Tag Archives: Boris Nisnevich

Victor Ryabinin Artist Four Years Out of Time

Victor Ryabinin left Königsberg in 2019 to go back there. There is so much presence in his absence that it is hard to say if he ever went at all.

18 July 2023 ~ Victor Ryabinin Artist Four Years Out of Time

Featured image: Victor Ryabinin with Mick Hart, The London Pub, Kaliningrad, 2015

Our friend, artist, philosopher and local historian, VIctor Ryabinin, who lived out his entire life in Königsberg, died on 18 July 2019. He was, as I and others have written, a most unassuming, but in spite of and because of this, most remarkable man, both intellectually and on the level of humanity.

This is the first year that I will be unable to make the annual homage to his grave, as I am in England at present doing all the things that we people have to do whilst we are alive and which, when we die, mean very little if nothing to anyone. “Is it worth it?” sang Elvis Costello.

Such is not the case with Victor: Victor left behind a concatenation of friends and colleagues who filled the hall at his funeral to pay their last respects to him, who have written heart-felt eulogies to him, enough to fill a book, and who continue to speak of him with great affection and reverence. This is the yardstick of a worthwhile life: to have people remember you for the essence of the person you were and the light that you brought to their life.

It was a small affair, my funeral: There was the vicar, who begrudgingly turned out on a wet afternoon when the pubs were open, Ginger the cat, who had nothing better to do, and two professionals from Rent A Mourner. No one could be asked to dig the grave, so they used a post-hole digger and buried me standing up. My brother, the one who is a carpenter, made the coffin from MDF, his stock-in-trade material and, in order to keep things cheap, cut corners literally so that my feet stuck out one end. Happily ~ purely for the sake of appearances, mind, nothing to do with respect ~ someone found an old pair of wellies, so that took care of that.

Leonard Cohen was played throughout, and a man, chosen because of his serious face and the fact he cost a fiver, read an excerpt from my favourite short story, Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, and then the graveside bystanders, muttering “He always was a miserable bugger.” ~ Ginger the cat said “Meow!” ~ off they went to the nearest pub at a gallop and by the time their first pint had been downed they had forgotten I ever existed.

Victor Ryabinin Artist

Something as ignominious as this could never happen to the likes of Victor Ryabinin, because he was a truly likeable man: admired, respected, loved, revered, warm of company and generous in spirit.

In 2022, we privately and officially celebrated Victor’s life and commemorated his death with a plaque that we had commissioned, and which is now attached to the wall of our dacha. There was talk once, there always is a lot of talk full of good intentions immediately after someone dies, of erecting a plaque in Victor’s honour on the wall of the building where his studio once was. It is a great pity that this idea has never been brought to fruition, as many people ~ poets, architects, historians, artists, museum curators and me ~ were privileged to sit with him there, surrounded by relics from Königsberg and the artworks created in his own hand, artworks which these relics, these haunting pieces of the past combined with his personal memories, had assigned him to compose and pass on for posterity.

Another building that deserves to be endowed with a plaque in memory of Victory Ryabinin is the Kaliningrad Art School, where Victor worked as an art teacher for many years. His former students speak warmly of him, both of the man and the teacher, and it is gratifying to discover that the inspiration that he instilled shines through their sketches and paintings, which are displayed at various times in solo exhibitions and with the works of other artists in Kaliningrad’s art museums.

Today, I am far away and unable to make my annual trip to Victor’s graveside. When he died, I vowed this would never happen, but show me the man who is master of his destiny and we’ll sit together and talk of lies. Fortunately, our minds are capable of travelling far greater distances than any machine, and special people and unique places never stray far from our thoughts. They are a source of great comfort in its ever having been and a source of equal pain in its never to be again.

What happens to the heart? Leonard Cohen asks. And well he might. Whatever it is, we have no choice but to live with it, if only, thankfully, for a little while longer ~ somehow.

Victor Ryabinin
Arrived in Königsberg 17^th December 1946
Returned to Königsberg 18^th July 2019

Victor Ryabinin Königsberg Artist-Historian: A biographical essay by author Boris Nisnevich

Victor Ryabinin Königsberg Kaliningrad: Mick Hart recalls how fortunate he was to have met and to have known Victor Ryabinin

“Through Victor, I learnt many things that I had seen throughout my life in Königsberg but had never really thought about.“ ~ Stanislav Konovalov, student and personal friend of Victor Ryabinin

Victor Ryabinin at one with Königsberg

Victor Ryabinin, artist, Königsberg
17 December 1946 ~ 18 July 2019

Why Victor Ryabinin will never leave Königsberg

Victor Ryabinin, a word with him after his death:
Thoughts on the second anniversary of Victor’s death
It is two years now, by our understanding of time, since Victor stepped out of time, but hardly a day goes by when we do not mention him. Since his death, Victor has become the benchmark by which we judge both the architectural and cultural developments in Kaliningrad and its region.

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To coincide with what would have been Victor Ryabinin’s 75^th birthday, a book has been published which celebrates and commemorates his life and work. Conceived, supervised and edited by Kaliningrad artist Marina Simkina, daughter of the famous Russian poet Sam Simkin, and Boris Nisnevich, author and journalist, this fascinating book contains personal memories of Victor Ryabinin and critical acclaim of his work and career from 28 of his friends and colleagues.

More information about the book can be found by following this link [Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg], which will take you to the permanent pages on this blog under the category Victor Ryabinin Königsberg.

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The following articles relating to Victor, his life and his art, also appear in this category:

Victor Ryabinin the Spirit of Königsberg
Oдин из самых замечательных людей, которых я когда-либо встречал
I first met Victor Ryabinin in the spring of 2001. A friend of my wife’s, knowing how much my wife liked art and how fascinated I was with anything to do with the past, suggested that we meet this ‘very interesting’ man, who was an artist and a historian.

An artist who can hear angels speak
Художник, у которого ангелы говорят
Kaliningrad author and journalist, Boris Nisnevich’s essay on the haunting influence that Königsberg’s ruins had on Victor Ryabinin’s philosophy and art: “When I wrote the draft to this article, I wrote that I believe there is no equal to him in Kaliningrad — I still believe he has no equal.” ~ Boris Nisnevich

In Memory of Victor Ryabinin
This article was published in memoriam on the first anniversary of Victor’s death. Victor died on 18 July 2019.

Personal Tour Guide Kaliningrad
Stanislav Konovalov (Stas) was a student and close friend of Victor Ryabinin. In the months following Victor’s death Stas supervised and worked on the emotionally and physically difficult task of dismantling, packing, transporting and storing the many and various Königsberg artefacts, artworks and assorted relics that once adorned and constituted The Studio ~ Victor’s atmospheric art studio and celebrated reception room. Stas took detailed photographs and measurements of the room in the hope one day that it could be reconstructed as part of a permanent exhibition to Victor and his work. Sadly, Stas himself passed away in November 2020. We live in hope that someone will continue the work that his untimely demise left unfinished. This is Stas’ story.

Victor Ryabinin’s Headstone Königsberg Kaliningrad

Victor Ryabinin’s Headstone Königsberg
After quite a hiatus Victor’s grave was finally bestowed with a headstone befitting the man and the artist. It shows Victor sitting on a stool in his art studio. He is leaning nonchalantly in his chair, relaxed, unassuming, in tune with himself, his life and the world around him. His right arm is resting on one of his art-historian creations, his left arm cradling the base. The artwork is an assemblage, a composition of assorted Königsberg relics assembled icon-like within a frame …

A book about Victor Ryabinin

On the 75th anniversary of Victor Ryabinin’s birth

Published: 17 December 2020 ~ A book about Victor Ryabinin

The following articles relating to Victor, his life and his art, also appear in this category:

In Memory of Victor Ryabinin
This article was published in memoriam on the first anniversary of Victor’s death. Victor died on 18 July 2019.

Life & Death in Mauthausen Concentration Camp

A Russian Survivor of Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Published: 22 November 2020 ~ Life & Death in Mauthausen Concentration Camp

This summer we had the pleasure of meeting a very special lady in Kaliningrad, Zoya Ostin, the widow of a former Russian soldier, Vsevolod Ostin, who, in his youth, was incarcerated in the notorious Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Upper Austria. The young Russian soldier survived his ordeal and later wrote a highly detailed account of life and death within the camp, how he beat the odds and lived to tell the tale. My wife, Olga, has been busy translating his book, Rise Above Your Pain, into English.

During the Second World War, Vsevolod Ostin, a young Soviet soldier, had the grave misfortune to be interned in the notorious Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Upper Austria.

Whilst most of us in the West are familiar with the names of Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen, the name Mauthausen may not be immediately recognisable, but Mauthausen was considered to be one of the Nazi’s most severe and brutal camps, so much so that it was known affectionately by the SS as the bone mill or bone grinder.

Life & Death in Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Mauthausen was the principal camp in an extensive complex of satellite camps operating throughout Austria and the southern regions of Germany. The inmates, mostly drawn from the Soviet and Polish intelligentsia, were used as slave labour for numerous German companies, both local and national, with the majority of prisoners working mainly in the nearby granite quarries, providing raw materials for the reconstruction of German towns and cities.

The regime in Mauthausen and the surrounding sub-camps was so relentlessly brutal that the average life expectancy was estimated to be 3 to 6 months at most. Vsevolod Ostin entered the camp in 1942 and miraculously managed to survive until 1945, when the camp was liberated by the United States Army.

Vsevolod Ostin wrote his account of life in Mauthausen in 1961 but not to the acclaim that he had hoped for. Publishing house after publishing house rejected the manuscript. Various reasons were given, but the main stumbling block seemed to be that the Soviet authorities considered it to be too international, too cosmopolitan, at a time when literary and historical accounts of the war had an urgent imperative to condemn Fascism as irredeemably evil.

Surviving Life & Death in Mauthausen

A man such as Ostin who had survived the horrors of Mauthausen was hardly likely to give up that easily, and he did not. But it would be 25 years from completion of the manuscript before he would see his work in print. Rise Above Your Pain was finally published in 1986, a year after perestroika.

By definition, Rise Above Your Pain is not an easy book to work on, neither is it bedtime reading! The subject matter is grim and grisly and in order to do it justice, to translate and edit it in the tone and spirit in which it was written, we have had to rise above our pain with each successive chapter.

This is because Ostin tells it as it was; he pulls no punches. He lays bare the worst excesses of human nature’s darker side, his book serving as a salutary reminder of how war unleashes the worst in us and how, in its consuming climate of hate, violence and death, the dregs of our societies, the malcontents, thugs and sadists, rise from the sediment into positions of power the consummate nature of which they could only dream of in times of peace and stability.

Nevertheless, between the cracks of inhumanity that the book so meticulously documents, reassuring glimpses of a human light shine through, and it is this as much as the depravity it delineates that makes Rise Above Your Pain a compelling lesson from history and a story that needs to be told.

Life & Death in Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Olga and I were approached to translate and edit Vsevolod Ostin’s book Rise Above Your Pain by Olga Tkachenko, Head of the Sobolev Children’s Library in Kaliningrad, on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, author and journalist Boris Nisnevich.

The translated and edited text is scheduled for completion in early 2021, with a view towards publishing an English language version later in that year.

Vsevolod Ostin, writes of Life & Death in Mauthausen

Vsevolod Ostin, Life & Death in Mauthausen

Vsevolod Ostin, recounts Life & Death in Mauthausen

Vsevolod Ostin, survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp, author of Rise Above Your Pain

An afternoon in the company of Zoya Ostin, widow of Vsevolod Ostin, survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp, author of Rise Above Your Pain. {Top middle picture, left to right: Olga Tkachenko, Head of the Sobolev Children’s Library, Kaliningrad; Zoya Ostin; and Olga Korosteleva-Hart.}

**Place laid at table for the deceased in keeping with Russian tradition, with glass of vodka and bread**

Victor Ryabinin’s Headstone Königsberg

Victor’s grave is adorned with a headstone befitting the artist and the man

Published: 14 August 2020

Yesterday (Thursday 13 August 2020) a friend emailed a photograph to us of Victor Ryabinin’s recently completed and erected headstone. I was expecting the headstone to incorporate a photographic likeness of Victor’s face, as most gravestones in Russia seem to display a portrait of the deceased, but the image on Victor’s tombstone is more than that and all the more poignant for it.

It shows Victor sitting on a stool in his art studio. He is leaning nonchalantly in his chair, relaxed, unassuming, in tune with himself, his life and the world around him. His right arm is resting on one of his art-historian creations, his left arm cradling the base. The artwork is an assemblage, a composition of assorted Königsberg relics assembled icon-like within a frame, a symbolic reincarnation of parts that in their new unity pay homage to the unique bi-cultural character by which Victor defined the seamlessness of the Königsberg-Kaliningrad time continuum.

The image depicts a man forever and inextricably connected with the subject of his life’s work ~ Königsberg. It captures the eternal spiritual symbiosis that exists between each. It also captures the essence of the man himself: his unaffected attitude towards life and people, his open good-natured manner and his kind, calm and collected philosophical disposition.

Victor Ryabinin’s Headstone Königsberg

Victor was a larger than life person. He had a magnetic personality, first appreciated and then adored, and the fact that he is no longer part of life as we understand it is hard to accept, but the ethos and quality of this monument are a fitting tribute to him, both to the art-historian and the man.

When I look on this image it does not make missing him any easier. It captures who he was so well that it is difficult to gaze upon without wanting the yesterday we all once shared.

Consolation is all elusive, except for what we find in destiny and I cannot help believing in that respect that our loss is Königsberg’s gain.

Rest in Peace Dear Friend