PASHKOV Valentin (born in 1940)

I was born six months before the Great Patriotic War, December 17, 1940 from two peasant labor, Misha's maternal and paternal Pashkov, in the Kaluga province Yuhnovsky district, village Kurkino.

Rhode Misha lived before the revolution and only spravno unexpectedly early death of his grandfather in 1929, saved the rest of the then minor children from almost certain death, where be in the north or in Siberia. Grandfather's first cousins ​​were deported, and 37 in Smolensk shot.

Rhode Pashkov, in the village of Rakitno that is six kilometers from Kurkino was plentiful and the poor. No cannibalization, no repression was not affected, a third of the village was our last name. But of all her masculine - war, survived only one man - that's me. For my deceased father was granted a pension 40 rubles. A bottle of cheap vodka then cost 30 rubles. For his work on the farm is not only money, but also did not pay anything at all, but for the fact that you have 25 acres of land, and that your burenka grazing on public land taxes were huge and they had to make quarterly period - or arrears.

In the twelve years I became a shepherd and is recognized by the three villages artist painted the girls and the women embroidery cocks. And his first aphorism, I wrote at the time, as well as for the lack of paper at hand I burned it on his stick through a lens, and therefore remembered and made into this book without changes: - "Only he can consider himself a master of his craft, who be able to perform exactly as born in his imagination. "

I wanted to be an artist, so I express myself in color, but I knew that even if they were with me, I do not succeed, because I conceived all this is put into practice, without the necessary skills. Only after the army, I was able to enroll in absentia People's University of the Arts in the Faculty of Painting, Tatyana Pavlovna Rodimova - the daughter of the last President of the Society of Russian Wanderers Paul Rodimova. I do not know whether I could realize his first aphorism in the case, but the fact that all his life striving - this show hundreds of thousands of pictures and sketches. Which, unfortunately, I was not allowed to show either then do not give now. Thirty years ago, giving me a reproduction of his work, Tatyana Pavlovna inscribed it so wishes - "The young talented artist with the confidence that you are on the roads of Art will carry the tradition of the realist school," that as much as I do.

Valentin Pashkov.