The “Genius Loci”: Grigory Potanin on Artist Grigory Gurkin’s Manor in Altai

The article studies the problem of a “genius loci”. The initial statement of the research is that the creative work of Grigory Gurkin, a famous artist, became the first individual declaration of the Russian (Gorny) Altai about itself in the cultural space of the Russian Empire. Unlike in other peripheries of the Empire, painting, not literature, performed the function of the region’s representation. Still, the image of the artist, who was a person from the indigenous community of the region, purposefully designed in the media space of Tomsk Province was a literary and regionalist construct created by Grigory Potanin. The construct embodied the idea of the high intellectual potential of the Siberian peripheral areas. The article aims to reveal the significance of Gurkin’s manor in the cultural life of Siberia in 1990-1917. The material for the study was correspondence between Potanin and Maria Vasilyeva, documents from Potanin’s archive in the Research Library of Tomsk State University, publications in the newspaper Sibirskaya Zhisn’, and archival materials from the Tomsk Regional Museum of Local Lore belonging to the period from 1901 to 1917. Using a cross-reading method, the author collected texts which describe or mention Gurkin’s manor located in a tiny picturesque Altai settlement, Anos, “the edge of the Great Edge” (A. Novosyolov). The author analyses and interprets these texts by methods of imagology studies, geopoetics, and ethnopoetics. The information from the texts proves the hypothesis that the figure of the Altai artist was a positive reply to the question “of the cultural abilities of indigenous tribes and their abilities to perceive the common human civilisation” (Yadrintsev) that the oblastniks (regionalsits) tried to answer. Potanin assessed Gurkin’s talent as a natural gift of the powerful nature of Altai. That is why he would add “Altaian” to the artist’s name, which served the purpose of drawing a link between the genius and the locus on the level of space and ethnicity. The artist’s manor with its elaborated topography was built as Altai in miniature. It became the first secular (in opposition to missionary) cultural centre of the Russian Altai that attracted the local population to the exploration of the region. It also was a summer residence for researchers from “Potanin’s Circle” and for artists, who would come to Anos from around the country. The study showed a specific feature in the reception and representation of Gurkin’s Anos in Potanin’s opinion pieces and egodocuments-through the system of images of The Harz Journey by Heinrich Heine. The author of the article concludes that the ascription of the role of Gottingen to Gurkin’s Anos became the oblastniks’ dream of forming research and art centres in Siberia come true.

Keywords

Authors

References