The review aims to draw the readers’ attention to the book by Mikhail Biryukov on the history of the free art workshop, school-commune and art technical school in
Mstyora in the 1920s. Based upon unpublished texts of its teachers and students and upon wide range of archive documents introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time, the author of the book reveals practically unknown pages of the provincial reminiscences of the Russian artistic avant-garde, the prominent representatives and fans of which were occupying stable positions in the appropriate links of the Soviet system of artistic education. The students of the artistic workshops and technical school had a direct interest in learning from the practitioners and theoreticians of the new art who worked at Mstyora or from visiting teachers from Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad, but in practice followed the traditions of icon painting deeply rooted in Mstyora or hard realistic art positions represented by the leader of the whole educational complex F.A. Modorov and the majority of his colleagues. This way the leftist ideas sooner lead to broadness and variability of the students’ creative views than to their formation as the avant-gardists’ younger generation. A certain overlapping of the Mstyora Ark history with the two other traditional art centers — Palekh and Kholuy — are marked, and the book as a whole is evaluated as a proper example of the cutting-edge local artistic history.
For citation: Polyvannyi D.I. Mstyora as an “experimental station” of the artistic avantgarde of Russia in the 1920s. Book review: M.L. Birukov. Mstyorsky Ark. From the history of artistic life in the 1920s, Moscow, 468 p., Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 4, pp. 192—198.