Vasily Chekrygin and the Devils of Avant-garde

The early part of the twentieth century was a time of acute awareness of the elusiveness of humanity in humans combined with earnest attempts to establish a new world characterized by genuine, full-blooded existence. And while artistic depictions of the devil were often deployed during this period as a reflection of the era’s intense cultural and societal upheavals, Chekrygin, who was intensely aware of death and believed in immortality via the resurrection of the dead, felt that the correct response to these events lay not in the turn to darkness but in its opposite, namely spiritual awakening through Christianity. Moreover, as he saw it, the paramount mission of an artist was to overcome death and evil. What reason would he have then to depict devilry?

Let’s begin with the missing drawing itself. In his essay “A tragedy of Nikolai Khardziev,” Soviet dissident, chairman of the Glasnost Defense Foundation and art collector Sergei Grigoryants reflects on the penchant of avant-garde masters for devilry:

“One cannot help but notice the characteristic craving of the masters of the avant-garde for devilry. Kruchenykh, Malevich, Goncharova (her saints, of course, are larger, but in execution, perhaps less convincing), Rozanova, Chekrygin, Verevkina […] This path is seen much more clearly in Chekrygin and, of course, was clear to Khardzhiev – the small drawings with devilry I got from him. But I also have a large, signed one, which is rare in Chekrygin’s drawings, that is, an important drawing for him – and also a composition with the devil.  […] However, this drawing is weaker than the others – Chekrygin became a brilliant draftsman only after he’d abandoned the devilish theme.”^[1]

Grigoryants bought portrayals of the devil from Khardziev, which, according to a book about Chekrygin, were added to his collection. Unfortunately, the cataloguing of Grigoryants’s avant-garde collection was put on hold following his death in 2023, and the information recorded up to that point was only recently made available for research, which was when the discovery of the missing images was made. The mysterious disappearance of these images adds to the intrigue surrounding the avant-garde’s fascination with the devil.

The motif of devilry was certainly not uncommon amongst Chekrygin’s contemporaries, as evident in futurist publications such as The Devil and The Poets and Games in Hell and sketches by luminaries such as poet Aleksei Kruchenykh and artists Olga Rozanova and Kazimir Malevich. This turn toward darkness and the occult was not accidental, but rather rooted in a longstanding tradition of drawing inspiration from folklore, a practice prevalent in Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian literature, in which authors like Nikolai Gogol (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, 1830, Viy, 1835), Alexander Pushkin (Demon, 1830, Queen of Spades, 1834), Mikhail Lermontov (Demon, 1839) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot, 1869, Demons, 1872) made a character of the devil in both prose and poetry, sometimes portraying him as a seductive trickster, pure evil; other times as a free spirit, expelled from paradise and doomed to eternal loneliness in the endless space of the universe.

By the start of the twentieth century, the devil motif had become a fixture in various forms of art, including illustration, drawing, and painting. The lubok^[2]-inspired devil figure was employed ironically and sometimes as a form of mockery or satire, as seen in Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s poem Game in Hell (1912). The publication exists in two editions: the first, published in 1912 and illustrated by Natalia Goncharova, and the second, in 1914 with illustrations by Malevich and Rozanova. The devil, as depicted in Game in Hell (1914) is likely presented in an ironic and mocking manner in reflection of the avant-garde movement’s penchant for subversion and challenging established norms. Malevich and Rozanova’s artistic choices appear to serve a deeper, symbolic interpretation of the devil as a force of change and disruption. Natalia Goncharova, for her part, merged traditional folk motifs with avant-garde forms, and thus tapped into orthodox iconography.^[3]

The turn toward folklore and occult imagery at the turn of the century was not accidental. The transitional state in which society found itself on account of the transformative events of the turn of the twentieth century resulted in feelings of uncertainty and anxiety.^[4] This, in turn, appears to have prompted a yearning for spiritual guidance, which can sometimes lead the more susceptible toward mythology and, unsurprisingly, the otherworldly, the wicked, and the mysterious. Artists were particularly susceptible to these undercurrents of anxiety.

However, amidst this prevailing trend, Chekrygin and his metaphysical pursuit through Christianity cut a stark contrast to his contemporaries like artists Malevich, Rozanova and Goncharova or even close acquaintances like painter Mikhail Larionov and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Chekrygin’s work was imbued with a sense of inner meaning and reflection, echoing the artist’s deep appreciation of spirituality and morality. His departure from the devilish theme toward more life-affirming and Christian motifs reflected his profound belief in the paramount mission of the artist: to overcome death and evil through spiritual awakening.

Initially embracing the ideas of the early futurist movement, Chekrygin, working in collaboration with mutual friend and fellow artist Lev Zhegin in 1913, created illustrations for Mayakovsky’s first collection of poetry, Я! (Me!). These drawings bore little relation to the themes addressed in the collection, and instead appeared to be informed by traditional Russian icons: a kneeling angel, a galloping horseman, and an old man blessing animals.

Zhegin, later reminiscing in his memoir about the process of the publication’s creation, wrote: “Well, Vasya,” Mayakovsky muttered, “once again you’ve drawn an angel – why not a fly, it’s been a while since you’ve drawn one of those!”^[5] The quote clearly reflects Mayakovsky’s irritation at Chekrygin’s penchant for religious motifs. But how could Chekrygin not draw angels? How could he focus on the mundane when his mind and soul were preoccupied with the spiritual?

It is peculiar that Chekrygin’s faith was not without inner contradiction. He is known to have painted Hell around the same time, between 1912 and 1913. Zhegin described that “in the middle of the painting is a figure in green with raised hands, praying for mercy, for the salvation of the fallen and damned.”^[6] In a journal he kept at the time, Chekrygin speaks of Dionysus,^[7] comparing him to the devil: “I will not give this beloved Satan to anyone.”^[8] One can trace this ongoing internal battle to the spiritual orienteers of the time and the drive to rebel:

“A convinced idealist and deeply religious Christian, he conceptualized his calling as an artist in the irrational categories of the spiritual, eternal, and cosmic. His obsession with searching for unprecedented creative goals was fully consistent with the spirit of the avant-garde movement that unfolded in Russian art in the early 1910s.”^[9]

The incompatibility of atheistic and religious worldviews soon led to a complete break between Mayakovsky and Chekrygin. Their paths diverged, but not only theirs. The positivist program to which Chekrygin’s futurist friends subscribed turned out to be alien to him, as his beliefs and upbringing increasingly clashed with the dominant ‘secular’, ‘materialistic’ mindset and political doctrine. He increasingly felt that futurist activity, which always appeared to be defined by conflict, noise and the need to scandalize, profaned life: “I was among the first Russian followers of futurism. [..]. But I quickly and radically broke with futurism when I discerned its lack of foundation and realized that I could not build my worldview solely on emotionality.”^[10] The only image of the devil he would create after that was a caricature he made of avant-garde artists, the drawing I’ve been unable to trace.

To further contextualize Chekrygin’s line of thought, I’ll skim through some biographical highlights. At the early age of nine, Chekrygin was already well on his formative journey of religious artistic expression, initially as a pupil at the icon painting workshop held within the confines of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra from 1906 to 1910. Wracked by inner turmoil – “Death and prayers, I’m suffocating, I can’t do it anymore”^[11] – he subsequently departed the monastery for formal academic training at the Moscow academy.

Later came the pivotal encounter with a collection of religious icons at a Moscow exhibition in 1913, which featured revered pieces such as Our Lady of Vladimir (1131, artist unknown) and Andrei Rublev’s Trinity (1425), an experience that had a profound impact on Chekrygin’s artistic trajectory. These works resonated deeply with him, their significance synergizing with the stylistic influences of painters such as Jacopo Tintoretto, El Greco, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso.

By the end of the 1920s, Chekrygin’s mystical sketches, inspired by Nikolai Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Cause, had culminated in his own philosophical treatise, “On the Cathedral of the Resurrecting Museum.” Like N. Punin, Chekrygin viewed art as integral to spiritual life, and sought to use it to infuse the world with spiritual depth amidst societal tragedies. The idea of monumental “cathedral” art, which would embody Fedorov’s ideas and unite artists in a single creative work, crystallized in a plan to produce paintings for the Cathedral of the Resurrection Museum.^[12] Chekrygin set out the plan in letters to M. Larionov.