String bag

Modern string bag

A string bag is an open netted bag. In particular, such bags were popular in USSR where they were called avoska (Russian: авоська) or perhaps-bag.^[1]

Avoska with items

Invention

The production of string bags dates back to 1920s to the town of Žďár nad Sázavou/Saar in former Czechoslovakia, present Czech Republic, when a salesman Vavřín Krčil, representing Jaro J. Rousek company, began to produce string bags under own trademark Saarense (EKV) at the local chateau Ždár. The production replaced former product - hair net, which was obsolete due to shorter hairstyles. String bags brought years of prosperity. Hand made shopping bags were made from artificial silk yarn by women home workers (often as their second job or child labour), who handed them directly to Vavřín Krčil. Soon they became very popular due to the low price, light weight and space saving. Krčil soon extended the variety of types of the string bags - with special design for shopping, walking, elbow bags, shoulder bags, for sports and games (bags for tennis and football balls). The string bags soon appeared in later 1920s in production of Switzerland and Italy and soon were distributed around the world. Krčil himself exported the bags to Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the northern African countries.^[2]

In the USSR

Avoska was a major cultural phenomenon of Soviet daily life. It was manufactured of various kind of strings.^[3] With the advent of synthetic materials, some of them were made of stretchable string, so that a very small net could be stretched to a very large sack.

With the popularization of plastic bags (with the same important trait of convenient foldability) avoskas gradually went into disuse, but recent political trends banning plastic bags may bring it back.^[4]

Etymology

The name "avoska" derives from the Russian adverb авось, an expression of vague expectation of luck, in various contexts translated "perhaps", "hopefully", etc. The term was introduced in 1930s in the context of shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet Union, when many basic things could have been purchased in a shop only by a strike of luck, and people used to carry an avoska in the pocket all the time.^[1] The origin of the term is uncertain, with several different attributions. ^[5] In particular, in 1970 a popular Soviet comedian Arkady Raikin explained that around 1935 he introduced a character, a simple man with a netted sack in his hands. He used to demonstrate the sack to the spectators and to say "А это авоська. Авось-ка я что-нибудь в ней принесу" ("And this is a what-iffie. What if I bring something in it..."). The text is attributed to Vladimir Polyakov. ^[6]

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Avoska.

Look up авоська in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.