Dobuzhinskii Valerianovich Mstislav
(1875-1957)

MVDobuzhinsky was the son of an artillery officer, a descendant of an ancient Russianised Lithuanian family. After the first year of law school at St. Petersburg University Dobuzhinskii tried to go to the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, but was not accepted and was engaged in private studios until 1899, when, after finishing university, went abroad and continued his art studies at the studios of Munich.

Back in 1901 in St. Petersburg, he became friendly with the association "World of Art" and became one of its most prominent representatives. Dobuzhinskii debuted in the chart - pictures in magazines and books, cityscapes, which was able to impressively convey their perception of St. Petersburg as a city where majestic classical architecture phantasmagoric connected with ugly realities of the XX century urbanism.

Subject town immediately became one of the most important in his work, he turned to her in the landscape cycles created in the wake of frequent trips to Russia and abroad; urban landscape is an important component of many of his works.

Dobuzhinskii engaged in easel and drawing, and painting, successfully taught - first with L. Bakst in private art school E. Zvantseva, and later in different educational institutions, and after the revolution he had ever designed a festive decoration of streets, composed by one of the curators of the Hermitage and even read popular lectures on art. But the most weighty was his work in the theater and in the book drawing. Soon after he successfully designed several productions at the Antique Theatre and the Theatre Komissarzhevskaya (1907-08), invited him to Moscow Art Theatre staging of Turgenev "A Month in the Country" (1909).

The great success of the performance of his decorations marked the beginning of a close collaboration with the renowned artist of the theater. The peak of this cooperation is the scenery for the play "Nikolai Stavrogin" (1913), the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed". Acute rare expressiveness and conciseness made this pioneering work phenomenon, anticipating future discoveries of domestic scenography.

Dobuzhinskii did not leave the theater and in the future, but in the 1920s. the greatest success he was destined to achieve already in the book drawing. Sensitivity to radical changes in the art of the previous decade had helped him move away from the canons "miriskusnicheskoy" book graphics. This was already seen in the figures for "swineherd" H.-K. Andersen (1917), followed by drawings to the "Poor Liza" Karamzin and "Toupee Artist," Nikolai Leskov (1922) and, finally, to the "white nights" of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1925); become masterpieces of Russian book graphics.

In its motion for a new Dobuzhinskii was an ally of the young artists, while dramatically transformed the design of children's books, as evidenced by his brilliant illustrations in 1925 to "The Merry ABCs" Pavlova, "Primus" Osip Mandelstam, "Barmaley" K. Chukovskii.