Rasseja. [Mit einführenden Aufsätzen von Oskar Bie, Pavel Barchan, Alexander Benois und Boris Grigoriew], 1922. D2463

Rasseja. [Mit einführenden Aufsätzen von Oskar Bie, Pavel Barchan, Alexander Benois und Boris Grigoriew], 1922. D2463

The Possessed... If you, like the Russian authorities, dislike "the distortion of the images of the Russian peasantry and their social life," in Grigorev's edition of Rasseja, then look to Shchedrovskii's more realistic but much earlier view. This volume was published simultaneously in St. Petersburg and Berlin and the artist was criticized in Petrograd/Leningrad for his "distortions." He had emigrated in 1919 to the West, and this German edition differs from the Russian edition printed in Berlin, and printed there again in 1922 in that it has three times more oils and graphics. Can we assume there was some bowdlerizing of the Russian edition? Alexander Benois, from whose private library our copy comes, wrote part of the text. The art of Grigorev is said to be rather close to the work of later German expressionists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz, and he was one of the first Russian artists to have an exhibition in the U.S. after the war, a successful one at that, at the Brooklyn Museum. The Department of Special Collections had an opportunity some years ago to buy a few of the books from the library of Aleksandr Benois of the Benois dynasty of intellectuals in art and architecture. Benois felt that Petersburg's architecture was not derivative, but rather was unique within the tradition of neo-Classicism and that Petersburg itself should become the subject of Russian art, that it was not inimical to native Russian styles. He was a preservationist of the Old-Guard, a member of the Society for Old Petersburg. But he became a westerner when he emigrated in 1926.

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