Russian Lacquer Boxes

Hello All, I need help figuring out the value and info on these boxes I came across. Any help is greatly appreciated. There are quite a few so I will upload shortly. The pics are very close up due to having to be under 1MB.

 

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the guy grabbing feathers off the birds tail is the best painted one......very nice...

we don't generally do values here.....but we'd need to see the whole box ...with sizes...to even venture opinions....

maybe u need a Worthpoint account??

 

On the right it says Palekh, one of the famous Russian lacquer villages:

The Firebird, a fairy tale. (And a ballet.) There is a Firebird box in each set of photos.

 

The boxes vary in size. Most are around 1-2 inches tall. The lengths x widths vary around 2.5-4 inches wide x 4-5 inches long. I will look into that, thank you for the advice.

 

On the left it says Mstera, another lacquer village:

 

Thank you Any Jewelry. This is the kind of help I need with these. I am by no means an antique guy. Thank you in advance for this help.

 

You'r welcome, Justin. We have some Russian speakers here, they will be along later. I'll tag one, @Figtree3 . There are more, but my memory won't cooperate, so my apologies to anyone I left out.

 

You might find this website helpful:

https://www.russianamericancompany.com/lacquer-boxes-info/

 

Thank you Any Jewelry and 2manybooks for the help!

 

I'm not a native Russian speaker. Have an undergrad degree in Russian, but my skills are somewhat rusty. So it would take me a little while to run these through Google translate. I also can't always tell which photos go together on the same box, so will refer to them in the order in which they were posted.

First, will tell you that the city in which the box is made is usually included on the left, although sometimes on the right (as the city name of one that has been ID'd from Palekh is). The title of the picture on the box, if any, is usually in the middle, surrounded by quotation marks. The name of the person who painted the box is sometimes at the right, and sometimes is only initials.

I've only looked at image #2 in your first post so far. The title is "Зимушка-зимa" -- or "Zimushka-zima" in the Latin alphabet. I don't know the exact translation but the word "zima" is "winter" and the first word "Zimushka" sounds like a name based on the word "winter." I find online that there is a folk song with that title and also some cartoons/animations.

The words in image #4 of the first post are Конёк-горбунок (Konyok-gorbunok), which is "The Little Hump-backed Horse," a well-known folk tale.

I will come back later to see whether any native Russian speakers can pick up the slack to help. I need to look around this site a little, then have to leave for a while. May not be back here until tomorrow.

I hope this helps.

By the way, if these boxes are relatively new, and they probably are, the costs can vary by size and also by which country the buyers/sellers are in. About 15 years ago I had the pleasure of visiting St. Petersburg on my only visit to Russia. These types of boxes, many quite beautiful, were being sold by vendors on the street for anywhere from $50-$150. Most were under $100 unless quite large in size.

 

I've rarely had any luck selling them here, but apparently some can and do.

 

The pictures have now been inserted in full size and the order in which they appear has now changed from what I wrote before. What I called image #2 is now the final image in post #1. However, it is still visible in the current image #1. The one that I called image #4 in post #1 is now image #3.

I can't read the letters well enough in the other item in post #1, so will skip it.

In post #2, the first box (two images) depicts the Firebird and I don't see any writing on it.

The second box (two images) is Сивка-бурка (Sivka-Burka) which is apparently the name of a horse in a folk tale. The Russian version of Wikipedia gives this basic description of the story: "This was the most popular fairy tale among Pudozh storytellers - more than twenty variants are known [1] . In the course of the tale, Ivan the Fool marries the princess and turns into a prince with the help of the magic horse Sivka-burka." As Any Jewelry mentioned, the box comes from the Mstera factories.

I can't make out the writing on the third box in post #2.

I also can't read most of the writing on the fourth box in post #2, except the word at the left is Mstera.