Tag Archives: In Memory of Victor Ryabinin

Hippy Party on the Baltic Coast

A funky, flower-power, fabulous day

Published: 13 September 2021 ~ Hippy Party on the Baltic Coast

It didn’t go exactly according to plan, but then what does? I am talking about our hippy party, which was scheduled to take place on the 11^th September 2021. The main stumbling block was the weather. We had decided to hold the event on the 11^th because two weeks before the day assorted internet weather services were predicting uninterrupted sun, but as the days fell away from the calendar, so the forecast changed erratically.

One consultation revealed that it would be overcast, another that we were in for intermittent rain, another that … In desperation, I even turned to the BBC weather site, knowing only too well that their forecasts, like everything else that they do, has a sharp liberal left slant to it, so the probability of getting the truth, the half-truth or anything but the truth was rather hit and miss, and yes, their forecast was also chopping and changing, like the way they had reported Brexit and the EU referendum.

It was hardly surprising, therefore, that as the day drew near, one by one, people cried away; and on the evening before the day that the party was to take place, we cancelled it.

Between times, we had succeeded in completing the renovation of Captain Codpiece, the deteriorating statue in our garden. Our friend and artist Vladimir Chilikin, with the help of a beer or two, had transformed Codpiece from the worn concrete man that he had become over the past 40 years into a strapping bronzed figure, in which many lost details could now be clearly seen.

Olga Hart with Russian fisherman statue — Olga Hart with renovated fisherman statue

We, my wife and I, had been admiring Chilikin’s work from the pavement at the end of the garden when who should materialise but our friendly stout babushka.

“Hello,” we regaled her, cheerily.

“Why have you spoilt him?” she asked.

I knew she could not have been referring to me, so she must have meant the statue. Before we had chance to reply, she had exclaimed “He’s black!”

I heard someone saying, but I know not from whence the voice came, that it would not surprise me if it was black. Being British, I am only too aware that white statues are an endangered species, at least in the UK, and that, unless they are all painted black, it won’t be long before they will all have been run off with and thrown over some wall or other into a watery mire. But I ignored this voice and simply retorted, “No, in fact, he is bronze.”

“Well,” replied the stout babushka in a rare moment of concession, “I wouldn’t know because I am peearnee (drunk).”

I think in all fairness we can say ‘tipsy’, because when Olga collected some litter from the side of the road and placed it in our rubbish bag, babushka was quick to comment: “Huh! Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time!”

The statue, which is bronzed not black, was completed that afternoon. We had brought the marble glazed plaque to Victor Ryabinin with us, and before we left at the end of the day, we dragged the boat into place and finished the ensemble.

Hippy Party on the Baltic Coast

We came back on the 11^th September as, on the morning of that day, we discovered that the weather forecast had changed again. Now we were informed that it would rain but not until 8pm, and until that time it would be bright and sunny, with temperatures reaching 26 degrees centigrade.

It was too late to rally the fringe, but the old faithful were ready to go and at a moment’s notice, so our hippy party went ahead, albeit reduced in numbers.

An executive decision was reached that it did not seem proper to combine the opening of Victor’s memorial with everyone dressed in flower power, even though Victor’s Boat with Flowers put flowers centre stage. But we abided by the decision and reserved the ceremony for a later date

The renovated statue, rocks adorning the plinth and Victor’s Boat with Flowers joined forces with our rather silly attire, caricature wigs, bright-coloured cushions and mats and, with the help of Arthur’s classic Volga and the dulcet tones of the Beatles wafting from our music system, attracted many a stare and comment from passing villagers.

The stout babushka was not in evidence today, which was a shame. I am sure that she would have had a thing or two to say had she witnessed our shenanigans. But at some point in the early evening a different distraction occurred. Someone had sent a drone buzzing over the garden and consigned us all and our antics to film.

I am sure that a hippy party, themed or not, would not have gone down well had this been the former USSR, even though, or especially since, drinking cognac from cognac glasses gave our particular brand of hippyness a rather bourgeois air.

Peace man! (no sexism intended, of course)

Hippy Party on the Baltic Coast — Mick Hart with Artour, who looks like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Benny Hill

Mick Hart with Egis Kaliningrad — Mick Hart with Egis looking as cool as cucumbers on a hot day

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.

Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg

Happy Birthday Victor!

Published: 17 December 2020 ~ Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg

**Young artists! Victor Ryabinin & Marina Simkina** (From the book **Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg** (Marina Simkina)

This 198-page commemorative anthology, which has been produced to the highest standards in full colour and landscape format, provides a valuable and affectionate insight into who Victor Ryabinin was and his unique contribution to our understanding of Königsberg-Kaliningrad’s remarkable legacy as a place of dramatic change, an incomparable centre of culture and a magnetic hub for creative talent.

A Victor Ryabinin Assemblage — A Victor Ryabinin ‘Assemblage’ *(From the book* **Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg**)

The book contains numerous photographs capturing Victor both in creative mode and at leisure. It also incorporates examples of some of his most memorable works, presenting his sketches, drawings and paintings and includes his idiosyncratic and evocative Königsberg ‘assemblages’ ~ large frames in which random fragments of Königsberg are artistically assembled to form latter-day icons, a symbolic act which enabled Victor to explore his philosophy of universal interconnectivity, in this instance the destiny of two cultures symbiotically fused by time, place and fate.

The book also contains various extracts from Victor’s phenomenal pictorial diaries, which for me are the most fascinating and thought-provoking accomplishments of his career.

Victor Ryabinin's sketch books/diaries — Victor Ryabinin’s pictorial diary (From the book **Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg**)

Victor was hardly ever without his sketch book, his ubiquitous fold-over drawing pad, in which he would faithfully and meticulously record everything that interested him. Spanning a period of 50 years, the page-a-day inclusions range from simple sketches and notes, verse and philosophic comments, often entered in a beautifully flowing calligraphic hand, typically sharing space on the same page with a bottle label, sweet wrapper or any other souvenir arbitrarily collected from a restaurant, bar or anywhere else he had frequented on a particular day, to highly intricate and detailed drawings, mostly symbolic in nature.

Victor Ryabinin Königsberg diaries — *Victor Ryabinin’s pictorial diary (From the book Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg*)

Each page, with its distinctively different collage, told him where he had been and what he had seen that day. It also captures his mood and artistic frame of mind at the moment of representation. Whilst functioning as a journal and being works of art in themselves, each sketch book contains pages, and within those pages numerous stimuli, of inspirational material that Victor could use at a later date for a broader and larger canvas.

Victor Ryabinin the Artist's pictorial diaries — Victor Ryabinin’s pictorial diary (From the book **Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg**)

The range and scope of artistic expression within these journals alone demonstrate Victor’s acute observation of the world in which he lived whilst revealing glimpses into his inner world, the one shaped by symbolism, in which he worked and flourished.

Book illustrations by Victor Ryabinin

Whenever I mention Victor Ryabinin, I am met with the same reply, “Ahh, you mean Victor Ryabinin the artist!” But I tend to think of him as Victor Ryabinin the social historian, the art-historian, not somebody who studied the history of art but who made the unique history of the ruined city in which he was born and lived his lifelong study, and who made sense of it and articulated his thoughts and feelings about it using art and the symbolist genre as his medium for expression.

Victor Ryabinin was truly a one-off, both in terms of his defined artistic-historical focus and in being one of the most agreeable, charmingly charismatic and humanistic of people that you could ever wish to meet.

(From the book **Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg** (Sergey Federov)

Within the covers of this superb publication, thanks to Boris Nisnevich and Marina Simkina, those who knew Victor, loved him, valued his work and everything that he stood for, pay tribute to the artist and the man, the likes of which in all probability we will never meet again.

Victor Ryabinin is a synonym for Königsberg. And this is the book by which he will be remembered.

(From the book **Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg**)

Photographs & inspiration from Victor Ryabinin the Artist Born in Königsberg, compiled, edited and published by Marina Simkina and Boris Nisnevich (2020)

In Memory of Victor Ryabinin

The Spirit of Königsberg

Published: 18 July 2020 on the first anniversary of Victor Ryabinin’s death

Victor Ryabinin died on 18 July 2019

For those who knew him well, it has been a difficult 12 months. The first 12 months after someone dear passes away always is. There are so many occasions that memory will not let go of, everything becomes a commemorative anniversary of the last time, and it is virtually impossible not to fall victim to the ‘this time last year’ syndrome.

As the anniversary of Victor’s death closed in, it has also been impossible not to fall under the insidious spell of that morbid countdown: viz, this time last year Victor had only four weeks left to live … It is a macabre thought is it not, that last 60 seconds of life ticking inexorably away and then nothing? Not just the physical man himself gone but, as Leonard Cohen so eloquently puts it, “that tangle of matter and ghost”. A lifetime lost in a second. A unique loss of personality, thoughts, talent, experience, good nature, kindness, humanity. It is, indeed, a morbid thought, but as a friend of mine pragmatically said about death, “Well, you can’t stop it, can you?”

There is nothing much longer than eternity, but notwithstanding in the past 12 months those of us who were fortunate enough to be counted among Victor’s friends and those whom he taught and mentored have been just as busy preserving his memory as we have been cherishing it and missing him.

Book celebrating Victor Ryabinin’s work

As well as my blog, which is dedicated to Victor Ryabinin, to his artistic talent, to the magic that he found in and brought to Königsberg-Kaliningrad and to the man himself, one of Victor’s closest friends, Marina Simkina, herself an artist, has been working with writer and journalist Boris Nisnevich to bring to fruition a book about the life and work of this remarkable man: a thematically related text with essays, personal recollections, interviews, letters and poems which taken together speak of the rich legacy that Victor has bequeathed in his paintings, assemblages, collages and diaries and, for those of us who knew him personally, in the light that his sincerity, goodwill, open nature and profound interest in everything he heard or saw brought into our lives.

On the first anniversary of Victor’s death, I have added another article to the pages of my blog contributed by our friend Stanislov, whom Victor introduced us to shortly before he passed away

Catalogue of Victor Ryabinin’s work

Stas, as we know him, is actively involved in a project which will hopefully see the canon of Victor Ryabinin’s artistic work and his collection of Königsberg ‘relics’ housed and displayed in a permanent exhibition here in Kaliningrad. He also hopes to catalogue Victor’s work and produce a definitive version in print of the extraordinary talent of this man whose self-genre as Königsberg’s art-historian captured, celebrated and ultimately cast him as the spirit of the ruined city he had spent his life divining ~ the very Spirit of Königsberg.

Victor Ryabinin’s love affair with the interconnectivity of Königsberg’s past and Kaliningrad’s present, the surface paradox of two cultures hammered together in war but mysteriously wed by time and destiny, was as devotional as it was unconditional. For him, both transition and movement were seamless; it was the place itself that ‘drew people in’ as it had drawn him in.

Victor’s childhood impressions and art-historian perspective surpassed that of mere academia ~ he lived and breathed Königsberg. It was not a lifestyle choice; it was made for him; it was predestined. The symbiotic relationship that he formed with this special, this unique place, as he called the Königsberg.-Kaliningrad continuum, continually reminded him that his soul existed in two cultures, both Russian and German, and as much as he enjoyed anywhere else he intuitively knew he belonged nowhere else. He could not precisely say why, ‘I cannot explain this magic’, but as a child of Königsberg’s ruins he instinctively knew “this is my city”.

His city, represented symbolically through the artistic fusion of his childhood memories, the interaction between Gothic ruins and Hoffman’s Gothic fantasy, transcended time and place, engendering philosophical interpretations on a universal scale. His enduring belief in the insolubility of the past’s effect on the present and of existence viewed as a fantastic web of interconnectivity may suggest that whilst he had a definite sense of place and his place in it, he was also a child of the universe, but if so he was a prodigy.

In memory of Victor Ryabinin

The oft-cited opinion of those who were close to him, that he exhibited an almost childlike fascination in everything new that he saw or heard, was not a slight on his character but a character trait to be envious of. For the majority of people, interest, as with every other human faculty, slips further and further away from us the older we become, but not so with Victor, who remained alert, fascinated, enthralled to the last. Even in the latter days of his life, when in hindsight, by recourse to photographs of that time, he appeared discernibly older and more frail, he never lost his curiosity, he never grew old as others grow old, giving up his zest for life only when life itself decided that the time had come for him to paint his last picture, make his last entry in his pictorial diary and drink his last cognac with friends.

In the shadow of death and even more desperately in its gloomy, memory-filled aftermath, we rake among the embers not of the life that has passed, the life that has been extinguished, but in what remains of our left-behind lives, in hope of consolation.

But my consolation in Victor’s death lies in the certain knowledge that whilst we grieve for ourselves, we have no real need to grieve for him, for he has returned to the self-same spot where it all began. He is a child again in the ruins of Königsberg. His spirit has gone home. He is now a part of that history which so fascinated and clung to him from the moment of his birth. It is my belief that it never let go; he was just given to us on loan; and he drew us into Königsberg as he himself had been drawn in.

If you do not believe me just listen to and read the testimonials of those who knew him and what they have to say ~ his students, friends and colleagues. Through their words and their impressions, they seek to understand the mystical aura with which Victor was endowed. We may never comprehend it entirely, but we share one thing in common which is a sense of pride and privilege that in this ephemeral but interconnected world it was fortunately predetermined that our paths should cross with his.

We shall miss him always, forget him never.