Aleksey Remizov on Drawings by Writers, with Particular Reference to the Interrelationship between Drawings and Calligraphy in his Own Work

Leonardo, Vol. 13, pp. 234-240. Pergamon Press, 1980. Printed in Great Britain. ALEKSEY REMIZOV ON DRAWINGS BY WRITERS, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DRAWINGS AND CALLIGRAPHY IN HIS OWN WORK Avril Pyman* I. INTRODUCTION Aleksey Mikhaylovich Remizov was born in Mosc?w on mid-summer's eve (24 June (old style RussIan calendar) or 6 July (western European ~alendar)) .in 1877. The world into which he came at thIS charactenstically 'witching hour' was harshly materialistic: the world of Moscow merchants, hard men for the most part who had made their way up the social scale from a state of serfdom in the span of two or three generations . Remizov's guardians, uncles on his mother's side, wielded considerable influence in the financial world of Moscow. While they kept a firm grasp on material benefits recently acquired and reached out ruthlessly for more, compassion for the less fortunate was relegated to the home, where women observed the rule of the Orthodox Church and the biddings of Christian charity, keeping their kitchens open to pilgrims , beggars and the colourful, shifting ri~f-raff of the semi-Asiatic capital. In these kitchens and In th~ cou~t­ yard of his uncle's paper-mill, the boy learnt to IdentIfy with outcasts, grotesque cripples, defenceless ou~­ siders the butts and victims of a harsh world. ThIS self-identification was intensified by his own physical frailty (he was slightly hunch-backed, extremely shortsighted , broken-nosed, shock-headed and very ~mall) and by his mother's position as a poor rela~IOn, a humiliated rebel who had flouted the conventIOns by walking out on an elderly and unloved husband to be 'her own woman', only to find herself and her five children (one of whom died in infancy) entirely dependent on a disapproving family. . From the beginning, the boy's outlook on hfe was different, conditioned perhaps by his short-sightedness and certainly by an intense imagination. The world appeared to him as fragmented, but this did not prevent him from making the best of his education at school and at university, where he studied physics and mathe~at­ ics, read widely and attended lectures on such subjects as jurisprudence, philosophy and biology. 'I could not *Writer and translator, 20 Ravensdowne, Berwick upon Tweed T01S 1HX, England. (Received 3 June 1979) 234 imagine' he wrote many years later, 'H.0w people could pass their time in idleness when there IS so much that a man simply has to know' [A. M. Remizov, 'Iveren', p. 20, quoted by Yu. Andreyev in his Preface to A. M. Remizov, Izbrannoye (Selected Works) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennay Literatura, 1978) p. 6]. At the University of Moscow, Remizov became interested in sociology and politics and spent two months on vacation in Zurich, reading with intense interest Marxist books and other literature that was illegal in Tsarist Russia. On 18 ~ay 1896 he .was arrested in Moscow for a chance Involvement In a student demonstration and exiled to the provincial town of Penza. Here he organized a strike and, after a period of solitary confinement in a cell s~d to have been especially constructed for the. ~otonous 18t~­ century rebel Pugachov, was sent to JOIn more expenenced revolutionaries in exile in Vologda in the far north. As none of them had heard of him before, he was at first ostracized as a suspected police informer, but later he made many friends among them and married Seraphima Pavlovna Dovgello, an exiled Social Revolutionary and specialist on ancient Russian scripts. Remizov wrote his first story at the age of seven and, as he says in the extracts I have selected below, c.ould not remember a time when he had not made drawmgs, but it was during this period of his exile and under the influence of his wife that he became a professional writer. Permitted by the government authorities to tak~ up residence in any Russian city from 1905, RemIzov brought his wife and daughter, Natasha, to Pet~rsburg (Leningrad), where they led a ha~d-to-~outh e:ustence amongst the literary and theatncal ehte untIl, on. 5 August 1921, he and Seraphima Pav~ovna left RUSSI~, as it...