In our previous post, we explored in detail how Vera Mukhina skillfully captured the logic and plasticity of movement. However, the exhibition at the State Historical Museum proves that the sculptor was driven by an equal passion for exploring human character. The second hall of the exhibition presents her portraits and is aptly titled ‘Heroics’.
Mukhina always displayed striking uncompromisingness when choosing whose faces she wanted to immortalise. Perhaps it is precisely this artistic honesty that explains the fact that you will almost never find official portraits of party leaders or high-ranking government officials in her legacy. She was genuinely admired by entirely different people. Once she confessed with characteristic candour:
Why do I love history? It is because I love great people, and I found them in history.
And she sought out these “great people” among her contemporaries—scientists, pilots, doctors, engineers, and artists.
When Mukhina worked on portraits of real people, her usual monumental generalisation would delicately step aside, giving way to subtle, precise, and individual features. At the same time, the very decision to sculpt a particular person became a unique manifesto—an acknowledgment of the scale of their personality, the value of their work, and the courage of their actions. She formulated her task as follows:
I want to show the new man in my works. The image of the creator—the builder of a new life, no matter what sphere they worked in—inspires me more than any other. In addition to a portrait likeness of a person, I wanted to embody in sculpture the synthetic image of the builder, their unyielding calm and strength.
One of the most mesmerizing exhibits in the hall is the unusual glass portrait of the prominent chemical technologist Nikolay Kachalov. It was he who stood at the origins of the revival of unique artistic glassmaking in the Soviet Union. A man of amazing destiny: on his mother’s side, he was a second cousin of the poet Alexander Blok, and we can still admire the fruits of his scientific labor—monumental artistic glasses—today at the Avtovo metro station.
Nearby stands the expressive bronze bust of the engineer Pavel Lvov. He became famous for creating an advanced apparatus for spot-welding steel cladding on aircraft fuselages. But for Mukhina, he was above all a comrade: as the chief engineer, Lvov directed the technical side of assembling the legendary Worker and Kolkhoz Woman for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris (incidentally, this same factory also created the famous ruby stars for the Kremlin towers for the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution).
An attentive visitor will also notice in the hall a portrait of a man with a strikingly strong-willed face—this is Dr. Alexey Zamkov, Vera Mukhina’s husband. He made a real breakthrough in medicine by creating Gravidan—the world’s first commercial hormonal drug derived from the urine of pregnant women. The drug worked wonders, and Zamkov’s high-ranking patients included Maxim Gorky, Vyacheslav Molotov, Mikhail Kalinin, and Clara Zetkin. The staggering successes of Zamkov’s laboratory and the specifics of his research lead literary historians to consider him one of the most likely prototypes for Bulgakov‘s Dr. Preobrazhensky from The Heart of a Dog.
Also exhibited here is a portrait of another Zamkov—Sergey, Alexey’s full brother and Mukhina’s brother-in-law. A talented architect whose life was tragically cut short in 1941, he managed to design the Matsesta balneological valley in Sochi, Gorky Square with the monument in Nizhny Novgorod, and Mukhina’s own house-studio in Moscow. The sculpted marble image, named The Builder, became a profound collective portrait of an entire generation of creator contemporaries. An interesting fact: it was Sergey Zamkov’s strong-willed profile that served as the starting point for Mukhina when shaping the face of the Worker for her main masterpiece.
It is interesting to examine the plaster bust of the renowned academician and shipbuilding expert Alexey Krylov. The academician’s pedigree is impressive: he was the grandson of a hero of the Battle of Borodino, wore the shoulder straps of a fleet admiral back in tsarist Russia, and earned the title of Hero of Socialist Labour and the Stalin Prize in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Krylov led extremely dangerous deep-sea expeditions whose participants amazed the sculptor with their fearlessness. Residents and guests of St. Petersburg entering the city by car from Moscow are well acquainted with the endless fence of the Krylov State Research Centre, which stretches along M10 highway directly opposite the iconic building of the former Kirov Meat Plant.
Absolute fearlessness and readiness for feat were embodied in two monumental collective images of the hall.
The first is Epronovets, conqueror of the sea depths from the Special Purpose Underwater Operations Expedition (EPRON). Curiously, EPRON was created with the participation of Academician Krylov in 1923 at the personal initiative of Genrikh Yagoda, who caught fire with the idea of raising the legendary HMS Prince from the bottom of the Black Sea off Balaklava, which had sunk during the Crimean War while allegedly carrying an astronomical amount of 30 barrels of gold sovereigns. During WWII, the organization transformed into the Navy rescue service, and today it exists as the Marine Rescue Service of Rosmorrechflot. Initially, the figure of the mighty diver was supposed to adorn the facade of the Hotel Moskva in Okhotny Ryad, but the project was never realised in architecture.
The second monumental symbol of the hall was the famous Partisan Woman, created in the harsh year of 1942. The image of incredible internal resilience, proud popular wrath, and unshakeable will to win stands on a par with Mukhina’s main creation in terms of its energetic concentration, the power of emotion sublimation, and the scale of generalisation.
We are, of course, talking about Worker and Kolkhoz Woman—the world-renowned plastic symbol of the past century and the triumph of Soviet industrialisation. But a detailed conversation about the birth of this colossus deserves a separate publication.
So stay tuned, the continuation is coming!
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