Biography of Yuri Avdeeva

Yuri Konstantinovich was born in Serpukhovsky district, with his parents moved to live in Serpukhov, studied painting in an art studio under the leadership of A. Buzovkin, then at the Art School in Orel and a volunteer, as part of the 3rd Moscow division of the people's militia, went to the front. He survived a lot of bitter and terrible: he participated in the battle for Moscow, liberated the Novgorod and Leningrad region, the Baltic states.

Avdeev was a signalman, participated in battles, awarded the soldier's medal "For Courage". His military fate changed at the end of the year. The political department of the division noticed portraits that he painted on postcards for fellow soldiers. Photos in the trenches were rare, and everyone wanted to send home not only warm words, but his own gaze, a smile.

In the trenches, dugouts, just in the forest, he drew more than three hundred portraits of our fighters. After the war, the artist was sure that only a few portraits were preserved. Later, Moscow historian Ivan Savchenko found in the archive of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences a battered folder with 60 portraits of Avdeev’s work several works are presented at the exhibition.

After the third wound, Avdeev was blinded: he spent six years in hospitals. When a slight improvement came, he returned to Serpukhov. For almost a year and a half he worked in the Serpukhov historical and art museum. When he was offered to go to work in Melikhovo, he agreed immediately. Here he took up the restoration of the Chekhov estate. But Avdeev could not live without art.

He managed to return to painting. Of course, work on portraits was now impossible for him. But he saw color and light. They saturated his paintings, many times returning with easel to the favorite bright corners of the Melikhovsky garden. Sergei Apryshko, the last student of Avdeev, and now the famous Moscow designer, spoke of the special photosensitivity of the eyes of an almost blind man.

He emphasized that Avdeev perfectly felt color and knew how to convey his feelings to the viewer. In August, he went to the front as a volunteer; ended up in the ranks of the 3rd Moscow Communist Division. He was a scout, a signalman, a mortar, an artist in a division newspaper. He painted portraits of distinguished soldiers and officers. From the front, Yu. Avdeev returned in the fall of the year with three severe wounds, the result of which was almost complete blindness: only lateral vision was partially restored.

In the year, he was appointed to lead the artel for the disabled who made buttons. However, already at the end of the year he began to work in the Serpukhov Museum of History and Local Lore. In the year, he reached Melikhovo on foot, where the now famous state-reserve A., Yu. Avdeev, was created by the current state museum, was created almost from scratch.

Restored all the buildings that were during the life of Chekhov. He collected 17 thousand exhibits - things, documents, manuscripts, photographs, books of the writer, his environment, his time. He wrote 12 books about Melikhov and other Chekhov places in the suburbs. Being almost blind, he had a phenomenal memory. He remembered Chekhov’s stories by heart, 12 volumes of his letters.

He worked until his death in the year. He was buried at the left chapel of the Church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Melikhovo. Wife: Lyubov Yakovlevna Lazarenko. Moscow magazine. The history of the Russian state. The first breath of the war felt on himself when the enemy came close to Moscow. Their hastily the formed battery stood near the river station. From morning to the Germans, refugees stretched from Kalinin and Klin from the morning to evening.

Once it was possible to get a dismissal and visit an art exhibition on the Kuznetsk bridge: “Little idyllic landscapes with blue skies, quiet rivers and fields, filled with warm shining sunlight hung on the walls. No war looked into these places. I recalled that in June-July I myself wrote the same thing, without thinking that the earth was on somewhere, cities are collapsing, people die.

This cannot be written if you yourself have not survived, if life is perceived smoothly, calmly, without a nerve. However, I did not have to use the acquired then. The division was reorganized into personnel and transferred to the North-Western Front. In that harsh winter of the year, according to Yuri Konstantinovich, he did not hope to stay alive among the fiery circle surrounding him.

Seeing after the first battle on the outskirts of the village of killed soldiers in brand new overcoats and with duffel bags behind him, the artist decided to part with the luggage he burdened him, including with an album and paints, "so as not to drag anything superfluous to the next world." Then Avdeev will regret it more than once - after all, in the war, he remained faithful to his vocation.

There were no colors even in the political department, where Yuri Konstantinovich was seconded to the front line after a year and a half. I had to limit myself to sketches. But you won’t write a sketch without brushes and colors. Therefore, Avdeev in every letter asked his mother to transport at least something from his reserves to the front. In the end, she was able to send her son a sketchin with paints.

In moments of calm Avdeev, right in the trenches or dugouts, painted portraits of comrades in arms.If at his disposal, paints were at his disposal, then on pieces of cardboard he captured the ash after the battle, paintings of soldier’s life, creating a “picturesque annals of front -line campaigns”. After the battle, everyone wanted to attach their image to the news and their image.

The photographer, one for a whole division, could not provide all such requests. And Avdeevsky drawings were sent to the rear - on mail cards, on scraps of paper ... Soon Avdeev’s talent was noticed. The authorities decided that posing should be an incentive to distinguished in battle. Assigned by the division artist, Yuri Konstantinovich found portrait on the front line on the line of fire.

In dugouts, in the trenches with quick strokes, he threw the faces of people who had just looked into the eyes of the death of people. According to his memoirs, the political department put this work “on the stream”. Sometimes I had to draw several portraits per day. They were collected in the "Field Gallery of Heroes" and used in propaganda work, arranging exhibitions.

It happened that the work ended after the death of the portrait, and the drawing, thus, became an artistic document, the memory of the feat. In military conditions, it was difficult to preserve the “picturesque annals of front -line campaigns”, so Avdeev tried to transport his sketches and sketches to the rear, believing that “the collected material is enough for life for future paintings about the most memorable years of Russia.” One batch took away from the advanced head of the political department; After the war, part of these works was discovered in museums.

In the year, the front -line film operator Semyon Galadzh, who had traveled to Moscow, took with him to fifty sketches, which later compiled the backbone of the exhibition, which was demonstrated in Moscow, Novgorod, Old Russ, Orle, Serpukhov, Podolsk, Chekhov. There were losses. Once, a car, transporting Avdeev’s paintings to an exhibition of artists of the North-Western Front, was destroyed by shelling.

Many paintings were simply lost on the roads of war. And only a few fell into the state storage facilities of the State Historical Museum, the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, the Novgorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve. To the above, a lot of campaign posters and sketches should be added, which were made in hot pursuit of events and put in the next number of the front newspaper.

When there was no opportunity to take up the brushes or pencil, what she saw tenaciously captured the memory. Yuri Konstantinovich has repeatedly turned to his front -line memories in the sunset of life. His verbal descriptions were also pictures. Here in the snow are the bodies of the dead and for some reason the Donaga of the stripped Germans, and behind them-the burning houses of the Great village ...

Here is a lonely driven tank with a gun barrel, which was stolen on the ground, around-around the shells, a dead forest ... Here are among hundreds of killed civilians-the body of a deceased girl with a frozen strict face ... in their own admission of the artist, the war turned all over him. World perception. The soul was ill for the sole -mired earth, poured with blood.

The abundance of the corpses that met dulling a natural sense of self -preservation, encouraged extremely risky acts. Once he ran skiing around the mined field to directly stretch the communication line. The Red Army soldier, who had followed, was blown up and got into the medical battalion. For indifference to danger, friends even called Avdeev "Fakir." Judging by the letters, he was then tormented by deep semantic issues.

The scale of the existential shifts seemed to be unquenchable momentary creative comprehension. Avdeev considered it precisely and truthfully to reflect them until the experienced one has cooled. And it is no accident that he will really return to the topic of war only decades later. In the meantime, not for years the mature, the son shares his insights with his mother: “The war took a lot from me, but gave a lot.

She cleared her soul from any scale, made the main thing in life. She enriched me as an artist. And if I, like those, others, was outside of this, arranged my personal well -being, then I would be a more unhappy person. It is not the goal of my life ”; "To see the image, you need a distance"; “How many impressions do you get on the roads, especially now, on the roads of war!

One of my albums - a diary in the drawings - I called that. " Yuri Avdeev reflects on what the meeting of the survivors will turn out to be with post -war reality.