Victor Ryabinin art exhibition - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

“Whenever sad, draw a flower” ~ Victor Ryabinin

Published: 6 January 2022 ~ The Terrible Doubt of Weeping Flowers Victor Ryabinin

The Terrible Doubt of Appearances or the Terrible Doubt of Weeping Flowers? ‘Whenever sad, draw a flower’, Victor Ryabinin wrote. If only he was here to show us how

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Recently, a friend of Victor Ryabinin’s visited the flat where he used to live, she wrote:

“Yesterday we were at V. Ryabinin’s house. I looked at his diaries — amazing documents of the life of not one person, but of a country. Today I read poetry on one of the pages [of his diary] , and my heart sinks.”

It would appear that Victor had found the words he needed to express his own thoughts and feelings in a poem by the American poet Walt Whitman, Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances.

The following extract, translated into Russian by Victor, appeared in his diary:

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,
shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these
are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real
something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and
mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of
them,)

My wife, Olga, wrote on her Facebook page on the same day as she read the above:

“Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. It has always been the same. My friend Victor Ryabinin, who was not only a great artist but a great philosopher, invented a simple cure for depression. His motto was: “Whenever sad, draw a flower”.

The Terrible Doubt of Weeping Flowers ~ Victor Ryabinin

The photographs below are of the building where Victor lived and some of his stored artwork. They are reproduced here with the kind permission of Valentina Pokladova, who wrote:

“The shrubbery along the fence seems to remember the owner and sheds pearly tears …”

Click here for details of an exhibition of Victor Ryabinin’s work.