From a Grandmother's Bookshelf to the Library of Congress: Nikita Mishin's Lifelong Love Affair with Artist Mikhail Nesterov |
I could not yet read, but I already knew I loved him.
As a child, I spent long stretches at my grandmother Valentina Pavlovna Khokhlova's flat in Lytkarino, a small town near Moscow. It was a Khrushchev-era apartment — low ceilings, modest rooms — but her bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling and held more than 2,000 volumes. I would run my fingers along their spines, trying to puzzle out titles from the letters I was still learning. More than the books themselves, though, I loved the art albums. I would sit for hours turning pages, lost in images I could not yet explain to myself but could not stop returning to.
Among Russian painters, two held me. Viktor MikhaylovichVasnetsov, with his fairytale world of heroes and magic. And Mikhail VasilyevichNesterov — mysterious, quiet, unlike anything else. His paintings made me ask questions I had no language for. What was the Great Taking of the Veil? Why did his figures seem to belong to the landscape as much as to the earth itself, as though holiness and nature had simply grown together? I did not know. But I felt something.
That feeling never left me.
Eight years ago, a friend — the sculptor Alexey Morozov — introduced me........