Exhibition "Tales of my friend I. P. Belkin"

A line from Pushkin's letter is the name of the exhibition, timed to coincide with the 190th anniversary of the publication of Belkin's Tales. The exposition offers an acquaintance with the graphic interpretation of stories in the drawings of the masters of book graphics of the second half of the 19th - first half of the 20th century from the collection of the All-Russian Museum of A.S. Pushkin.

The earliest work in the exhibition is the illustration for The Shot, made in the 1860s by the “artist of His Imperial Majesty” A. I. Charlemagne. At the end of the nineteenth century, the publishers were in great demand for the composition of St. Petersburg graphic artists M. E. Malyshev and R. F. Stein. They were printed on postcards, published in popular magazines.

A whole suite of small drawings to "Belkin's Tales" was created with an energetic contour line for the book series "People's Library" by the famous illustrator of Pushkin IV Simakov. The graphic works of A. M. Laptev and G. N. Veselov, made in the 1930s-1940s, are distinguished by their excellent knowledge of the realities of Pushkin's time, the ability to recreate the emotional and semantic background of a literary work. The illustrations for the "Station Keeper" by the world of art MV Dobuzhinsky became the adornment of the exhibition.

"Belkin's Tales" - the first completed works of Pushkin the prose writer - saw the light at the end of October 1831. They were received coldly by critics and readers. Later, Lev Tolstoy wrote in his diary that Pushkin's stories were "somehow goals". But it was that nakedness, that precision and brevity, at which every word, every pause is filled with deep content.

Alexander Pushkin wrote his stories to Boldinskaya in the fall of 1830, on the eve of the wedding, "worried and worried about the future." A hundred years later, A. A. Akhmatova, reflecting on the happy endings of "Belkin's Tales", will call them "an amazing psychological monument", "in which Pushkin hid his longing for happiness, his own kind of spell of fate." In the plot of each of the five stories, one way or another, there is a matrimonial theme. It seems that the daughter of the stationmaster Dunya is happily getting married. The desired wedding awaits Liza Muromskaya and Alexei Berestov from "The Young Lady-Peasant". The wedding is the main scene in the composition "Snowstorms", whose heroine Marya Gavrilovna is "a slender, pale and seventeen-year-old girl." Seventeen years old and Duna Vyrina, and Liza Muromskaya, and the daughters of the undertaker Adrian Prokhorov, Akulina and Daria. Natalia Goncharova was the same age when Pushkin wooed her in 1829.

In the summer of 1831, the poet, already married, at the Tsarskoye Selo dacha prepared a book for publication and, having written the last phrase "The end of I. P. Belkin's stories", sent the manuscript to St. Petersburg to P. A. Pletnev: "I am sending you ... the tales of my friend I. P. Belkin ... ".