Василий Коротеев. Дягелевский лес в Тверской области, Конец 1920-х

In the wake of Florensky, the French critic was unable to silently pass by several traits that enabled him to equivocate the group of Moscow artists’ paintings with the legacy of the impressionists. However, he stipulated that the resemblance, if it exists (which is not obvious), is superficial, not essential: the loose, unstable surface of the subjects exhibited the nebulous, hidden structure of plants, earth, air, water and human beings. He also spoke about light and made the fair observation that the mutability and inconstancy of the images of nature given here were not dependent upon a lighting effect: there is a different kind of light that appears as sunlight but that a person perceives and rejoices in like the internal light of the world.

From here he takes a step towards another, even more wonderful observation when he speaks of the artists’ “pantheistic worldview.” In any case, this is correct with regards to Koroteev’s works. They ring clearly with the theme of the mysteries that fill the everyday world.

Art, as it is manifest in his creative work, is an understanding of the living flesh of the world, and this understanding reveals his pagan, Dionysian and orgiastic beginning. All this flesh bursts forth, copulates and gives birth simultaneously; it is the world as a person encounters it; but this flesh is also painting; it manages to absorb and strengthen all the barely perceptible movements of the world in its counter-directional motion; this flesh is the basis of love for the world, for the earth and for nature and it is the genesis of humanity. But art is also insight, including carnal insight, the discovery of an Other, encounter with it and salvation of the flesh from the yearning for Another. In this place a new culture is born. It is here that the rays break through from an unseen but obviously existent secret of the world, a secret of incarnation, of life.

The culture that gives birth to this painting is saturated with magicism in relation to the world; here everything is animated, everything is divine and at the edges of the “pantheistic worldview” slides together with the characteristic traits of Eastern Orthodox mysticism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This painting is a flexible parallel, almost an illustration of F. I. Tyutchev’s words:

“Nature is not what you think it is:

it’s not a mould, not a soulless face.

It has a soul. It has freedom.

It has love. It has a tongue…”