«Split» identity: Russian emigrant artists B. Grigoriev, S. Sudeikin and J. Graham in the USA in the 1920-s - 1930-s

The article considers the process of identity transformation in Russian art abroad at the 20-30th of the twentieth century by the example of three prominent artists: Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev (1886-1939), Sergey Sudeikin (1882-1946) and Ivan Dombrovsky / John Graham (1881-1961). All the three of them had been ardently working in the 1920-1940s but each of them had chosen their own methods of identification. Grigoriev often came from France for a winter season but never wished to "be separate" with his Russian past and to move to the USA. Sudeikin had settled down in the USA since 1922 and he started to adapt himself to the foreign art system, keeping his own national cultural identity till his last days. And so John Gram had almost changed his identity, even disowned his personal name - Ivan Dombrovsky. Thus all of them had followed the very typical way for many Russian artists - from "conservation", some peculiar duplication of their own national identity with the specific Russian iconography (Grigoriev), through the step-by-step adaptation to the foreign artistic context, differentiation of "the own" and "the other" (Sudeikin), to the almost absolute assimilation but not the dissolution (Gram). The images of art support a comprehension that identity is flexible, that it has no ideal and inseparable nature, but there is continuous temporal process of subject designing through its identification with a mythic "deep-laid" pattern (the basis and the roots of the holistic national character that had been lost during the perpetual process of modernization unsteadiness) and with a simultaneous differentiation from the other societies. The experience of the Russian artistic emigration of the 20-30-th of the twentieth century gives a lot of issues for the scientific speculation. With the different individual methods Russian art abroad reveals that the deprivation of territorial integrity (as one of the most important basis of the national identity reservation) caused the other methods and forms of identity designing (especially the artistic methods). In the everyday tragedy of the emigrants' existence the national subject had to confirm its identity as originality (once with a motivation to improve it) by quoting the past experience. The original visual "narration" of the native history was essential as the narrative of the historical overcoming of space and time borders, outer and inner barriers by the communal subject during the process of creation the imaginary society (B. Anderson).

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