People and events:

• SERGEI MIKHALKOV - FROM FABLES TO ANTHEMS (writer's 90th birthday)
• "LIGHT-HEARTED DREAMS" OF BORIS KUSTODIEV (the 125th birth anniversary)
• THE HOLY WONDERER - MOTHER MARIA
• "SOUL OF THE DANCE" LOOKS FOR THE BEST

SERGEI MIKHALKOV - FROM FABLES TO ANTHEMS

(writer's 90th birthday)

On March 13th Russia's celebrated and oldest writer Sergei Mikhalkov marked his 90th birthday. The wonderful author of books for children, scriptwriter and playwright, co-author of the USSR anthem and Russia's anthem has become the classical figure of the 20-century Russian literature.
For the first time his name emerged in the paper in the 1930s after he finished from school and traveled from the North Caucasus to Moscow to conquer poetical Olympus. But before he managed to realize his dream, he had to work as an unskilled laborer at a factory, a topographer in a geological expedition and an assistant in a pioneering party. The door to the big literature swept open for him when his poem "Squadrons' March" was published by an influential central magazine, Ogonyok. In 1936 Sergei Mikhalkov published his first collected poems and three years after his literary activity was awarded with a prestigious prize the Lenin order. Probably, since then Mikhalkov has been called the Fortune's favorite.
The writer doesn't deny the role of occasion in his destiny. He says the fact that he's a remarkably lucky man is well-known today, but if some people speak of his luck calmly and with due respect, the others take it hard. In fact, Mikhalkov succeeded in everything he dealt with - he wrote dazzling screenplays and plays that can be still seen on stages of Russia's leading theatres, wrote acutely social fables that gave him an unofficial title of the country's chief fabulist, and poems for children. He has been repeatedly decorated with the most prestigious prizes and awards, he was acquainted with Soviet leaders and even commanded respect by Iosif Stalin. To some extent Sergei Mikhalkov became even more popular after he along with his friend Gabriel el-Reghistan wrote the words for the USSR anthem composed by Alexander Alexandrov. Over 100 people took part in a contest. Illustriously, there were neither Sergei Mikhalkov nor el-Reghistan in the list of the literary men recommended to write words for the anthem. But among them were such eminent poets as Isakovsky, Surkov and Dolmatovsky. A government commission selected the texts and then submitted them to Stalin for consideration. The Soviet leader approved the words written by the two. El-Reghistan was already a distinguished and influential writer whereas for young Mikhalkov the recognition proved to be a genuine triumph.
But his life was far from unclouded. Though he personally wasn't touched by either of the waves of political repressions, his brother Mikhail was convicted for treason. Mikhalkov tried to help his brother and appealed to many authoritative figures but in vein. Only years after Mikhail was rehabilitated.
Sometimes Sergei Mikhalkov was to pay for his image of a favorite of fortune. Each of his successes became cluttered with rumors, frequently evil ones. He suffered particularly much during the first years of perestroyka when there was an outpouring of severe criticism against Mikhalkov. He was accused of time-serving, plagiarism and even the absence of talent. But even at that difficult period he created many wonderful poems. Even today young readers listen to his writings with pleasure and learn them by heart. Naturally, his poems reflect Soviet realities but they are full of humor, subtle irony, useful knowledge, soft edification - all that children like and that ease their parents' life. Such poems are kept in memory for the whole life. There is such curious example: during a popular TV quiz a host asked a player - "Where does uncle Styopa live?" (Uncle Styopa is the first Soviet super-hero - a kind giant, police officer and children's friend, and the lead character of Mikhalkov's poem with the same name). And a respectable man said without hesitation: "In building 8/1!"
That's right, people of many generations know and love Sergei Mikhalkov's poems since childhood. And that's the highest estimation of his poetical endowment.
 

"LIGHT-HEARTED DREAMS" OF BORIS KUSTODIEV

(the 125th birth anniversary)

March 7th marked the 125th anniversary of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev. Kustodiev's many pictures reproduce merry and picturesque Russian festivities, the flurry of fun and spiritual freedom. But the incomparable master of solemn images created not genre picture in traditions of the Russian realism of the late 19/early 20 centuries. Instead, Kustodiev didn't comply with traditional genre rules. His canvases could be simultaneously a portrait, a poem, a fairy-tale and a landscape. He combines decorative tolls with ethnography, monumentality with cartoons and grotesque with epic. For one, the honorable full-size portrait of the outstanding Russian artist and singer Fyodor Shalyapin. Renaissance masters used to portray their characters full-height to give the personality certain greatness. But if the Renaissance painters tended to turn the pictures' environment into a pedestal for the character, Kustodiev did visa versa.
What do we see on this picture? A massive Shrove-tide celebration that swept through an old Russian town. Spring is coming, the bright blue sky is on the background of the joyous panorama. Crowds of strolling well-dressed people, tipsy dancers, abundant bazaars, booths and merry-go-rounds. Shalyapin's talent was born by this atmosphere. People seem to simply live there and enjoy life. There is kindness and cordiality in their relations. People look like as if they know nothing about difficulties of hard working from dusk to dawn as it was in reality. In this fantastic world the people's ideal of good life was March 7th marked the 125th anniversary of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev. Kustodiev's many pictures reproduce merry and picturesque Russian festivities, the flurry of fun and spiritual freedom. But the incomparable master of solemn images created not genre picture in traditions of the Russian realism of the late 19/early 20 centuries. Instead, Kustodiev didn't comply with traditional genre rules. His canvases could be simultaneously a portrait, a poem, a fairy-tale and a landscape. He combines decorative tolls with ethnography, monumentality with cartoons and grotesque with epic. For one, the honorable full-size portrait of the outstanding Russian artist and singer Fyodor Shalyapin. Renaissance masters used to portray their characters full-height to give the personality certain greatness. But if the Renaissance painters tended to turn the pictures' environment into a pedestal for the character, Kustodiev did visa versa.
What do we see on this picture? A massive Shrove-tide celebration that swept through an old Russian town. Spring is coming, the bright blue sky is on the background of the joyous panorama. Crowds of strolling well-dressed people, tipsy dancers, abundant bazaars, booths and merry-go-rounds. Shalyapin's talent was born by this atmosphere. People seem to simply live there and enjoy life. There is kindness and cordiality in their relations. People look like as if they know nothing about difficulties of hard working from dusk to dawn as it was in reality. In this fantastic world the people's ideal of good life was born and it looks like a happy dream.
Kustodiev determined his credo in painting as follows: "A picture is beautiful if it's painted not naturally and roughly but conventionally. I'm called a realist. What's nonsense! All my pictures are total illusions". Meanwhile, the range of his creativity is great. A prominent sculptor, engraver, illustrator, theatre decoration and costume designer, cartoonist and poster artist. Who could even imagine that a volume-length list of all the works was left by a painter who lived less that half a century fell sick at young age and spent the last 11 years in a pushchair because of paralysis of legs. But during that years his artistic creativity didn't weaken at all. Light-hearted mood conquered his physical illness.
An artist's creation is born by his fantasy. But what shapes his imagination? That was Kustodiev's native environment: he was born in the Volga city of Astrakhan populated with merchants, traders, craftsmen, city's poor and newly arrived peasants. At the age of 5 he started to paint and was amazed by music and stage. At 9 he finally decided to become a painter. A display of the Peredvizhnik painters reached his town where was not a single museum, and he saw canvases by the Russian realist painters Repin, Surikov, Kramskoy and Shishkin. In 1903 Kustodiev graduated from the St. Petersburg art academy and traveled to Paris and then to Spain to improve his skills. In Madrid he studied pictures by Velasquez, the painter for whom there was nothing impossible, as Kustodiev put it. Another Spanish master - Goya dazzled the Russian painter with "subtly painted portraits with absolutely alive faces". The achievements of the great Spanish, French and Fleming painters were reflected in Kustodiev's own works so organically, that became completely Russian. For one, the shining flesh of heroines of Rubens became the value of his Russian Venus - plump beautiful women, impressive and flourishing. They seem to live outside history.
By 1910 Boris Kustodiev became famous world-wide and represented the Russian art abroad. In 1931 Kustodiev was elected a member of the Russian Art Academy. He was awarded numerous medals and prizes. But he escaped from high-ranking customers to his cottage in the provincial town of Kineshma where he was happy indeed. He carried his young daughter Ira in a basket for mushroom to forests and taught his son, a would-be theatre painter, how to enjoy the changeable beauty of clouds. His tastes saw no changes since childhood: he loved dogs, cats, cows, everything living, simple and necessary.
Boris Kustodiev wrote once he didn't know whether he managed to express in his works what he wanted - love to life, joy and good spirits, love to everything native, Russian… This was always the only "subject" of his pictures. born and it looks like a happy dream.
Kustodiev determined his credo in painting as follows: "A picture is beautiful if it's painted not naturally and roughly but conventionally. I'm called a realist. What's nonsense! All my pictures are total illusions". Meanwhile, the range of his creativity is great. A prominent sculptor, engraver, illustrator, theatre decoration and costume designer, cartoonist and poster artist. Who could even imagine that a volume-length list of all the works was left by a painter who lived less that half a century fell sick at young age and spent the last 11 years in a pushchair because of paralysis of legs. But during that years his artistic creativity didn't weaken at all. Light-hearted mood conquered his physical illness.
An artist's creation is born by his fantasy. But what shapes his imagination? That was Kustodiev's native environment: he was born in the Volga city of Astrakhan populated with merchants, traders, craftsmen, city's poor and newly arrived peasants. At the age of 5 he started to paint and was amazed by music and stage. At 9 he finally decided to become a painter. A display of the Peredvizhnik painters reached his town where was not a single museum, and he saw canvases by the Russian realist painters Repin, Surikov, Kramskoy and Shishkin. In 1903 Kustodiev graduated from the St. Petersburg art academy and traveled to Paris and then to Spain to improve his skills. In Madrid he studied pictures by Velasquez, the painter for whom there was nothing impossible, as Kustodiev put it. Another Spanish master - Goya dazzled the Russian painter with "subtly painted portraits with absolutely alive faces". The achievements of the great Spanish, French and Fleming painters were reflected in Kustodiev's own works so organically, that became completely Russian. For one, the shining flesh of heroines of Rubens became the value of his Russian Venus - plump beautiful women, impressive and flourishing. They seem to live outside history.
By 1910 Boris Kustodiev became famous world-wide and represented the Russian art abroad. In 1931 Kustodiev was elected a member of the Russian Art Academy. He was awarded numerous medals and prizes. But he escaped from high-ranking customers to his cottage in the provincial town of Kineshma where he was happy indeed. He carried his young daughter Ira in a basket for mushroom to forests and taught his son, a would-be theatre painter, how to enjoy the changeable beauty of clouds. His tastes saw no changes since childhood: he loved dogs, cats, cows, everything living, simple and necessary.
Boris Kustodiev wrote once he didn't know whether he managed to express in his works what he wanted - love to life, joy and good spirits, love to everything native, Russian… This was always the only "subject" of his pictures.
 

THE HOLY WONDERER - MOTHER MARIA

By D. Stepanyan
An exhibition devoted to one of the most extraordinary Russian women, Yelizaveta Kuzmina-Karavayeva, ended in St. Petersburg on March 31, the day of her death. The majority of objects on display were provided by her relatives. Yelizaveta Karavayeva went down in history as Mother Maria. Few people are capable of denying themselves the pleasures of earthly life and sacrificing their well-being in the name of others. In all times self-sacrifice commanded deep respect mixed with great surprise. How could a person devote his one and only life to people he doesn't even know? In reality, the holy deeds performed by such devotees can be explained in terms of their divine mission. Yelizaveta Kuzmina-Karavayeva came of a noble family. Very emotional, vulnerable and romantic, she adored poetry and composed verses ever since she was a child. The sudden death of her father plunged her into a heavy depression. Her life became different. She spent hours wandering about St. Petersburg, thinking about poems she had heard at a literary party. She fell desperately in love with their author, one of the best Russian poets Alexander Blok. For him she was just one more admirer, nothing more. At the age of 18 Elizabeth Dmitry Kuzmin-Karavayev, a lawyer and poetry lover. They both took a great interest in new trends in poetry and fashionable philosophic views, moved in literary circles, mixed with such celebrities as Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Blok. Yelizaveta's life was full of parties, entertainments, endless disputes about poetry - all those things typical of the Bohemia. At one of such parties Blok sharply criticized the first selection of her poems called "Scythian Shards". But the young poetess, not disheartened by his attack, proceeded to publish her story "Yurali" and later another selection of her poems came out under the title "Ruth". After the 1917 revolution Yelizaveta Karavayeva and her second husband Dmitry Skobtsev emigrated to France. With three children on her hands, life proved hard for Yelizaveta. Her husband became a taxi-driver and she earned some extra money by sewing and doll-making. Relative family happiness didn't last long. The death of her younger daughter came like a shock to Yelizaveta, but it also paved the way for her spiritual rebirth. She joined the French "Christian Movement" and took the veil as Mother Maria. Every day she visited hospitals and prisons, doing all she could to ease people's sufferings and giving the little money she had to the poor.
During World War II Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavayeva was an active member of Resistance. In 1943 she was arrested for hiding Jews and sent to the Ravensbruk concentration camp where she died on March 31, 1945, a month before the victory.
Legend has it that she exchanged clothes and camp numbers with another inmate and went to the gas chamber instead of her.
She wasn't afraid of death - for her it was an encounter with God.

"SOUL OF THE DANCE" LOOKS FOR THE BEST

By N. Yakhontova
Has a dance got a soul? The editors of the Russian "Ballet" magazine believe it has, which prompted them to institute the "Soul of the Dance" annual prize 9 years ago.
A regular prize-giving ceremony took place at Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre on March 4. The "Queen of the Dance" award went to the incomparable Nina Ananiashvili. A rain of spangles came down on her from above minutes after she appeared on stage. A similar salute accompanied the appearance of other laureates, alternating with ballet numbers. Nina Ananiashvili started in "The Pleasures of Mannerism", a short ballet to music by Francois Couperin and Richard Strauss with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky.
At first there were only three prize categories, now there are eight - "Queen of the Dance", "Star of the Dance", "Rising Star", "Actor", "Magician of the Dance", "Maitre of the Dance", "Knight of the Ballet" and "Teacher". The number of candidates is more than enough. "Ballet"'s chief editor Valeria Uralskaya explains: "This indicates a high level of domestic ballet art. Our theatres, though sometimes criticized in the press, offer potential opportunities for excellent performance, that's why we have no problem picking up nominees. At the end of each season our editors (all of them ballet critics) suggest a whole list of candidates".
The "Soul of the Dance" prize consists of a metal figurine of a ballerina and a memorial sign. This time the winners of the "Knight of the Ballet" award were the artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre's ballet troupe Makhar Vaziyev, director of Boris Eifman's Ballet Theatre Gennady Albert and … ballet critic Natalia Sadovskaya, although "knighthood" somehow suits men more than women.
"Any "male" title can suit a modern woman", Valeria Uralskaya jokes. "Knighthood is a sign of nobleness and Natalia Sadovskaya is just the right person. She is the brilliant organizer of ballet festivals all across Russia".
Anna Redel won the "Maitre of the Dance" prize. A popular variety dancer, she created an independent trend in that particular branch of choreography. As she appeared on stage, a videotape showing Reidel and her partner Mikhail Khrustalev in their humorous dance "On the Skating-Rink", premiered 5 decades ago, was played on a big screen to music by Johann Strauss.
Prizes in the "Star of the Dance" category went to the Bolshoi Theatre soloist Sergei Filin and the leading ballerina of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre Natalia Dedovskaya. She performed a fragment of the ballet "On The Verge" to music by James Horner.
Another Bolshoi soloist, ballerina Ilse Liepa received the "Soul of the Dance" prize in the "Actor" category. Handing the prize to her, the well-known actress Lyudmila Maksakova said: "We know many ballet dancers, singers and actors with virtuoso technique, who will never achieve perfection because they have no soul. In the face of Ilse Liepa we have a talented ballerina, actress and wonderful person all in one - we have perfection".