The article examines the special role of the Russian manor in the formation of the worldview, aesthetics and painting style of Viktor Borisov-Musatov. In the eyes of the artist, the manor appears as a specific place that generates a spectrum of feelings creating the inner landscape of the artist’s consciousness and making it possible to explicate it through his work: a sense of harmony in respect of existence, expressed by the consonance of colours, and at the same time its evanescence, a sense of beauty and suffering from its evanescence, nostalgia for its loss and absorption over time. For Musatov, the manor was a space where one could find peace of mind, while at the same time understanding its doom, a symbol of the inevitably moribund aesthetics of life of pre-revolutionary Russia. Such an interpretation of the manor phenomenon turned out to be unclaimed, either by the public around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, who preferred narrative-realistic paintings, nor even by Soviet viewers. Nowadays, Musatov’s manor world appears as an emblematic Heimat—an artistic correlate of a European Russia of the past.
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