"Moscow eccentrics, my friends …"
Veronica Valley
Publishing house "Art-Volkhonka" together with the Museum of Architecture published a book dedicated, as it was customary to write about thirty years ago, the life and work of Dmitry Petrovich Sukhov. This is the first detailed monograph about Sukhov, its authors are Tatyana Dudina, the curator of the museum graphics fund of the 18th-19th centuries, and Larisa Vulfina, a historian-restorer.
Dmitry Petrovich Sukhov lived a little over ninety years, remembered the time of Alexander II and outlived Stalin for five years. He did not fight, did not sit, was not in exile, unlike, for example, his friend Pyotr Dmitrievich Baranovsky or his colleague-historian Nikolai Ivanovich Brunov. He held respected positions in his own way, was, in particular, the chief architect of the Kremlin, but he lived extremely poorly in Soviet times: with his wife and daughter in a fourteen-meter wooden room above the guardhouse of the Novodevichy Convent, he did not receive any professorial preferences. He was respected by his colleagues, in honor of Sukhov they organized skits evenings, he was invited for consultations, in 1957 they celebrated his ninetieth birthday with an anniversary exhibition at the Central House of Artists, but they were completely forgotten after his death. Only GNIMA, a museum of architecture, where Sukhov was a member of the Academic Council for a long time, organized in 1980 the second, first posthumous exhibition with a catalog.
Sukhov's drawings are regularly encountered in work by everyone who, in one way or another, studies the history of ancient Russian architecture; but there are few of them in published books, if they come across there, then in the background. Everyone has heard of Baranovsky; they remember Maksimov, Brunov, Ilyin, Sukhov's student Lev Arturovich David - they rarely remember Sukhov himself, and also as if casually, with difficulty. One can understand the authors of the monograph, who at the end of the biographical sketch answer the question why they did their painstaking work with the words “to be remembered”: Dmitry Petrovich Sukhov found himself on the periphery of historiography, and the new book fills this gap. The fact that the book about Sukhov was initiated by the Museum of Architecture, and not, say, by the Kremlin, can be explained: it is in the GNIMA that the architect's main archive is kept, transferred by his daughter Yevgenia Dubovskaya in 1975 and named fund number 38 - it became the basis of the book, in which, however, materials from the Historical Museum and other funds were also included. The authors published a lot of archival graphics, source material, and just curious stories and life details, for which descendants, historians and local historians should, of course, be grateful to them.
But first of all, it must be admitted that Dmitry Petrovich Sukhov was not very noticeable as an architect. In competitions he received second and third places, honorable, but not the main ones. He worked in all styles, started with Renaissance and Russophile eclecticism, mastered the fluid lines of Art Nouveau, was fond of neoampire and graduated from the Dorogomilov chemical plant "Aniltrest" in the spirit of constructivism, although with panels, cornices and thermal windows - it was difficult for Sukhov to leave the classical tradition, - write Tatiana Dudina and Larisa Vulfina. But despite his attachment to the classics, Sukhov did not take any part in the formation of Stalin's Art Deco - however, by that time the architect was sixty years old.
Meanwhile, at the very beginning of his career, in 1890-1892, Sukhov's brother-in-law, the architect Sergei Ustinovich Solovyov, recruited him to work on the facade of the Stroganov School on Rozhdestvenka, a building that now belongs to the Moscow Architectural Institute. Dmitry Petrovich designed the interiors and made, personally observing the production in the workshops of the school, all the majolica panels - well-known, I suppose, to the students-architects who at least once hung out around the fountain in the courtyard of the institute.
The most curious of the stories described in the book is about how in 1907 Sukhov made an attempt to make money on real estate by buying a plot, to build his own small wooden two-story tenement house - one of those with which all of Moscow was rapidly being built up at that time. The idea failed, the house with the plot had to be sold. One feels that architecture was a necessary income for the hero of the book: at this time he was raising four daughters. Sukhov undertook outbuildings, reconstruction, but was especially fond of interiors, abundantly saturating them with decorations, including picturesque panels on plafonds and walls - in a word, in this he was completely and completely a man of the late 19th century. The best of the mansions built by the architect is the house of K. A. Bellick, partly preserved in Petrovsky Park on the Leningradskoye Highway (1914). Sukhov taught a lot, starting soon after his graduation from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but more often he taught courses in technical drawing, watercolor decorative painting, interior design and furniture, less often in architectural design itself. Later, during and after the Great Patriotic War, he was engaged in the design of theatrical performances.
And yet the work of Dmitry Petrovich Sukhov's life was "antiquity." Along with his brother-in-law Solovyov, already in the 1890s, he began to participate in the work of the Commission for the Study of the Preservation of Ancient Monuments of the IMAO, measured monuments, described them, made reports, many drawings: plans, details, reconstructions, and simply pictorial sketches - all this at the same time and seems to have the same passion. This work became more important than others in the twenties, when Sukhov participated first in the stormy museification, and then in the equally stormy and unsuccessful protection of many monuments, mainly churches, demolished by hundreds. He examined, measured, sketched many monuments everywhere - in Moscow, in Pskov, in the Crimea, saving churches and at the same time - sketching the Mausoleum, arranging the house of the Lenin Museum in Ulyanovsk and the house-museum of Stalin's exile in Solvychegodsk - all with restoration and meticulous restoration of the historical setting. Sukhov also created the Museum of Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana and Turgenev with Lutovinov. Absolutely ubiquitous, judging by the biography and the massive archive, he was a man, and somehow calmly combining affairs of completely different kinds: saving the young Leo David, a famous restorer in the future, from military conscription, writing letters about the preservation of churches, designing a chemical plant and glorifying the memory of the leaders revolution. Somewhat frightening even versatility. However, and saving, probably; although it is not for us to judge the people of that time.
What is left to us from the tumultuous activity of Dmitry Petrovich Sukhov and for what do we need to appreciate him? I would name three things. One was well shown by the authors in their book, attaching the so-called "album" of his watercolors to the architect's biography. In fact, this is not an album, although it is pleasant to look at the pictures - maybe Sukhov spent the second half of his life in a bad mood, but he painted very optimistically, no expressionism. The application differs from the album in that the pictures are small, and their descriptions are large, with a detailed popular story about each painted monument: it turned out to be a guide to Moscow, somehow lost. Sukhov drew enthusiastically, constantly, watercolors and etchings were his outlet: from trips he sent watercolor postcards, painting the backs of postcards. This is the nice part.
The second part of Sukhov's legacy is important. One must think that, to some extent, thanks to him, the Soviet school of restoration and research of monuments of ancient Russian architecture was formed - a very good school, the stars of which were David, Altshuller, Podyapolsky. It cannot be said that Sukhov was the main one in this matter, but perhaps he was one of those links, those people, without whom it would not have been so good. Again, it cannot be said that this school is flourishing now - but it is somehow alive, which means that at one time it became strong, which, again, is the merit of Dmitry Petrovich.
The third part is especially difficult to explain, it is subtle. Here, first you need to take a closer look at the "album" in order to find out this: in which direction you flip through it, all the watercolors are alike. They do not trace the latently expected chronological evolution, both in the twenties and fifties, the style, or rather the range of techniques and moods are completely the same, and depend rather on the genre: measurement, reconstruction or sketching, than on time. And it’s terrible to say how many things have changed during this time: not to mention the avant-garde, Sukhov found even a piece of thaw - but no chemical plant prompted him to leave the once found Vasnetsov-Abramtsevo image of a mummer boyar, to stop painting congratulatory addresses with flowery ornaments. Imagine: a post office, a co-worker sorts the postcards of the Pioneer Octobrists, and one of them comes across a letter in half-charter.
Sukhov did not write the history of Russian architecture, did not make a big discovery, and did not approve the rules of the restoration school, although he was involved in many things, he is not the first anywhere here either. The architect, restorer, graphic artist Sukhov does not have what could be called the main achievement of life. His achievement is different: he completely drops out of that Soviet mainstream, which we are used to considering in simplicity as almost the only one - war, avant-garde, Stalinist classics number one, war, Stalinist classics number two, Khrushchev's struggle against excesses. Having equipped the museums of the two leaders, he lived his inner life as if these leaders did not exist at all. The authors of the book are sure that Sukhov, who sketched iconostases before the revolution and participated in the competition for the sculptural shroud of the shroud, remained a believer all his life. I’ll say more: he could have been a monarchist all his life, but we will never know. He carried his passion through more than half of the 20th century, his life is strange, latent, combining parallel realities, and his drawings are all evidence of the continuity of some tradition, let's call it the tradition of festive Russophilia, without which our history and history of architecture would be different; they are proofs of the viability of the community of "Moscow eccentrics" who can do so much and are so rarely noticeable.
It is not surprising, by the way, that the only posthumous exhibition of Sukhov at the State National Research Imperial Academy took place in the eighties, the beginning of a new hobby for Russophilia. Perhaps she somehow contributed to the development of the modern genre of landscape reconstruction, which is now remarkably (and more accurately than Sukhov) painted by Vsevolod Ryabov, whose paintings are illustrated in all modern books about old Moscow.
Our historiography is uneven; there is no French enthusiasm or German scrupulousness in her. There are many lacunae in it and often one feels a fascination with schemes that seem to be given once and for all, but never exhaust anything. And they make our ideas about life flat, forcing us to be surprised every time, learning, for example, about a person who carried a romantic look at Russian antiquity untouched until 1957, passing it on to his students. The book by Wulfina and Dudina is important in this sense - it contains more facts than generalizations, it talks about what is not very well known, turns a piece of history into a partly half-forgotten side. If we take the current hysteria of "scrapie" aside, and the book does not seem to coincide with it in any way, it is written too calmly for this and too intelligently, neatly published - then the monograph looks surprisingly detached: it does not fall into any stream, it is simply research, publication of rare and beautiful material. We just miss research.
