Chekrygin Vasily Nikolaevich. Russian transhumanist movement Chekrygin artist paintings

...As some sources dryly report, on June 3, 1922, on the Pushkino-Mamontovka stretch, under “mysterious circumstances,” the talented young artist Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin was hit by a train and tragically died.

In fact, there was nothing mysterious here. According to the memoirs of the artist’s friend and biographer L.F. Zhegin, the immediate impetus for the tragedy was a banal “... quarrel with his mother-in-law, gloomy and capricious, who looked at him (Chekrygin - I.P.) as if he were some kind of foreign body that had accidentally fallen into their family. It was the day of Konstantin and Elena (June 3) - the name day of the brother and sister of Vera Viktorovna Chekrygina (the artist’s wife - I.P.). The holiday was celebrated in Pushkino, where relatives and guests arrived. Flushed with wine, offended by some remark from his mother-in-law, Chekrygin tore Railway tickets and went on foot to Mamontovka, where his father-in-law’s other dacha was located. But this was the path to death. Chekrygin died trying to jump on the running board of a speeding train. It was 9 pm. The train was stopped. Chekrygin’s wife was in one of the carriages. He was still breathing, but had no memory. The right leg was cut off at the ankle, the left leg was crushed, there was a small abrasion on the head, at the back of the head. The face is calm, with a normal smile, eyes half-open. I saw him already in the coffin. I will never forget this beautiful, seemingly transformed face. This is how he was, barely touching the rough elements of everyday life, always somehow enlightened, and this is how he went into eternity. He was buried on June 6 in the cemetery in Mamontovka, on the edge of the forest. This place does not exist now - it is covered with water from the Moscow-Volga canal. In addition to his wife and her relatives, he was accompanied by a few friends who came from Moscow... wooden cross a photograph from Rublev’s “Trinity” was mounted.

Artist N.M. Chernyshev, who also knew Chekrygin well, later wrote: “On June 4, on Trinity Day, Zhegin came to me with stunning news about tragic death Chekrygina. For a long time he could not utter a word. The day before, at 9 o'clock in the evening, our Vasily Nikolaevich jumped onto the train steps while moving and died instantly. The next morning of Spiritual Day, I had to be present at the washing of his body in the Mytishchi hospital chapel and put Vasily Nikolaevich in the coffin and his severed foot. On top of the sheet that covered him all, I put... fresh blue violets. On the 5th funeral service and funeral in Pushkino, on rural cemetery(Akulovsky). On Sunday, June 11, in the Church of Flora and Lavra on Myasnitskaya, a public funeral service was celebrated (at 5 pm): by the Union “Art - Life”, “Makovets” and the Printing Workshop. On Wednesday, June 14, a meeting of the union dedicated to the memory of V.N. Chekrygin, in his wife’s apartment in Konyushenny Lane.”

This is such a sad story...

A short biography the artist is like that.

Russian painter, graphic artist, one of the founders and most bright artists association "Makovets" Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (January 6/18, 1897, Zhizdra, Kaluga province - June 3, 1922, "Mamontovskaya" station, Moscow region) spent his childhood in Kyiv. He studied at the icon painting school at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra and a four-year city school. At the age of thirteen, accompanied by his older brother, he went to Moscow to enter college. Moscow school painting, sculpture and architecture (MUZHVZ) and easily passed the competition. In 1912, three students of the school themselves produced a book of poems that one of them wrote. Chekrygin rewrote the poems on special paper, from which they could be transferred to lithographic stone, and added several drawings. This was the first book of poems by V.V. Mayakovsky - “I!” In the winter of 1913–1914, he exhibited several of his innovative works at the XXXV exhibition of the MUZHVZ. But the accompanying scandal and the year-long deprivation of his scholarship force Chekrygin to stop studying. Having left the walls of MUZHVZ, he goes to travel around Europe. Returning to Russia, he goes to the front. As part of a machine gun brigade he fights near Dvinsk. In 1918 he became a member of the Commission for the Protection of Artistic Treasures. In the early 1920s, the artist’s work flourished; from this time almost one and a half thousand of his drawings have reached us. Chekrygin creates several graphic cycles “Execution” (1920), “Crazy” (1921), “Hunger in the Volga Region” (1922) and “Resurrection of the Dead” (1921–1922). Actively participates in organizing and writing the future manifesto of the Union of Artists and Poets “Art-Life” (“Makovets”).

Among theoretical works Chekrygin's most famous work was “On the Cathedral of the Resurrection Museum” (1921), dedicated to the memory of the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. Creative and life path Chekrygina's career ended very early: at the age of twenty-five, he died tragically after being hit by a train.

Here are some facts from the life of the artist.

...Vasily Chekrygin, despite the age difference, was on very friendly terms with Vladimir Mayakovsky.

He even allowed himself small insolence, such as the fact that “you, Volodka, should bend arcs in the Tambov province, not paint pictures.” But when Mayakovsky wanted to publish the first collection of his poems, the artist decided that he needed help with this. The poet brought lithographic paper and ink and began to dictate to Chekrygin - he wrote in his characteristic handwriting, a little in the Slavic spirit. Chekrygin made several beautiful drawings, reminiscent of Novgorod frescoes, but have nothing in common with Mayakovsky’s text.

“Well, Vasya,” he muttered, “I drew an angel again - I would draw a fly, I haven’t drawn for a long time!” However, the poet did not particularly object. The text of Mayakovsky’s first book “I!” and the drawings were taken to a small lithograph at the Nikolsky Gate and published in an edition of 300 copies.

However, a close relationship with the poet did not prevent Chekrygin from looking with irreconcilability at Mayakovsky’s relationship with Lilya Brik and her husband Osip Brik. When Mayakovsky and the Briks came to Chekrygin’s dacha in Pushkino, the artist usually muttered under his breath: “Here, the Britzka has arrived with two riders!” Chekrygin believed that relations with the Briks were harmful for his friend Mayakovsky. In fact, because of this, a gap occurred between the artist and the poet.

But that was later.

...In the meantime, after traveling abroad, at the end of 1915, Vasily Chekrygin volunteered for the active army, fighting in a machine-gun brigade, participating in the battles near Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia).

According to the artist himself, he would probably have died in the “damned Pinsk swamps” if not for his brother Ivan. Having stocked up with the necessary passes and risking his own fate, Ivan Chekrygin transferred his brother to the headquarters of the Engineering Regiment, where he himself served as a senior clerk. There was a lot of work in the headquarters office, but it was still better than the trenches. From here Chekrygin sent L.F. Zhegin has a drawing depicting him at a table on which lies a piece of paper with the inscription “Dear Leo!” But during the war his health suffered greatly (chronic bronchitis and rheumatism); he becomes nervous and irritable. To encourage him, Zhegin writes that the time has not yet come for him. To which Chekrygin replied: “I don’t have any bell. I don’t want to be a bell ringer myself, to compose a bell tower for myself. Calling in vain, what could be sadder or stupider. Hope! What is hope, what is ahead is the same as what is behind. But for me there was always twilight and even night when nothing could be made out. Every day there is less faith in people.” Due to illness, the artist was repeatedly evacuated to the rear, and finally, in August 1917, he returned to Moscow.

And three years later, Vasily Chekrygin marries Vera Viktorovna Berenstam-Kotova. How they met and what role the war played in this (where the artist’s future companion was a sister of mercy) is still unknown.

But be that as it may, the artist lived with his wife and newly born daughter in Pushkino at his father-in-law’s dacha during the winter of 1921–1922.

And so, literally a month before tragic death Vasily Chekrygin, on April 30, 1922, an exhibition opened at the State Museum of Fine Arts (since 1937, the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin), organized by the union of young artists and poets “Art-Life” (“Makovets”), the ideological inspirer of which he showed up. One of the main sections of the exhibition was dedicated to the work of Chekrygin himself; Of the four hundred of his works selected for the exhibition, half were exhibited - 201 works. And almost all of this was created at the very last period Chekrygin’s creativity when he lived in Pushkino, being one of the founders of the Makovets group and a follower of Nikolai Fedorov’s “Philosophy of the Common Cause”. " Painting works Vasya was almost absent, but his drawings surrounded the hall like a brilliant ring... All the huge number of drawings he created this year were made at night, when he was on duty at the bedside of his wife’s seriously ill brother,” recalled the artist’s friend and colleague Lev Zhegin.

...Well, we already know the rest.

Let us only add that after the death of V.N. Chekrygin left a lot of his works, many of them now decorate a variety of collections not only in Russia, but also abroad.

They say that the writer K. Paustovsky, after visiting the artist’s exhibition, wrote: “The first, most obvious and unmistakable feeling from Chekrygin’s works is a feeling of genius. This is an artist of world significance, world power!..”

...Let's remember kind words our “countryman”, a direct participant in the First World War, an extraordinary person and talented artist Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin!..

I. PROKURONOV.

In the pictures:

V. Chekrygin (1920).

V. Chekrygin. Trinity (1922).

Rice. V. Chekrygina “At the Front”.

V. Chekrygin with V. Mayakovsky.

(1897-1922)

V. I. Chekrygin grew up in Kyiv and as a boy was accepted into the icon painting school of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. At the age of thirteen, accompanied by his older brother, he went to Moscow to enter the Moscow School of Higher Painting and Painting, and easily passed the competition.

In 1912, three students of the school made a book of poems with their own hands, which one of them wrote; Chekrygin rewrote the poems on special paper, from which they could be transferred to lithographic stone, and added several drawings. This was the first book of poems by V.V. Mayakovsky - “I!”. A talented young man makes friends with older comrades who are passionate about searching for new forms, new paths in art. He paints angular, sharp portraits full of inner drama, causing the displeasure of teachers.

In 1914 he left the school and participated in one of the famous “leftist” exhibitions - “No. 4” (1914). The First World War found him abroad, he returned to Russia by a roundabout route, and was at the front.

Early 1920s - the flowering of the artist’s creativity.

From this time, almost one and a half thousand of his drawings have reached us. He worked most often with compressed charcoal, which lay on the paper in soft, velvety spots. And from these swirling spots, forming an indefinite, mysteriously pulsating dark space on the sheet, appear unclear figures and faces, but imbued with passionate dramatic tension. The drawings are sketches, quick. The artist does not give them names - they are only links in an endless chain, particles of a single, colossal plan, sketches of individual characters and episodes that have yet to receive their final meaning, united into a harmonious whole. In fact, the artist dreamed of a grandiose fresco dedicated to the future destinies of humanity. At the heart of this utopian plan is N.F. Fedorov about the resurrection of past generations and the resettlement of humanity into space, which made an indelible impression on Chekrygin. But mastering space, the path to the stars, is not a technical task for an artist, but spiritual feat accomplished by heroic impulse and insight. Chekrygin's sheets with their naked bodies shining from the darkness have nothing in common with science fiction. “Do not take these figures for bodies, there should be nothing corporeal in them, these are only images, spirits,” said the artist.

But next to this philosophical utopia, a completely different topic appears in Chekrygin’s drawings, a topical one, straight from the newspaper page: “Hunger in the Volga region” (1922). And here the same interest is not in the fact, although terrible, but in its internal drama, in the spiritual tension of the time. Having moved from painting to drawing, which allowed him to almost instantly splash out on the page this storm of passions tearing him apart, Chekrygin remained a painter throughout his creative make-up. These sheets, modest in material, seem like paintings; they are not graphic, not linear, filled with powerful masses of color (even if only black and white), the radiance of light and the depths of darkness. And in their tragic power, these works echo the most dramatic images of the great masters of the past - the mighty drawings of Tintoretto, the inspired graphics of Rembrandt, the tragic grotesques of Goya.

A passionate obsession with art, penetrating the destinies of suffering and beautiful humanity, made the very young Chekrygin the inspirer of a whole group of artists with similar spiritual aspirations. They called it “Art - Life” or, according to the title of their magazine, “Makovets”. An artist-thinker who also sought to theoretically determine the meaning of his art, Chekrygin was the ideologist of the group. But his path ended tragically early: at the age of twenty-five, the artist died under a train.

, Kaluga province

Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (January 19 1897 , Zhizdra Kaluga province - June 3, Mamontovka station Moscow region) - Russian painter, graphic artist, one of the founders and most prominent artists " Makovets ».

Biography and creativity

First illustrated and printed in lithography technique poetry V. Mayakovsky. In winter - 1914 exhibited several of his innovative works at the XXXV (Anniversary) exhibition of MUZHVZ. The scandal and the year-long deprivation of the scholarship force Chekrygin to stop studying. Having left the walls of the MUZHVZ, he participated in the exhibition “No. 4”, organized by Mikhail Larionov, and traveled around Europe. Returning to Russia, he went to the front. As part of a machine gun brigade he fights under Dvinsk. IN 1918 is a member of the Commission for the Protection of Artistic Values.

In the early 1920s, the artist’s work flourished. Chekrygin creates several graphic cycles “Execution” (), “Crazy” (), “Famine in the Volga Region” () and “Resurrection of the Dead” ( -). Actively participates in organizing and writing the future manifesto of the Union of Artists and Poets “Art-Life” (“ Makovets"). Among Chekrygin’s theoretical works, the most famous was the work “On the Cathedral of the Resurrection Museum” (1921), dedicated to memory philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.

The artist’s creative and life path ended very early. At the age of twenty-five, Chekrygin died tragically after being hit by a train.

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Literature

• Chekrygin, V.N. “About the Cathedral of the Resurrection Museum.” In the book "N.F. Fedorov: pro et contra". Book 2. St. Petersburg: RKhGA. P.450-482.
• Bakushinsky A.V. “On the way to great art”, w. “Life” No. 3, M.: 1922
• Catalog of the exhibition of works by V. N. Chekrygin (1897-1922). M.: Tsvetkovskaya Art Gallery , 1923
• Catalog. Second exhibition of paintings. “Makovets” (Art-life). Page 13, M.: Museum of Fine Arts, 1924 (January).
• Catalog. XIV-a Esposizione Internazionale D'Arte della Citta di Venecia, MCMXXIV, p. 237, 1924
• Shaposhnikov B. Without title (about the last meeting with V. Chekrygin). Catalog of the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin for the artist’s personal exhibition. M., Soviet artist, 1969
• Chiseled O. Exhibition of works by V.N. Chekrygina, “Banner” No. 3, Kaluga, 1965
• Levitin E. S. “About the art of V.N. Chekrygina." Catalog of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin for the artist’s personal exhibition in this museum. M.: Soviet artist, 1969
• Levitin E. S. Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin: Drawings. M.: Soviet artist, 1969
• Catalog of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin for the artist’s personal exhibition in this museum in 1969-70. M.: Soviet Artist, 1969
• Kustov G. “Vasily Chekrygin”, M.: “Moscow Artist” No. 41, 1970
• Bakushinsky A.V. “V. Chekrygin. Selected art criticism articles." M.: Soviet artist, 1981
• Zhegin L.F. “Memories of V.N. Chekrygin. Editorial, preface and comments by N. I. Khardzhiev.” “Panorama of Arts” No. 10, M.: Soviet Artist, 1987
• Wassili Tschekrygin: Mystiker der Russischen avantgarde: aus der Geschichte des Russischen Expressionismus. Köln: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1992
• Dymshits E. A. “Vasily Chekrygin. Album. Kyiv, 2005
• Skomarovskaya N.V. “The Cathedral of the Resurrection Museum.” The legacy of the artist Vasily Chekrygin. J. "Shpil", Perm, 2005
• Murina Elena , Rakitin Vasily. Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin. - M.: , 2005. - 288 p. - ISBN 5-902801-02-8.
• Nekrasova., E.A. The life, Writings and Art of Vasiliy Chekrigin. pp. 119-123,Leonardo,Vol.17,#2,1984

Links

Notes

Excerpt characterizing Chekrygin, Vasily Nikolaevich

Meanwhile, another column was supposed to attack the French from the front, but Kutuzov was with this column. He knew well that nothing but confusion would come out of this battle that had begun against his will, and, as far as it was in his power, he held back the troops. He didn't move.
Kutuzov rode silently on his gray horse, lazily responding to proposals to attack.
“You’re all about attacking, but you don’t see that we don’t know how to do complex maneuvers,” he said to Miloradovich, who asked to go forward.
“They didn’t know how to take Murat alive in the morning and arrive at the place on time: now there’s nothing to do!” - he answered the other.
When Kutuzov was informed that in the rear of the French, where, according to the Cossacks’ reports, there had been no one before, there were now two battalions of Poles, he glanced back at Yermolov (he had not spoken to him since yesterday).
- They’re asking for an offensive, they’re offering various projects, but as soon as you get down to business, nothing is ready, and the forewarned enemy takes his measures.
Ermolov narrowed his eyes and smiled slightly when he heard these words. He realized that the storm had passed for him and that Kutuzov would limit himself to this hint.
“He’s having fun at my expense,” Ermolov said quietly, nudging Raevsky, who was standing next to him, with his knee.
Soon after this, Ermolov moved forward to Kutuzov and respectfully reported:
- Time has not been lost, your lordship, the enemy has not left. What if you order an attack? Otherwise the guards won’t even see the smoke.
Kutuzov said nothing, but when he was informed that Murat’s troops were retreating, he ordered an offensive; but every hundred steps he stopped for three quarters of an hour.
The whole battle consisted only in what Orlov Denisov’s Cossacks did; the rest of the troops only lost several hundred people in vain.
As a result of this battle, Kutuzov received a diamond badge, Bennigsen also received diamonds and a hundred thousand rubles, others, according to their ranks, also received a lot of pleasant things, and after this battle even new movements were made at headquarters.
“This is how we always do things, everything is topsy-turvy!” - Russian officers and generals said after the Battle of Tarutino, - exactly the same as they say now, making it feel like someone stupid is doing it this way, inside out, but we wouldn’t do it that way. But people who say this either do not know the matter they are talking about or are deliberately deceiving themselves. Every battle - Tarutino, Borodino, Austerlitz - is not carried out as its managers intended. This is an essential condition.
An innumerable number of free forces (for nowhere is a person freer than during a battle, where it is a matter of life and death) influences the direction of the battle, and this direction can never be known in advance and never coincides with the direction of any one force.
If many, simultaneously and variously directed forces act on some body, then the direction of movement of this body cannot coincide with any of the forces; but there will always be an average, shortest direction, what in mechanics is expressed by the diagonal of a parallelogram of forces.

Vasily Chekrygin. Self-portrait

March 14, 2017 Tuesday. A tragic paradox: an artist captivated by the ideas of the philosopher Fedorov to restore life to everyone to past generations, he himself spent only 25 years in the human world. On June 3, 1922, he was hit by a train on the stretch between Pushkino and Mamontovka near Moscow. In chronological notes about his life, work and death, his wife, V. Chekrygina, and his closest friend, L. Zhegin, the son of the famous architect Shekhtel, wrote: “Death on the eve of Trinity Day - a favorite holiday.<…>V.N. [Chekrygin] died instantly. A small abrasion was found on the head, towards the back of the head, right leg It turned out to be cut off at the ankle, the left one was crushed. Calm face with a normal smile, eyes open.”

Chekrygin’s life unwinded, as it were, in three spirals, at different distances from the “weighty, rough, visible” reality that surrounded him.

And the first spiral was his direct, active participation in this very reality, marked by the great, fateful and tragic earthquakes of the early twentieth century (and ancient thinkers warned: God forbid man to live in such eras). 1914 World War. He volunteers for the front: “There is suffering there, I must go there.” 1916 As part of a machine gun company, he took part in fierce battles near Dvinsk. Pinsk swamps give rheumatism and chronic bronchitis. In 1917 he taught classes at the Sokolniki House of Arts. In the fall of 1919 he was called up for military service, to camouflage school. Then he was seconded to the People's Commissariat for Education. Meets with Lunacharsky. Works in a number of commissions initiated by him.

In a word, the biography of a completely trustworthy citizen of the RSFSR, who accepted October, but never lived to see the proclamation of the USSR. But this is only the outer contour of the biography. Its internal, deep-seated overtones bear the imprint of the tragic, deadly time in which he happened to live.

Much in his short earthly existence, including the fanatical, superhuman thirst to work and create, is explained by this heightened personal feeling the universal struggle of life and death, the preciousness of the years, months, days, minutes, seconds allotted to him on earth. The reason for this was the loss of loved ones, whose concentration sharply exceeded those that befall one ordinary human life(especially in youth). And, perhaps, an intuitive prediction of his early departure.

Chekrygin’s second life spiral is his path in art. In his manner, style, and plasticity one can find echoes of both the great Western masters and ours - Rublev, Dionysius. After all, in search of your handwriting in fine arts he “scanned” almost all the “isms” that existed in it (and is it necessary to remind what a “melting pot”, what a concentration of explosive extremes - extremes in both affirmations and denials) was domestic art the first decades of the last century), tried to write in a variety of manners. Almost as a child, he was shocked by Larionov’s rayism and went through a wonderful vocational school first at the icon-painting workshop at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, then at the legendary Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (by the way, who later worked mainly in contrasting black and white was considered the best colorist there), then also studying abroad. However, it is perhaps impossible to name one specific Master, from whose “overcoat” the author of the graphic sheets “Genesis” and “Resurrection of the Dead” emerged.

At the same time, of course, many rays and threads coming from such a truly renaissance personality as Chekrygin was, with the widest range of his interests, can be extended to the masters of the past. In the notes already mentioned, L. Zhegin and V. Chekrygina testify: "Determined" eternal companions»»: Phidias, Rublev, Leonardo; loves Giotto, Masaccio, Tintoretto. Has a negative attitude towards Michelangelo. His traveling library: the Bible, Dante, Cervantes. He loves to read Gogol out loud and bursts out laughing at him.<…>The distant influence of Goya is the gray-green-red palette, and “Stonemasons” is compositionally dependent on Courbet. Knows the French. Loves Cezanne. Gets acquainted with the cultures of Greece, Byzantium, Egypt and India. He is very fond of the paintings in Kut-El-Amarna and the mosaics of Mystras, but especially delves into icon painting (Russian) and fresco.<…>He writes poetry, a poem.”

This is all a recording of just one, 1911. When Chekrygin is 14. Still just a boy!

Plus, meeting futurists. Mayakovsky. Burliuk. By the way, among the exhibits of the exhibition is “I”. The very, very first book by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Autographed by the author. It was illustrated by Vasily Chekrygin and Lev Zhegin (then Shekhtel) in a clearly futuristic manner.

And finally the third spiral. Chekrygin belonged to that rare group of artist-thinkers who could in no way be satisfied with the very noble role of expressing the contradictions and prejudices, aspirations and ideals of their time in a consistent series individual works. All this was for them only a foundation, a footing on the path to some unifying spiritual, intellectual peak, a kind of goal-setting that brings us closer to understanding the meaning of our own and common life.

Such was, for example, through dozens of sketches, each of which a wonderful example of first-class painting, the rise of Alexander Ivanov to his pinnacle “The Appearance of Christ to the People.” This was the path of Vasily Chekrygin to the grandiose murals “Genesis” and “Resurrection of the Dead” that he conceived. But the work was interrupted by death. I can’t say: at the very beginning of the journey. For in the year and five months that passed from his acquaintance with Nikolai Fedorov’s “Philosophy of the Common Cause” until his own death, he managed to create more than 1,400 sketches. And what sketches!

Fedorov's idea to resurrect all people who have ever lived on Earth attracted the attention of Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Bryusov and Tsiolkovsky. The name of the latter in this series is especially significant not only because they were fellow countrymen (in Borovsk and Kaluga). But also because both are considered among the founders of Russian cosmism. In the second incarnation of his teaching, Fedorov struggled with the problem: how to settle on our small planet all the humanity that preceded us? And he came up with the idea of ​​space resettlement of people to other planets. Similar thoughts of Tsiolkovsky (remember: humanity cannot remain in the cradle forever) were especially popular with us during the time of the first space launches.

Fedorov’s fundamentally utopian concept nevertheless carried a rational grain: a premonition, a harbinger of that belief in the omnipotence of science that gripped people in the twentieth century, in which the philosopher himself would no longer live (he died in 1903). The first condition in order to nullify many of the natural and social disasters awaiting us in the near future and even to defeat death itself, was, according to Fedorov, the unification of the intellectual and spiritual efforts of art, science, and religion of all mankind. The second main condition for victory over death was the merging of the most scattered humanity into a single brotherhood.

The end of the past and the beginning of this century greatly cooled the belief in the omnipotence of such unions. Although, of course, there are still many reasons to fuel it. The information revolution alone is worth it! And all these gene copies of living organisms, stem cells, chips implanted in us... etc., etc. But still, our hopes for a reasonable reorganization of the world through the united efforts of all humanity turned out to be quite overestimated, especially in terms of the planetary triumph of social justice and in terms of faith in the victorious step scientific and technological progress Same. But, on the other hand, we simply have no other choice but to implement Fedorov’s project - albeit not in the author’s utopian, but in a more realistic version.

Disunited humanity has brought our Earth and the existence of all living beings and plants on it, including humans, to such an extreme state that either “peoples, having forgotten their strife, will unite into a single family,” and humanity, now, according to Vernadsky, a gigantic geological force, will direct it along a creative rather than destructive vector, or what awaits us ahead - and the count has already begun - is a nuclear, environmental (or what other end of the world are there?) apocalypse. And then there will be no one and no one to resurrect on the depopulated planet.

March 22, 2017 Wednesday. In our everyday life, we too often and easily slide into defining complex, voluminous phenomena through unambiguous stereotypes: “Fyodorov? Oh, it’s about raising the dead!” In fact, in the same “Philosophy of the Common Cause”, no less powerful a principle than the “rebellion against death” was, for example, an analysis of what content is filled with the concept of the price and meaning of a person’s life in interaction with the human communities around him.

“How is it possible,” writes N. Fedorov, - altruism without egoism? Those who sacrifice their lives are altruists, but who are they who accept the sacrifice?<…>If life is a good, then sacrificing it will be a loss of good for those who gave their lives to preserve it for others; But will life be good for those who accepted the sacrifice and preserved their lives at the cost of the death of others?

This beginning was directly related to the moral quest in contemporary public life for both Fedorov and Chekrygin. It is no coincidence that the problem of “unity and struggle of opposites”—egoism and altruism—identified in “Philosophy of the Common Cause” had such a long and resounding echo not only in philosophical discussions, but also in our fiction.

Starting with one of the most famous early stories Maxim Gorky’s “Old Woman Izergil”, where through the thick, viscous fabric of the confession of the old woman herself, at the beginning and at the end, two prominences break through - legends: about the egoist Larra, sentenced by people to the most terrible execution - endless torture by immortality, and about the altruist Danko, who tore his burning heart out of his chest in order to lead people out of the stinking dark forest to the light. By the way, the author himself is not so simple here in depicting the seemingly obvious contrasting head-on collision of the personalities of Larra and Danko, if you pay attention to how the human groups interacting with them are written in the story. In any case, Gorky (and his reading circle was always quite wide and varied), in my opinion, clearly reveals here that he is familiar with the “Philosophy of the Common Cause.”

And ending with a later entry from the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin: “The highest morality is the sacrifice of one’s individuality for the benefit of the collective. The highest immorality is when the collective sacrifices the individual in favor of itself.”

Memories bring to us the image of Chekrygin as a highly moral, conscientious person, to whom these Fedorov’s searches for self-determination of a person in a world of his own kind were close.

In his personal comments to his graphic sheets, he seemed somewhat ashamed of his intoxication with the beauty of the human body (which is so natural for a true artist), calling to see in his images not real people, but some kind of phantoms, ghosts. Such modesty, of course, is largely in tune with the character of this man, his hyper-sensitiveness, hyper-responsiveness to any human pain and any joy nearby (how selflessly, better than professional nurses, he cared for his sick wife, and then his sick brother, with what tenderness he surrounded his born daughter !).

But the point here is still something else. It was important for him that, while “seeing” the moments of the resurrection of human bodies, the viewer did not lose the main guideline to which the artist was leading him. And this is a resurrection, an affirmation - no matter what! — spiritual principles in a person, faith in the invincibility of these principles.

Still, in order to believe in Fedorov’s resurrection of all humanity who lived on Earth before us in our, albeit sometimes crazy, existence, one must be a little out of this world. Or an artist. Like Chekrygin. But to find in art an equivalent to the ideas of this philosopher, strange even for the spiritual searches of the early twentieth century, seemed, in principle, an impossible task.

It is known that the illustrations for “ Divine Comedy"was not easy even for such Masters as Francesco Michelino, Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Dore, Ernst Neizvestny. But there, in Dante, there are much more purely artistic clues than in Fedorov.

Vasily Chekrygin is the only one who managed to express, so to speak, in the flesh these very moments of Fedorov’s “resurrection from the dead.” Although, it would seem, no, there cannot be such an artist on Earth. It's not about visual media, (here the author can, of course, turn to the experience of other masters), but about a philosophical and artistic task that no master would undertake to solve. How Chekrygin managed to do this is his main mystery. This is how, perhaps, the main “subtext” of this exhibition was roughly explained to me by its curator Elizaveta Vladimirovna Efremova (at the Tretyakov Gallery she is the curator of the 20th century graphics department).

The first attempts to penetrate this secret were made immediately after Chekrygin’s death. In the second issue of the magazine “Makovets”, published in 1922 (many materials in the issue are dedicated to his memory), B. Shaposhnikov defined it this way: stylistic features, most often found in the Chekrygin series “Resurrection of the Dead”: “In various places on the surface the artist applies dots with charcoal or pencil; they mark the eyes, the nipples of the breasts, the mouth, but sometimes they appear in seemingly completely random places in the shaded background, between the figures. Just look closely at the drawing, and it becomes obvious that these dots are never random - they achieve the dynamism of the composition. It is also characteristic that, when drawing his spirit-images, V.N. never outlined the contours of the figures, they seem to appear out of thin air, and only the skulls, the contour of the crown of the head, he carefully draws with a sharply sharpened pencil, as if it were the only material part of the entire figure . It seems that these dots and the outlined contours of the crown, being the artist’s subconscious handwriting, provide the key to revealing the process of his, mostly subconscious, creativity.”

Well, yes, of course, art historians will explain to us how this was done technically. How, by thickening dark spots in some cases and blurring them in others, the artist achieves maximum emotional impact on the viewer. But still, they are unlikely to be able to fully explain how by magic we get the impression that these figures on the flat space of the sheet are moving in volume, as if this very mystery of resurrection from the dead is happening before our eyes. It has just begun and is far from being completed. It - in move from afterlife shadows to real, living human flesh.

Particularly impressive are the luminous sheets, allegorically reproducing the beginning of the great interplanetary migration of mankind. Imagine a revived Socrates or Aristotle, setting off on their cosmic ascension... Of course, these sheets are neither at the exhibition nor in nature. But it’s already possible to imagine, to “complete” this in your imagination, after what Chekrygin managed to create.

He, naturally, does not bring his heroes to individual recognition, but, in full accordance with Fedorov’s inherently democratic plan to resurrect all people, and not just the righteous, he populates the sketches with very different characters. And those who, perhaps, were in a past existence on Parnassus, and those who wasted their lives in medieval taverns and taverns.

The first person to attract general attention to Chekrygin’s work was art critic A.V. Bakushinsky said about his “Resurrection of the Dead”: “...A penetrating artistic vision, in which the great mortal pain of the sensation of accomplished, as well as inevitably future catastrophes and the great joy of the premonition of a new heaven and a new earth - a new man in new, hitherto unseen, social and cosmic relations found their expression.”

By the way, the exhibition taking place within the framework of the project “ Tretyakov Gallery opens its storerooms” and dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the artist’s birth, it is called: “Graphics by Vasily Chekrygin. Premonition of the future».

This small exhibition, with only two halls, is perfectly conceived and organized. Above the first hall (life and creative path artist before becoming acquainted with Fedorov’s ideas) the idea seems to be to express what he experienced in a cycle of graphic sketches, where from a variety of modern, historical and mythological events - “Uprising”, “Execution”, “Faces”, “Crazy Woman”, “Head of a Bacchante”, “ Screaming”, “Little Slave with a Horse”, “Chimera with a Boy” - crystallizes what in the finale was to become the monumental mural “Genesis”. And the future fresco “Resurrection of the Dead” dominates the second hall.

But I still lacked a third hall here. Of course, in the form of separate artifacts and exhibits, his imaginary exposition was presented separately in the first two. However…

In general, the general interest in the rebellion against death raised by Fedorov with its still, in the 21st century, unknown ending and its equivalent reflection in Chekrygin’s graphic sheets is understandable. But this still somewhat distracts the viewer’s attention from yet another artistic and philosophical peak that he managed to achieve on his own short life Vasily Chekrygin. It's called "Makovets".

It was a magazine founded in 1922 and at the same time a community of artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists. The name of the magazine and the association was given by history. This was the name of the hill on which Sergius of Radonezh founded the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. This unifying symbol for Russian self-awareness has gathered around itself a truly diamond personal crown: P. Florensky, V. Khlebnikov, B. Pasternak, P. Antakolsky, S. Gerasimov, V. Chekrygin, A. and N. Chernyshev, L. Zhegin, A. Fonvizin, A. Shevchenko, S. Romanovich, K. Zefirov and others.

They were brought together by a series of culture-saving principles. They were most fully expressed in the manifesto “Our Prologue” written by Vasily Chekrygin, as well as in such program documents as “Art at the turn of the century” by Lev Zhegin, “Letter to the venerable “Makovets” by Pavel Florensky, a number of articles by Nikolai Chernyshev.

In contrast to the contemporary desire of people of art to isolate themselves, withdraw only into themselves, and invent unique means of self-expression, the Makovites called for unity spiritual world artist and Total world around him, defended genuine, deep democracy, the artist’s responsibility for the spiritual principles in his people, for the aesthetic self-organization of his life: "Art, preserving folk wisdom, growing from the depths of hoary centuries and giving the artist scope for the manifestation of his personality in powerful and creative creativity, should lead the people to high culture cognition and feeling, to participation in creativity and to the ability to evaluate and judge.”(V. Chekrygin. “Our Prologue”).

In the days of the revolutionary, and more often - nihilistic denial of the past, throwing the classics “from the ship of modernity”, Makovites called for the unity of the world not only in the moment, but also in historical time, perceiving art as a process with a centuries-old extent, realizing their blood, filial connection with everything what was created in art before them: “Rebirth is possible only with strict continuity with the great masters of the past, with the resurrection of everything eternal and living that has been achieved so far...”

The peculiar spiritual ecologism of “Makovets” is also characteristic: “The task of our creativity is to merge the unconscious voices of nature, which have risen into the highest sphere of spiritual life, with it, to enclose it in powerful, holistic objective images that synthesize these states.”. In this excerpt from “Our Prologue” the concept is already predicted ecology of culture, which, with the light hand of Andrei Voznesensky (and to be more objective, Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev is at the origins of this concept), established itself in our country in the 80s of the last century.

Having started his path with the denial of false prophets, their self-isolation from the “guiding ideal”, from universal human values, the participants of “Makovets” continued this path, declaring their consonance with divine plans and natural laws. And they came to understand the prophetic purpose, the predestination of art: “The artist again accepted the high appointment of envoy. He will see before him the whole mystery of the images as a bright, dazzling reality.”(L. Zhegin. “Art at the turn of the century”).

Pavel Florensky said well about “Makovets” as a constellation of different springs running down from a single hill: "Makovets" should be Makovets- the central elevation of Russian culture, from which the waters of creativity flow in different directions. In different- firstly, and from a single- Secondly. “Makovets is not a geometric center and not the arithmetic mean of different currents, but a living node from which the threads stretch.”

In the formation of the ideological and artistic fundamental principles of “Makovets”, Chekrygin, together with Florensky and the Chernyshev brothers, played an outstanding, leading role. And although after his death the association existed for several more years, until 1926, the reflection of this remarkable personality lay on all the undertakings, deeds, and achievements of “Makovets”, preventing his spiritual unity from disintegrating, his human circle joining hands being torn apart.

April 1, 2017 Saturday. Both of his main plans - the murals "Genesis" and "Resurrection of the Dead" - remained unfulfilled. Although according to what is on display at the current exhibition approaching to these heights one can imagine what artistic and spiritual power these creations would have. And we can only agree with his friend Lev Zhegin: if Chekrygin had been given the opportunity to rise to these two peaks, he would certainly have been called a great, world-class Master of Frescoes (in past centuries there was such a custom - to appropriate the best artists titles: Master of winter landscapes, Master of female half-figures; I heard, however, another version: it was, they say, our modern art critics who, without identifying the names of unknown painters, gave them such “pseudonyms”).

However, what would have happened to the murals “Genesis” and “Resurrection of the Dead” themselves, if they had been completed, during the famous “five-year period of godlessness”, when they were thrown down from bell towers and belfries, bells were split into pieces and ancient frescoes were chipped from temple walls? And what fate would await their author in the ill memory of the 37th, who during his lifetime did not tolerate any violence against the inner, secret freedom of creativity? This riddle has no solution in the realm of common sense.