Robert Falk

Poetic Dedications by Boris Slutsky (The Old Blue) and Tatiana Selvinskaya (Robert Falk)

The memories of Falk shared by Marina Prozorova are mostly associated with her parents, who used to be the artist’s closest friends: the translator and musicologist Jerzy Kucharski and the architect Natalya Prozorova. A Russianized Pole, the son of the Polish communist and engineer Richard Szade, Jerzy Kucharski lost his parents very early: they died in the torture chambers of the NKVD. “I may be unlucky in many things,” he used to say, “but I have always been lucky to have good people around me”. And indeed he was – he was good friends with figures such as Sviatoslav Richter, Robert Falk, Artur Fonvizin, Aleksander Vedernikov, and Heinrich Neuhaus”.

The recollections of the art historian Olga Severtseva touch on a memorable event from her youth, when in 1950-1951 she sat for an oil portrait by Robert Falk. Falk was a friend of Olga’s relatives - her aunt Natalya Severtsova, an actor and artist, and Natalya’s husband, the eminent philosopher, art scholar and artist Aleksander Gabrichevsky. An academic and intellectual of encyclopaedic knowledge, who studied art history, philosophy of art and architectural theory, alongside literary translation, German studies, music, and aesthetics, Aleksander Gabrichevsky was unable to fulfil many of his scholarly goals during the tragic decades of the Stalin regime. He was arrested three times, in 1930, 1935 and 1941; twice, 1935-1936 and 1942-1944, he was exiled for his “cosmopolitan and anti-patriotic writings”, and in 1949 he was ousted from the Academy of Architecture, where he worked as a department head.

Elena Borisovna Levina chose as the title for her recollections the line from a poem by Ksenia Nekrasova, “I love coming into this refuge,” since no-one else had so accurately and poetically captured the special atmosphere of the studio where Robert Falk and his wife, Angelina Vasilyevna, lived. Nekrasova was friends with the couple and visited their home often. There, she found refuge and became the life model for one of Falk’s finest portraits.

The artist Elizaveta Zeldovich’s (married name Galperina, 1902-1985) memories of Falk are published here for the first time. This material belongs to that special genre of “oral history”. The excerpt from the conversation with Zeldovich-Galperina presented to the reader here was originally recorded using a tape recorder on March 5, 1981, by the legendary philologist Viktor Duvakin.[1] Duvakin gathered a unique collection of oral memoirs on the history of Russian culture in the first half of the 20th century, which became the foundation for the oral history department of the Academic Library at Moscow State University.[2] Duvakin approached the artist upon the advice of her friend at the gymnasium, Elena Konstantinovna Osmerkina (nee Galperina, first wife of the artist Osmerkin), with whom Duvakin had spoken in 1980.