Valentina Kropivnitskaya, the wife of Oskar Rabin, died in Paris on 23 December (Lenta.ru, in Russian).
Valentina Kropivnitskaya, the wife of Oskar Rabin, died in Paris on 23 December (Lenta.ru, in Russian).
Short biography of Alik Sidorov (see IZO earlier today) (RIA Novosti, in Russian). His last project appears to have been an unusual-looking ultra-high-format camera (paralleltravel, in Russian).
Alik Sidorov, co-editor of A-Ya, the journal of unofficial art published in Paris in 1979-80s, has died in Moscow (Open Space, in Russian).
The legendary ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya, winner of four Stalin Prizes, has died (Open Space, in Russian).
Russian solo round-the-world yachtsman Evgeni Gvozdev has died in Italy, probably drowned in a storm near Naples (Kursor, in Russian).
Reactions to the death of Aleksi II, including this one (mrparker, in Russian):
Malefactors kidnapped a two-month-old child who had been brought to the church by its parents to be christened. But when the service for the peace of the patriarch's soul began, the inconsolable parents found their child.
Biography of Aleksi II (BBC).
Aleksi II, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus, died at his residence in Peredelkino at 11 am this morning (BFM, in Russian). Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was born in Tallinn in 1929. He's a controversial figure under whose leadership, in recent years, the Orthodox Church has become a powerful force in Russia.
The last surviving emigre-citizen of the old Russian Empire, Andrei Shmeman, has died in Paris aged 88; he left Russia as a child with his father, an officer in the imperial army (MIGnews, in Russian).
Stalin's grandson Iosif, by profession a cardiologist, has died in Moscow. During his life he declined to write memoirs and rarely gave interviews (Ekho Moskvy, in Russian).
The graphic artist Boris Efimov (Yefimov) has died, aged 108 (Daily Telegraph). It's a strange business, thinking about the depths of time that extremely old people link to. About 1980, when working as a caretaker at a block of flats in the Marylebone Road, I got to know a gentleman, a Mr Solomon, who was very nearly one hundred years old. He came from a family of similarly long-lived people. One of his relatives - maybe a great-grandfather - had told him, way back circa 1885-90, about how he, as a child, had seen Napoleon in Trieste. I looked it up: that would have been in 1797, I think.
The well-known sculptor Lazar Gadaev has died in Moscow aged 70 (Kommersant, in Russian).
Possibly Solzhenitsyn's last interview (Independent).
There are obituaries to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89, all over the internet. I'm linking to Zinovy Zinik's unhagiographical take in a recent review of The Solzhenitsyn Reader (Times Literary Supplement). UPDATE: fixed broken link.
Death of an old-school kremlinologist, helper to Norton Dodge (LA Times). Update: he was apparently a great Rukhin collector (thanks, MK).
The illustrator Mai Miturich, son of the graphic artist Petr Miturich and of Vera Khlebnikova (sister of futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov), has died in Moscow (Open Space, in Russian).
Dmitri Prigov, hospitalised following a heart attack, has died, reports Lenta.ru.
I met Prigov in the 80s and bought a drawing from him that I still have, a melancholy satirical image of Mikhail Gorbachev drawn in ink on newspaper. Some years after the collapse of the Soviet Union he moved to England and set up home in Stanmore on the outskirts of London. Here his wife, his son Andrei and Andrei's family lived, and here he too was based, when not shuttling to Moscow and around the world. He observed a rigorous, almost monastic regime: the day was divided into the hours for writing and the hours for drawing, with a nap between; he worked deep into the night. When he relaxed, he smoked and drank beer. I saw him read his poetry in London last year, at a gathering of British musicians and writers. "Perform" is a better description than "read": sitting at a table, he delivered his work in a sonorous dramatic fashion, sometimes almost shouting, sometimes almost singing. It was a compelling experience even to the bulk of the audience, which was non-Russian-speaking.
His website (all in Russian) is here.
