Hermitage of arts: life-creating of Georgy Grebenstchikoff

Different kinds of Georgy Grebenstchikoff’s creative activity are analyzed in the context of Russian modernism ideas and searching: searching for a new collective form of life, life-creating, interest to peasants’ sects, reunion of art and religion, arts synthesis, creating «personal» mythologies. Life-creating of the writer is seen through his self-presentation, on the material of texts by Grebenstchikoff. His main life-creating ideals are Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, the Bolsheviks, Altai Old Believers (as shown in the early works by Grebenstchikoff), St. Sergius of Radonezh, St. George. In the Tolstoy’s doctrine, Grebenstchikoff appreciated ideas of healthy physical work but did not like the views on the ritual side of Christianity. The Bolsheviks were the negative pattern, anti-ideal. Negative patterns appear in life-creating more rarely than positive ones. However, this type of behavior is common for the Russian emigrant who absolutely disagreed with the Soviets. In the USA, Grebenstchikoff organized the commune «Churaevka on the Pomperaug River» which he called «the hermitage of Russian cultural thought». This «hermitage» can be compared to the famous DISK (Dom Iskusstv ‘The House of Arts’) in Petrograd: Sergei Rakhmaninov, Mikhail Chekhov, Igor Sikorsky, Nikolai Roerich, Mikhail Fokin and many other famous Russian emigrants lived or rested there. «The Churaevs», the chapel in Churaevka on the Pomperaug River, built in honor of St. Sergius of Radonezh («the page of Russian epic written not with the words but with the granite»), and the text of «Radonega» make an interesting literary and architecture triptych, probably unique in its genre. The main author was Grebenstchikoff; the co-authors were Nikolai Roerich (the author of the architectural project of the chapel), famous sculptor S.T. Konenkov, artists who took part in its painting, poets who dedicated poems to it. The intermediary unit which Grebenstchikoff gave a new name Radonega can be considered in the context of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk .

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