Konstantin Vasiliev - an artist at the call of the heart

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Biography of Konstantin Vasiliev

Konstantin Alekseevich Vasiliev (1942-1976) - Russian artist, whose creative heritage includes more than 400 works of painting and graphics: portraits, landscapes, surreal compositions, paintings of epic, mythological and battle genres.

Among the famous works are the cycles "Epic Russia" and "Ring of the Nibelungen", a series of paintings about the Great Patriotic War, graphic portraits, as well as the last work of the artist - "A Man with an Owl".

From 1949 to 1976 lived in the house where the museum is open.

In 1976 he died tragically, was buried in the village. Vasilyevo.

In 1984, the Vasiliev family moved to the city of Kolomna near Moscow, where they transported all the artist's paintings that belonged to her.

The museum occupies a part of a residential building, which includes a memorial apartment with an area of 53.3 m2.

The exposition is based on a memorial collection donated by the artist's sister V. A. Vasilyeva and his friends.

The artist at the call of the heart

To understand the inner world of a person, one must certainly touch his roots. Kostya's father was born in 1897 in the family of a St. Petersburg worker. By the will of fate, he took part in three wars and worked all his life in leadership positions in industry. Kostya's mother was almost twenty years younger than her father and belonged to the family of the great Russian painter I. I. Shishkin.

Before the war, the young couple lived in Maykop. The firstborn was eagerly awaited. But a month before his birth, Aleksey Alekseevich left for a partisan detachment: the Germans were approaching Maikop. Klavdia Parmenovna was unable to evacuate. On August 8, 1942, the city was occupied, and on September 3, Konstantin Vasiliev entered the world. Needless to say, what hardships and hardships befell the young mother and baby. Klavdia Parmenovna and her son were taken to the Gestapo, then released, trying to reveal possible connections with the partisans. The life of the Vasilievs hung literally by a thread, and only the swift advance of the Soviet troops saved them. Maykop was released on February 3, 1943.

After the war, the family moved to Kazan, and in 1949 - for permanent residence in the village of Vasilyevo. And this was not an accident. A passionate hunter and fisherman, Alexey Alekseevich, often leaving the city, somehow got into this village, fell in love with it and decided to move here forever. Later, Kostya will reflect the unearthly beauty of these places in his many landscapes.

If you take a map of Tatarstan, it is easy to find the village of Vasilyevo on the left bank of the Volga, about thirty kilometers from Kazan, opposite the mouth of the Sviyaga. Now here is the Kuibyshev reservoir, and when the family moved to Vasilyevo, there was an untouched Volga, or the Itil river, as it is called in the eastern chronicles, and even earlier, among ancient geographers, called by the name of Ra.

Young Kostya was struck by the beauty of these places. She was special here, created by the great river. In a blue haze rises the right bank, almost precipitous, overgrown with forest; you can see a distant white monastery on the slope, to the right - the fabulous Sviyazhsk, all fitting on Table Mountain with its temples and churches, shops and houses, rising above wide meadows in the floodplains of the Sviyaga and Volga. And very far, already beyond Sviyaga, on its high bank, the bell tower and the church of the village of Tikhy Ples are barely visible. Closer to the village there is a river, a wide water stream. And the water is deep, slow and cool, and the pools are bottomless, shady and cold.

In the spring, in April-May, the flood flooded all this space from the ridge to the ridge, and then to the south of the village water with bushy islands was visible for many kilometers, and the distant Sviyazhsk itself turned into an island. By June, the water was leaving, exposing the entire expanse of flooded meadows, generously watered and fertilized with silt, leaving behind cheerful streams and blue overgrown lakes, densely populated with burbots, tenches, loaches, squints and frogs. The coming summer heat with irrepressible force drove thick, juicy, sweet grasses out of the ground, and along the banks of ditches, streams and lakes it drove wilderness, currant, and wild rose bushes up and in breadth.

The meadows on the left bank near the ridge gave way to light linden and oak forests, which to this day, interspersed with fields, stretch for many kilometers to the north and gradually turn into a coniferous forest-taiga.

Kostya differed from his peers in that he was not interested in toys, ran little with other children, but always fiddled with paints, pencil and paper. His father often took him fishing, hunting, and Kostya painted the river, boats, father, a forest apiary, game, Orlik's dog, and in general everything that pleased the eye and amazed his imagination. Some of these drawings have survived.

Parents, as best they could, helped the development of abilities: tactfully and unobtrusively, preserving taste, they selected books and reproductions, introduced Kostya to music, took him to the museums of Kazan, Moscow, Leningrad, when an opportunity and opportunity presented itself.

Kostin's first favorite book is "The Tale of the Three Heroes." At the same time the boy got acquainted with the painting by V. M. Vasnetsov "Heroes", and a year later copied it with colored pencils. On his father's birthday, he presented him with a picture. The similarity of the heroes was striking. Inspired by the praise of his parents, the boy copied "The Knight at the Crossroads", also with colored pencils. Then he made a pencil drawing from Antokolsky's sculpture "Ivan the Terrible". His first landscape sketches have survived: a stump strewn with yellow autumn leaves, a hut in the forest.

The parents saw that the boy was gifted, he could not live without drawing, and therefore more than once they thought about the advice of teachers - to send their son to an art school. Why, where, to which, after which class? There was no such school either in the village or in Kazan. The case helped.

In 1954, the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" published an announcement that the Moscow secondary art school at the Institute named after V. I. Surikov accepts gifted children in the field of drawing. The parents immediately decided that this was exactly the school that Kostya needed - he showed the ability to draw very early. The school accepted nonresident children five or six people a year. Kostya was one of them, having passed all the exams with excellent marks.

The Moscow Secondary Art School was located in the quiet Lavrushinsky Lane of the old Zamoskvorechye, opposite the Tretyakov Gallery. There were only three such schools in the country: in addition to the Moscow one, also in Leningrad and Kiev. But the Moscow Art School was revered beyond competition, if only because it existed at the Surikov Institute, and had the Tretyakov Gallery as a training base.

Of course, Kostya did not wait for the day when the whole class headed by the teacher went to the Tretyakov Gallery. He went to the gallery alone as soon as he enrolled in school. The personal interest inherent in life, on the one hand, and the living active force of the paintings, on the other, collided in his excited consciousness. Which picture should I go to? No, not to this one, where the night sky and the dark shadow of the house, and not to the one where the sandy seashore and the scow in the bay, and not to where the female figures are depicted …

Kostya went further and heard a call in himself when he saw three bright familiar figures on a large, half-wall canvas by Vasnetsov "Heroes". The boy was delighted to have a date with the source of his recent inspiration: after all, he studied the reproduction of this picture by centimeters, looked at it countless times, and then diligently redrawn it. So this is what it is - the original!

The boy stared into the decisive faces of the heroes, the brilliant, reliable weapons, the shimmery chain mail, the shaggy horse manes. Where did the great Vasnetsov get all this? From books, of course! And all this steppe distance, this air before the fight - also from books? And the wind? After all, the wind is felt in the picture! Kostya became agitated, now revealing the feeling of the wind in front of the original. Indeed, horse manes, and the blades of grass stir the wind.

Having recovered from the first impressions of the giant city, the boy did not get lost in an unusual space for him. The Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum, the Bolshoi Theater and the Conservatory - these are the main gates for him to the world of classical art. He also reads Leonardo da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting" with childish seriousness, and then studies the paintings of this great master and "Napoleon" by the Soviet historian Yevgeny Tarle, with all the fervor of a young soul plunges into the music of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Bach. And the mighty, almost materialized spirituality of these giants is fixed in his mind by crystals of a precious breed.

Quiet, calm Kostya Vasiliev always behaved independently. The level of his work, declared from the first days of his studies, gave him the right. Not only boys, but even teachers were amazed by Kostin's watercolors. As a rule, these were landscapes, with their own clearly distinctive theme. The young artist did not take something large, catchy, bright, but always found some kind of touch in nature, past which one can pass and not notice: a twig, a flower, a field blade of grass. Moreover, Kostya performed these sketches with minimal pictorial means, sparingly selecting colors and playing with subtle color ratios. This shows the character of the boy, his approach to life.

Miraculously, one of his amazing staging has survived - a still life with a plaster head. Having almost finished the work, Kostya accidentally spilled glue on it; immediately he removed the cardboard from the easel and threw it into the trash bin. So this watercolor would have disappeared forever, like many others, if not for Kolya Charugin, also a boarding boy who studied in the class later and always watched with delight the work of Vasilyev. He saved and for thirty years kept this still life among his most valuable works.

All the components of this still life were tastefully selected by someone in the subject fund of the school: as a background - a medieval plush caftan, on the table - a plaster head of a boy, an old book in a worn leather cover and with some kind of rag bookmark, and next to it - not yet withered rose flower.

Kostya did not have to study for long - only two years. Father died and he had to return home. He continued his studies at the Kazan Art School, immediately enrolling in the second year. Kostya's drawings did not resemble the work of a student. He made any sketch with a smooth and almost continuous movement of his hand. Vasiliev made many vivid and expressive drawings. It is a pity that most of them have been lost. Of the surviving ones, the most interesting is his self-portrait, painted at the age of fifteen. The outline of the head is drawn with a smooth thin line. With one movement of the pencil, the shape of the nose, the bend of the eyebrows, the mouth, the chiseled bend of the auricle, curls at the forehead are slightly marked. At the same time, the oval of the face, the cut of the eyes and something else subtle reminds of "Madonna with a pomegranate" by Sandro Botticelli.

Characteristic is the preserved small still life of that period - "Kulik", painted in oil. It clearly imitates the Dutch masters - the same strict gloomy tonality, filigree texture of objects. On the edge of the table, on a rough canvas tablecloth, lies the hunter's prey, and next to it is a glass of water, an apricot pit. And the clear well water, and the still dry bone, and the bird left for a while - everything is so natural that the viewer can easily mentally expand the frame of the picture and draw in his imagination some everyday situation accompanying the artist's production.

By this period of his life, Vasiliev could write in any manner, under anyone. He mastered the craft masterfully. But he had to find his own way and, like any artist, he wanted to say his own word. He grew up and looked for himself.

In the spring of 1961, Konstantin graduated from the Kazan Art School. The diploma work was sketches of scenery for the opera "Snow Maiden" by Rimsky-Korsakov. The defense passed brilliantly. The work was rated "excellent", but, unfortunately, has not survived.

In a painful search for himself, Vasiliev "got sick" of abstractionism and surrealism. It was curious to try the styles and directions, which were headed by such fashionable names as Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Salvador Dali. Vasiliev quickly grasped the creative credo of each of them and created new interesting developments in their vein. Plunging with his usual seriousness into the development of new directions, Vasiliev creates a whole series of interesting surrealistic works, such as "The String", "Ascension", "The Apostle." However, Vasiliev himself was quickly disappointed by the formal search, which was based on naturalism.

“The only thing that is interesting about surrealism,” he shared with friends, “is its purely external showiness, the ability to openly express in a light form momentary aspirations and thoughts, but by no means deep feelings.

Drawing an analogy with music, he compared this trend with jazz processing of a symphonic piece. In any case, Vasiliev's delicate, subtle soul did not want to put up with a certain frivolity of the forms of surrealism: the permissiveness of expressing feelings and thoughts, their imbalance and nudity. The artist felt its inner inconsistency, the destruction of something important that exists in realistic art, the meaning, the purpose that it carries.

The passion for expressionism, related to non-objective painting and claiming great depth, continued for a little longer. Here, the pillars of abstractionism declared, for example, that the master, without the help of objects, depicts not longing on a person's face, but melancholy itself. That is, for the artist, the illusion of a much deeper self-expression arises. This period includes such works as: "Quartet", "Sadness of the Queen", "Vision", "Icon of Memory", "Music of Eyelashes".

Having mastered the image of external forms in perfection, having learned to give them special vitality, Konstantin was tormented by the thought that, in essence, nothing is hidden behind these forms, that, remaining on this path, he would lose the main thing - creative spiritual power and could not express -really your attitude to the world.

Trying to comprehend the essence of phenomena and to suffer the general structure of thoughts for future works, Constantine took up landscape sketches. What a variety of landscapes he created during his short creative life! Undoubtedly, Vasiliev created landscapes unique in their beauty, but some new strong thought was tormented, beating in his mind: "The inner strength of all living things, the strength of the spirit - that's what the artist should express!" Yes, beauty, greatness of spirit - that is what will henceforth be the main thing for Constantine! And the "Northern Eagle", "The Man with the Owl", "Waiting", "At Another's Window", "Northern Legend" and many other works were born, which became the embodiment of a special "Vasilyevsky" style, which cannot be confused with anything.

Northern eagle

Constantine belonged to the rarest category of people who are invariably accompanied by inspiration, but they do not feel it, because for them this is a familiar state. They seem to live from birth to death in the same breath, in an increased tone. Konstantin loves nature all the time, loves people all the time, loves life all the time. Why he watches, why and catches the eye, the movement of a cloud, a leaf. He is constantly attentive to everything. This attention, this love, this striving for everything good was the inspiration of Vasiliev. And this was his whole life.

Usuzha window

But it is unfair, of course, to assert that the life of Konstantin Vasiliev was devoid of inescapable human joys. Once (Konstantin was then seventeen years old), his sister Valentina, returning from school, said that a new one had come to them in the eighth grade - a beautiful girl with green slanting eyes and long, shoulder-length hair. She came to live in a resort village because of her sick brother. Konstantin offered to bring her to pose.

When fourteen-year-old Lyudmila Chugunova entered the house, Kostya suddenly became confused, fussed, and began to rearrange the easel from place to place. The first session lasted a long time. In the evening Kostya went to see Luda home. A gang of guys who met them beat him severely: Luda was immediately and unconditionally recognized as the most beautiful girl in the village. But could the beatings cool the ardent heart of the artist? He fell in love with the girl. He painted her portraits every day. Lyudmila told him about her romantic dreams, and he made color illustrations for them. They both disliked yellow (maybe just a youthful dislike for the symbol of betrayal?), And once, having drawn blue sunflowers, Kostya asked: “Do you understand what I wrote? If not, you'd better be silent, don't say anything …"

Konstantin introduced Luda to music and literature. They seemed to understand each other at a glance, at a glance. Once Lyudmila went to Konstantin with a friend. At this time, together with his friend Tolya Kuznetsov, he was sitting in the twilight, enthusiastically listening to classical music and did not react to those who entered. For Luda's friend, such inattention seemed insulting, and she dragged Luda by the hand.

After that, the girl was afraid of meeting for a long time, feeling that she had offended Kostya. Her whole being was drawn to him, and when she became completely unbearable, she approached his house and sat for hours on the porch. But friendly relations were broken.

Several years have passed. Once by train, Konstantin was returning from Kazan with Anatoly. Having met Lyudmila in the car, he approached her and invited: - I have an exhibition opened in Zelenodolsk. Come on over. Your portrait is also there.

A resounding, joyful hope awakened in her soul. Of course she will come! But at home, my mother categorically forbade: “You won't go! Why dangle somewhere, you already have a lot of his drawings and portraits!"

The exhibition was closed, and suddenly Konstantin himself came to her house. Having collected all his drawings, in front of Lyudmila's eyes, he tore them up and silently left. Forever…

Several works of the semi-abstract style - the memory of the youthful search for pictorial forms and means dedicated to Lyudmila Chugunova, are still preserved in the collections of Blinov and Pronin.

Warm relations once connected Konstantin with Lena Aseeva, a graduate of the Kazan Conservatory. The portrait of Lena in oil has been successfully demonstrated at all the artist's posthumous exhibitions. Elena successfully graduated from an educational institution in the piano class and, of course, was well versed in music. This circumstance especially attracted Constantine to the girl. Once he made up his mind and proposed to her. The girl replied that she should think …

Well, who of us, mere mortals, can imagine what passions boil and disappear without a trace in the soul of a great artist, what sometimes insignificant circumstances can radically change the intensity of his emotions? Of course, he did not know with what answer Lena went to him the next day, but, apparently, he was no longer interested in this, since he did not immediately receive the desired answer.

Many will say that this is not serious and that such important issues are not resolved. And they will, of course, be right. But let's remember that artists tend to be easily hurt and proud people. Unfortunately, the failure that befell Constantine in this matchmaking played another fatal role in his fate.

As a mature man, at the age of about thirty, he fell in love with Lena Kovalenko, who also received a musical education. An intelligent, thin, charming girl, Lena disturbed Konstantin's heart. In him again, as in his youth, a strong, real feeling woke up, but the fear of being rejected, of meeting misunderstanding did not allow him to arrange his happiness … But the fact that his only chosen one until the last days of his life was painting, one can see the special purpose of the artist.

There are undoubtedly objective reasons for this. One of them is the selfless maternal love of Klavdia Parmenovna, who was afraid to let her son out of his nest. Sometimes she could look at the bride too meticulously, with a critical eye, and then express her opinion to her son, to which Konstantin reacted very sensitively.

Man with owl

An extraordinary talent, a rich spiritual world and the received education allowed Konstantin Vasiliev to leave his own, incomparable, trace in Russian painting. His canvases are easily recognizable. He may not be recognized at all, some of his works are controversial, but once seeing the work of Vasiliev, one can no longer remain indifferent to them. I would like to cite an excerpt from the story "Continuation of Time" by Vladimir Soloukhin: - … "Konstantin Vasiliev ?! - the artists protested. - But this is unprofessional. Painting has its own laws, its own rules. And this is illiterate from the point of view of painting. He is an amateur …, an amateur, and all his pictures are an amateurish daub. In the same place, not a single scenic spot corresponds to another scenic spot! - But excuse me, if this painting is not even art, then how and why does it affect people?.. - Maybe there is poetry, your thoughts, symbols, images, your view of the world - we will not argue, but there is no professional painting. - Yes, thoughts and symbols cannot influence people by themselves in their naked form. These would only be slogans, abstract signs. And poetry cannot exist in a non-embodied form. And on the contrary, if the picture is super-literate and, professional, if every painting spot in it, as you say, correlates with another painting spot, but there is no poetry, no thought, no symbol, no view of the world, if the picture does not touch no mind, no heart, boring, dull or simply dead, spiritually dead, then why do I need this competent relationship of parts. The main thing here, apparently, is precisely in the spirituality of Konstantin Vasiliev. It was the spirituality that people felt …"

Kostya died under very strange and mysterious circumstances. The official version is that he was shot down with a friend at a railway crossing by a passing train. It happened on October 29, 1976. Kostya's relatives and friends do not agree with this - there are too many incomprehensible coincidences associated with his death. This misfortune shocked many. They buried Konstantin in a birch grove, in the very forest where he loved to be.

Fate, so often evil in relation to great people from the outside, always carefully deals with what is in them inner, deep. The thought that is to live does not die with its carriers, even when death catches them unexpectedly and accidentally. And the artist will live as long as his paintings are alive.

Homesickness

Farewell to the Slav

The fires are burning

Valkyrie over the slain warrior

Wotan

Fire spell

Fight with a snake

Dobrynya's fight with a snake

Fight with a snake

Fire sword

Duel of Peresvet with Chelubey

The birth of the Danube

The birth of the Danube

Eupraxia

Vasily Buslaev

Invasion (sketch)

Alyosha Popovich and the red maiden

Gift of Svyatogor

Gift of Svyatogor

Ilya Muromets and Gol tavern

Giant

Knight

Expectation

Divination

Prince Igor

Volga

Volga and Mikula

Avdotya-ryazanochka

Ilya Muromets

Nastasya Mikulishna

Svarog

Sviyazhsk

Svetovid

Ilya Muromets frees prisoners

Northern legend

Reaper

Mermaid

Old man

Sadko and the Lord of the Sea

Crying Yaroslavna

Large resolution collection: 1700 - 7000 px (smaller side size)

Archive size: 274MB

Number of works: 153