Benoit illustrations for the Bronze Horseman. Illustrations by A.N.

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A.S. Pushkin “The Bronze Horseman”

The history of the creation of the poem The poem is based on real story flood that occurred in November 1824 in St. Petersburg. During the flood, Pushkin was in exile in Mikhailovskoye, so in the poem he described the events according to eyewitnesses. The story about the “revived monument” could have been taken by Pushkin from the story about how in 1812 Emperor Alexander I wanted to remove the monument to Peter from St. Petersburg. But the emperor was stopped by reporting the dream of a major. In his dream, the major saw the “Bronze Horseman” galloping through the streets of St. Petersburg and, approaching the emperor, said to him: “Young man! What have you brought my Russia to! But while I’m in place, my city has nothing to fear.” According to another version, Pushkin could have borrowed the idea of ​​​​a revived monument from Don Juan.

Illustrations by A. N. Benois for the poem “ Bronze Horseman» Evgeny at the place where his beloved lived Eugene talking to the Bronze Horseman

Alexander Nikolaevich Benois Alexander Nikolaevich Benois (April 21, 1870, St. Petersburg - February 9, 1960, Paris) - Russian artist, art historian, art critic, founder and main ideologist of the World of Art association.

Born on April 21, 1870 in St. Petersburg, in the family of architect Nikolai Leontievich Benois and his wife Camilla, daughter of architect A.K. Kavos. He studied for some time at the Academy of Arts, and also studied fine arts independently and under the guidance of his older brother Albert. In 1894 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. In 1894 he began his career as a theorist and art historian, writing a chapter on Russian artists for the German collection “History paintings of the 19th century century." In 1896-1898 and 1905-1907 he worked in France. He became one of the organizers and ideologists of the art association “World of Art” and founded the magazine of the same name. In 1916-1918, the artist created illustrations for A. S. Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman”. In 1918, Benoit headed Picture gallery Hermitage, published her new catalogue. Continued to work as a bookstore and theater artist and director, in particular, worked on staging and designing performances of the Petrograd Bolshoi drama theater. In 1925 he took part in International exhibition modern decorative and industrial arts in Paris. In 1926, A. N. Benois left the USSR. He lived in Paris, where he worked on sketches of theatrical scenery and costumes. Participated in S. Diaghilev’s ballet enterprise “Ballets Russes” as an artist and director of performances. Died on February 9, 1960 in Paris. IN last years I was working on my memoirs.

Illustrations by M. S. Rodionov for the poem “The Bronze Horseman” Death of Eugene Peter I on the banks of the Neva

Mikhail Semenovich Rodionov Mikhail Semenovich Rodionov (1885, Uryupinsky district of the Volgograd region - 1956, Moscow) - Russian artist and art teacher.

He studied in Moscow, initially in the studios of F. Rerberg and I. Mashkov, then at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the painting department (1908-1910) and after a break in the sculpture department (1915-1918). In the 1920s was part of the art association "Makovets". In the pre-war period he actively worked in the field book illustration, especially to the works of L.N. Tolstoy; the best of these works Great encyclopedia“Terra” calls the lithographs for the story “The Canvasser” (1934, for the publishing house “Academia”). Among later works A series of lithographic portraits of cultural figures stands out. He was married to Elizaveta Vladimirovna Giatsintova (1888-1965), daughter of art critic Vladimir Giatsintov and sister of actress Sofia Giatsintova.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, drawings by Alexander were made Nikolaevich Benois(1870 – 1960) to “The Bronze Horseman” is the best thing created in the entire history of Pushkin’s illustrations.
Benoit began working on The Bronze Horseman in 1903. Over the next 20 years, he created a series of drawings, headpieces and endings, as well as great amount options and sketches. The first edition of these illustrations, which were prepared for a pocket edition, was created in 1903 in Rome and St. Petersburg. Diaghilev published them in a different format in the first issue of the World of Art magazine in 1904. The first cycle of illustrations consisted of 32 drawings made in ink and watercolor.
In 1905, A.N. Benois, while in Versailles, reworked six of his previous illustrations and completed the frontispiece for The Bronze Horseman. In the new drawings for “The Bronze Horseman” the theme of pursuit by the Horseman little man becomes the main one: the black horseman over the fugitive is not so much Falconet’s masterpiece as the personification of brutal force and power. And St. Petersburg is not the one that captivates with artistic perfection and the scope of construction ideas, but a gloomy city - a cluster of gloomy houses, shopping arcades, fences. The anxiety and concern that gripped the artist during this period here turns into a real cry about the fate of man in Russia.
In 1916, 1921–1922, the cycle was revised for the third time and supplemented with new drawings.

In the drawings of A.N. Benois, the images of A.S. Pushkin’s “Petersburg Tale” are, as it were, colored by the reflections and experiences of a person at the beginning of the 20th century.
Therefore, it was the “modernity” of Benoit’s illustrations that caught the eye of art connoisseurs at the beginning of the twentieth century; it seemed to them no less significant than the artist’s sense of style, understanding of Pushkin’s era and the ability to skillfully theatricalize the action, developing a number of “masterfully choreographed mise-en-scenes.” The artist and art critic Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar at that time wrote to Benoit about these illustrations of his: “They are so good that I still can’t come to my senses from the novelty of the impressions. The era and Pushkin are conveyed damn well, and there is no smell of engraving material at all, no patina. They are terribly modern - and this is important..."

"The ABC in Pictures" by Alexandre Benois (1904)

Alexandre Benois, painter, graphic artist, theater artist, historian and art theorist, began with landscapes and worked mainly in watercolors. Since 1898, he has been mastering the genre of book illustration, opening up a new area for himself visual arts. Its main body graphic works associated with illustrations to the works of Pushkin. In 1904, “The ABC in Pictures” was released, during the creation of which Benoit acted simultaneously as the author of the concept, and as an illustrator and designer. The artist was faced with the task of not just illustrating, but inventing the artistic design of the “ABC”.
Benoit does not depict a specific object alone, but a situation where this object plays key role. The artist gives preference not to a portrait, but to a detailed narrative scene, with characters, with many small parts. A cross-cutting character also appears in “ABC”, who, according to the author’s plan, masters the alphabet together with the child: his first portrait opens a series of illustrations, and the second completes it.

Each era in Russia offered its own type of alphabet. silver Age brought readers an alphabet in the style of the World of Art. Benoit's exquisite graphics are still an unsurpassed example of book illustration. Each page of "The ABC" is amazingly mesmerizing fairy world.

Looking at a book evokes many associations, and when performing the traditional task for children “telling a story from a picture,” the imagination of little readers and their parents or mentors can be simply limitless. “Azbuka” received censorship permission on October 24, 1904, the production cycle for its publication took about six months. According to some information, 34 chromolithographs with gold and silver were printed in collaboration with the printing house of I. Kadushin. The book had a high retail price of 3 rubles. The circulation was 2500 copies.

Each page of the "ABC" is an amazing, bewitching, fairy-tale world - funny scene, packed with action and character. These scenes are imbued with the spirit of home theaters, which were not uncommon in Russia in former cozy times, with the poetry of “St. Petersburg children’s rooms,” which was noted with admiration by the writer Mikhail Kuzmin, according to whom Benoit “himself, completely, entirely in these rooms, these delights and phantasmagoria. It's very homely, local, personal..."

Once, reflecting on children's books, Benoit said that he would like to express in them “immediate passion, fun, real, unimagined feelings, sun, forest, flowers, dreams of distant and dangerous things, courageous, heroic spirit, desire for achievement, beautiful pride ". We can easily find all this on the pages of “The ABC in Pictures” sparkling with fantasy and fun...

Before the reform of Russian spelling in 1918, the letter “i” existed in the Russian language. It was used before vowels and before the letter “y” in words such as iod, history, Russian, Jerusalem.
Now when we read pre-revolutionary texts, you sometimes need to be very careful, because the letter “i” could seriously change the meaning of the word. For example, Vladimir Dal in his famous “ Explanatory dictionary living Great Russian language" distinguished between the words "mir" and "peace".
"mir" - "universe"<…>, our land, the globe, all people, the whole world, community, society of peasants,”
“peace” - “the absence of quarrel, hostility, disagreement, war.”
The letter “i” also appeared in the famous “ABC in Pictures” created by Alexandre Benois in 1904.

15.

BENOIT Alexander Nikolaevich. A set of postcards with the artist’s illustrations for the poem by A.S. Pushkin "The Bronze Horseman" (Edition " Soviet artist". Moscow. 1966)

Illustration from 1916
On the shore of desert waves
He stood there, full of great thoughts,
And he looked into the distance. Wide before him
The river rushed...

Illustration from 1903

Illustration from 1916

I love you, Petra's creation,
I love your strict, slender appearance,
Neva sovereign current,
Its coastal granite,
Your fences have a cast iron pattern,
of your thoughtful nights
Transparent twilight, moonless shine,
When I'm in my room
I write, I read without a lamp,
And the sleeping communities are clear
Deserted streets and light
Admiralty needle,
And, not letting the darkness of the night,
To golden skies
One dawn gives way to another
He hurries, giving the night half an hour.

Illustration 1903

Terrible day!
Neva all night
Longing for the sea against the storm,
Without overcoming their violent foolishness...
And she couldn’t bear to argue...
In the morning over its banks
There were crowds of people crowded together,
Admiring the splashes, mountains
And the foam of angry waters

Illustration 1903

And Petropol surfaced like Triton,
Waist-deep in water.
Siege! Attack! Evil waves
Like thieves, they climb into windows. Chelny
From the run the windows are smashed by the stern.
Trays under a wet veil,
Fragments of huts, logs, roofs,
Stock trade goods,
The belongings of pale poverty,
Bridges demolished by thunderstorms,
Coffins from a washed-out cemetery
Floating through the streets!

Illustration 1916

Then, on Petrova Square,
Where a new house has risen in the corner,
Where above the elevated porch
With a raised paw, as if alive,
There are two guard lions standing,
Riding a marble beast,
Without a hat, hands clasped in a cross
Sat motionless, terribly pale
Eugene….

Illustration 1916

The water has subsided and the pavement
It opened, and Evgeny is mine
He hurries, his soul sinking,
In hope, fear and longing
To the barely reconciled river.
But victories are full of triumph,
The waves were still boiling angrily,
As if a fire was smoldering under them,
The foam still covered them,
And Neva was breathing heavily,
Like a horse running back from battle.
Evgeny looks: he sees a boat;
He runs to her as if he were on a find;
He's calling the carrier...

Illustration 1903

And long with stormy waves
An experienced rower fought
And hide deep between their rows
Every hour with daring swimmers
The boat was ready...

Illustration 1903

Illustration 1903

But my poor, poor Evgeniy...
Alas, his troubled mind
Against terrible shocks
I couldn't resist. Rebellious noise
The Neva and the winds were heard
In his ears. Terrible thoughts
Silently full, he wandered.
...He'll be out soon
Became alien. I wandered on foot all day,
And he slept on the pier; ate
In the window served in a piece.
His clothes are shabby
It tore and smoldered. Angry children
They threw stones after him.

Illustration 1903
He found himself under the pillars
Big house. On the porch
With a raised paw, as if alive,
The lions stood guard,
And right in the dark heights
Above the fenced rock
Idol with outstretched hand
Sat on a bronze horse.
Evgeny shuddered. cleared up
The thoughts in it are scary. He found out
And the place where the flood played,
Where the waves of predators crowded,
Rioting angrily around him,
And lions, and the square, and that,
Who stood motionless
In the darkness with a copper head,
The one whose will is fatal
A city was founded under the sea...

Illustration 1903

And from the time when it happened
Go to that square for him
His face showed
Confusion. To your heart
He hastily pressed his hand
As if subduing him with torment
A worn out cap,
Didn’t raise embarrassed eyes
And he walked aside.

Famous St. Petersburg painter and graphic artist, book illustrator, master theatrical scenery, historian and art critic. The inspirer and leader of the artists' association "World of Art", he played a prominent role in artistic life Russia. “Miriskusniki,” as the artists of this artistic movement were called, unlike traditional artistic groups, least of all aspired to become a “society of painters.”

Benoit's father is a famous St. Petersburg architect, his mother, nee Kavos, is also the daughter of an architect and builder Mariinsky Theater, near which they lived in St. Petersburg on Nikolskaya Street in the “Benoit House”. Every minute of “Shura” Benoit’s life was filled with art. The first drawings are scenes from the performances we have seen. The theater is like a box at the opera and is visited every week. Theater is his god, his faith for life. The sets for the ballets and operas of Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Seasons in Paris will bring Benois European fame. "Alexandre Benois decorator" will be written on his Parisian business card. My passion for theater will affect my future work on book design. In 1894, after graduating from university, Benoit went abroad. He travels through Germany and Italy, studying the heritage of German and Italian masters, in Paris he intensively studies French culture and creates a series of his watercolors.

A.N. Benois lived long life and saw a lot. I saw the heyday of Repin and Stasov. He was Diaghilev's teacher and colleague. He was friends with Serov. Worked with Stanislavsky, Gorky, Lunacharsky.

French and Italian by birth, Benoit is Russian by upbringing and conviction. He spoke, wrote and thought in Russian. With all his multifaceted activities, he contributed to the flourishing national culture, introducing Russia to the art of the West and the West to the art of Russia.

In 1926, having received another interesting order for the design of a performance and preparing the first personal exhibition, Benoit went to Paris, where he was forced to stay until the end of his days.

One of the first published works by Benois in the field of book illustration is his famous “ABC in Pictures”, designed as an exquisite example of St. Petersburg graphics, strict and sophisticated. In 1904 it was printed in the best printing house at that time - the Expedition for the Procurement of State Papers. In 1990 it was reproduced in facsimile. The artist with his “ABC” made his dream come true - to give “a beautiful book to Russian children.” In it, each letter of the alphabet is dedicated to a page with an entertaining drawing in colors, whimsically combining the real with the fabulous. In “ABC” the artist achieved the complete artistic unity of the “book organism”; the drawings of each page became masterpieces of graphic art. Thanks to illustrations by Benoit, almost every page becomes a fairy tale performance