Lydia Yenova

ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Lydia Yenova
The Meeting that Changed the World

#4 2020 (73)

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

In November 2021, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Alexander Pushkin Museum in Moscow opened the exhibition “The Meeting that Changed the World”, where the artist Viktor Apukhtin presented his works for the first time - graphic reflections on the problems elucidated in the novel “The Idiot” and their timeless relevance. Viktor Olegovich Apukhtin (b. 1952) is known as a graphic artist: he has illustrated such works as Goethe's “Faust”, “The Divine Comedy” by Dante, “Don Quixote” by Cervantes, the poems of Ali-Shir Nava'i, a collection of Uzbek folklore (Hodja Nasreddin series) and Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” (in an edition of the novel in Uzbek). Visiting the exhibition “Letters of Heaven” at the Solzhenitsyn House for the Russian Diaspora in Moscow, Irina Antonova called Apukhtin an upholder of the tradition of advancing book illustration.