The creators of the Kenozero exhibition in Moscow achieved a complete, immersive illusion of the Russian North by lining the gallery walls with the exquisite works of Viktor Popkov—a quintessential artist of the 1960s ‘thaw’ who visited Kenozero shortly before his tragic death at the hands of a drunken cash-in-transit guard, capturing the stern beauty of the region with unfeigned affection.
The picture frames along the exhibition hall serve as veritable window-panes, through which the unhurried, contemplative life of Poozerye pursues its quiet course. Between these windows are placed quotations so felicitously chosen that one fancies hearing living voices and watching the canvases come alive.
I offered them money for my lodging—they would not take it. And when I was leaving, I slipped the money beneath the tablecloth. I wrote in a letter: ‘Grandmother, when you remove the tablecloth, look beneath it.’ They sent a reply: ‘Dear soul, why did you leave us money? We were only glad to have you stay with us. We have no need for coin. I receive 12 roubles, and grandfather 12. Whatever should we spend it on?’ Such are the folk who inhabit the North. Their kindness, sincerity, openness, mercy, faith, conscience, and wholesome fear of God are truly astonishing. (V. Popkov)
And here, in this painting and its accompanying preliminary sketch, one may observe those very same ‘heavens’:
— Well, I had little Alyoshenka, my grandson, baptised too. I went and fetched holy water from the sacred stone.
— What does that mean?
— Why, I dropped some coins down there on the stone, and brought back that water. I had two little crosses, I took and placed an icon down there… Lit a candle, and my icon is given over to him, to St. Nicholas’s stone… Then I lowered the cross, everything proper and in due order, and lit a candle. (A resident of Morshikhinskaya village)
Hanging alongside the splendid canvases of Viktor Popkov—kindly lent by Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery and Saint Petersburg’s Russian Museum—is a work by the pre-eminent scholar of Russian Northern architecture and co-author of the master plan for the Akademgorodok of Novosibirsk, Yuri Ushakov.
You daren’t go poking about there with an axe—it is a grievous sin. One fellow cut down a pine tree for gate-posts, sawed it up, and his horse dropped dead. He cut down a second pine, fell sick, walked with a limp, and presently died.
These paintings and spare, hammer-hewn quotations leave a singular, lingering aftertaste. They are entirely free of theatrical faux-folklore or picturesque showing off—offering instead a severe, almost palpable silence, wherein behind every wooden log-cabin, behind every centenarian tree, behind the sky above and the painted ‘heavens’ below, dwells a life invisible to the casual tourist eye.
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