Vladimir Milashevsky (1893–1976) was a graphic artist, watercolour and oil painter and member of The Thirteen (a group named after the number of its participants). His works were first exhibited in 1929 in Moscow. The Thirteen artists abandoned the academic approach to painting in favour of painting from life. And Milashevsky, a proponent of the free-hand dip-pen and ink drawing style and an illustrator of many classic literary works, would become one of the group’s ideologists.

He wrote: “As an artist, the most treasured thing in the world for me was to sneak up on some new “game” and “shoot” it like a hunter does! This new, authentic view of life! […] I went up to some […] red-headed peasant and started painting him in watercolours. I felt instinctively that it was precisely this technique, its subtlety and “evanescing” forms, that would allow me to remove the “sculptural, ” the “grabbable, ” leaving the desired part – that which can only be perceived by some higher human senses than “touch and feel” […] I began to sense a new “vision.” A form defined by the colour perception of faces. Away with the “sculpture” – I hailed a “new day” of my vision! ’

Vladimir Milashevsky would often travel to Pskov Region in the summer season to make sketches, during which time he painted a series of portraits of the locals. Konstantin Fedin was one of the few people who saw the value of the portraits and bought them. Fedin and Vladimir Milashevsky enjoyed a life-long friendship, which first took root in Saratov at the turn of the century, was further shaped by the zeitgeist of the first post-Revolution years in Petrograd, and matured after the War. The two shared similar destinies and creative paths. This is why Fedin immediately understood the essence of Milashevsky’s works.