For what should be grateful to immigrants from the Russian Empire Latin America

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Each collapse of a great civilization does not pass without a trace for humanity. First of all, many refugees, including masters of their craft and scientists, are scattered around the world and as a result are spreading skills and science and bringing up a replacement for themselves - only now for another country. The same thing happened with the Russian Empire after the revolution, and one of the regions that benefited from this is Latin America.

Mexico: took everything from Europe

In the period between the two World Wars and during the Second World War, Mexico City became the second Paris, where creative and not only life swirled - including the Russian communists who fled from Stalin actively manifested themselves there. But the inhabitants of the Russian Empire arrived in Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century. Often these were Jewish families fleeing the pogroms - the Romanov dynasty looked at the beating of their Jewish subjects through their fingers, regardless of how they replenish the treasury with taxes and simply with considerations of humanism.

The environment of such refugees from the pogroms gave Mexico Anita Brenner, a native of Latvia, who made an enormous contribution to Mexican anthropology, folklore studies and the preservation of traditional heritage. The book "Idols Behind Altars", which showed and proved that the history of visual arts in Mexico has not been interrupted since the time of the Aztecs and that contemporary Mexican artists continue it, became a real hit not only in Mexico, but also in the United States.

Brenner published it in New York in 1925. Brenner lived in two countries, so once they even tried to award her with the Order of the Aztec Eagle - Mexico's highest award for foreigners, which shocked and offended the researcher. After all, she was actually a Mexican citizen! In total, she owns more than four hundred articles and about a dozen books on Mexico and its culture.

Physicist Alexander Balankin, a native of the Moscow region, is considered one of the most outstanding scientists in Mexico. In the ninety-second year, seeing no prospects at home, he accepted the invitation of the Mexicans and began to raise the country's science so well that he was given many awards. Moreover, he received international awards for his personal scientific work - not only for the organization of scientific work in Mexico. For example, he did a huge, first in this area, work on calculating the coming earthquakes in Mexico - this information never loses its relevance there, so Balankin's work was aimed at saving human lives.

Just like Balankin, the artist Angelina Belova, wife of Diego Rivera, was once invited to train a new generation of Mexican academic artists. In addition to teaching, Belova delighted the Mexicans by contributing to the creation of children's theaters - there was no such genre as a separate one in Mexico, children simply attended those adult performances that they could already understand.

Argentina: poetry and sculpture

This country was a new haven for a huge number of Russian Jews, especially from the Bessarabian province, which created a real oasis of Yiddish culture in it. But the contribution of former Russians to the general Hispanic culture was very noticeable. For example, among the generally recognized poetesses of Argentina - Lilya Guerrero (Elizaveta Yakovleva), a half-Russian, half-Jewish, who ultimately created Argentinean Spanish poetry. She was born at the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires into a family of committed communists. Among her works was also a play about the Spanish poet, who is highly respected in Argentina - Federico García Lorca.

After the Bolsheviks came to power in the former Russian Empire, the young poet decided to leave her homeland to build a bright communist future. She came to Moscow and actively translated into Spanish, for further publications, such poets as Mayakovsky (whom she knew personally), Simonov and Pasternak. She also translated prose. In Moscow, Guerrero met and married Argentine communist and writer Luis Sommi. In 1937, they fled the USSR to their homeland and lived there for a long time, despite the period of persecution and murder of communists in Argentina.

By the way, Lily Guerrero's stepfather and educator was the Argentine immigrant geologist Moses Kantor, who was also not alien to literary activity and also came to the USSR in 1926 to educate the next generation of geologists. He refused to leave the USSR and died in Moscow in 1946. But before the twenty-sixth year, he managed to make a significant contribution to Argentine mineralogy.

The real legend of Argentinean art is the sculptor Stepan Erzya, in fact, of Erzya origin. He was born into a peasant family in the village of Bayevo, and came to Argentina to live in 1927, having managed to live in Europe before. For twenty-three years he worked in his new homeland. Already upon his arrival - since he managed to become famous in Europe - Argentine newspapers began to write about him. In Argentina, Erzya studied and used local tree species as material, believing that the country's art should be firmly connected with it, and not only spiritually. Stepan's favorite tree was kebracho, very hard, the way of working with which he developed himself.

Alas, Stepan took away many of his works when he decided to return to his first homeland, in 1951. This very seriously offended the Argentines, who at one time received him so warmly that he could create fruitfully and without thinking too much about pressing problems. However, several of his sculptures remained in museums and private collections (he exhibited the rest, but did not sell, making a profit from ticket sales).

The choreographers-spouses Boris Romanov and Elena Smirnova and the violinist Alexander Pechnikov, who taught in Argentina, had a noticeable influence on the development of Argentine schools of music and ballet.

Brazil: ballet and painting

One of the prominent figures in the history of ballet in Brazil was Maria Oleneva, the former prima ballerina of the Anna Pavlova troupe and the founder of the ballet school at the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro. Back in 1922, having arrived in Brazil, she began her teaching career, and in 1927 she opened the doors of the school. In 1931, the school was officially recognized at the state level, and it became the first professional ballet school in the country. When the work of the school in Rio da Janeiro was properly established, Oleneva moved to Sao Paulo and opened a new school, exactly twenty years after the first. Is it any wonder that she has received awards from Brazilians all her life?

Another choreographer who was born in the Russian Empire and influenced the development of Brazilian ballet is Pole Tadeusz Morozovich. He opened his school a year after Oleneva. His school operated until 1988. Tadeusz's daughter, Milena Morozovic, in 1972 created the first free modern dance course in Brazil.

Finally, one cannot but recall Tatyana Leskova, the great-granddaughter of the writer. She was born in Paris to a family of Russian emigrants in 1922. In 1944, Leskova married a wealthy Brazilian industrialist and moved to his country. Soon, after several different jobs, she received an invitation to become the prima ballerina of the country's main theater. Over time, she also became its artistic director.

A native of the Bessarabian province of the Russian Empire, the city of Soroka (Moldavia), Samson Flexor became the founder of abstractionism in Brazilian painting. Painting Samson took turns studying at the Odessa Art School, Bucharest, Brussels and Paris. In 1929, he became a citizen of his mother's home country, France, and soon converted to Catholicism. He moved to Brazil in 1948, in France everything was too clearly reminiscent of the horrors of the past war. In addition to abstract paintings, Flexor also created frescoes for two Brazilian temples in São Paulo. He also did a lot to support other abstract artists in the country.

And at the origins of Brazilian modernism is another Jew from the empire, a native of Vilnius (Lithuania) Lazar Segal. He graduated from the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, but came into conflict with supporters of academicism and decided not to stay in the alma mater - he left to teach painting in Dresden. In 1923 he came to Brazil and received citizenship. His paintings in a new country acquired a new sound, although they did not represent exactly Cubism, they still referred to this direction. Now his former home in São Paulo has become a museum and art school.

A Russian biologist, a native of Warsaw, Boris Skvortsov, and a researcher in the field of cultural cultivation of cocoa, a Ukrainian, Grigory Bondar (he was born in the empire, and because of this, he is often mistakenly referred to as "Russian Brazilians"), contributed to the science of Brazil.

This list, of course, is far from complete, otherwise I would have had to write a real book - after all, there are also those who were born within the Russian-speaking diasporas of Latin America, there are also slightly less well-known names of creators and scientists who came from the Russian Empire and the USSR. But how small the world is - can be seen even from the several names included in the article.

But most closely, of course, he is somewhere in the Mexico City area: Russian and other celebrities who, for various reasons, decided to live in Mexico.