Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. 1837 – 1937

Exhibition dedicated to the 225th anniversary of the birth of the great poet “Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. 1837 – 1937". A series of illustrations for an unpublished book.

In 1937, a series of ceremonial events dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the death of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin took place in the country. The celebrations were marked by the publication of the poet’s works, as well as works dedicated to his work. It was by this date that the book Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was supposed to be published. 1837 – 1937. Unfortunately, the fate of this publication is unknown. It is possible that the book was never published or was withdrawn from circulation, but illustrations to it remain with characteristic pencil markings in the margins of the sheets, usually used when preparing the layout of a book.

The drawings are mostly sketches of book screensavers, made using the silhouette technique. Screensavers include the headings of the supposed sections of the book: Childhood and youth, In the south, Trip to the Caucasus, In Mikhailovskoye, In Moscow and Boldin, In St. Petersburg, In court captivity, Under the tutelage of the Tsar and the gendarmes, Duel, On his deathbed, Funeral. The series concludes with the ending of the book with an image of an obelisk at the site of Pushkin’s duel. Graphic sheets are distinguished by classical simplicity and technical consistency, with a vivid description of figures in complex compositions. The author of the drawings is the wonderful Russian artist Yuri Nikolaevich Kupreyanov (1899 - 1942). The name of this master is unknown to the general public, and little of his creative heritage has survived.

Yuri Nikolaevich was born into a hereditary noble family. Father - court councilor Nikolai Nikolaevich Kupreyanov, mother - Maria Gennadievna, nee Myagkova. He studied at the St. Petersburg Tenishevsky School (1911 - 1912), then at the gymnasium of the city of Suwalki in the Kingdom of Poland, where his father served as governor, and in March 1913 he moved to Kostroma. As a high school student, for two summers in a row (1916, 1917) he voluntarily served as an orderly on the Western and Southwestern fronts as part of a detachment of the Russian Red Cross. In 1918 he was arrested and kept in prison for two months in connection with the Yaroslavl uprising. In the spring of 1919 he was mobilized into the Red Army.

From 1923 to 1929, he collaborated with Moscow publishing houses (Teakinopechat, Zemlya and Factory), magazines Krokodil, Iskorka, Lapot, Komar and others. He spent the summer months in a manor house in the village of Selishche near Kostroma, which before the revolution belonged to his maternal ancestors. He collaborated with Kostroma publishing houses: the newspaper Severnaya Pravda, the magazine Boronii Zub, the almanac of the Kostroma group RAPP Stroika. In the summer of 1930, he worked for two months as a digger at a brick factory in Kostroma, and from September as a loader at Volgorazgruz.

On November 4, 1930, Yuri Nikolaevich Kupreyanov was arrested in Kostroma on a trumped-up case of an officer-White Guard counter-revolutionary organization of former leaders and members of the Union for the Revival of Russia and was sentenced to ten years in prison in strict isolation. Yuri Nikolaevich served his sentence on the construction of the White Sea Canal, and in prison he drew up camp magazines Under the banner of Belomorstroy and the White Sea-Baltic Combine. There he created a series of illustrations for the book Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. 1837 - 1937. The publication of camp magazines was carried out by the Cultural and Educational Department of the White Sea-Baltic Combine (KVO - BBK).

A kind of cultural center of Belbaltlag was the Central Library in the Karelian village of Medvezhya Gora: The library for such a forest town was good, even rare, and usually after work there gathered many people eager to “take a break” from everyday, often unusual work, and talk. For us, sent to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, this narrow room with a dozen chairs on the sides and long shelves was essentially a kind of club where we came to relax, meet interesting people, of which there were many here, exchange news, argue, or simply breathe the air of the wise. books… At small meetings, first one or the other of those living on Medvezhka gave impromptu lectures about Winckelmann and Schopenhauer, about Freud and Beethoven, about the possibilities of Russian verse and about Blok, about the Art Theater…, about Serov, Vrubel…. (N.N. Yanovsky).

In 1937, Kupreyanov was released. In 1940, he lived in Yaroslavl and worked as a designer of school visual aids. On November 7, 1941, Yuri Nikolaevich was arrested following a denunciation, sentenced to capital punishment by the Military Tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Yaroslavl region and executed on January 27, 1942. Rehabilitated on December 26, 2001.