Sergey Vladimirovich Filenko was born in 1962. He currently lives and works in Moscow. He illustrated works by Mikhail Lermontov, who is one of his favorite authors.

Sergey Filenko has a deep knowledge of Mikhail Lermontov’s works, down to who illustrated them and when. In the Caucasus, the artist literally followed Lermontov’s route, visiting many of the places where the Russian poet had once been.

In 2012, Sergey Filenko created the illustration titled “From lofty cliff that castle lowered // Grim, silent, motionless alway…” for Lermontov’s poem “Demon”. The artist depicted Khatissopeli, also known as Dzuarkau — an abandoned hamlet in the Gudsky Gorge. Previously, it was inhabited by the Ossetians and the Mtiuli people — an ethnographic group of Georgians.

The village has been preserved in the form of ruins on the banks of the Aragvi River. There is a theory that many years ago there used to be a Georgian monastery. The ruins are interestingly compared to the castle of the Georgian prince Gudal, which is described in Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Demon”.

The poem has the following lines:

Sergey Filenko mustered a certain amount of courage in order to take up the task of working on the poem after such a famous predecessor as Mikhail Vrubel. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, the artist decided to start illustrating the unfinished story by Mikhail Lermontov called “Shtoss” which is considered the writer’s last known prose work.

Filenko was working on the series for two months. In the summer of 2021, it was exhibited at the Mikhail Lermontov State Museum-Reserve. Among the earlier artists who illustrated “Shtoss” was the famous painter Engel Khariyevich Nasibulin.