Is it true that the origin of the word "sweatshirt" is associated with Leo Tolstoy?

On the Internet you can find the statement that the name of this item of clothing comes from the name of the Russian writer. We checked how reasonable this statement is.

They write about the connection of sweatshirts and Leo Tolstoy and sitesselling clothes, and bloggers (for example, in Livejournal,VKontakte"And on the platform"Zen"). It is alleged that the name was formed from the free shirt, which was worn by the author of “War and Peace”.

The spacious peasant shirt, tattered by a belt, was everyday clothes for Leo Tolstoy. In it, the writer is depicted both on the portrait of the work of Ivan Kramsky (1873), and in the paintings of Ilya Repin (1887) and Mikhail Nesterov (1907). 

During the life of Tolstoy, this item was not called a sweatshirt. So, critic Vladimir Stasov in article He used the word “blouse” about the Repin Portrait: “He looks directly at the audience, tilting a mighty head to the side of a little, with a long gray beard, a black blouse is worn on it (on the portrait of 1873, he is also in a blouse, only blue), the blouse is pulled in a belt in the waist, but somehow looks like a young man.”

At the end of the XIX century, the word "sweatshirt" denoted a follower Tolstoy -The religious and ethical teachings of Leo Tolstoy, which implied a rejection of violence against living beings and domestic luxury. For example, it was in this context that Nikolai Leskov used it in the essay "Corral”(1893):“ If you may be Tolstoy, then it is; But in vain he signed for all women. Maybe they are as he expresses, but for this they had to be disfigured in a special way from childhood. And my daughter, as you see, is a living and full of life, not a sweatshirt. ” Another example of usage is in his own story "Winter day”(1894):“ Yeah, that means she is a sweatshirt! Well, nothing: I hate all sorts of utopias, but the servant, in my opinion, is even fine for the servant. ”

In relation to the writer's clothes, the word “sweatshirt” is found in memoirs writer Andrei Bely: “The gray beard became white at all, she frowned and decreased; no longer in civilian clothes - in a sweatshirt; He sat stuck in front of his mother. " But Bely wrote the book “At the Border of two Centuries” already in 1930, when the word was widespread in everyday life.

“Sweatshirt is the most common type of clothing of a Soviet worker,” wrote in the book “The language of the revolutionary era"(1928) Soviet linguist Afanasy Selishchev. The outerwear of a free cut, belted with a belt, was perceived as a symbol of revolutionary simplicity, was contrasted with old -regime frock coats and tailcoats. Details about this in the story "Grand slam"(1934) Boris Pilnyak:" Human clothing was rebuilt not only by the fact that the galloons, gold and insignia disappeared - but because it was unnoticed, poorly dressed, it was decent to be decent, a red scarf and a brown hog of water flowing, boots, a cap, casing disappeared along with a hat. " In the story of Evgeny Zamyatin "X"(1919) A burgundy sweatshirt converted from the cassock is a key image in the description of the tragedy of the deacon, looking for his place in a new life:" It would be impossible: but it is impossible: from the corner of his deacon sees that it is not a cassock, but a burgundy sweatshirt. " In Soviet literature, 1920-1930, although simple, but everyday clothes are also dressed in a sweatshirt, and Berlag's accountant in "Gold calf", And the poet homeless in"Master and Margarita".

However, the Soviet sweatshirt was different from the peasant Tolstoy blouse. By the mid-1920s, the upper shirt of the half-willed cut was called, and only the length and an indispensable belt resembled the clothes that the writer wore.

And ten years later, the sweatshirt left even further from the original model and began to remind the jacket more.

Only one style was similar to a traditional sweatshirt - the “sweatshirt of the artist”, which painters often used as a working blouse.

Extending simplicity in clothes gradually went out of fashion in the late 1920s. In 1927 in the poem "Stabilization of life"Vladimir Mayakovsky condemned the return to the pre -revolutionary style, mentioning and Slust:

I suggest

                    so that this ideological fight

did not last meaningless further

sew

                    To sweatshirts

                                            Faldy from a tailcoat

And wear

                Lacked sandals.

Nadezhda Mandelstam in his memoirs She described this process as follows: “It was no longer supposed to walk in a torn form and it was necessary to have a completely master's appearance in order to go to the editor or to the film committee. The jacket and sweatshirt of the Komsomol members of the twenties finally went out of fashion - "everything should look like before."

By the 1940s, sweatshirts almost disappeared from everyday life. The word returned already in the 1990s as a designation of a free soft sweater with a hood. In the newspaper Kommersant in 1992 it It was written in quotation marks, and in 1993, when the use, apparently, became more frequent and familiar, already Without them. The term became an analogue of later borrowed from the English “sweatshirt” and “hoody”, and the word, apparently, was chosen because of a free cut resembling the original sweatshirts.

Photo on the cover: Ilya Repin. Plowman. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy on arable land. 1887. Tretyakov Gallery

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