sci-fi film Solaris. (Not the bad American remake!) Aside from it being a great movie, the leading actress is barefooted throughout the entire film!

Interesting that this should come up, as the City Feet model in the current update, Valya (Girl with Plaited Hair), makes me think of a perpetually barefoot farm girl who comes into the big city to see the sights. She just has this real natural beauty, and her feet have the look of a real barefooter to me. Of course, in reality, she's probably lived in Moscow her whole life, but her appearance suggests something else.