One of the items presented at the literature exhibition ‘The Worthy Son of Motherland’ is a lithograph ‘Contemporary Russian Writers’ dated 1857 from the periodical issued by Vasily Fyodorovich Timm Russky Khudozhestvenny Listok.
Georg Willem Timm known as Vasily Fyodorovich Timm was born in 1820. He graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Russky Khudozhestvenny Listok became the most important case in his life. This illustrated periodical contained lithographs on the most relevant topics, as well as eye-witnessed stories, sketches from folk live, portraits of outstanding personalities. This periodical was quite popular and was circulated by subscription.
The presented lithograph depicts Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrassov, Ivan Ivanovich Panayev, Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich and Vladimir Alexandrovich Sologub. All of them worked for Sovremennik journal. There is no portrait of Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in the lithograph, even though by 1857 he already was the actual leader and the central author of the journal. People both in the capital and in Russian provinces were awaiting his articles, and each of them provoked a wave of sometimes-opposite opinions.
The ‘old’ Sovremennik employees did not share Chernyshevsky’s views. The relations inside the journal became especially strained in 1855 — after Chernyshevsky defended his dissertation Esthetic Relation of Art to Reality. His statement about art being a surrogate of the reality seemed extremely shocking.
There are no depictions of Chernyshevsky in any other pieces published by Timm, and we can do nothing but speculate about it. One of the possible explanations — the personality of almost scandalous writer did not fit with Timm’s concept. The following arrest and imprisonment of Chernyshevsky quite justified the position of the publisher famous for his extremely cool-headed perception of Russian realities.
The collections of the memorial estate of Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky hold more than 40 lithographs from Russky Khudozhestvenny Listok published by Timm.
Georg Willem Timm known as Vasily Fyodorovich Timm was born in 1820. He graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Russky Khudozhestvenny Listok became the most important case in his life. This illustrated periodical contained lithographs on the most relevant topics, as well as eye-witnessed stories, sketches from folk live, portraits of outstanding personalities. This periodical was quite popular and was circulated by subscription.
The presented lithograph depicts Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrassov, Ivan Ivanovich Panayev, Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich and Vladimir Alexandrovich Sologub. All of them worked for Sovremennik journal. There is no portrait of Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in the lithograph, even though by 1857 he already was the actual leader and the central author of the journal. People both in the capital and in Russian provinces were awaiting his articles, and each of them provoked a wave of sometimes-opposite opinions.
The ‘old’ Sovremennik employees did not share Chernyshevsky’s views. The relations inside the journal became especially strained in 1855 — after Chernyshevsky defended his dissertation Esthetic Relation of Art to Reality. His statement about art being a surrogate of the reality seemed extremely shocking.
There are no depictions of Chernyshevsky in any other pieces published by Timm, and we can do nothing but speculate about it. One of the possible explanations — the personality of almost scandalous writer did not fit with Timm’s concept. The following arrest and imprisonment of Chernyshevsky quite justified the position of the publisher famous for his extremely cool-headed perception of Russian realities.
The collections of the memorial estate of Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky hold more than 40 lithographs from Russky Khudozhestvenny Listok published by Timm.
