The path of Vasily Semenovich Svarog in art is so unusual that we are obliged to give the floor to the artist himself: “I was born in the city of Staraya Russa. My parents are peasants... I was one and a half years old when my father died, and my mother, with the hard work of a laundress, raised three children, having managed to give them the necessary education... Even at the city school, they paid attention to my ability to draw, and upon graduation, teacher Chistyakov collected one hundred rubles from the local intelligentsia and sent me to St. Petersburg, where, having successfully passed the exam, I entered the Stieglitz Art School.” The knowledge and acquired fundamentals of skill acquired at Stieglitz’s school turned out to be so thorough that after graduation (1900) the artist began independent creative work. Genre compositions with fragments of peasant life and rural life, drawings for numerous magazines at that time, portraits of acquaintances and commissioned ones - the artist’s intensive, often forced work in the 1900-1910s. He receives first place for a series of drawings for “The Living Corpse” by L.N. Tolstoy and for participation in the poster competition of Niva magazine, participates in numerous exhibitions of those years.

In Soviet times, V.S. Svarog is also at work. From 1919 to 1922 he worked in Staraya Russa as an artist and singer in opera house, which was also organized by him. There he paints many paintings and helps create an art museum. What follows is a historical and revolutionary series of paintings, portraits of leaders and heroes of that time. In 1939 V.S. Svarog is painting a large canvas “Members of the Politburo among children in the Park of Culture” for an exhibition in New York. The artist responds with his canvases to the anniversaries of A.S. Pushkin and P.I. Tchaikovsky. Finally, he teaches at the Studio of Military Artists named after M.B. Grekov, and therefore among his paintings is widely represented heroic theme Red Army. Creativity V.S. Svarog fully corresponded to the dictates of the new life and the enthusiasm of the country

The artist's works are in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

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"Let's start from the end."

How is it that “the authors of the publications do not provide any evidence that the version of suicide was not obvious to acquaintances and other persons, including those present during the examination of the corpse”?

And the drawings made on December 28, 1925, and the testimony of Vasily Svarog (V.S. Korochkin)?!!

Memoirs of an artist

Later, V. Svarog, who made drawings of the deceased Yesenin in his hotel room, told his friend, journalist I.S. Heishin:

“It seems to me that this Erlich slipped him something at night, well... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. It was not for nothing that he “forgot” his briefcase in Yesenin’s room.

And he didn’t go home to “sleep” - with Yesenin’s note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was hanging around all the time nearby; probably, their whole company was sitting and biding their time in the neighboring rooms.

Elimination plan

The situation was nervous, there was a congress in Moscow, people in leather jackets were walking around in Angleterre all night. They were in a hurry to remove Yesenin, that’s why everything was so clumsy, and many traces were left.

The frightened janitor, who was carrying firewood and did not enter the room, heard what was happening and rushed to call Commandant Nazarov... And where is this janitor now?

Chronology of Yesenin's murder

First there was a “noose” - Yesenin tried to loosen it with his right hand, and so his hand froze in a cramp. His head was on the armrest of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of his nose with the handle of a revolver.

Then they rolled him up in a carpet and wanted to lower him from the balcony; a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to kidnap. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, so they left the corpse by the balcony, in the cold.

Covering your tracks

They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained... Why do I think they rolled it into the carpet?

When I was drawing, I noticed a lot of tiny specks on my trousers and several in my hair... they tried to straighten their arm and slashed the tendon with a Gillette razor right hand, these cuts were visible...

They took off their jacket, wrinkled and cut, put valuables in their pockets and then took everything away... They were in a hurry... They “hung” them in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser.


Ensign Erlich

When they fled, Erlich remained to check something and prepare for the version of suicide...

He put this poem on the table, in a prominent place: “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye”... A very strange poem...” (Published in the newspaper “Evening Leningrad”, December 28, 1990).

It turns out there was at least one “doubter”!..

M.-L., Raduga, 1925. 13 p. from ill. Circulation 10,000 copies. Price 85 kopecks. In color publisher's lithographed cover. Very rare!

Svarog (real name - Korochkin), Vasily Semenovich(1883, Staraya Russa - 1946, Moscow) - Russian and Soviet artist, book illustrator, poster artist, amateur guitarist. Vasily Semyonovich Korochkin was born in poor family the peasant Semyon and the washerwoman Olga Vasilievna Korochkin, in which besides him there were two more sisters Anna (later a rural teacher) and Nadezhda (later a seamstress). When he was two years old, he lost his father; his mother raised the children. The desire to draw was observed in Vasily Semyonovich from early years. Having noticed him, the art teacher of the Old Russian City School Chistyakov collected money by subscription from the city residents so that the talented child could continue his art education after graduating from school. In 1896, at the age of thirteen, Vasily Semyonovich entered the St. Petersburg Stieglitz Art School of Technical Drawing and four years later successfully graduated from it. In the third year of study, before the next exam, he received the task of painting a picture on the theme “The God of Heavenly Fire Svarog” - a deity in the mythology of the Western Slavs. Well, our Vasya went to fantasize - he painted the sun, stars, lightning, flashes of the northern lights, dawns, rainbows, and in this sparkling environment - the face of a deity. The picture was a success, but the examiners said: “Korochkin, were you looking in the mirror when you painted Svarog? Looks exactly like you." From that day on, we jokingly began to call him Svarog. He got used to this nickname. This is how the artist’s pseudonym appeared - “Svarog” - the name of the god of the sky and heavenly fire in Slavic-Russian mythology. After his graduation, from 1900, he collaborated in the St. Petersburg illustrated magazines “Picturesque Review”, “Machine Gun”, “Magic Lantern”, “Sun of Russia” and others. His satirical drawings and caricatures were published on the pages of the largest illustrated weeklies. In parallel with painting, V. Svarog was seriously involved in music. Gifted with exceptional musical abilities, absolute pitch and a wonderful voice, he began to independently learn to play the guitar, guided by the school of M. Vysotsky and A. Sihra. Then I switched to six string guitar, specialized in playing the “Spanish guitar” and in 1907-1908 performed as a solo guitarist at concerts. I preferred metal strings. He had his own works, most of which were not published. He sang well with the guitar and took part in performances. He also developed as an artist. In 1911 V.S. Svarog was awarded first prize at a competition organized by the editors of the magazine "Sun of Russia" for a series of drawings for "The Living Corpse" by L.N. Tolstoy. The decisive importance for the development and activation of the realistic principles of V.S. Svarog had his meeting with I.E. Repin in 1915. One of famous works I. Repin is a portrait of V. Svarog with a guitar in his hands.



Ilya Repin. Portrait of the artist V.S. Svarog. 1915

Frequent stays with Ilya Repin and presence at his portrait sessions also influenced the direction of Svarog’s work (self-portraits of 1923, 1926, portraits of O.A. Kisterova, L.S. Svarog, etc.). On the advice and recommendation of I.E. Repin Vasily Svarog joined the Association of Itinerants and, starting in 1916, exhibited his works at traveling exhibitions. The best work of this period by V.S. Svarog is "Portrait of a Mother" (1916, oil on canvas), awarded first prize at the spring Traveling Exhibition. In January 1917, he was awarded the title of academician. While pursuing a career as an artist, Vasily Svarog did not part with music; as a virtuoso guitarist, he toured Russia and gave solo concerts. In 1919, due to the serious illness of V.S.’s mother. Svarog returned to his hometown and until 1922 lived in the city of Staraya Russa, where he became interested in organizing People's House, a vocal circle and an opera group (he himself performed the most difficult opera roles on stage: the miller in “Rusalka”, Mephistopheles in “Faust”, Mazepa in “Mazepa” and others), was the initiator of the creation of a local art museum, amateur choral and orchestral clubs, artistic studios for teenagers. According to the artist’s wife Larisa Svarog, when asked what was most important for him: painting or music and singing, Vasily Svarog answered:

“First of all, I am an artist, but I love music and singing equally passionately. I cannot imagine life without these three arts. If I am ever deprived of one of them, if the balance is disturbed, I will probably cease to be an artist ".

Returning to Petrograd in 1922, V. Svarog resumed work as an illustrator and poster artist. In 1925, he received a silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris for the album “January 9,” for which he completed 11 large drawings. Vasily Svarog combined creative work with teaching activities as a teacher at an art and industrial technical school. V.S. Svarog was well acquainted with Sergei Yesenin and, according to some sources, they even had plans for joint performances, at which guitarist Svarog was supposed to accompany Yesenin’s recitation. These plans, however, were not destined to come true due to the sudden death of S.A. Yesenina.




On the day of the tragic death of the poet, V. Svarog was also at the Angleterre hotel and on the night of December 28, 1925, he managed to make a posthumous pencil drawing in Yesenin’s room depicting the dead Yesenin (first published: “Our Heritage”, 1990, No. 3) , which is currently stored in the Moscow state museum S.A. Yesenina. Since 1929, the permanent residence of V.S. Svarog becomes Moscow. During the Moscow period, he worked a lot on historical and revolutionary themes: he painted a series of paintings dedicated to the events of 1905 ("Gapon's Betrayal", "Secret Printing House", "The Death of Potemkin"), began to paint portraits of statesmen of Soviet Russia (portraits of S. Ordzhonikidze, V.V. Kuibysheva, S.M. Kirova, K.E. Voroshilova, etc.).

October Headquarters. 1939. Oil on canvas.

A response to the most important events in the life of the country were the paintings “Fitting Workers”, “Dneprostroy”, “Kuznetskstroy” and others, twenty-four watercolors, united under the general title “The Red Army on Maneuvers”, the works “Hero-pilots in the Kremlin before the flight”, “ Meeting of Chelyuskinites on Red Square", "Sedovites on Red Square" and others. During 1932-1941, Svarog created his own best works Soviet period: still life "Guitar" (1934), "Sick Woman" (1935), "After the Storm" (1930), "Birth of a Poem" (1937), "Portrait of Mayakovsky" (1910), "Portrait of Tchaikovsky" (1940). Among the works of V.S. Svarog’s many works are united by the important theme of “Painting and Music” for him (among these works, in particular, the painting “Guitar Player”, 1940, which, according to the testimony of the Ryazan guitarist Grigory Evseevich Shishkin (1920-2000), depicts a student of P.S. Agafoshin Evgenia Makeeva (1916-1967), and a pencil portrait of Andres Segovia From the first days of the Great Patriotic War, V. S. Svarog began to work energetically to create inspiring posters, drawings, wall paintings, reproductions of which were published in many newspapers and illustrated books. publications. Vasily Svarog sang well. While in Staraya Russa, he performed complex roles on the stage of the old Russian opera - the miller in Dargomyzhsky's "Rusalka", Mephistopheles in Gounod's "Faust", Mazepa in Tchaikovsky's "Mazepa", Karas in Gulak's "Cossack beyond the Danube". -Artemovsky, Aleko in Rachmaninov’s “Aleko” In addition, Svarog played the guitar:

“First of all, I am an artist, but I have equal passion for music and singing. I cannot imagine life without these three arts. If I’m ever deprived of one of them, if the balance is upset, I’ll probably stop being an artist.”

In 1940, the Political Directorate of the Moscow Military District united professional military artists into the Studio of Military Artists named after M.B. Grekov on the basis of Art Workshops of Amateur Red Army Art. The studio was given the task of cultural and political education of soldiers, displaying the heroic military path of the army. V. Svarog was appointed head, who created a number of paintings on military themes:

"Council of Commanders"

"Smolny in October"

"Taking of Winter"

"The boat trip of the commanders' wives."

Since 1941 - in evacuation. First in Nalchik, then in Tbilisi. On May 25, 1942, an exhibition of paintings took place in Tbilisi. The newspaper "Zarya Vostoka" wrote:

“Creative reports from artists. On Monday, May 25, at 12 noon. of the day at the Art Gallery of Georgian Artists, Stalin Prize laureate, Honored Artist I.E. Grabar and artist V.S. Svarog will give creative reports. On this day, an exhibition of their paintings made in Tbilisi and Nalchik in 1941 and 1942 will open in the gallery premises.”

In 1942 V.S. Svarog completed his last painting - a complex, multi-figure historical and patriotic composition "Stepan Razin". At the end of the same year, due to an accident, he became seriously ill. In 1943, for many years of creative work, V.S. Svarog was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and on December 31, 1946, after a long illness, he died. Buried in Moscow on Novodevichy Cemetery. The tombstone on the artist’s grave was made by his student, People’s Artist of the USSR, sculptor N.V. Tomsky. In 1948, through the efforts of the artist’s friends and his wife Larisa Semyonovna Svarog, a posthumous exhibition of his works was held. It featured paintings, portraits, sketches from the exhibitions of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Historical Museum, Central House Soviet army, museums A.S. Pushkin, M. Gorky, the USSR Academy of Arts and regional museums. Works by V. Svarog are available in Tretyakov Gallery and at the Academy of Arts. About two hundred of his works, bequeathed by the artist hometown, in 1974 became the basis art gallery in the city of Staraya Russa, Novgorod region.

I.V. Stalin and members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks among children

in the Central Park of Culture and Leisure named after M. Gorky in Moscow. 1939.

Canvas, oil. 200x300

Art historian I.E. Grabar noted that the artist Svarog is characterized by “a special exceptional love for today, vigilance for its phenomena, facts, people. Throughout his life, he did not miss a single significant event, responding to it immediately, with lightning speed, with his paintings, in which he reflected his personal attitude towards him, the attitude of his people and the time.” The title of the work, despite being descriptive, does not express its actual content. Meeting of children and country leaders - I.V. Stalin, K.E. Voroshilova, M.I. Kalinina, V.M. Molotova, M.M. Kaganovich - an event that could have happened in reality, in the picture, takes on the features of a myth. The radiance illuminates not only faces and figures, but also the landscape, the sky, everything around. What is happening seems to have been filtered through the dream of the unity of government and people.

The famous drawing of Vasily Svarog, made by him in Angleterre on that same tragic night, has returned to Russia.

The artist Svarog (V.S. Korochkin), who made a drawing of the deceased Yesenin in a hotel room, told his friend, journalist I.S. Heisin, the following: “It seems to me that this Erlich slipped him something at night, well... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. It was not for nothing that he “forgot” his briefcase in Yesenin’s room. And he didn’t go home to “sleep” - with Yesenin’s note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was hanging around all the time nearby; probably, their entire company was sitting and biding their time in the neighboring rooms. The situation was nervous, there was a congress in Moscow, people in leather jackets were walking around in Angleterre all night. They were in a hurry to remove Yesenin, which is why everything was so clumsy, and many traces were left. The frightened janitor, who was carrying firewood and did not enter the room, heard what was happening and rushed to call Commandant Nazarov... And where is this janitor now? First there was a “noose” - Yesenin tried to loosen it with his right hand, and so his hand froze in a cramp. His head was on the armrest of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of his nose with the handle of a revolver. Then they rolled him up in a carpet and wanted to lower him from the balcony; a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to kidnap. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, so they left the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained... Why do I think they rolled it into the carpet? When I was drawing, I noticed a lot of tiny specks on my trousers and a few in my hair... they tried to straighten their arm and slashed the tendons of their right arm with a Gillette razor, these cuts were visible... They took off their jacket, wrinkled and cut, put valuables in their pockets and then they took everything away... They were in a great hurry... They “hung” it in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich remained to check something and prepare for the version of suicide... He also put this poem on the table, in a prominent place: “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye”... A very strange poem ..." (Published in the newspaper "Evening Leningrad", December 28, 1990).

There is another mysterious person in this matter, a certain L. Sosnovsky, a friend of Trotsky, a feuilletonist. It was his accusation that led to the case of 4 poets accused of anti-Semitism (Yesenin, Klychkov, Oreshin, Ganin). All the poets died a violent death, as did Sosnovsky (his name appears in the execution case royal family), shot in 1937. Another victim, A. Sobol, who stood up for the “anti-Semitic” poets. Soon after the funeral of S.A. Yesenin, he was found near the monument to Dostoevsky with a bullet through his head.
It was a dark time.


Self-portrait. 1926. Tretyakov Gallery

Vasily Semyonovich Korochkin was born into the family of a peasant Semyon and a washerwoman Olga Vasilievna Korochkin, in which besides him there were two more sisters Anna (later a rural teacher) and Nadezhda (later a seamstress). When he was two years old, he lost his father; his mother raised the children.
Vasily Semyonovich had a desire to draw from an early age. Having noticed him, the art teacher of the Old Russian City School Chistyakov collected money by subscription from the city residents so that the talented child could continue his art education after graduating from school. In 1896, at the age of thirteen, Vasily Semyonovich entered the St. Petersburg Stieglitz Art School of Technical Drawing and four years later successfully graduated from it. It was during his studies that the artist’s pseudonym “Svarog” appeared:
"N In the third year of study, before the next exam, he received the task of painting a picture on the theme “The God of Heavenly Fire Svarog” - a deity in the mythology of the Western Slavs. Well, our Vasya went to fantasize - he painted the sun, stars, lightning, flashes of the northern lights, dawns, rainbows, and in this sparkling environment - the face of a deity. The picture was a success, but the examiners said: “Korochkin, were you looking in the mirror when you painted Svarog? Looks exactly like you.” From that day on, we jokingly began to call him Svarog. He's used to this nickname..."

I.E. Repin. Portrait of the artist V.S. Svarog (1915)


Repin Ilya Efimovich

Illustration source: Repin Ilya Efimovich. Sketches, graphics, sketches, portraits. MCF, IDDK. 2000.



Svarog V.S. SOLOISTS. (1910s)
From here: http://www.shishkin-gallery.ru/auction_20100522_lot66.html#bottom


Self-portrait with a torban, 1923. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Posthumous portrait of Yesenin returned to Russia

Svarog wrote these “political compositions”:


1939. I.V. Stalin and members of the Politburo among children in the Central Park of Culture and Culture named after. Gorky


K.E. Voroshilov and A.M. Gorky at the CDKA shooting gallery. Central Museum of the Soviet Army
From here: http://otkritka-reprodukzija.blogspot.ru/2008/05/1883-1946.html

But also this:

Portrait of P.I. Tchaikovsky. 1940. Moscow. Concert hall them. P.I. Tchaikovsky

Portrait folk artist USSR, academician I.E. Grabar. 1942 State Tretyakov Gallery

Guitarist . 1940. Ryazan regional Art Museum, Ryazan, Russia.

Portrait of Andres Segovia

By the way, Svarog himself sang and played music beautifully!

And he also wrote this:


City". 1931. Old Russian Museum of Local Lore, V.S. Svarog Hall.

Scenery. 1932.


Turksib. 1934.

Original taken from oxxik in Staraya Russa. Art Gallery

As I told you yesterday, in Staraya Russa currently operational Museum of Local Lore AndKart innayagallery cities. My post today will be about her, about the art gallery, the entire space of which is dedicated to the work of Vasily Svarog and his followers. The first art gallery in the history of Staraya Russa was opened on the initiative of the artist Svarog in 1922. Events of subsequent decades, especially the Great Patriotic War, caused serious damage to the culture of the city. Much had to be created anew, including the art collection. Only in 1974, after a long break, the Starorusskaya Art Gallery was reopened. It was placed in the Church of the Presentation of the former Transfiguration Monastery. It was conceived as a gallery of fellow countrymen.

Vasily Semenovich Svarog (Korochkin) was born in 1883 in Staraya Russa. He received his art education in St. Petersburg at the Baron Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing. The style of Svarog the painter was formed under the influence of Russian pictorial realism at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.

An important period of Svarog’s creativity began in 1929 after moving to Moscow, where he created dozens of huge canvases depicting the leaders of the revolution, which brought him official recognition and material well-being. Svarog became one of the chroniclers of Stalin's time. These works are still kept in central museums, in the storage rooms of the Ministry of Culture Russian Federation. They are part of our history.

However, the best that was created by Svarog in the 1930-1940s in painting is not associated with the doctrine of socialist realism, but reflects the personal artistic preferences of the master, his deep knowledge of the traditions of Russian art " silver age" It is these works that occupy most of the exhibition of the Staraya Russian Art Gallery. These are portraits and interiors, surprisingly free, saturated with air, rich in the play of light, distinguished by the accuracy of psychological characteristics and depth.