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Now few people remember that there was an artist whose name was Anatoly Nikiforovich Yar-Kravchenko. Not that I want to sing him an ode or tell him that he has created a direction or given the world a light that the world has not yet known.
I just want to say something. Yar-Kravchenko is undoubtedly a very strange figure. Very, very strange. He, undoubtedly, an excellent draughtsman and qualitative portraitist (Ah his portraits Mayakovsky, Yesenin and Dreiser, me seems, all on light of must know), but essentially (Yes and as he himself not times recognized) - talent have him not was. But there was an incredible perseverance and " understanding how and whom to draw." And not only to draw, but also to say the right things. Oh, who am I kidding - not only to draw and speak, but also with whom to sleep.
After all, in fact, it is well known that Anatoly Nikiforovich owes his career to the poet Klyuev (well, the very one about whom Yesenin described quite accurately: "here is Klyuev-Ladoga Sexton, his poems are like a padded jacket; I read them aloud yesterday and a Canary died in a cage"), whose lover he was. Well yes. Anatoly Nikiforovich Yar-Kravchenko, the great laureate of Stalin prizes and draughtsman of Gorky, Stalin, Lenin, Voroshilov and so on, was the lover of the main gay man of poetic Russia until the death of the latter. And a favorite disciple of Isaac of Israel Brodsky. What about his love for drawing leaders from all angles and on all vehicles we know, of course.
Well, that's it.
And on the other hand, because Yar-Kravchenko in 1941 volunteered for the front and the whole war was first in the technical services at the airport, and then-a shooter-radio operator on a bomber. So, I don't know, it's a sin to spit. I know the biographies of a dozen "beautiful sincere painters" who, at the request of the Union of artists, sat out the entire war in Tashkent receiving a salary, and then returned to their workshops in Moscow and St. Petersburg, to scold the Soviet Union and the "damned Communists".
