Landscape

One of Russia’s oldest museums devoted to literature, the Lermontov Museum in Pyatigorsk was established in 1912 in the house where Lermontov spent the final months of his life and wrote his last poems. The famed “Lermontov House” itself has been preserved exactly as it was during the poet’s lifetime, while the museum itself currently consists of several sections situated in the four old estate houses on its compound.

FOUR DECADES IN FRANCE, RETURN TO MOSCOW, RECOLLECTIONS OF MAYAKOVSKY

The artist Yevgenia Lang (1890-1973) was an acquaintance of my aunt, Lyudmila Mayakovskaya, the sister of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. My aunt was closely involved in my education, hoping to prepare me to take over the mission of preserving the great poet’s legacy and studying his work. Lyudmila, an artist herself introduced me to many interesting personalities from the world of art and literature of her time, and I developed a particular friendship with Lang.

Born into a peasant family in the Arkhangelsk governorate, Alexander Alexeyevich Borisov (1866-1934) received an excellent academic training at the Imperial Academy of Arts under the tutelage of Ivan Shishkin and Arkhip Kuindzhi. He travelled to the Arctic several times with artistic missions and, as a token of gratitude to his teachers, patrons and colleagues, Borisov gave their names to the glaciers and capes of the region. Thus new sites appeared on the map of Novaya Zemlya: Cape Shishkin and Cape Kuindzhi, the Tretyakov Glacier, and the capes of Kramskoi and Repin, Vasnetsov and Vereshchagin...

A student of Arkhip Kuindzhi, Ferdynand Ruszczyc (1870-1936) became a renowned landscape and graphic artist, stage designer and educator, professor and public figure. Along with such prominent realist painters as the brothers Apollinary and Ipalit Goravsky, Stanislav Zhukovsky and Vitold Byalynitsky-Birulya, he laid the foundation for the Belarus school of landscape painting. Through his significant contributions to the evolution of his country’s visual arts and overall spiritual renewal in the 20th century, Ruszczyc earned personal fame as an artist, as well as recognition for his ancient family, which was descended from the Belarus landed gentry’s Clan Lis.

During the preparation of the new Kuindzhi exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery research clarified certain circumstances and details relating to the painter and his art, including various episodes from the life both of Kuindzhi and those who were close to him, his artistic and public engagements, and the histories of some of his compositions. Although Kuindzhi was one of the most famous and sought-after painters of his day, many gaps in his biography remain. The paucity of archival material and scarcity of surviving letters make it almost impossible to determine what the artist himself thought about the role of painting, or to clarify the characteristic features of his artistic practice. Evidently Kuindzhi, “lazy” at writing letters,[1] preferred personal contact to such correspondence, and discussion, of the sort described in the memoirs of those who witnessed such moments, to philosophizing on the page. All this gives special value to these new pieces of information about Kuindzhi’s life and work that have been found.