"An Amazing Mixture of Good and Evil"

“The Brothers Karamazov” as Illustrated by Russian hmigre Artists in the 1920s-1930s

In the late 1910s, certain influential theoreticians insisted that illustrating Dostoevsky’s novels was an undertaking that made no sense and, moreover, was doomed to failure from the start. Indeed, the attempts to visually interpret the writer’s works turned out so inauspicious (with but a handful of exceptions) that they could simply be disregarded. As literary critic Nina Goncharova noted, the illustrators “were scratching the surface without any appreciation of the depth of the material. With his 20th-century consciousness, Dostoevsky was out of step with his generation, so it took some time before ... his revelations were heard and understood.”[1] The first visual interpretations of the great writer’s works that managed to be daring and unconventional but also compelling appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s, when, enriched with avant-garde experimentation, book design was flourishing and discovering new horizons. Unsurprisingly, this complex literary material received special attention from Russian artists living outside Soviet Russia. In the official Soviet culture of that period, Dostoevsky was an objectionable, semi-banned writer; however, among emigre intellectuals, he remained a dominant influence, his personality and writings provoking heated debate and his works seen as a place where one could find answers to vital questions of the times.

Wassili MASJUTIN. Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky. From the series “Dostoevsky Characters”. 1923
Paper, wood engraving. 21 × 14 cm. Reproduced from: L.R. Varshavsky, Essays on the History of Modern Engraving in Russia (Woodcut and Linocut Printing). Moscow, 1923

In 1922, in Hannover, a German-language edition of “Monk Zosima’s Tale” was published, with 22 illustrations by Wassili Masjutin. This first attempt by the most prolific book illustrator of “Russian Berlin” (he compared his 1920s’ artwork to an inexhaustible fountain) to address Dostoevsky’s prose was arguably effective but rather superficial and shallow. The graphic artist assiduously “recaps” the chapter from “The Brothers Karamazov,” depicting the most momentous episodes from the future monk’s life, although what ultimately comes out is not full-blooded characters, but some barely traced sketches, abstract signs with all the juices of life squeezed out of them. What the illustrator does do is to remind the reader about the events described in the already familiar text, without trying to convey its stylistic distinctiveness. Masjutin’s drawings for “A St. Petersburg Chronicle”, Dostoevsky’s collection of satirical writings published in Munich in 1923, did not become a milestone in the artist’s creative career either. For this book, he created only a xylograph for the cover and several headpieces with views of St. Petersburg.

Wassili MASJUTIN. Monk Zosima. From the series “Dostoevsky Characters”. 1925
Paper, wood engraving. 21 × 14 cm. Galeyev Gallery, Moscow

Perhaps the artist himself regarded these pieces as inconsequential, mentioning them only rarely. He showed quite a different attitude to another project, conceived and begun in 1925: the large series “Dostoevsky Characters” was to feature the heroes of “The Brothers Karamazov”, “The Idiot”, “Crime and Punishment” and “The Possessed” and to become the artist’s “foremost ... engraving work”[2]. This series was important for him not only in terms of content, but also as a formal, professional exercise: Dostoevsky’s novels presented a fine opportunity to master all the nuts and bolts of wood engraving. Taking as a model Pyotr Boklevsky’s “Gallery of Gogol Characters” (1858), the artist chose a fairly controversial methodology for the detailed realistic portrayal of characters. In the 1920s, such an approach to classic literature was criticised harshly and, in many respects, fairly (especially in Yury Tynyanov’s well-known article),[3] because the illustrator too strongly forced his own vision of literary heroes on readers, precluding them from thinking and imagining independently.

Regrettably, with regard to the Masjutin series, such critical remarks were quite justified. Working on the illustrations to “The Brothers Karamazov”, the engraver was also creating sets for a Berlin staging of “The Idiot”, produced by actor and director Vladimir Sokolov. Perhaps it was the influence of theatrical aesthetics, with its unavoidable exaggeration that is instrumental in communicating the heroes’ emotions to the entire audience, that dampened the artist’s sense of proportion. When he grew weary of excessively abstract visual idioms, he went to the opposite extreme. Now, his compositions looked like sketches for stage makeup. “Surgical strikes” of the burin and tiny hatching lines shape the forms and even convey the texture of the skin, but the illustrator’s penchant for hyperbole and the moderate “leftism” of his style somewhat bring the old-fashioned vocabulary of his prints up to date. The carefully wrought details do not detract from the expressive force.

One of the best compositions of the series is the portrait of Grushenka, to whom the artist lent some of the features of his wife, Valentina Yastrebtsova. Staring off into the distance, the woman looks more dreamy than infernal. Monk Zosima also has an absent-minded look in his eyes. The asymmetry of his face, all in fine lines, bespeaks his aristocratic lineage, but what is much more important here are the traces of the mystical experience on his face - the experience that reveals to him things hidden from others.

The images of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his four sons are manifestly grotesque, if not outright caricatural. The paterfamilias’s repulsive appearance (the slits of derisive eyes under the drooping eyelids, the weird shape of the nose, the swollen ear, the thick, sensual lips curled in a sneering smile, the turkey-like triple chin) exposes him as an old lecher and deep-dyed vulgarian, “an evil buffoon”. Of all the sons, Smerdyakov has the strongest resemblance to the father, however, the latter’s features on Smerdyakov’s face are marked by the repugnant subservience of a lackey. Dmitry, with his bulging eyes, scraggy bristled hair and half-open mouth, looks not like an officer with a prodigiously big heart, but like a hysterical, ludicrous character from vaudeville or a schmaltzy melodrama. Even less persuasive is the moustached Ivan. With a bowtie fitted tightly around his sturdy neck, he looks like a bar bouncer, a jaded heavy drinker. Even in Alyosha’s appearance (an infantile lad with plush lips and long eyelashes), there is something unpleasant and unhealthy.

The prints are impressive for their fine workmanship and each features an archetypal character portrayed compellingly, recognisably and very forcefully. However, few readers among those who had already formed their opinion about the Dostoevsky characters would identify these mugs with them. These mostly satirical and quite shallow visual representations of them draw on the original text, but convey none of its style and philosophical concept. It goes without saying that, in the novel, these characters are much more complex and deep.

Portraying the characters of this great realist writer, the artist eschews background, whereas in the portrait of the writer himself, the piece that should have opened the cycle, it is precisely the background that carries the main message and becomes a field of symbolical interpretation of the great writer’s works. The composition features Fyodor Mikhailovich, strongly resembling the real-life prototype, and, behind his back, a mysterious, ominous fancifully shaped black shadow, the figure of a guard with a rifle. In an open space between the houses, there is Christ’s head in the crown of thorns and, next to him, the silhouette of a man furiously beating his victim, whom we do not see, with a stick or a thick whip. This juxtaposition does not seem sacrilegious: like many of his heroes, the author of “The Possessed” was able to contemplate “two abysses at once” and was equally interested in the phenomenon of holiness and in the nature of evil. The composition’s background changes its meaning and even genre - a nice but quite traditional image of the writer against a backdrop of St. Petersburg slums becomes a visual shorthand for his worldview.

Masjutin’s work, it seems, was met with mixed reactions from those who had an opportunity to see it. In a letter to Moscow critic Pavel Ettinger, the artist tried to explain the essence of his concept: “I don’t insist that Alyosha or Mitya are precisely like my images, but that’s how I imagined them. It wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that hundreds of sketches were made before I accomplished the prints. I tried to imagine all of the characters talking and checked: with the face that I’d given him, could this person say this or that, could he act the way he did in the Dostoevsky novel? I became intimate with them. If this is unacceptable to you, this is the only way they are acceptable to me. Gogol excels at describing appearances; Dostoevsky is an unmatched portrayer of what’s inside. If the face is the mirror of the soul, then, in my prints, I tried to capture this mirroring effect. Maybe a physiognomist could decipher in my faces that which an ordinary observer will find unconvincing.”[4]

Masjutin did not find a publisher for his already completed xylographs nor did a large-scale project to illustrate characters from Dostoevsky’s other novels materialise. In the years that followed, however, the artist never abandoned his plans, or better say his dreams, of engaging with Dostoevsky’s prose again. The writer’s name regularly comes up in the artist’s letters: he says he loves this author “perhaps more strongly” than he does Pushkin or Gogol and feels spiritual affinity with him. The printmaker intended to complicate his task - no longer individual portraits but multi-figure compositions, which would be as elaborate and as meticulously crafted as the individual images - but did not follow through with this plan.

Another emigre artist, Alexandre Alexe'ieff, did, however, succeed in producing a large (100 pieces) and highly original series of illustrations to “The Brothers Karamazov” and creating images in keeping with the various messages and emotions of the original. Printed in Paris in 1929, this series of aquatints is well known (nowadays, readers can see it in the two-volume edition released in 2005 by the publisher Vita Nova),[5] extensively described and thoroughly analysed in Lola Zvonareva and Lydia Kudryavtseva’s monograph[6]. We will, therefore, just highlight some of the series’s distinctive features, which make it appropriate for comparison with other visual interpretations of the novel.

Alexandre ALEXEÏEFF. The Confession of an Ardent Heart (in verse). 1929
Illustration to Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. Aquatint on paper. 31.7 × 24.5 cm
Reproduced from: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue, [2 volumes], with 100 illustrations by Alexandre Alexeïeff. St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2005

First, the series has a very neat and measured arrangement akin to film editing: “the experimental artist was the first to feel the special cinematographic quality of Dostoevsky’s prose and responded to it ... with surprising angles and sharp framing of the imagery.”[7] The assemblages of individual prints, like the frames of a movie, form neat montage sequences. Furthermore, the illustrations can be grouped into several easily identifiable genre categories. Each of the groups has its own purpose: the multi-figure compositions convey the progress of the story, the portraits supposedly give insights into the characters’ psychology, the landscapes bring an epic breath to the narrative, the “metaphysical still lifes” and interiors reflect the novel’s mystical motifs, and the allegories (a dove hovering over the monastery or Ivan’s twisted figure, pierced with a bolt of lightning, as if in seizure) condense the events and reveal their true meaning.

Among the Alexei'eff illustrations, the portraits are probably the ones that are most controversial and open to attack by critics. In terms of harshness, subjectivity and the sharply grotesque, many of these pieces are on a par with Masjutin’s works. For instance, Fyodor Pavlovich’s eccentric behaviour resembles the vulgar antics of a clown and Alyosha can go into a somnambulistic trance at any moment. Dmitry playacts outrageously, making faces, bulging his eyes again and again. Captive to his own passions, his psyche unstable, he has become a weightless creature that can easily get off the ground and literally has its head in the clouds. Only at the end of the novel, when the hero, convicted of a crime he did not commit, accepts his destiny, does this image become powerful, weighty, meaningful. Such “horrible moral dialectics” are quite in the spirit of Dostoevsky. The Devil from Ivan’s dream has no attributes of the evil spirit - he is just a smart dresser and innocuous idle talker. Ivan himself, with his Mephistophelian beard, incinerating the viewer with his sinister stare, has far more resemblance to the Devil.

Perhaps the best compositions are the ones in which the figures, fitted into a landscape or an interior space, are not fleshed out but suggested in semi-transparent, twinkling silhouettes. In contrast to the portraits, these drawings are not only much more aesthetically compelling, but also much truer to the text, deeper, more nuanced and, finally, more accurate. In the writer’s literary imagination, there is much emphasis on mysterious occurrences, on “what can only be spoken of ‘clairvoyantly’, seen ‘through a glass darkly’, and [...] revealed on the final day.”[8] Interestingly, Alexei'eff himself, in his 1931 lecture, recommended that his colleagues refrain, whenever possible, from creating portraits of literary characters, to avoid conflicts with the writer and readers. The best images from the series arguably also include those that do not feature people at all, but convey the characters’ feelings through objects: a light from a window alleviates the gloomy atmosphere of an empty room; a hero’s clothes neatly stacked on a chair seem to be capable of acting independently, having adopted his habits and reproducing his gestures. These images are not at all scenes from daily life: even the simplest objects, such as a big samovar or an old chair with a ripped pillow - shown up close and removed from their usual environment - look like intricate symbols that cannot be deciphered and give rise to complex associations.

Although the artist does not neglect the novel’s religious content and its biblical allusions, his imagery is dominated by gloomily grotesque motifs. In the literary text, the realm of goodness is only suggested by scarce highlights, by a flickering of light, whereas evil is depicted much more comprehensively and diversely. The fiery accusatory rhetoric reaches a climax in the illustrations to the final chapters. The ordeals of Dmitry, who, although innocent, was thrown into the ugly grinder of the Russian justice system, are represented as a Kafkaesque absurdity. The viewer is treated to a series of nightmarish scenes, a living person engages in an unequal fight with a host of soulless mannequins, with orators revelling in their own verbal pyrotechnics and with monstrous bit-part players guided by an invisible conductor.

The artist’s work has little in common with the familiar type of illustrations that obediently follow the storyline, timidly complementing it with inconsequential details. “Alexe'i'eff does not illustrate - he transforms, he reaches into the heart of the logic ... of the text and illuminates it,”[9] writes the famous French Slavist Georges Nivat. According to Nivat, Alexe'i'eff understands the writer’s ideas better than whole armies of his commentators and is much better sensitised to the existential split of Dostoevsky’s world. This researcher sees the Alexe'i'eff series as a dialogue of equals or even a duel between the great writer and the avant-garde artist. In some pieces, the artist competently uses Modernist visual idioms, enriching the reader’s perception of the novel with the aesthetic and historical experience of a different era. However, when Dostoevsky gets the upper hand, the illustrator has to work in a more traditional mode, in which the relationship between the images and the text becomes “astoundingly direct”[10].

A series of illustrations to “The Brothers Karamazov” accomplished by Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev, another well-known Russian artist living outside Soviet Russia, is reasonably comparable to Alexeieff’s work in terms of magnitude and boldness of concept as well as in terms of volume (more than 60 pieces), although it did not fare quite so well. Researchers differ over the dating of the series. For instance, John Ellis Bowlt argues it was created over the course of 16 years, beginning in 1916[11], but some Russian researchers put the date as 1932-1933, although, if the artist Yury Cherkesov’s memoirs[12] are to be believed, the bulk of the series had already been accomplished by 1927. In 1933, many gouache pieces from the Karamazov series were exhibited at the Marie Sterner Gallery in New York. The exhibition garnered praise in the press, but failed to interest collectors and publishers. Cherkesov claims that the drawings were destined for a competition announced by one of the American societies of bibliophiles, but the competition’s organisers seem to have preferred more mainstream takes on classic prose.

This situation caused much pain to the artist, who was experiencing a turbulent period in all aspects of his life. In 1938, he wrote to Alexander Benois:

“I was boycotted with my ‘Kazamazov’ pieces; 10 prizes with this subject were awarded to some rascals whereas my bits of truth, which were very pertinent even as illustrations, were rejected! All this shocked me. I even began to get under cars, suffered falls on the streets, was sick and even thought of taking my own life.”[13] Not long before his death, Grigoriev somehow managed to sell his drawings to a certain collector, who soon disappeared into the blue together with his collection. For 70 years, the series was believed to have been lost for good or at least rendered inaccessible to scholars and the public. All that was left for those wishing to familiarise themselves with it were laudatory comments from a handful of memoirists and reviewers. As a result, when the works turned up in 2007 at a Sotheby’s auction, this came as a staggering surprise. Many of them were first reproduced in the auction’s catalogue14 and, in the same year, pieces from the series were featured at the Tretyakov Gallery’s exhibition “Lost Masterpieces of Russian Art from Private American Collections”.

Undoubtedly, it was no accident that the artist had engaged with the writer’s legacy: he attached great importance to this project, saying it gave him lots of “long and sweet hours”. Critics and art scholars have time and again drawn parallels between Grigoriev’s celebrated series of paintings and drawings “Raseya” (“Russia”) and Dostoevsky’s works. The artist was called “A Dostoevsky of Painting”, a brother and loyal associate of Fyodor Mikhailovich. Grigoriev, on his part, rejoiced at such comparisons and even liked to draw such parallels himself, believing that even if he was not altogether equal in stature to the author of “The Possessed”, he was, in any case, his spiritual heir and disciple. Indeed, the artist and the writer had a lot in common. First of all, a keen interest in the national character (including the qualities that were fairly unpleasant, even scary), in the mystical dimension of Russian life, a life woven with blatantly incompatible threads, combining beauty and ugliness, submissiveness and rebelliousness, heroic exploits and brutality.

In his character and temperament, the artist resembled not so much the writer as some of his heroes. Forever lurching from one extreme to another, he often could not keep his emotions in check, had the reputation of being a “dangerous rabble-rouser” and was keenly interested in all the “alleys of vice” that life had to offer. He did not have to strain himself to get into the skin of the writer’s characters, to immerse himself in the nervous, charged atmosphere of “The Brothers Karamazov”. Benois said that some pieces from the series were as forceful as Dostoevsky’s prose.[15] According to Yury Cherkesov, the artist’s images substantially complemented the novel, developing and deepening its main theme: “In this series, Boris Grigoriev continued what he had been doing in ‘Raseya’, only this ‘Raseya’ was even more lurid, profound, shattered, confused, semi-bestial and sinful, even though it was humbly pleading in repentance. That was Fyodor Mikhailovich [Dostoevsky] pure and simple, with his prophetic analysis of the multifaceted and long-suffering Rus.”[16] Sergei Shcherbatov admitted that the “Karamazov suite” was Grigoriev’s best work, but believed that the artist, with his trademark “unquestionable sickly genius” reached not so much into the writer’s creative mind as into a world of nightmarish dreams and scary hallucinations. The collector may have been left with such an impression because of the rather disturbing atmosphere of the Parisian cafe where Grigoriev showed him his pictures late in the evening. The memoirist is convinced that the illustrations are absolutely devoid “of any signs of grace typical for Dostoevsky’s works, all their dread notwithstanding.”[17]

This judgement is far from being beyond dispute. In any case, Grigoriev’s series (unlike Alexei'eff’s) is almost completely lacking in conspicuously shocking and repulsive images. Something unhealthy, ugly and dreadful is present in his pictures, not in the foreground, but slowly growing inside seemingly quite respectable images. For instance, in the illustration to the chapter “Over Brandy”, only the disquieting lighting and the nervous, loose strokes of the brush warn the reader that the heart-warming family feast is poised to veer off into disgusting scandal. Whereas in Masjutin’s and Alex- e'feff’s pieces divine and demonic traits are usually neatly separated, distributed among characters or grouped in different episodes, Grigoriev depicts, as one of the characters put it, “an amazing mixture of good and evil”.[18] In his letters, the artist could very easily eulogise Russia in one paragraph and curse it in another, being sincere in both cases. It is this ambivalent approach to the subject, this “hating love” that probably forms the most important element of the illustrations. They can be considered as compelling and true-to-fact evidence that “Karamazovshchina” (all that is related to or in the style of the novel) has its deepest roots in the very tenor of Russian life, is inseparable from that life’s gracious traits and is diffused in its air.

It is certainly not in every piece that Grigoriev sets out to convey a character’s state of mind through their appearance; often, the artist treats the characters quite superficially, shuffling a set of masks thoroughly familiar to the viewer. For instance, Alyosha is easily recognisable because he looks down shyly; Dmitry, even more superficially, resembles a dim-witted and cruel drillmaster with a cockroach moustache. Fyodor Pavlovich’s baggy, lined face reflects not so much depravity as world weariness. Nearly all of the novel’s female characters are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If we are to look for a psychological dimension in the illustrations, it can be found in the sum total of the artistic techniques used, the expressiveness of the colour scheme and, finally, in the improvisational, sketchy style of the drawings. As much as the Alexei'eff series is neat in its structure and rationale, Grigoriev’s “suite” is elemental. With a nearly childlike impulsiveness, Grigoriev often records his impressions from the text too hurriedly, neglecting to elaborate and “fine tune” details.

However, even if the setting is represented in a fairly abstract fashion, it is a very important element of every composition, to a great extent defining the emotional intensity of one or another episode and bringing to mind the philosopher Fyodor Stepun’s phrase about “the mystical shapelessness of the Russian landscape”.[19] At first glance, the unnaturally twisted figures of Smerdyakov with a guitar and the mannered woman listening to him look inept and affectedly theatrical, but, at the same time, they also fit in quite well with the dreary, washed-out landscape with a rickety fence and firewood scattered all over the place, appearing to be this landscape’s natural offshoot and continuation. Sometimes, motifs from different chapters are combined in one picture: the conversation between Mitya and Alyosha (“The Confession of an Ardent Heart”) takes place against the background of the “sticky green little leaves” that Ivan loved so much. Perhaps the most spectacular and expressive picture in the Grigoriev series is the one featuring the seemingly unexceptional “crowd scene” from the chapter called “Delirium”, in which village girls from the chorus, entertaining rich guests, play the part of bears.

The Grigoriev series has indirect theatrical references, which include, first of all, the artist’s impressions from “The Brothers Karamazov” at the Moscow Art Theatre. Depicting Captain Snegiryov and Liza Khokhlakova, Grigoriev obviously used his pencil sketches of the actors who played these roles - Ivan Moskvin and Lydia Koreneva - and Vasily Kachalov’s features are easy to discern in Ivan Karamazov. However, these images are dominated not by the theatrical or even graphic element, but by the elementary force of painting. Particularly apt in their regard are the words of Benois after visiting Grigoriev’s exhibition in 1937: “How but as miraculous can one describe his fast yet encompassing all that is essential manner, his equally well-aimed and intense colourfulness? How could one not admire the boldness of his colourful juxtapositions, in which he always remains harmonious and, despite the audacity of his combinations, beautiful!”20 True, the artist sometimes deliberately applies a washed-out colour palette and uses not so much gouache as watercolour, charcoal, and lead pencils, but these drawings are as expressive as Grigoriev’s more colourful compositions and are not eclipsed by them.

In their book, Zvonareva and Kudryavtseva very aptly call Alexei'eff’s unusual take on “The Brothers Karamazov” an aesthetic shock.[21] This definition can be applied to all three series discussed in this article. Very different from each other, what these graphic “suites” have in common is the aspiration to interpret a well-known story using sharp and paradoxical techniques of modern art and to discover new dimensions and meanings in this story. Characteristically, all three interpretations are dominated by a rough grotesque, which is not at all the novel’s most important expressive tool. Perhaps the reason for this is not just the illustrators’ artistic imagination or fashionable trends in aesthetics.

The illustrators of the 1920s approached “The Brothers Karamazov” not as a literary masterpiece, but as a terrifying prophecy about Russia’s destiny in the 20th century. They found in the great novel accurate descriptions of those most dangerous malaises that, many years later, would result in a historical catastrophe for the country, making it impossible for these artists to stay on in their homeland. Some emigre thinkers were convinced that the main cause of the troubles that had befallen their native country was precisely the Russian mentality so compellingly epitomised in Dostoevsky’s characters. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the artists’ dialogue with the writer and the characters he created was a loud one and was highly tendentious and emotional. It is not difficult to find among Alexe'i'eff’s images an example of the most literal parallels between the classic text and the issues of the day: a discourse of one of the characters about Russia’s future is illustrated with an image of a frenzied street fight.

You can have different opinions about, and different takes on, the illustrations by Masjutin, Alexe'i'eff and Grigoriev to “The Brothers Karamazov”. You can argue about which of the series is the best companion piece to the novel, but you cannot deny that these works are compelling examples of the innovative, experimental art of the 1920s, that they reflect the catastrophic worldview of a person living between two world wars and that they capture the times that were, as Boris Grigoriev put it, “unnaturally overburdened with events fatal for people.”[22]

The author would like to thank Ildar Galeyev, Nina Markova and Igor Melanyin for their help in preparing the illustrations to this article.

1. Nina Goncharova, Dostoevsky as Reflected in Drawings and Reviews (1848-1998) [Dostoevskiy v zerkalakh grafiki i kriti- ki (1848-1998)}. Moscow, 2005. P. 14.
2. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, fund 29, inventory 3, item 2603, sheet 1 reverse (letter of September 22, 1925).
3. Yury Tynyanov, “Illustrations” in Yury Tynyanov, Poetics. A History of Literature. Cinema (collection of articles) [Poetika. Istoriya literatury. Kino: [Sbornikstatey]]. Moscow: 1977. Pp. 310-318.
4. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, fund 29, inventory 3, item 2604, sheet 1 (letter of October 25, 1925).
5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue [Brat'ya Karamazovy. roman v 4 chastyakh s epilogom] 2 volumes, with 100 illustrations by Alexandre Alexeieff. St.Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2005.
6. Lola Zvonareva and Lydia Kudryavtseva, Silver Age in Paris: The Lost Paradise of Alexandre Alexe'ieff [.Serebryanyy vek v Parizhe: poteryannyy ray Aleksandra Alekseeva]. Moscow, 2020. Pp. 178-195.
7. Ibid, p. 180.
8. Galina Syritsa, Poetics of Portraiture in Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (monograph) [Poetika portreta v romanakh F.M. Dostoevskogo: monografiya}. Moscow, 2007. P. 48.
9. Alexandre Alexeieff: Dialogue with the Book [Aleksandr Alekseev: dialog s knigoy] (collection of articles). St. Petersburg, 2005. P. 31.
10. Ibid, p. 47.
11. The Grigoriev Conference: Collection of Articles [Grigor’evskie chteniya: sbornik statey], no 4, ed. R.N. Antipova and G.F. Kovalenko. Moscow, 2004. P. 249.
12. Yuri Cherkesov, “Three Meetings with Boris Grigoriev” [Tri vstrechi s Borisom Grigor'evym], in Boris Grigoriev, The Line: The Artist's Literary and Artistic Legacy [Liniya. Literaturnoe i khudozhestvennoe nasledie]. Moscow: 2006. Pp. 285-307.
13. The Grigoriev Conference, no. 4. P. 329.
14. Sotheby's. Russian Art. Volume II. New York, April 17, 2007.
15. Alexandre Benois Discusses...: Articles, Letters, Public Pronouncements [Aleksandr Benois razmyshlyaet...: Stat'i, pis'ma, vyskazyvaniya]. Moscow, 1968. P. 249.
16. Boris Grigoriev, op.cit. Moscow, 2006. P. 298.
17. Sergei Shcherbatov, The Artist in Russia of the Past [Khudozhnik v ushedsheyRossii]. Moscow, 2000. P. 343.
18. Quoted from: Dostoevsky and Russians in the World in the 20th Century [Dostoevskiy i russkoe zarubezh'e XX veka]. St.Petersburg, 2008. P. 65.
19. Ibid, p. 69.
20. Alexander Benois Discusses... P. 242.
21. Zvonareva, Kudryavtseva, op.cit., p. 178.
22. The Grigoriev Conference, no. 4. P. 66.