The surname Tutunjan seemed to me, a Vologda boy, especially northern, and Janna - the name of some quiet people lurking along the shores of bottomless forest lakes. I remember how surprised I was when I learned that the name and surname of the artist were originally Armenian.

favorite window

And shines in bad weather.

Miraculous. It -

Above all in the world.

Lucky Window.

He was stabbed.

Don't think that you

We have forgotten the way.

Believe - and fly

To the treasured road!

And I will be again

At the sweet threshold...

Gianna Tutunjan

I remember this window...

It was summer at its zenith, thunderclouds were thickly blue over the forest, and our jeep either dived into ravines, then strainedly creaked uphill, then flew down the mountain, raising clouds of dust. So twenty years ago I flew at full speed, scaring chickens, into the village of Sergievskaya, to visit the artist Janna Tutundzhan.

I grew up in Vologda and went to exhibitions Tutunjan in the art gallery with my grandfather. Grandfather with tenderness found his village childhood in her paintings, and I fell in love with the cheerful pure colors of Tutunjan, its open spaces, snow and sky - everything is sonorous, like her name - Gianna.

She moved to Vologda from Moscow in 1961 - following her artist husband Nikolai Baskakov.

...From two roots my foundation:

Raised by grandmother Snezhkov,

And the one by whom my father was given,

Warmer and hotter than all southerners ...

Frost and the Sun, as two forces -

Armenia and you, Russia.

And I was born on the Arbat,

And Sivtsev Vrazhek is the cradle...

Soon, Nikolai and Gianna bought a house on the outskirts of the village of Sergievskaya, where they sailed along the Sukhona on ... a makeshift raft.

About places like Sergievskaya, we are used to talking about "deaf village", without noticing that the most remote villages in our cities are more remote. And the larger the city, the more silent it is, the more unresponsive to human grief.

How they met Gianna in the village, recalls Dekabrina Shalashova (in a letter to the Vologda journalist N. Veselova): “There was a rumor in the village - the artist is coming to us, she will live in the summer, draw our people, at home. During the big break, the whole school ran to look at her , as a curiosity. There were few strangers in the village then, not only there were no televisions, you can’t hear the radio in every hut. Somehow a photographer came to our school, so we almost trampled him! And here is an artist, and even with a non-Russian surname - how not to look! ..

And when Tutunzhan began to make the first sketches for the painting "Young" from me, I told her: "All the artists draw beautiful people, but I seem to be ugly, why did you choose me?" - "You still don't know how beautiful you are!" She smiled and replied...

And for half a century now, the southern name of Janna (and many call her Zhdanochka) in Sergievskaya is as familiar to hearing as the local names: Shevdenitsy, Khavdenitsy, Tyureber, Madovitsy ...

“My favorite state: in winter to live alone on the edge of the village,” says Zhanna Tadzhatovna. “During the day I write snow and people. And in the evening, when I heat my stove, I will go along the upper or lower tenement. And without knocking I will open any door. warmth... And I will draw and listen how to drink, this life! And it will pass through me... And after having a meal, I will go to my place, tipsy with happiness, communicating with something important, genuine, expressed in living words ..."

So in the verses of Gianna all the words are alive, dear.

Tit is blue.

Tit - canopy.

Tomorrow will be

Clear day.

Tomorrow will be Blue March.

And again the sun

In excitement!

And will be again

Melting snow.

Will come again

Warmth for everyone.

Again dripping drops

April will follow.

And the streams will run again.

They will float away, as if no one's,

All my sorrows and troubles.

And I will live to win...

Exhibition of works folk artist Russian Gianna Tutunjan opened in Moscow in art gallery Central Museum Great Patriotic War on Poklonnaya Hill.

The exhibition will run until the end of April.

Tutunjan's work is admired by fans not only in Russia, but also abroad.

Janna Tadzhatovna Tutundzhan - People's Artist of Russia, Corresponding Member Russian Academy Arts - is one of the most talented Russian artists who lived and worked in the Vologda region.

The artist was born in Moscow on September 22, 1931. On the maternal side, she comes from a family of hereditary Moscow nobles. On the paternal side, she has Armenian roots, but in Armenia itself, as Gianna herself noted in an interview, she was only once, in 1955.

Her childhood passed in a difficult time for the country, when the whole world was fighting fascism. The girl entered one of the secondary art schools in Moscow in 1944. For a long time the school was opposite Tretyakov Gallery, which could well contribute to the development creativity Gianna. After leaving school, the young artist entered the Moscow State art institute named after V.I. Surikov.

Tutunzhan studied at the workshop of M. M. Cheremnykh and N. A. Ponomarev, and her theme thesis became a monumental image of the Motherland in the technique of Florentine mosaics. In 1959, she graduated from high school, married painter Nikolai Vladimirovich Baskakov, and went with him to Vologda, which she later began to consider her small homeland.

In one of her interviews, Gianna talked about meeting her future spouse: “My husband is a Vologda citizen. We studied together in Moscow art school, in one class, at the Surikov Institute. True, it was at different times. It was from him that I heard interesting stories about Vologda. He was the first one who introduced me and led me through this land. I am grateful to him for everything, especially for teaching me to always do what my soul lies in."

On one of their trips around the region, this creative married couple found a secluded place on the banks of the Sukhona in the village of Sergievskaya, lost in the forests of the Tarnogsky district. It was this place that gave impetus to the development of the work of this wonderful artist.

She worked hard, painted pictures, communicated with people, enjoyed the landscapes of the Vologda hinterland. Gradually, her first sketches began to appear, filled with wise reflections, philosophical thoughts, and great love for the Motherland.

Gianna Tutundzhan is one of the few Russian artists who depicted the fate of the Russian peasantry so capaciously and deeply. She can rightfully be called a muralist. It combined human heartfelt sensitivity with boundless talent.

Already in 1969, her first personal exhibition of painting and graphics was held in the regional capital. Her work became a bold discovery in the field artistic style. Then she made a huge impression on lovers of pictorial art.

In her work, Gianna did not depict famous people, her paintings are not filled with pathos. On the contrary, she showed the life of an ordinary peasant, common man through life, but complex in the soul, with its inner experiences and joys. Tutunjan showed life as it really is, without embellishment. The central painting of this period of the artist's work is Forget-Me-Nots.

At this time, a number of large-format works were performed using felt-tip pens and ink. The titles of these paintings are very bright and concise: “My own mistress”, “Victory Day”, “About bread, about salt”, “Eternal chime”, “Son of a son”, “Eternal chime” and others.

The popularity of Tutunjan increased every day. Her name was already known not only in Vologda, but also beyond its borders. Since 1981, her personal exhibitions were held every ten years, which gathered a huge number of fans of the artist's work.

Her works are made in such a way that the viewer, looking at the picture, thinks about eternal questions that have troubled mankind for thousands of years. Very often in her works, Janna used symbolic images that reflected the problems of village life and modern society: "Parting", "Bird Market", "Root of the Family", "The Last Horse".

As Gianna herself noted, the main goal of her paintings is to represent the folk spirit of the Russian people. Therefore, the Vologda poets and writers-"villagers" highly appreciated the work of the artist, saw in her soul mate.

Tutunjan loved to paint close-up portraits: female faces wrinkled, children doing household chores, men working in the fields or simply playing musical instruments.

For the semantic enrichment of her works, Janna introduced text additions. This became a kind of highlight of the artist. She skillfully used the text as an element of the image. Her famous dialogues “In truth, in conscience” appeared, which still amaze viewers with their beauty. village life, the brightness of folklore.

Very often, Gianna was asked what is closer to her in creativity, painting or graphics, to which Tutunjan answered: “Graphics are my roots, painting is the crown.” In her paintings, the artist used soft, warm colors, but sometimes they had defiant bright colors. For example, in one case, the red light reminded of the light of the native hearth, and in the other, the bright flame of a fire that destroyed everything around. But at the same time, in her paintings, a connection with nature runs like a red thread.

As many critics point out, Gianna wrote for modern people O modern life. Almost every painting by the artist, in terms of depth of conception and laconism of expressive form, belongs to the social genre, where a private motif turns into a generalized image-symbol: “Forget-me-nots”, “Burn brightly”, “Fire”, “Free will - will” and “Bereginya”. These studies belong to the same theme, although they were created at different time intervals, divided by decades. We can say that the artist needed to continue the dialogue with the viewer on a particular topic that excites both herself and humanity as a whole.

Without a doubt, the most burning issues were presented in the cycle of "village" works of Tutunjan. Her heroes survived wars and revolutions, but at the same time they did not lose the most important thing - faith and hope for the best. It is they, peasant women with their hands folded on their knees, surrounded by old and new family photographs, who are the root of the human race, its hope and support. After all, it is no coincidence that the symbol of the revival of the Russian village, and hence the native land, in the paintings of Tutunjan is a village woman surrounded by children and not afraid to take on the role of a talisman for them.

Gianna was worried about the fate of the peasantry, she saw how entire villages were ruined when their inhabitants left for the cities to work. Therefore, like village writers, in her works she turned to traditional values ​​in the depiction of modern village life.

In her paintings, Tutunjan used bright and expressive artistic means, which even now involuntarily send our memory to Russian icon painting. Many researchers called some of her monumental works "fresco", and Tutunjan herself used the parable in them as the main plot outline. Her village heroes can often be compared to medieval saints and martyrs. However, unlike the parable legendary heroes, Janna portrayed people who really live on earth. Even with the titles of her paintings, she tried to awaken our national memory: “Carrying His Cross”, “Mother Queen of Heaven”, “Trinity”, “The All-Seeing Eye” and other works.

In the paintings made in the portrait genre, she preached and affirmed the ideal of spiritual beauty and purity, spiritual wealth. That is why her portrait images are romantic and devoid of everyday life, and the soft color and pictorial details help to reveal what the artist considered the most important - devotion and passion for what she loves.

Tutunjan believed that "the world was created beautiful and formidable", "and life weaves its own canvas and suffering and joy ...". This is how the artist poetically expressed her understanding of the world. She sought to comprehend all the patterns of this life: beauty and ugliness, humanity and cruelty, its infinity and limitations. Being a deeply truthful artist and a sincere person, Gianna has always shared the concepts of "Good" and "Evil" both in life and in her work. For her, there was never a half-truth.

Tutunjan worked on her works until the end of her days. So her famous cycle “Conversations in Truth, in Conscience” ran like a red thread through her whole life. It is he who most accurately shows the features of the artist’s style: in addition to the portraits that Gianna painted from nature, a text element was introduced in the paintings with notes of what the people depicted on the canvases told her. The artist herself said about this cycle as follows: “So I want the viewer, who believes in Man, looking at people who, according to my concepts, represent the basis of the national spirit, would also hear what these people think about our life ".

In the 1980s and 1990s, large-scale parable paintings appeared in Tutunjan's art. In them, the artist sought to respond to the most complex moral and ethical and rather complex historical and cultural phenomena that arose in that rapidly changing time: “Black Raven”, “Fire”, “Freedom - Will”. Very often in art gallery exhibitions and presentations of these paintings were held in the regional capital, which became important social events of those perestroika years.

In 1972, Janna Tutundzhan was awarded the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR for her monumental works that amazed art connoisseurs. And more than thirty years later, in February 2004, the artist was awarded the honorary title of People's Artist of Russia, although she had long had this status with the faithful admirers of her work.

Many critics noted that the peculiarity of her work lies in the fact that “Gianna has never been an outside observer, because everything in her art screams, groans, confesses, even the earth itself talks about itself. In addition, these full of dignity icon-painting old women, dear peasant children, tired, shabby peasants, are gaining a voice. She is their representative, their voice, it is them, and not her "self-expression". But at the same time, the work of the artist - sharp, tough, demanding, sometimes embarrassing with its ascetic simplicity, hot, passionate, modest to the point of selflessness, devoid of any egoism - is herself.

Her art is her destiny, the destiny of a girl from the Arbat, with the hot Armenian blood of her ancestors on her father’s side and the intellectual aristocracy of Muscovites on her mother’s side.”

Janna Tadzhatovna Tutunzhan died on February 23, 2011 in Vologda, but she will always live in her paintings, instructing the audience on the path of kindness, selflessness, true beauty.

After all, it is no coincidence that the exhibitions of Zhanna Tadzhatovna, as in her lifetime, gather the largest audience. “I got acquainted with the work of Tutunjan from a friend when he wrote a work about her. I looked at her paintings and they fascinated me. Since I really like the Russian village, her work turned out to be very close to me. Her works are small children or old men and old women,” Alexei Nechaev, an admirer of the artist’s work, shared his thoughts with us.

The phenomenon of the popularity of this artist is not only in the plot basis of her paintings, close and understandable to people living both in the provinces and in the capital, but also in the aesthetics of their plastic language, close to the ethical and aesthetic traditions of Russian folk culture.

Angelina Vishnevskaya

Janna Tutundzhan was born in Moscow on September 22, 1931. She graduated from a secondary art school, and then from the Moscow Art Institute named after V. I. Surikov (1959). She studied at the workshop of M. M. Cheremnykh and N. A. Ponomarev, choosing for her thesis the monumental image of the Motherland in the Florentine mosaic technique.

After graduating from the institute in the same 1959, she left for her husband's homeland, Nikolai Vladimirovich Baskakov, and never later regretted it. On one of their trips around the region, they looked after themselves a village house on the banks of the Sukhona, and since then the village of Sergievskaya, lost in the forests of the Tarnogsky district, has become a source of themes and images of Tutunjan's graphic and pictorial creativity. After all, it was here, on the Vologda land, that she found her heroes, determined for herself main goal creativity - to tell the world about simple and beautiful people who preserve in their souls and hearts the best and brightest qualities of the national character. She met such people in the Vologda outback, these people surrounded her in Sergievskaya.

Gradually, travel drawings and sketches were overgrown with the flesh of reflections, turning into generalized, philosophically wise paintings and portraits. Perhaps, none of the Vologda artists depicted the fate of the Russian Vologda peasantry so capaciously and deeply as Tutunjan did. Her gift as a monumental artist and human heart sensitivity combined to tell the world about the spiritual beauty, wisdom and stamina of the national character through the images of village women, girls, old women.

This topic was devoted to her "Sergius Sheets" - frank and intimate drawings, with which Tutunzhan excitedly entered the Vologda art. “About bread, about salt”, “My own mistress” - her heroines graphic works akin literary images Vasily Belov, Alexander Romanov, Olga Fokina, in whose work the rural theme found its special expression. And surprisingly, the Vologda writers and poets - "villagers" accepted and understood her, a Muscovite with an Armenian surname, recognizing her as a kindred spirit. The main expressive advantage of Tutunjan's graphics was a laconic realistic drawing. Close-ups of women's faces, furrowed with wrinkles, looked into the viewer's soul with their intelligent, understanding eyes, as if they were looking for support in them, but in fact they were simply talking about their fate. Gradually to expand storyline drawings, their semantic enrichment, Zhanna Tadzhatovna deliberately began to introduce text additions into them. As a creative person, who also has literary abilities, she used the "word" not only as an element of the text, but also as a pictorial element. This is how her famous dialogues “In Truth, In Conscience” appeared, striking us with the liveliness of everyday sketches and the bright folklore expressiveness of their texts. Frightened by their frank veracity and the double power of influence - visual and literary, art officials at one of the exhibitions of Vologda graphics in Leningrad in the early 1980s. urged to remove them from the exhibition.

When an artist is asked what is closer to her as a creator: painting or graphics, she answers: “Graphics are my roots, painting is my crown.” In the arsenal great artist all means are harmoniously united and subordinated to one goal - creativity. In Tutundzhan, we can talk about the graphic nature of her paintings and about the fullness of her graphic compositions with pictorial associations. The graphic element of an expressive silhouette is always complemented by the symbolism of a picturesque color spot. So, the soft red color in one case symbolizes the life and warmth of the hearth (“Burn brightly”); in another, contrasting with black, it lights up with a fire flame ("Fire"). And at the same time, in each picture of the artist, a living connection with nature is emphasized. She paints modern people and modern life. Almost every landmark canvas by Tutunjan, in terms of depth of conception and laconism of expressive form, is social genre, where a private motif develops into a generalized image-symbol. “Forget-Me-Nots” (1969) and “Burn Clearly” (1976), “Fire” (1991), “Freedom - Freedom” (1996) and “Bereginya” (2001) are paintings of the same theme, although they were created in different years and separated by decades . Started at the very beginning creative way The artist's dialogue with the viewer about the meaning of human life continues even now.

Probably, the most burning issues of modern life are concentrated in the "village" works of Tutunjan. Her beloved heroines, having survived wars and revolutions, have not lost the most important thing - faith and hope. It is they, these peasant women with their hands folded on their knees, surrounded by old and new family photographs, that are the “root of the human race”, its “reliance”. After all, it is no coincidence that the symbol of the revival of the Russian village, and hence the land, in the paintings of Tutunjan is a village woman, surrounded by children and not afraid to take on the role of "Beregini".

The expressive means that the artist uses in her paintings involuntarily send our memory back to Russian icon painting. Many researchers called the language of her monumental paintings fresco, and Tutunjan herself uses the parable in them as a plot outline. Its village heroes are akin to medieval saints and martyrs, only not legendary, but living today on our land. Yes, and with the names of her paintings, she “wakes up” our national memory: “Bearing His Cross”, “Mother Queen of Heaven”, “Trinity”, “All-Seeing Eye” ...

"In truth and conscience" the artist engages in a dialogue with the viewer in almost every work. In the portrait genre, she addresses people she knows and loves well, preaching and affirming through them the ideal of spiritual beauty and wealth. Perhaps that is why her portrait images are romantic and devoid of everyday life, and the color and pictorial details help to reveal the main thing that she appreciates in their character: creative impulse, dedication, devotion.

Zhanna Tadzhatovna's exhibitions usually attract the largest audience. What is the phenomenon of the popularity of Tutunjan's works with the public? Of course, not only in the plot basis of her paintings, close and understandable to people living in the provinces, but also in the aesthetics of their plastic language, close to the ethical and aesthetic traditions of Russian folk culture.

L.G. Sosnina

Prominent Vologda residents: Biographical sketches/ Ed. council "Vologda Encyclopedia". - Vologda: VSPU, publishing house "Rus", 2005. - 568 p.

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Part one

SPRING COUNTRY

1.
And a vision from youth surfaced ...
In the afternoon, a neighbor girl suddenly slipped into the hut to my old people without a sound. She sat down right there, at the threshold, hiding snow-covered boots under the bench and squelching her nose. Her white bangs protruded cockily from under a red scarf.
We had lunch in the hall, and no one came out to her. Grandmother continued to strain boiling water from the samovar into a cup, grandfather stabbed a matte block of sugar in his gnarled palm with a wide knife. The windows were frosty, so we did not see how the guest made her way along the narrow path to us.
I myself am not a hostess, I did not dare to command in someone else's house. Yes, and I didn’t know then whether it was customary in the village to call to the table for the sake of decency - after all, not with long journey man, just crossed the street ...
Grandfather then silently hobbled past the neighbor in the hallway, I followed my grandmother into the kitchen with cups and plates and began to rinse them.
And when she freed herself, instead of the girl, she found only a wet spot at the door, as if the small one had melted.
- Why did she come? I asked my grandmother in dismay.
- Duck on the gazebos, - she answered calmly.
2.
And today this episode blazed in my memory, when suddenly, drenched in the April flood longing, I intuitively dissolved on my knees the precious book of graphics by Gianna Tutunjan. I knew her healing power, but two years ago I removed it from my eyes away, so as not to let the grief of loss storm in my soul.
And she herself called me, Gianna, a person called "soul." I felt there, in heaven, that it was dreary inside me, as it happened with her in the spring, when discreet saving lines formed by themselves: “It will drip again. April will follow. And the streams will run again. They will float away, as if no one's, All my sorrows and troubles ... "
When, in our youth, we entrust ourselves to someone, we imagine him to be beyond the control of ordinary human experiences. It seems incredible that the elders, who inspire us with strength and hope, can suffer and secretly cry from their doubts, loss, uselessness.
And suddenly now it’s too late, but by the way, Gianna herself pushes me to her earthly spring experiences, to the inescapable dream of picking up the keys “To the castle, what a winter, in the night I didn’t give me rest without sleep. And maybe I'll open that lock. And maybe I’ll melt away that secret ... "
Her divinely inspired artistic deeds have long become her pass to all heavenly mysteries. And we ... and I still hoot my share, mating and mating our not without a higher will crossed earthly paths. And I clearly see and realize, finally, that it was she, Zhanna Tadzhatovna, who allowed me at one time to lean on her shoulder in order to strengthen my step.
3.
It was a bad time, all the public props on which the visible well-being of the abandoned villages, which were being wiped off the face of the earth, were already rotten. And I went and went on business trips from the newspaper to the very wilderness, in order to make sure and convince readers that Russia is not over, as long as the older Russian generation is alive. What destinies opened before me, what spiritual depth, what indestructible national forces!
In those years before perestroika, the rubric “Russian Women” was born for my essays. And Zhanna Tadzhatovna had already published the first graphic sheets, which were then called dialogues “In truth, in conscience”. When I saw them, I literally died: one to one they were my heroines! And even what they told the artist and what she, without looking back at the canons of the genre, boldly entered right there, on the edges of the drawings, with all dialectal features, even their speeches were familiar and understandable to me.
But at the top, however, among those whose “organ” was the newspaper, doubts wandered about the patriotism of my position ...
That's when something dank autumn evening on the alley opposite the editorial office, I accidentally met Tutunjan. Until then, we only briefly saw each other at exhibitions and never spoke heart to heart.
And then she suddenly smiled, as if she were an old acquaintance of hers, and, holding on to my elbow, quickly and fervently blurted out:
- Listen, do not give up this business, your "Russian women"! You're doing great. And who will say a word for them, if not us, right?!
It seemed to me that at that moment and forever they took me under the wing and protected me from winds and bad weather ...
4.
And now I suddenly felt that shelter again. I opened the book and in the lines of Gianna I immediately recognized myself, sitting in my snowy house with a torn soul ... and I felt how something warm, but invisible, takes her, chilly, in her hands, and begins to stroke and straighten, telling:
“My favorite state: in winter to live alone on the edge of the village. During the day, write snow and people. And in the evening, when I heat up my stove, I will go along the upper or lower tenement. And without knocking open any door. And I will be covered with izbyanny warmth ... "
Lord, so that's where that girl from the past has stuck into my heart now! It was Gianna's soul fluttering overhead, trying to bring me back to the disturbing joy of being...
I’m here, Janna Tadzhatovna, I’m alive, and I see and feel everything ... how you step with felt boots on creaky snow and carry “heat from the feeling of eternity” ... and above you are “only high large stars” ...
As I understand, how I share your enthusiasm, remembering myself as a young woman, who also went from house to house in remote villages ... with the only difference that I hastily clung other people's confessions to my notebook with my indistinct letters, and your gentle hand sculpted in space while talking sheet graphic monuments to toothless old men and old women who stood guard over their fatherland. Where are they now, who piously endured all the suffering, melted away and were not rewarded for their quiet deeds?
"Motherland! I am burned with shame and impotence when you punish the innocent,” you wrote. And with their relentless work, they did for these people what the state could not, did not want to do.
Well, just imagine ... and are there any analogues to this? .. for almost half a century in winter and summer you have not parted with a brush and a felt-tip pen in order to capture those “who lived and suffered on their beautiful Earth” with a heart parched with empathy! Perhaps you even guessed that relentlessly and diligently, as if fulfilling obedience, you are writing the history of a single northern village of Sergievskaya. But the result for a long time, even during your lifetime, was obvious: you created an artistic chronicle of wooden, enlightened Rus, sinking in the river of oblivion.
Here you saw with your own eyes what you thought admiringly, looking at the folksy patchwork quilt.
“It struck me not just with its color ... It burned me with its essence. The one who made it is long gone, but this Blanket, sewn by her from what was at hand, looked like her whole Life ... Scarlet patches of her sundresses burned on it, like our Holidays and Victories ... Black widow days and headscarves - a husband and two sons did not come from the war ... Protective pieces of a soldier's uniform - grandchildren returned from the army ... Blue rags of her hopes ... Light, flowered, great-grandchildren's vests ... Yes, this is not only her This is the life of the country! I was stunned."
Just as the blanket of life consists and grows in separate patchwork days, so every feat is done drop by drop and without a great idea; it is based on daily, honest, conscientious work, supported by the pillars of the truths of righteousness.
It was about them that Gianna thought, returning from the village arbors, “drunk from the happiness of communicating with something important, real, genuine, expressed in living words. They will flare up in me with a hot light. And among them will flicker, like coals in the wind, ancient, but eternal concepts ... ".
5.
And the basis of everything in the people's understanding of life has always been work, honest, conscientious, selfless. The one from which now only memories remain.
And now they are hovering over me, striving for the light, for rebirth, when I leaf through "Talks in truth, in conscience." These voices are at first barely distinguishable, like an obsession, but gradually gain strength, grow stronger and begin to sound like an alarm.
“If I tell everything ... I can’t speak ...” - a bent woman, tired of life, wipes her tears.
And I imagine Gianna, ready to “draw and listen to how to drink, this life! And it will pass through me, all as it is, without embellishment. One of its truth and essence, sprinkled with salt of bitterness and laughter ... "
“Kaput to the collective farm ... - they are taking off the roof from the last yard ... they’re all sick of themselves ...” - the decrepit front-line soldier bitterly states, looking out the window.
“Ears would not smell, eyes would not see what they are doing to us ...” - the old woman echoes him.
“The cattle has become like people,” another picks up. - In the morning you won’t drive out of the barn, the grazing is not friendly, they wander home - which when ... And before that: they will kick you out - at dawn! On the flock - all - at the same time! And look after them - no need!
"Field of Dreams!!! Field of Dreams! And our field - the demon plows! ..».
“Oh, what a good dream I saw !!! - out of place inserts a very ancient grandmother. - I'm reaping barley! So spiky, big. I made the sheaves all to one, but I’ll make a clip of them all with my hands ... And it’s so joyful in my soul!
“When I was six years old, my mother took me to the field to harvest rye,” recalls another with a smile. - Sickle ... Then Ninka and I ran alone ... we rustle like goosebumps ... "
But these words are not heard, because - it hurts.
“If only the old people got up, but looked at how we are now timid - if only they would marvel at us ..!” - blames the man with heavy tired hands.
“Topere, young people are freer. And before - ... they were more true! ... Easy money will play tricks on people ... "
“Now, after all, they will spit - and then pay ...”
“If all our children and grandchildren lived at home ..! “Whoa, what a village it would be!.. They are afraid of work, and then they don’t go…” – the old man sums up exhaustedly.
“I would be… forty years old…” another, younger, meditatively interjects into the conversation. - I would have brought a mare ..! buy a tractor..! I would take three hectares of land ..! ... fifty calves ..! and would be...
"Well, what would you be?" - written by Gianna's hand after the speakers, and I guess that the wife of the dreamer, who was worn out by life, despaired of waiting for changes, could not stand it.
“We were late…” he sums up, sobering up.
“Do you think Sergovka will live long? - the artist tries another ..
- So if you rob - the whole forest will overgrow ... - after a pause, the interlocutor answers her. “All the fields… They would remember how they plowed during the war… without any fuel… – on only combustible tears… and didn’t drink their land…”
6.
About the war... No, I won't look again at the pages dedicated to military widows! Yesterday I burst into tears, allowing my soul to fly into the past ... I, just leafing through a book, burned everything inside with fire; and what was it like to endure these hardships in reality?
No wonder one of the heroines of the conversations says with a prayer:
“So that, like all countries, let them live in one heart! .. So that this damned war will not know more. Never!"
The canvas “The Root of the Genus” will not fade before my eyes. A paper flower attached to the photograph burns like a drop of blood, like a deadly trace from a fascist bullet. And in the foreground is the inconsolable mother; or a widow, of those who were the heroines of my essays.
And the faded old woman against the background of the icon from the painting "Nastya and the Lord" - she is also one of those I met on my earthly path. After the war, she had no one to love, except the Almighty, and she, along with her peers, steadfastly accepted her share, and now, in all her spotless holiness, she is ready to appear before the highest court ...
The womanish, almost without men, village feast on March 8, captured by Gianna, is also from her past.
And to whom the men returned from the front, did they make a lot of money ...
“I never get jealous about Pashenka in public ... I’ll see how there’s no one in the graveyard - and I’ll scream as I need to ...”
“Oh, how I loved the man. And he died, so I didn’t wash his sweaty shirts for a long time ... I used to sit down, bury myself in them and get fed up ... "
But before in this direction, as elsewhere in Rus', “there were people, as in China,” the old-timers testify.
7.
And what a people they were! Kindest!
“She also keeps a dog. And a chicken. And a rooster. And for a year I haven’t eaten a single egg ... I say: cut off her head! - Jauco, he says. She's too pathetic…”
This is what the old lady said. But the little man - smokes and adjusts to household chores, looking at his dog:
"What, bug? Did you miss the owner? While you were in Tarnoga? .. I was overjoyed. Now it won't leave."
And it doesn’t matter that we don’t know how long the owner was absent - maybe he was absent for a day on business, or maybe he spent a month in the hospital. But small joys of life, not significant for outsiders, now and then cling to the artist's felt-tip pen, capturing and exalting a moment of spiritual generosity, openness, closeness to heaven.
Here, a small old woman buried her face in her palms, cooing over them, and we guess from the text what is there ...
“Your mother didn’t manage to sit all of you out ... I hear something squeaking in the egg! .. I regretted it. She put it on the oven. You started showing up.. You are my angel! Be born. Be born, but don't give in to anyone! And I won’t let anyone hurt you!”
Here is a little boy silently hugging and stroking a big bird; he is clearly a “growth” from such kind grandmothers.
As one of the interlocutors subtly noted, "the soul - the soul - is glad."
The old people still remember the time when, on the radio, one could hear an unthinkable request today:
“Let someone come from them on a stallion - we have a mare on a spree ... And we don’t have time to go to them. We carry milk with her!
Caring for animals was the norm in former life. And therefore, in the current one, people were drawn and drawn to Dzhanna Tadzhatovna with their pain.
“The heart can’t stand how they conceive calves along the ridge with shovels to look after ... A calf - he’s also a man!”
“We pity Murka… Oh, what a smart cat she didn’t cast… She suffered, there were tears in her eyes… We already kept her to the end… And the neighbor – the cat didn’t need it – took it down to the stream, head into the water, crushed it with a heel… The beast is a beast ... "
Of course, rural life is not simple, and much is mixed and confused in it. Someone trembles over every blade of grass, and someone relates to death without unnecessary sighs, even if it concerns a person.
“As a child, I grew thin! Parents thought, what help? Tyatya used to say: “Die, Tanka, we’ll carry out with a red ringing ... But I survived!” - the old woman rejoices like a child, as if she had deceived death forever.
A man of one wife reproached that he works a lot, so he laughed it off:
“Here death will come - but I’m not even at home! .. - I didn’t swear. "You can't fool her."
But still, people will not stop playing on this topic.
“And today I dreamed in a dream that they made a coffin for me ... but it’s short! I said - I will spit on your work. And I won't die!"
8.
However, wherever a conversation starts, there will always be someone who will turn the arrow to the main thing, saying: “Let's talk about power!”
And this is where it starts!
“When are we going to have a good time? - the artist will provoke.
- After me.
Will Vasyukha survive?
- Must".
But there will not be much confidence in this answer, because demolishing is fast, but raising from the ruins ...
After all, only one generation has changed since the old people enviously looked around the area and said:
"To know what is life will be- I would have climbed back, and the toper - was born!
And today we are facing a terrible outcome and an even more terrible forecast:
“The Rusak will soon become completely obsolete ... They say: survive! But as?"
And at whose expense, if all the youth from the villages left? And there is nothing to remember about the peasants, you can read it on your fingers, and even those are either drunkards or cripples. Three old friends dreamed of getting out into the clearing, “to admire nature and sing songs so that they could hear across the river! .. But something here all three fell ill: Lavrik hears badly, Pantush does not see, but I can’t reach ... ”- states grandfather sitting in front of his jacket with medals and a reproduction from the painting "Three Heroes".
There was one more "hope" for Rus'; Gianna Tutunjan captured her in all angles, outfits and moods. This is a woman, more precisely, a Woman. The one from the war "I am a horse, I am a bull, I am a woman and a man." The one that "stops a galloping horse."
With the artist, she is very often next to the horse, which migrated from the wedding cart to the barnyard and there and dragged its strap to death. And their eyes, those of the horse and the dumb peasant woman, became very similar - equally cloudy and inquiring.
Such they are in the painting "The Groom", such in the work "The Last Horse".
And then an old woman with an eternal spade in her hands and with a full bag on the field, when asked about an assistant, wearily will answer: “There was a horse, but it was all worn out.”
And the other will pick up with tears in her eyes:
“After all, I was - a horse can’t trample! And the toper ... As you look - one dry grief ... "
An infirm old woman sat down awkwardly on a bench and secretly complained to the weeping guest:
“I’ve gone completely dark. I don't see any trouble. Where to go, I don't know. - And he adds prophetically: - How poor Russia ... "
9.
Lord, how figurative, wise and multi-layered deep Russian speech is! It would be - on the high stands, so that eternal truths reach those who are free to resettle them in life anew.
And is it not because most of Gianna's works are “speaking”, and silent - they speak mutely, with human eyes, colors - is it not because there is no feeling of hopelessness from her work, despite all the bitterness that is poured into it ?! But there is pride in the dignity with which the majority endure hardships, there is delight in the sharp mind and sharp tongue of the villagers. And overwhelmed by the feeling that you looked extraordinary documentary who moved you to the northern outback and nourished you not only with frosty freshness and smells of summer herbs, but also introduced an indestructible faith in the inevitability of change. And how could it be otherwise when there are such people on earth?!
Here is a reliable kindest person, "Carrying His Cross" for the care of a frail mother. Here is a man with the hands of a hero, languishing without a real cause - "There is strength." Here is a hard worker, not a lazy person, not a drunkard, but a master of all trades. But "Man with one wing" - how will you fly ?!
And after all, during the years that Gianna worked in the village, new kids were born, fledged, whom she was able to immortalize: "Crane" with wings cutting behind her back, "Falcon" locked in a house with a tiny window and tensely waiting to be called, will be called to heaven. And their mother “Bereginya” was entwined with young trunks by the three boys Yezhovs, who lived in Sergievskaya next door to the artist.
Yes, and what girls managed to grow up on this earth! Can you forget "Explanatory" or the one that sits in yellow plumage in the painting "Bright Soul"?
Of course, this is what they wrote in their reviews of one of the exhibitions:
“We thought that everyone in our country had already forgotten about the village. And you reminded the whole world of us. When you look at the picture “Freedom - freedom”, you understand that the Horse with tangled legs is the whole people striving for freedom. And someday people will be able to escape from captivity, gain freedom. AND better life will also come in remote villages.
Dear children... I am now holding in my hands a scorching book with your words, and outside my window are the rickety houses of an almost dead village; and crying outside the window drops. But with faith I whisper the words of Gianna that "they will float away, as if no one else's, All my sorrows and troubles ..."
After the exhibition in the capital, one of the Muscovites expressed the very essence of it in this way: from the works of Gianna Tutundzhan looks with hope at the mighty of the world of this, all of Russia "with its spring eyes, not clouded by self-interest and malice."
But the forces in it for understanding and changing the situation have accumulated ample. Take a look at a young mother sketched by the artist twenty-odd years ago, on August 21, 1991. She bent over the baby and, breastfeeding him, says-magic:
“Ondryusha, a good-from a boy ... That's what life has gone on ... Look, they thought - tanks on people ... Thin guys ... And you eat, berry, and grow. You will grow up big-oh! .. Then with Vitya, with Vasya, three of you, you will go to the field, and ask: Who is the boss here ?!”
And they will leave! And they will ask!
And from the foreboding of this, my heart is washed with tears, like the shore near Sergievskaya - with the waters of the Sukhona ...

Collage L.Beschastnaya

Janna Tadzhatovna Tutunzhan was born in Sivtsev Vrazhka on the Arbat in Moscow on September 22, 1931. On her mother's side, she comes from a family of hereditary Moscow nobles. Paternally related to Armenian roots, but in Armenia itself was only once, in 1955.

Back in the military year of 1944, Tutunzhan began to study at the Moscow Secondary Art School, which for a long time was located in Lavrushinsky Lane, just opposite the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1959 she graduated from the Moscow State Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov.

In 1952, Janna first came to Vologda, and since 1959 she has remained to live and work in Vologda forever. She was brought to the North by her husband, painter Nikolai Baskakov. In one of her interviews, Tutunjan noted: “My husband is a Vologda citizen. We studied together at the Moscow art school, in the same class, at the Surikov Institute. True, at different times. From him I heard the first stories about Vologda. He was the first to introduce me and lead me through this land. He taught me to always do what the soul lies to.

In 1969, the first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Tutunjan was held in Vologda. Tutunjan's works of the 1960s were a bold discovery of a new hero and an unusual style of artistic language.

Tutunjan led and approved in fine arts The Vologda region has its main and favorite hero: a simple in life and not at all simple in soul village dweller. In 1969, her central painting of those years, Forget-Me-Nots, appeared. In the village of Sergiyevskaya, Tarnogsky district, the first series of large-format drawings was made with a felt-tip pen and ink with very capacious, directly speaking titles: “My own mistress”, “About bread, about salt”, “Eternal chime”, “Victory Day”, “Son of a son” , "Old spinning wheel - long songs", "Tell me, bro."

Since 1981, every ten years, solo exhibitions of Tutunjan's new works were held in Vologda, which aroused general interest. At first, everyone was surprised and made to think a lot about her paintings-symbols about the exciting problems of the life of the village and modern society: “Parting”, “Bird Market”, “Root of the Family”, “The Last Horse”.

A real discovery was a series of drawings by Tutundzhan “Dialogues. In truth, in conscience." Highlighting her new creative task, she remarked: “So I want the viewer, who believes in Man, looking at people who, according to my concepts, represent the basis of the national spirit, would also hear what these people think about our life."

In the 1980s and 1990s, large-scale paintings-parables appeared in Tutunjan’s painting, in which she sought to respond to the most complex moral and ethical and very difficult historical and cultural phenomena of changing life: “Black Raven”, “Fire”, “Free - will". The art gallery held exhibitions and presentations of these paintings, which became important social events of those perestroika years.

In 1972, Janna Tutundzhan was awarded the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR. More than thirty years later, in February 2004, she was awarded the honorary title of People's Artist of Russia, which has long been among her loyal admirers.