The Imagery of Dostoevsky as Illustrated by Boris Nepomnyashchy

The Novgorod Art and Architecture Museum has a collection of drawings and book illustrations based on the prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky, including his “great pentateuch”: the novels “Crime and Punishment”, “The Idiot”, “Demons”, “The Adolescent” and “The Brothers Karamazov”. The works were created by renowned Russian artists such as Nikolai Alexeyev, Beniamin Basov, Fyodor Konstantinov, Tatiana Lebedeva, Oleg Manyukov, Yuly Perevezentsev, Tatiana Pribylovskaya, Mikhail Rojter, Yuri Seliverstov, Vsevolod Sulimo-Samuillo, Andrei Ushin and Maria Churakova. The biggest and most noteworthy subset of the collection, both in terms of size and thematically, is that of People’s Artist of the Russian Federation Boris Lvovich Nepomnyashchy.

Dmitry Karamazov. 1978. Illustration to the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”
Etching on paper. © Novgorod State Museum-Reserve

Born in 1945 in Kiev, Boris Nepomnyashchy graduated from the Grekov Art School in Odessa and then from Leningrad’s famous Mukhina Higher School of Art and Design, popularly known as “Mukha”.[1] He has lived and worked in Novgorod since 1971.

Metaphor has been a feature of his artistic idiom since the beginning. Over the years, his metaphors have become more complex, deeper and more supple.[2] This quality, together with the artist’s penchant for philosophical generalisation, empowered Nepomnyashchy to engage in a dialogue with Dostoevsky, one of the most complex writers in world literature. In 1978, the artist created a small series of drawings based on “The Brothers Karamazov”, many chapters of which were written in Staraya Russa. The town itself was the basis for the fictional town of Skotoprigonievsk, but Nepomnyashchy was fascinated not by the real place, but by the symbolical space relieved from all things mundane - the space of ideas and passions. He was keen to express passion and suffering, the pain racking the soul and the chill of despair, belief and unbelief. In one of the compositions, the artist depicts Dmitry Karamazov running along the town’s empty streets. This emptiness is metaphysical and absolute. The character is not within the environment, but outside it, above it. He is disengaged. This disengagement is conveyed through an interplay of proportions and rhythms: the town is small and static, whereas Dmitry’s figure is huge, dramatically stooped, taking up nearly the entire space of the sheet and looking unstable. This is nearly a state of flying, a disconnection from reality, a presence in a different space - the merciless space of passion. The figure is incorporeal, immaterial. It is more of a spectre, a phantom, a memory, but the face, arms, and clothes are very specific and carefully detailed.

In his coloured etchings based on “The Brothers Karamazov”, the artist wove an intricate fabric of metaphors, using the idiom of engraving to convey the crucial motifs of the novel: its heroes’ reflections about children’s suffering (“the tears of a child”), the poem about the Grand Inquisitor.

These pencil drawings (1983) demonstrate the artist’s interest in a different dimension of Dostoevsky’s unfathomably profound last novel. His goal was to portray the main heroes: the Karamazovs. Nepomnyashchy’s images are quite realistic. They are recognisable and correspond with the writer’s descriptions. However, in this case too, the artist did not content himself with narrating and showing. He found an expressive, symbolic image: the cobweb. Cobwebbed lineaments “expose” the characters’ faces, revealing their antagonism and kinship. Each of the Karamazovs is a captive of a passion. Fyodor Pavlovich’s passion is the cravings of the flesh, Ivan’s is feverishly intellectual and Alyosha’s is a restless passion of faith. The simplicity of the visual vocabulary and the clarity of the artist’s thinking are astonishing. Executed with a lead pencil, the drawings have a coloured background. The images are vertically stretched. This seemingly insignificant detail lends to the triptych (“Fyodor Karamazov”, “Ivan Karamazov”, “Aleksei Karamazov”) a barely perceptible hint of anxiety and inner instability.

In the 2000s, Nepomnyashchy again addressed Dostoevsky’s prose. He illustrated “The House of the Dead,” the plot and characters of which have inspired many artists.[3] A book containing the 51 images was published in 2010 by Vita Nova.[4]

Isai Ilyich. 2007–2009
Illustration to “The House of the Dead”
Pencil on paper. © Novgorod State Museum-Reserve

In “The House of the Dead”, Dostoevsky described his impressions of the penal labour camp - the House of the Dead. The tragically irredeemable world, which encompassed evil punished and evil smugly in power, was rendered by the writer accurately and unsparingly. Dostoevsky walked out of the house of the dead alive but irrevocably scorched, not only with a wound in his heart but also forever painfully aware of the existence of that world. He is close by but in a different dimension. In depicting the characters, relationships, situations and realities of this life, Nepomnyashchy faithfully followed the writer. The artist was deeply shocked by the phantasmagoric “inversion” of life and its values, by the borderline state of a person’s psyche, reflected in the text, and the deadening mundaneness of all that was going on. He was likewise smitten with the depth and accuracy with which the writer created what was, in essence, a case history not only of each of the heroes’ illnesses, but also of the world within which humanity is encloistered. The bulk of the series is portraits. The characters are presented in close-up, so that the viewer can see every little wrinkle, every little facial feature. Some images are frighteningly revealing. In the illustrations “A-v is a rascal!” and “The Camp Major”, the artist compellingly conveys two types of spiritual deficiency: unabashed treachery and meanness, and inhumane, blunt, indomitable fury. These characteristics make the “heroes” of these pieces stand out even in the rogues' gallery of the novel's characters.

The artist draws differently directed, dynamic lines that cross each other. These lines lend physicality to the objects, faces, figures and nearly phantasmagorical scenes (“Playing Cards in the Prison Camp”, “The Mad One”), breathing life into them. At the same time, their “over-the-top” quality creates something like a veil separating us from the world of the House of the Dead.

In addition to the pencil drawings included in the book, in 2010, Nepomnyashchy produced a series of etchings featuring nearly all of the characters from “The House of the Dead”. The effect of monotony, humdrum and despair, of alienation from real life is created by repetition of compositional techniques in the portrayal of the characters, from the identical rigidity in the overall design of the pieces. The artist depicts the “heroes” in a particular setting, busy at work (“Sewing”) or self-absorbed, reflecting (“Reading the Bible”, “Pondering Faith”). Using in his etchings the techniques of the Old Masters, and working hard to make every detail seem palpable, to faithfully convey the texture of the materials, Nepomnyashchy lends a certain monumental quality to the imagery. Only three etchings take us outdoors. The other scenes are set in the closed space of the prison barracks with a barred window. The wall is brought close to the viewer, and seems to be pushing forward the portrayed character toward them. The array of the prisoners’ portraits is unique. There is no high drama, there are no showy poses (except in the piece called “Pour a Drink”). Like Dostoevsky, the artist is interested in the human element in these wretched criminals. It is not only the deep insights into the text, but also the technical workmanship that contribute to the rendering of the subtlest nuances of the characters.

Working on the “House of the Dead” series, the artist also became fascinated by another of Dostoevsky’s works - the story “The Village of Stepanchikovo” (also known in English as “The Friend of the Family”). The illustrations “had been held in reserve for quite a while,” Nepomnyashchy recalled, “and I realised that, if I didn’t commit myself to one or another visual idiom, I wouldn’t be able to re-engage with them in the near future. What I wanted most of all was to differ at least a little bit from my former self, to be working just a little bit differently. At that point, it occurred to me that, teaching calligraphy to students, I myself had learned to write letters quite well and prettily. That’s how the idea came to me - not a novel idea, of course - to combine drawing and words”[5].

Illustration to “The Village of Stepanchikovo”. 2017
Mixed media on paper. Collection of the artist

“The Village of Stepanchikovo” opens up to readers a different, albeit equally unhealthy and bleak world. Here too, reality is twisted to the point of being unrecognisable. Beauty, kindness and truthfulness are vilified and destroyed by the mean lack of principles and provincial play-acting of the central character, Foma Opiskin.

Nepomnyashchy found a way to visually express the plot’s entanglements differently from Vladimir Mila- shevsky and Yuri Gershkovich, who had illustrated the novella before him. He used the technique of artificially aged paper, on which the drawn line is particularly clear, especially in facial features and expressions, whereas the limpid watercolour wash spots appear random, but actually enliven the composition and make it lighter. The characters are depicted in a grotesque manner. The eccentricity of their poses and the theatricality of the mise-en-scenes are combined with ethnographic precision in the costumes and accessories. The pictures do not feature any mundane specifics, but each has an expressive detail that captures the attention and adds a new undertone to the overall phantasmagoric picture. In this series of illustrations, Nepomnyashchy consistently introduces a fragment of the writer’s text in every piece. Elegant, with flourishes, freely arranged on the sheets, the texts are an equal element of the visual effect.

In 2014, Nepomnyashchy set about designing the Brothers Karamazov Museum in Staraya Russa. “I keep re-reading the novel,” said the artist, “and, every time, I find something new, something I haven’t noticed or did not understand nearly 40 years ago.”[6] Simultaneously with the museum project, he was working on a series of portraits, most of which have been selected for display at the current exhibition, within which he set out his essential conceptual focus. The artist simply introduces the heroes to us, without immersing us in the novel’s events or depicting “high drama”. The somewhat abstract philosophical reflection of the early etchings, powerful and expressive, is now replaced with profound insights into the inner world of Dostoevsky’s heroes, based on a knowledge of the text and on an understanding of it gained through the workings of the heart and the mind. These drawings do not have unsettling contrasts of light and dark or contorted forms. They have light, fluid, differently directed strokes that extricate from nonentity both the physical shell and the inner world of the characters. There is a sense that the material world is unstable and vibrating and, ultimately, there is a feeling of impending tragedy. The artist spent much time and energy on Ivan Karamazov’s poem “The Grand Inquisitor”. Its tragic meaning has fascinated many artists. The desperation of life and inevitability of evil was most consistently rendered by artist Yuri Seliverstov, in his triptych themed on the poem (1980s). Allusions to images and metaphors of medieval art, however, filled his etchings with new and complex references. Nepomnyashchy’s artwork is totally different. In his polyptych, everything is very real-looking and, therefore, much more dreadful. The characters are enlarged and presented maximally close to viewers. Their faces, eyes, poses and gestures convey a most complex tangle of feelings and thoughts. These compositions fascinate the viewer with their powerful polyphony.

Every era looks for, and finds, its second “self” in a great writer. This is natural. Dostoevsky is no exception to that the rule. He is contemporary and, therefore, holds appeal for researchers and artists alike. Boris Nepomnyashchy has already been engaged in a continuous dialogue with Dostoevsky for 40 years now, but even today, the characters created by the great Russian writer are still a mystery for the artist to solve, powerful magnets enthralling him with their unusualness, complexity, and humanity.

1. The reference is to the Mukhina College of Art and Design in Leningrad, now the St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design.
2. Tatiana Volodina, “The World of the Images of Boris Nepomnyashchy” [Mir obrazov Borisa Nepomnyashchego], in Selected Graphic Works of Boris Nepomnyashchy [Boris Nepomnyashchiy. Grafika. Izbrannoye]. Veliky Novgorod, 2016. Pp. 11-15.
3. Dostoevsky's Prose Represented in Drawings and Book Illustrations: From the collection of a St. Petersburg Museum [Obrazy Dostoevskogo v knizhnoy illyustratsii i stankovoy grafike: Iz kollektsii peterburgskogo muzeya]. St. Petersburg, 2011. Pp. 102-103.
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead [Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma], foreword and annotations by B.N. Tikhomirov, illustrations by Boris Nepomnyashchy. St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2010.
5. Selected Graphic Works of Boris Nepomnyashchy [Boris Nepomnyashchiy. Grafika. Izbrannoe]. Veliky Novgorod, 2016. P. 89.
6. Ibid. P. 109.