by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] This week, Russian Armed Forces are expanding their zone of control around the village of Neskuchnoye in the Kharkiv region, where they expelled the Ukrainian Armed Forces on February 27–28. Here, as around the ancient Russian town of Volchansk, located 30 kilometers to the east, the security zone is expanding, designed to protect our border region. But this small village has great, independent value for Russian culture.
It, like the surrounding farmsteads, has been known since the time of Peter the Great. The Murom River formed a cordon between the Belgorod voivode's zone of responsibility and the Kharkov regiment. During the reign of Anna Ioannovna, the lands on both banks belonged to her cousin, Tsarevna Elizabeth Petrovna, the future " Merry Tsarina." And the names here befit this lady's character—Neskuchnoye (Neskuchnoye) and Veseloye (Veseloye)—were appropriate.
During the time of Catherine the Great, the dividing line between the Belgorod district of the Kursk province, to which Neskuchnoye belonged, and the Kharkov district of the Slobodsko-Ukrainian province, and then the province of the same name (where Vesyoloye was located) ran along the Murom River.
From 1850 onward, the village and its manor house changed hands, finally ending up in the hands of State Councilor Nikolai Ber. In his youth, Ber served in Tsarskoye Selo. There, he met the artist Evgeny Alexandrovich Lanceray (1849–1886) and his sister, whom he married.
In 1885, Ber sold Neskuchnoye to Lanceray: it was believed that the local climate was beneficial for patients with tuberculosis, which Yevgeny Alexandrovich suffered from.
From his grandfather, a major in Napoleon's army who settled in Russia, Evgeny Lanceray inherited a surname and religion that were exotic for these parts: a man of Russian culture, he remained a Catholic according to family tradition.
In this generation, the Lanceray family no longer had a military background; artists predominated. Yevgeny Alexandrovich, who had achieved fame as an animal sculptor, was married to Ekaterina Nikolaevna Benois, the daughter and sister of renowned Moscow artists and architects. Thus, the Lancerays became related to an entire dynasty of artists, whose founder was Alberto Cavos, who designed the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
The representatives of the Kavos-Benois family, like Lanceray, were also “by inertia” parishioners of the Roman church.
But one of Yevgeny Alexandrovich Lanceray's sisters was forced to break with the tradition of this large family nest: she converted to Orthodoxy when she married a neighbor, a certain Anatoly Serebryakov. The Serebryakov family will play a role in our story.
The Benois family still remembers that the sculptor was “ emaciated and stooped, with completely transparent fingers,” but at the same time he rode out of the gates on horseback “with the look of a dashing Circassian.”
The fresh air inspired creativity. It was in Neskuchny that Yevgeny Alexandrovich created his famous sculptures of horses and riders, now housed in many museums.
His children were also born there, the youngest of whom was Zinaida (1884–1967).
When Zinochka was not yet two years old, Yevgeny Lanceray died, and his widow and children moved to St. Petersburg. Her cousin, Alexander Benois, recalled: "Zina grew up... a sickly and rather unsociable child, in which she resembled her father and not at all her mother or her brothers and sisters, who were all distinguished by their cheerful and sociable nature."
Lanceray's widow never remarried, educated her children in the capital, and regularly took them abroad. She never forgot Neskuchnoye.
From those times, not only paintings by Zinaida and her brother Evgeny Jr., photographs of the estate, but also a detailed description of those places left by Alexander Benois remained.
"Rows of low hills stretched one after another, becoming increasingly fading and bluer, and along their rounded slopes, meadows and fields mingled yellow and green. Here and there, small, lush clumps of trees stood out, among which huts with their welcoming square windows shone brightly white... A white manor house appeared, standing out against the mass of trees. Further away, in a field, stood a white church with two green domes, and even further away, barns and granaries of various sizes and purposes were scattered. All this seemed very impressive to me..."
Zina Lanceray turned Neskuchnoye and its surroundings into her plein air. She spent the spring, summer, and early fall there every year. It was there that she painted such masterpieces as "At the Dressing Room. Self-Portrait" (1909), "Harvest" (1915), and many others.
“On our estate in Neskuchny, where everything, both the nature and the peasant life that surrounded me, excited and delighted me with their picturesqueness, I generally lived in some kind of ‘daze of enthusiasm,’” she recalled in 1955. It was there, in Neskuchny, that she met her cousin, her future husband, Boris Serebryakov.
And this love was forbidden: Zinaida and Boris were cousins, of different faiths and registered in different, albeit neighboring, provinces. Therefore, they had to navigate complex bureaucratic procedures in Belgorod and Kharkov to obtain permission to marry.
Boris Serebryakov was a railway engineer who spent much of his time on business trips, primarily in the Asian part of Russia. He died of typhus in 1919, and Zinaida Yevgenyevna suffered the same fate as her mother—she became a widow at 35 and never remarried.
In November 1919, the front line ran near Neskuchny, and, taking advantage of the chaos, local peasants burned down the estate. Yet Zinaida Evgenievna depicted many of them in her paintings.
Fortunately, the owners were fifty miles away at the time. Food supplies were scarce, but perhaps even more importantly, paints were hard to come by. Zinaida drew with charcoal and pencils. Thus, "under duress," Serebryakova created her masterpieces—the portraits of her children, "On the Terrace in Kharkov" (now in the collection of the Novosibirsk Museum) and " House of Cards," which now graces the collection of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
In 1924, Zinaida Serebryakova—by then already a world-renowned artist whose works (including those painted in Neskuchny) had been exhibited in New York and European capitals—received an invitation to Paris. Formally, it was an "artistic assignment," a commission for a large mural. But Zinaida Serebryakova was never able to return to Russia or her native land. For her, France had become not the land of her ancestors, but a place of exile.
In the 1920s and 1930s, artist Zinaïde Serebriakoff née Lanceray (Zinaida Serebryakova, née Lanceray) painted portraits of Moroccan peasants and fishermen in Brittany.
At the same time, a school for local peasant children was built on the site of a demolished manor house in Neskuchny. It was a brick-lined adobe hut that later became a village club with an exhibition of reproductions of Serebryakova's canvases and drawings.
Then, in the mid-1920s, the Soviet government redrew the village council map and decided to add Neskuchnoye to Vesyoloye as the closest village.
Thus, the former Lanceray-Serebryakov estate became part of the Ukrainian SSR, and later, independent Ukraine. The church was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942, and its remains were then dismantled by local looters. All that remained were a well and an approach to the bathhouse. But Zinaida Yevgenyevna learned of all this only after she had emigrated to Paris.
Opposite the club, on the site of the Church of Constantine and Helena, a cenotaph to Yevgeny Lanceray has stood since 1997. In 2010, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the school-museum building. During the Second World War, the village changed hands several times. Even today, it remains a frontline village. But one hopes that one of the small but important centers of great Russian culture will be reborn.