At the Vasnetsovs’ Birthplace

“...A healing balm for the soul. Oh, dear, dear Ryabovo!”[1]

In the memorial museum of the artist Apollinary Mikhailovich Vasnetsov at 6 Furmanny Lane in Moscow, a small exposition, “At the Vasnetsovs’ Birthplace”, has been prepared as part of the exhibition “The Vasnetsovs. Across the Generations. From the 19th to the 21st Century”, which will be held in the halls of the New Tretyakov Gallery from 24 May to 4 November, 2024. One of the halls will show a series of graphic works, “My Homeland” (1918-1919, 1924), and memorial items from the collection of the artist's family associated with their birthplace, the village of Ryabovo in the Vyatka region.

Apollinary Mikhailovich VASNETSOV. Early May. Ryabovo. 1918. Detail
“My Homeland” series. Watercolour, pencil on paper on carton.
© The Apollinary Vasnetsov Museum, Scientific Department of the State Tretyakov Gallery, 2024

Brothers Apollinary Mikhailovich and Viktor Mikhailovich belonged to an ancient family of priests in Vyatka. Their family name was well known in the Vyatka region since the first half of the 17th century. Many generations of the hereditary clergymen served in churches and monasteries of the Vyatka land. The Vasnetsovs always had in their house an icon of the Venerable Tryphon of Vyatka, the patron saint of the land, and, as the family believed, the patron saint of the Vasnetsov family.

Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov said about his ancestors: “I should also recall my good family, my grandfathers and great-grandfathers (all priests and most interesting people), whom I remember still alive”[2]. Deeply religious, honest, noble, well-educated priests, Vasnetsovs served in churches, taught their own and peasant children in parish schools, participated in painting and decorating churches under construction. Ivan Iosifovich Vasnetsov (late 1733 - early 1734 - 1812), Apollinary and Viktor’s great-great-grandfather, was a deacon of the Church of Our Saviour in the village of Oshet. He was engaged in the construction of a warm stone church, prepared sketches for painting and painted it together with Ivan Kotletsov. He took part in designing the iconostasis, made drawings of the stone fence of the church and the lattices. Kozma Ivanovich Vasnetsov (1776-1827), the brothers’ great-grandfather, studied at a theological seminary, attended Fyodor Cherepanov’s drawing class and graduated from it “with a great deal of success"[3]. He painted portraits, still lifes, landscapes. His designs were used to build a belfry and a stone church fence in the village of Taliye Klyuchi, where Kozma Ivanovich served as rector. A spacious house for his family, stone benches for merchandise at the fair in the village of Taliye Klyuchi were also built according to his designs. He collected a library at the church containing more than 2000 volumes, quite large for those times, of spiritual and secular content. Under his leadership, the parishioners collected funds to provide for the Vyatka militia in the 1812 Patriotic War. Kozma Ivanovich’s enthusiasm was honoured with a personal medal. Kozma Ivanovich’s first cousins, 20-year old Alexei and 19-year old Akim, psalm-readers at the church, volunteered for the Vyatka militia. Like many Russian people, the Vasnetsovs shared their fate with the fate of Russia.

A hundred years later, in 1914, during the First World War, two of Viktor Mikhailovich’s sons - Mikhail and Vladimir - were drafted to the army, with Vladimir going to the front as a volunteer. During the Second World War, Viktor Mikhailovich’s grandsons - Yuri and Andrei, a future artist and professor of painting, went to defend the Fatherland. Andrei took part in the battle at Kursk, made it through to Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad). Apollinary Mikhailovich’s grandson Vladimir also defended the Fatherland.

Vasily Kozmich Vasnetsov (1801-1827), the artists’ grandfather, after graduating from a theological seminary, was appointed rector of the church in the village of Taliye Klyuchi (now the village of Bogorodskoye). In September 1822, he married the daughter of the hereditary priest Alexander Grigoryevich Vechtomov. Olga Alex- androvna, Apollinary and Viktor’s grandmother, five years after the wedding was widowed, and with her children moved to her father’s house, which was considered one of the richest houses in the Kurchum district of the Vyatka diocese. The life style of the Vechtomov house had an enormous influence on the formation of the views and interests of Mikhail (the father of the future artists, the Vasnetsov brothers). The head of the family, priest Alexander Vechtomov, supported his daughter’s passion for drawing. Olga Alexandrovna did not part with her paints until the end of her days. Her love for painting was inherited by her son Mikhail. Home lessons in painting and arts became a family tradition.

Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov recollected: “... Apollinary and I saw the first real paintings in the house of our grandmother, to whom our father took us “to pay court” every time after we came from the seminary and had just a little rest from the road. It was at this grandmother’s house that for the first time we saw hanging on the walls of the room not just some popular lubok prints, but what seemed real pictures to us. They were watercolours done by grandmother herself. All of the same size, all under glass, in golden frames, and all in several rows covering the walls of the square drawing room, in which grandma solemnly sat in a soft armchair receiving guests. I don’t remember now what pictures they were, but from the fact that they were cherished and shown to the guests, we concluded that those were the real thing, and were proud of grandma’s talent, if secretly a little envious. Father also praised them”[4]. Olga Alexandrovna directly influenced the formation of artistic tastes of her young grandchildren.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Vasnetsov (1823-1870), the father of the artists, following the family tradition, graduated from the Vyatka Theological Seminary. In 1844, he married Apollinaria, the daughter of the priest Ivan Timofeyevich Kibardin. She was well educated and had a kind, sympathetic character. Ivan Timofeyevich for many years sang in the bishop’s choir well known in Vyatka; his grandchildren inherited his musical abilities. The Vasnetsov brothers sang wonderfully, especially Russian folk songs.

Mikhail Vasilyevich was given a parish in the village of Lopyal and was appointed rector of the Epiphany Church. The Vasnetsov family lived in that village from 1844 to 1849.

Here their children Nikolai (1845) and Viktor (1848) were born. In 1850, Mikhail Vasilyevich was transferred to the village of Ryabovo, Vyatka district, to the Church of the Nativity of John the Baptist to be the only priest of the parish. The family lived in Ryabovo for more than 20 years. They had four more sons there - Peter (1852), Apollinary (1856), Arkady (1858), and Alexander (1860). The Vasnetsov family was large and friendly. Six children, all boys. Their godparents were their grandfather Ivan Timofeyevich Kibardin, priest of the village of Berezeno, for Nikolai, Peter, Apollinary, Arkady, and Alexander, and their grandmother Olga Alexandrovna for Viktor.

The remote village of Ryabovo was where Apollinary Vasnetsov spent his childhood and teenage years. His father Mikhail Vasilyevich had a great influence on the upbringing of his sons and the formation of their views. A well-educated and versatile man, he did not confine himself to his official duties; he developed in the boys the desire for knowledge, the ability to see the beauty around them. All his life Apollinary Mikhailovich kept a grateful memory of his father. In his autobiography “How I Became an Artist...” he wrote about his father: “Love for nature <...>, love for it, power of observation was brought up in me by my father from early childhood. When spring came, he would call me to the forest to listen to the chaffinches; we would put birdhouses in front of the windows; in the evenings the whole family would walk in the fields. At night he would draw my attention to the sky, and from childhood I knew the main constellations and stars, the rotation of the dome of the sky and its causes”[5].

In Ryabovo and its environs, which preserved the old way of life, in the Vasnetsovs’ house, Russian folk songs were sung, fairy tales and legends were told. Fairy tales were told by grandfather Ivan Timofeyevich Kibardin and grandmother. That is why the influence of folk art is so palpable in the Vasnetsov brothers’ oeuvre - they got the first taste of it in their early childhood and youth. In the long winter evenings, the Vasnetsov family would get together to peruse and read illustrated magazines sent to them by acquaintances from Vyatka. Apollinary liked landscape pictures and copied them.

His father instilled in Apollinary a love of astronomy, taught him to distinguish stars from planets, showed him the main constellations and Polaris in the dome of the sky. Already as a child, Apollinary had an idea of the movement of the Earth and the Moon, the lunar phases. The whole family observed meteorites and comets, including Comet Donati in 1858, solar eclipse in 1867, transit of Mercury - its passage through the disk of the Sun. The family’s favourite reading was “Popular Astronomy” by the French physicist Francois Arago.

The atmosphere in the house in Ryabovo contributed to the development of the Vasnetsov brothers’ artistic abilities and understanding of the beauty of the world. The walls of the house were decorated with paintings and prints, lithographs from the Spanish painter Bartalome Murillo’s “The Infant Saint John with the Lamb”, “Night” by Vasily Timm, “Portrait of a Hierarch” by an unknown artist, a mosaic of the Urals sent from Yekaterinburg.

Apollinary Vasnetsov retained many of his childish pursuits throughout his whole life, and his love of nature, he said, made him a landscapist. The path to knowledge of the world also began here, in Ryabovo. Apollinary diligently and enthusiastically chalked out his first drawings on the log walls of the attic. Recollecting his childhood years, Apollinary Mikhailovich said that his father used to give him a hard time for spoiling the walls, but seeing his persistence in continuing his “art” with soap, he finally gave him a grey paper and a piece of pencil. Now he was free to indulge in his favourite pastime.

The museum has albums of pencil drawings by Apollinary Vasnetsov for 1869-1872, most of the drawings were made “under the guidance” of Viktor Mikhailovich who watched the choice and correct rendering of the scene, the form and the technique. Almost all the drawings are landscapes. He treasured them during his lifetime as a memento of “dear Ryabovo".

The village and its environs are shown in his drawings “Village of Ryabovo”( 1871, The V.M. and A.M. Vasnetsov Art Museum of Vyatka), “Bat- arikha Mill” (1871, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Karpusha Forest” (1871, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Village of Vakhrushi” (1871, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Wooden Bridge” (1872, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Bath House” (1871, private collection, Moscow) and other works. Vasnetsov carefully works out all the details of the landscape, uses shading, tries to convey the light contrasts of day and night, shades of the first snow, depicts the movement of clouds. His attention is drawn to the trees, the shape of branches and trunks, the leaves. (“Pine Tree” (1871, private collection, Moscow), “Linden Tree” (1872-1874, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Deciduous Trees”, (1869-1872, State Tretyakov Gallery)). The young artist strives to show the mood, the state of nature, his impressions (“Landscape with the Moon” (1870, The V.M. and A.M. Vasnetsov Art Museum of Vyatka), “Northern Nature. Heavy Cloud” (1869-1872, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The picturesque surroundings of the village, forests, vistas, hills, the river Ryabovka flowing into the river Kordyaga, Batarikha - everything became the subject of exploration and study of young Apollinary. Batarikha was his favourite place of walks and travels. There is a touching record about that place in the diary which Apollinary kept in the early 1870s: “In the west, half a verst [old Russian unit of distance equal to about one kilometre] from our village, lies a place called Batarikha. This area is not just the mill, but also its surroundings. <...> I consider the area <...> the most picturesque. The cliff and the promontory fringing the pond deserve particular attention. The cliff hangs almost precipitously over the fast-flowing river whose bed and banks are strewn with stones and pebbles that fell from the cliff <...> and this mountain is also remarkable in a geological sense: here I find a lot of fossilised bones, various prints and so on <...>. As I write this, I feel such palpitations in my side I want to scream”[6].

For his love of exploration and classification of knowledge the brothers nicknamed Apolli- nary “the scientist”. The showcase in the hall displays several fossilised objects collected by young Apollinary in Batarikha. There are also items that he kept his whole life: a leather-bound inkwell, a pen, and a magnet.

Most of the drawings in his juvenile drawing-book for 1872 were created under the strong impression of holiday trips home to Ryabovo and back to Vyatka where Apollinary was sent to study at the Vyatka Theological School.

They had to travel by horse - in summer they would stop somewhere by the river and watch the dawn, fog over the river and sunrise, and during winter journeys - moonlit nights in the forest, blizzards and bad weather. What was seen and remembered on the way was later, “as imagined”, embodied in drawings.

Life in Ryabovo was surrounded with love, affection and care of their parents, that is why so joyful were their visits home for holidays from Vyatka. Viktor Mikhailovich recalled: “... when we came home for summer holidays, of course, there was a joyful meeting. Mother would hurry to feed us well, and after that father would start checking how and what we studied, what marks we got. Then he demanded to be shown all our drawings, looked at them very seriously and criticised them severely, pointing out all the mistakes he had noticed. When he finished, somehow a little embarrassed and shy in front of us children, he showed his works - drawings and studies in oil paint, all the views of the beautiful places surrounding the village”[7].

The Vasnetsov family was orphaned early in life. When Apollinary was nine years old, Apollinaria Ivanovna, who he was named after, died (1866). The death of his mother shook the child’s soul. “It was as if I had woken up” - he recollected later - “it was eye-opening, I began to see what I had not seen before. It felt as if from that moment on my eyes had opened to nature”[8]. At the age of 14, he lost his father Mikhail Vasilyevich (1870). Apollinary’s reminiscences about his parents in his diary are filled with heartfelt sorrow: “... a funeral service was performed at mother’s grave. Oh, if only father, mother and grandfather were alive, there would be a different life, a life of light and sweetness”[9].

Further on, the younger brothers were taken care of by the elder Nikolai and Viktor. In the summer of 1870, Viktor Vasnetsov, who was then studying at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, came to Vyatka. Having seen Apollinary’s drawings, he decided that he needed to study seriously, and arranged with the artist Michal Elwiro Andriolli, who was in exile in Vyatka, that Apolli- nary would take drawing lessons from him.

Every Sunday Apollinary came to Andriolli with his drawings, listened to his comments, under his guidance, drew views from the window, stand-alone trees, copied lithographs from the works of the then popular Swiss landscape painter Alexander Kalam. But Apollinary Vasnetsov’s main teacher and mentor on the artistic path was his elder brother Viktor. “I became an artist because as a child I saw his drawings and works,”[10] - Apollinary Mikhailovich recollected.

One of the strongest impressions of childhood, according to the artist’s memories, was church painting. Years later he would write to Viktor: “The church is somewhat blackish with smoke inside and our favourite iconostasis in the cold church is bleeding, the paint is even peeling - so pathetic and sad. The most vivid impression is still from the iconostasis and the bleeding painting - it is the same, and the lively artistic impression and memory is the same”[11].

The theme of the Homeland cuts across the entire artistic work of Apollinary Vasnetsov. The painting “Homeland” (State Tretyakov Gallery, 1886) depicts a miserable village lost among endless fields and meadows. Behind a strip of forest merging with the horizon, a white church is visible, nature is in a state of peace and quiet. Movement is only felt in cumulus clouds running across the sky and a sunray sliding across the roofs of peasant houses. The painting is small in size but it gives a panoramic coverage of space. It may be for the first time in the artist’s work that an elegiac mood and philosophical reflection on the fate of Russia and the meaning of human life emerge. The painting was acquired by P.M. Tretyakov.

The painting “Homeland” precedes the cycle of epic landscapes by Apollinary Vasnetsov which create a monumental image of Russia’s nature with its boundless horizons, power of forests, full rivers, flat fields and vast expanses.

Apollinary Mikhailovich repeatedly visited his native places during his lifetime, visited his brothers Arkady and Alexander in Vyatka. In 1900, after a 28-year-long absence, he visited his native village Ryabovo, his parents’ house and their graves. He made several studies of his native places; the exposition has some of them: “The Village of Mukhino. 12 Versts from the Village of Ryabovo” (1900, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Ryabovo House” (1900, State Tretyakov Gallery). Near the Vasnetsovs’ house in the village of Rya- bovo there is an old linden tree which Apollinary Mikhailovich remembered from his childhood. As a memento, he had cut a twig and attached to the “Rya- bovo House” study. It can also be seen in the exposition. The last time the artist came to his native Vyatka to visit his brother Arkady Mikhailovich was in 1916.

Apollinary Vasnetsov returned to his sweet childhood memories of Ryabovo during the hard years at the sunset of his life, in the hungry freezing Moscow, when he was troubled by the disorder and uncertainty of life after the revolution, anxiety for the fate of Russia and his own.

The first years after the October Revolution saw major changes in the world of art. The Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture was reorganised into Free Art Workshops, the oldest teachers, professors of realism A.M. Korin, V.N. Baksheyev, A.S. Stepanov, Ap.M. Vasnetsov were dismissed. Vasnetsov was also deprived of his personal studio in the building of the School. When he was ill and absent from the studio, the paintings were loaded on horse carts and brought to his flat. He could no longer teach his students. All this became a severe trial for the artist. Apollinary Mikhailovich, deeply hurt by the undeserved attitude to himself, was supported by his son Vsevolod. Seeking to distract his father from his heavy thoughts, he prompted a theme to him: “You so affectionately told me about Ryabovo, about its surroundings <...> Why don’t you bring back your memories of the places so dear to you to once again fish in the river Batarikha, in the pond near the mill, to take a look from the hillside at your native village, the church, the ancestral home. And father all of a sudden somehow jumped at the idea”[12]. A workshop was set up in one of the rooms of the flat, the former dining room, and Apollinary Mikhailovich began to work. That was the beginning of a series of watercolours “My Homeland” (1918-1919, 1924), dedicated to the world of the Vyatka hinterland and the parental home.

The artist immersed himself in the dear memories of his childhood and youth, revisited his drawing-books for 1869-1872. Work on the “My Homeland” series restored Apollinary Mikhailovich’s mental balance, reactivated him, gave him comfort and joy of creativity. “The Ryabovo watercolours are under the press now, - Vasnetsov reported to his Vyatka friend N.N. Khokhryakov. - To remember long-past dear childhood is a healing balm for the soul. Oh, dear, dear Ryabovo!”[13] The series consists of nine watercolours (all in the collection of the Apollinary Vasnetsov Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery). The works are done in the original mixed technique - watercolour over fixed pencil drawing, which gives the pictures a certain graphically. They strike the viewer with artistic skill and deep and heartfelt sense of love for the native land, home, Russian nature. Vasnetsov very accurately depicted the views of the Ryabovo village and its surroundings in different seasons. The museum exposition features “Early May. Ryabovo” (1918), “Autumn. View from the Dining Room Window", “Our House. Ryabovo” (1918-1919, 1924), “Winter Evening. View from the Drawing Room Window to the West” (1924), “Mill. Batarikha” (1919), “Preparing for the New Year Fair” (1919), “Bath House in Winter (Bath House and Linden Tree)".

The watercolour “Our House” shows a winter sunset. The play of different shades of snow on a quiet frosty evening - from gentle pink to purple-blue, golden reflections of the sun on the windows of a wooden house with an attic, which colour the front garden and the well under the frosted tree in yellow-orange hues - are shown with surprising finesse. The watercolour “Preparing for the New Year’s Fair” features an early winter morning over the endless snow-covered hills and forests of the native village, the sky is covered with snowy, bluish-grey clouds. A scene from peasant life familiar to the artist since childhood unfolds in the foreground. Peasants who have arrived at a market are building stalls and laying out their simple merchandise.

Ryabovo remained a radiant, warm memory in Apollinary Mikhailovich Vasnetsov’s soul. After the death of his brothers Viktor (1926) and Alexander (1927), in a letter to his friend N.N. Khokhryakov, with bitterness and pain, the artist wrote: “Now I have no one to remember our dear distant Ryabovo with - everything has passed into oblivion. In our letters we used to go back to the good old days, distant and sweet as distant chords of far-away beautiful music <...> Oh, dear childhood! Sweet Ryabovo! You, fir and spruce quietly murmuring woods and little forests, fields, alive with crops and larks, early spring with starlings, and you, snow-slush spring brooks gurgling in the yard!...What remains is only to shed tears about the loss of past happy days, truly happy...”[14].

After the Vasnetsov brothers left Ryabovo in the 1870s, the oldest brother Nikolai put the house up for sale in 1873, and in early 1877 it was sold. Later the house accommodated a local school, and the Ryabovo eight-year school in Soviet times. In 1978, it was decided to open a memorial house museum of the artists in the village of Ryabovo, in the house where Viktor Mikhailovich and Apol- linary Apollinaryevich Vasnetsov, the artist’s son, and his wife Yekaterina Konstantinovna in Moscow, and Rimma Ivanovna Fominykh and Anatoly Stepanovich Kozlov in the Kirov region, it became possible to open the Ryabovo Historical-Memorial and Landscape Museum of the artists V.M. and A.M. Vasnetsov. When the Ryabovo estate was being rebuilt and the artist’s native house was being restored, the pencil drawings and the series of watercolours “My Homeland” became indispensable documentary material.

1. From Ap. M. Vasnetsov’s letter to N. N. Khokhryakov dated 25 May 1919 // State Tretyakov Gallery Department of Manuscripts, Fund 11. Storage item 314, Sheet 2-3.
2. V.M. Vasnetsov’s letter to V.V. Stasov dated 07 October, 1898 // Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov. The World of the Artist. Letters. Diaries. Memoirs. Documents. Opinions of Contemporaries. Moscow, 1987. P. 155 (Hereinafter: V.M. Vasnetsov. The World of the Artist...)
3. Cited from: Vinogradov O.N. The Vyatka Family of the Vasnetsovs. Kirov, 1998. P. 15, 17-18.
4. Ibid. P 15, 17-18.
5. Apollinary Vasnetsov. To the centenary of the date of his birth. Works of the Museum of History and Reconstruction of Moscow. Issue VII. Moscow, 1957. P. 125. (Hereinafter: Apollinary Vasnetsov. To the centenary of the date of his birth.)
6. Diary of Ap. M. Vasnetsov. 1870-1872. // State Tretyakov Gallery Department of Manuscripts, Fund 11, Storage item 1, Sheet 41 (Hereinafter: Diary of Ap. M. Vasnetsov)
7. Cited from: Vinogradov O.N. The Vyatka Family of the Vasnetsovs. P. 19.
8. Apollinary Vasnetsov. To the centenary of the date of his birth. P. 113.
9. Diary of Ap. M. Vasnetsov. // ОР ГТГ Ф. 11. Ед. хр. 1. Л. 61.
10. Ap. M. Vasnetsov’s letter to N. N. Khokhryakov dated 28 January, 1928 // Vs. A. Vasnetsov Archive.
11. V. M. Vasnetsov’s letter to Ap. M. Vasnetsov dated 17 June, 1914 // V. M. Vasnetsov. The World of the Artist... P. 237.
12. Vasnetsov Vs. Pages from the Past. Reminiscences of the artists, Vasnetsov brothers. Leningrad, 1976. P. 115.
13. Ap. M. Vasnetsov’s letter to N. N. Khokhryakov dated 25 May, 1919 // ОР ГТГ Ф. 11. Ед. хр. 314. Л. 2-3. State Tretyakov Gallery Department of Manuscripts. F.11. Storage item 314, Sheets 2-3.
14. Ap. M. Vasnetsov’s letter to N. N. Khokhryakov dated 9 May, 1927 // The Vs. A. Vasnetsov Archive