His great popularity as an actor was perhaps even exceeded by his popularity as a poet and songwriter; he wrote several hundred songs and poems, as well as incidental music for plays and films. Soviet officialdom permitted few of his songs to be sung on television or in films or to be recorded. His reputation spread by means of his appearances in clubs, factories, and universities and through the mass distribution of homemade (and illegal) tape recordings (magnitizdat) and typescripts and mechanical copies (samizdat). His lyrical themes ranged from Soviet prison life and internal exile (“Only the final judgment could be worse”) and Soviet official hypocrisy (“I grieve that honour has been put to rout, that backbiting has been deified”) to the exigencies of Russian daily life (crowded living quarters, long food lines, unfair privileges of the elite). More than simply reflecting a difficult reality, he gave many of his fellow citizens the strength to go on.
He died at age 42 of a heart attack brought on, it was said, by his hard-drinking lifestyle. In the late 1980s the Soviet government began allowing the publication of his poetry and song lyrics.
Bryullov, Karl Pavlovich
▪ Russian artist
original name Charles Bruleau , Bryullov also spelled Briullov, Bryulov, Brülov, Brüllov , or Brülow
born Dec. 12 [Dec. 23, Old Style], 1799, St. Petersburg, Russia
died June 11 [June 23], 1852, Marsciano, near Rome, Papal States [Italy]
Russian painter who combined technical proficiency and classical academic training with a Romantic spontaneity to produce some of the liveliest examples of Russian art of the period.
Bryullov was descended from French Huguenots, and his father was a sculptor. (The family name was Russified in 1821.) Bryullov was educated at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts (1809–21). He studied in Italy from 1823, painting his best-known work, the monumental “Last Day of Pompeii” (1830–33), while there; it brought him an international reputation. Though he painted other large canvases with historical subjects, none was as successful as “Pompeii.” Much of his continuing reputation rests on his more intimate portraits and his watercolours and travel sketches.
Repin, Ilya Yefimovich
▪ Russian painter
born August 5 [July 24, Old Style], 1844, Chuguyev, Russia
died September 29, 1930, Kuokkala, Finland
Russian painter of historical subjects known for the power and drama of his works.
Born to a poor family near Kharkov, Repin learned his trade from a painter of icons named Bunakov and in 1864 became a student at the Academy of Fine Arts at St. Petersburg. In 1871 he won an academy scholarship that enabled him to visit France and Italy, and when he returned to Russia he devoted himself to depicting episodes from Russian history. In 1894 he became professor of historical painting at the academy in St. Petersburg.
The powerful “Volga Bargemen” (1873) epitomizes the stark realism and socially critical cast of much of Repin's work, which was to serve as a model for Socialist Realist painting in the Soviet Union. His treatments of Russian subjects tend to be grim in tone, sharply drawn, and boldly composed. Among his pictures are “Religious Procession in Kursk Gubernia” (1880–83), “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, November 16, 1581” (1885), and “Zaporozhian Cossacks” (1891), the latter perhaps his best-known work. He also did vigorous portraits of his great Russian contemporaries, such as Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Glinka, and Modest Mussorgsky.
Kandinsky, Wassily
▪ Russian artist
Introduction
Russian in full Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky
born Dec. 4 [Dec. 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia
died Dec. 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Fr.
Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., “Tempered Élan,” 1944).
Early years
Kandinsky's mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian. His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula. At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. He also became an amateur painter, and he later recalled, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own.
In 1886 he began to study law and economics at the University of Moscow, but he continued to have unusual feelings about colour as he contemplated the city's vivid architecture and its collections of icons; in the latter, he once said, could be found the roots of his own art. In 1889 the university sent him on an ethnographic mission to the province of Vologda, in the forested north, and he returned with a lasting interest in the often garish, nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting. During that same year he discovered the Rembrandts in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and he furthered his visual education with a trip to Paris. He pursued his academic career and in 1893 was granted the degree equivalent of a doctorate.
By this time, according to his reminiscences, he had lost much of his early enthusiasm for the social sciences. He felt, however, that art was “a luxury forbidden to a Russian.” Eventually, after a period of teaching at the university, he accepted a post as the director of the photographic section of a Moscow printing establishment. In 1896, when he was approaching his 30th birthday, he was forced to choose among his possible futures, for he was offered a professorship in jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat (later called Tartu), in Estonia, which was then undergoing Russification. In what he called a “now or never” mood, he turned down the offer and took the train for Germany with the intention of becoming a painter.
Munich period.
He already had the air of authority that would contribute to his success as a teacher in later years. He was tall, large-framed, impeccably dressed, and equipped with pince-nez glasses; he had a habit of holding his head high and seeming to look down at the universe. He resembled, according to acquaintances, a mixture of diplomat, scientist, and Mongol prince. But for the moment he was simply an average art student, and he enrolled as such in a private school at Munich run by Anton Azbé. Two years of study under Azbé were followed by a year of work alone and then by enrollment at the Munich Academy in the class of Franz von Stuck. Kandinsky emerged from the academy with a diploma in 1900 and, during the next few years, achieved moderate success as a competent professional artist in touch with modern trends. Starting from a base in 19th-century realism, he was influenced by Impressionism, by the whiplash lines and decorative effects of Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil in Germany), by the dot technique of Neo-Impressionism (or Pointillism), and by the strong, unrealistic colour of central European Expressionism and French Fauvism. Often he revealed that he had not forgotten the icons of Moscow and the folk art of Vologda; sometimes he indulged in patterns of violent hues that would have delighted his Asian ancestors. He exhibited with the vanguard groups and in the big nonacademic shows that had sprung up all over Europe—with the Munich Phalanx group (of which he became president in 1902), with the Berlin Sezession group, in the Paris Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants, and with the Dresden group that called itself Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). In 1903 in Moscow he had his first one-man show, followed the next year by two others in Poland. Between 1903 and 1908 he traveled extensively, from Holland to as far south as Tunisia and from Paris back to Russia, stopping off for stays of several months each in Kairouan (Tunisia), Rapallo (Italy), Dresden, the Parisian suburb of Sèvres, and Berlin.