Prison for counterfeiting currency and execution for espionage: the fate of the children of Russian artists

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

After the revolution, some former celebrities were ruined by the Soviet government, others were taken aback. It was the same with the children of famous Russian painters, who are now called great. There was only one factor in common for them - in fact, all the children, or at least the children of the children, continued the family dynasty.

Sophia and Nikolai Kramsky

The daughter of the painter Ivan Kramskoy - the one who posed for him for "Unknown" - followed in her father's footsteps and became an artist. Before the revolution, she painted portraits of many noble Russians, including relatives of the tsar. She married a Finnish lawyer Juncker living in St. Petersburg, but after the revolution and the separation of Finland, she gave up all property in this country (she was already a widow) and citizenship, wanting to remain a Russian. She was engaged in illustration and helped many "former" to find work in Soviet institutions.

It was for this that she was sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. There, in Siberia, every time she found a new job and more or less acquired connections, an elderly woman was thrown into a new city. Kramskaya suffered two strokes until she was rescued by the official wife of Maxim Gorky, who achieved a reconsideration of the case and early release. A year after returning to Leningrad, the artist died.

Sophia's brother Nikolai became an architect. He met the revolution at fifty-four. He was removed from the post of architect of the Winter Palace, after which he disappeared from public attention, although he lived for another twenty years, having outlived his sister.

Alexander and Ivan Bilibin

After the revolution, Ivan Yakovlevich himself threw himself into exile and, after a long, difficult journey, settled in France with his third wife, the artist Alexandra Pototskaya. But in France it was morally difficult for him. In the thirty-sixth year, he obtained Soviet citizenship for himself and his wife and came to Leningrad. He taught at the Academy of Arts, not shying away from taking orders for illustration and theatrical scenery for the sake of part-time work. During the Blockade, he refused to evacuate on principle and died in 1942.

From his first wife, artist Maria Chambers, Ivan Yakovlevich had sons Sasha and Vanya. However, due to her husband's hard drinking, Maria left him, taking her children with her. In the thirteenth year, she went to Switzerland to heal her youngest son. There she was caught by the beginning of the First World War. Maria urgently went home, to England; the Bilibins Jr. lived there all their lives.

Alexander Ivanovich lived for sixty-nine years, worked mainly as a theater artist, but also painted in oils. Ivan Ivanovich became a journalist, achieved a certain fame; survived until the collapse of the USSR, but did not want to return to his homeland, which he almost did not remember.

Yuri and Dmitry Repins

The son of Ilya Efimovich, Yuri, became, like his father, a painter. After the revolution, the entire Repin family chose to stay in Finland, where they used to live every summer at their dacha. Both Yuri, and his son Dmitry, and the founder of the dynasty, Ilya Efimovich, were constantly invited by the Soviet government to return to their homeland. The older men flatly refused, but Diy (that was the home name of the grandson of Ilya Efimovich) was tempted.

The young man had a very strong character - he got stronger after a year and a half of service as a cabin boy. In the early thirties, Diy decided to enter the Institute of Proletarian Fine Arts in Leningrad. But as soon as he crossed the border, he was arrested as a spy. The fact is that the authorities refused to enter Dmitry - perhaps out of resentment at the Repins' previous refusal, and the young man crossed the border illegally. As a result, he was arrested, recognized as a spy and immediately shot. The irony of fate - two years later the IPII, where Dmitry was striving so much, was named after his grandfather Ilya Repin.

Ivan Myasoedov

The son of the same artist Myasoedov, whose face we see in Ivan the Terrible in the picture, where the tsar kills his son, very often really was on the verge of death at the hands of his father: Myasoedov Sr. was a tyrant, tormented first Vanya's mother, then Vanya himself, sometimes the boy was severely beaten. As an adult artist Ivan Grigorievich gladly sketched the agony of his own father.

Ivan was born in Kharkov, studied in St. Petersburg and lived and worked in Poltava for a long time. As a young man, he was fond of weightlifting and even became famous as an athlete. I did not meet the revolution as a boy - at thirty-six years old, a married man, an accomplished artist. Together with his wife, an Italian, a former circus performer, he left for Berlin and lived there by counterfeiting currency. He was in prison twice for this, the second time under the Nazis.

After their release, the Myasoedovs (including their daughter) decided to flee from Germany to Latvia, from there, using fake Czechoslovak passports, to Belgium and then to Liechtenstein, where Myasoedov managed to get himself a job as a court artist. However, even here he did not give up what he loved, so he soon found himself for forging money in prison. In 1953, the Myasoyedovs decided to start a new life in Argentina, but his strength was no longer the same, and upon arrival he died. However, the disease - liver cancer - sharpened him for a long time.

The stories of the twentieth century are truly mesmerizing: How the revolution divided the family and changed the life of the artist Serov's dynasty.

Text: Lilith Mazikina.