Rapai’s route

As you stroll along the center of Kyiv, you reveal for yourself so-called “Rapai’s route”: it stretches from the monument to legendary tenor Anatolii Solovianenko in Instytutska Street to the Les Kurbas Monument in Prorizna Street to memorial plaques to Oleksandr Vertynsky, Borys Pasternak, Maximilian Voloshin, Serhii Parajanov, and to Andriivsky Uzviz, to Mikhail Bulgakov. The sculptor’s urban works, which seamlessly blend in the cityscape, include memorial plaques to Mykhailo Hryshko, Oleh Antonov, Mykola Strazhesko, and memorable signs. If one marks all of them with stars on a map, the result will be a pattern that resembles the Sagittarius Constellation, and strong spirit, wisdom, and possession of the arrow of time, which will definitely reach its aim, are typical for this Zodiac sign.

One day famous artist Danylo Lider said about the sculptor: “Mykola Rapai is a magic personality, attractive, like his works.” Apart from the artistic gift, he has a wonderful talent of understanding people. The artist’s gallery of portraits of his close friends includes Serhii Parajanov, Danylo Lider, Heorhii Yakutovych, Serhii Danchenko, Heorhii Tovstonohov, Serhii Yursky, Larysa Kadochnykova, and Liudmyla Smorhachova. And the sculpture portraits of Mozart and Serge Lifar and the compositions “Morning” and “Evening” make you believe that the author is able to hear the music of life.

A connoisseur of antique and European culture, music, and poetry, Rapai created in the mid-1990s a graphic series based on Gospel with a title “Search of the Truth,” pastel drawings of mystical beauty and enlightenment. Mr. Rapai asserts: “You should create lightly, with inspiration and smile. People with a serious face expression have never created anything worth of attention.”

I NEARLY DIED IN 1933: THERE WAS NOTHING TO EAT

 We met Mykola Rapai in his studio. When I saw there horses and joyful centaurs among the graphical works, I could not help asking: where did those horses and centaurs come from?

“Centaur, a.k.a. Sagittarius is my Zodiac sign. And horses are my Kuban reminiscences,” Rapai explained, “During the war we, boys, were grazing herds of horses in the collective farm, we prepared the horses for the front. We drove them to bathe, we grazed them in the steppe, and we looked after them. Horses were my passion, we were fond of them, we raced and felt as if we were fairytale horsemen. I fearlessly broke in the horses, the fear we knocked out by practice. After getting into extreme situations for many times, you don’t feel scared anymore. It happened that the horse threw me down. I rose to my feet, caught the horse, mounted, and rushed ahead without a bridle or a saddle.

“We drove them into the field, and the virgin parts of the land were entirely covered with feather grass. The herd was grazing, and the horse I rode was standing hobbled nearby. I lied down on the grass and I could hear skylarks high in the sky. It was a warm summer morning, the blue sky was cloudless, it was quiet. I have never felt this bliss afterwards, and when I need to imagine the miracle of quietness and delight, I always recall those minutes. When sprinter Valera Borzov was going to the Olympic Games (we are friends), he asked me: ‘If you have insomnia, what do you recall to get rid of unnecessary thoughts?’ He needed to calm down before the start, he was anxious. And I told him about this.

“I had a free childhood, we went to the Kuban to swim. Parents trusted us, we had a feeling of freedom, although there was some supervision, it was not obtrusive. I am lucky to have parents like mine. There have been different kinds of situations, we even starved. I nearly died in 1933, there was nothing to eat. I remember, mother brought me and my sister in spring out of the house and seated us in front of our house. I sat down and everything went black before my eyes – and suddenly everything got extremely orange. (When the song ‘Orange Sky’ was released, I thought, ‘If you only knew, what it is like – when everything turns orange because of starvation.’) We were exhausted, thin as skeletons, a bit longer – and it could be the end. But fortunately, nettle started to grow, and mother started to cook soup with grass. And we survived.”

 I WAS FOND OF PAINTING, BUT I WAS TERRIBLY AFRAID OF COLORS

 How come a village boy became a sculptor?

“My parents were illiterate. My father kept telling me, ‘Son, you need to learn to leave this place.’ Life in the village was terrible – hard work which was barely paid. And I was a very good student, and in the 8th grade I started to paint (I got a set of primitive paints and a thin brush as a present for good studying results). I tried to paint landscapes: our house and poplars. My mother had a look, then our aunt Nadia, our neighbor, came and said: ‘Mykola, you are an artist. Paint something for me.’ I painted a picture for her, then for another neighbor, then I started to draw by squares, I copied the portraits of the chiefs. Students from Surikov Institute came to our collective farm for summer practice, they painted etudes on cartoon and hung their works in the club. My friend Zhenia, who also painted, and I went to see them, and the works smelled oil, solvent, and drying oil. I liked that very much. The students advised us to go to study. Odesa Art School was the closest.

“And after graduation from the ninth grade, I took a briefcase made of veneer and a certificate of identity issued at the raion council (no passports were issued to the village at that time). It was 1946 – the ruin, I had no money for the ticket, it took me over two weeks to reach Odesa on goods trains. I did not know the examination was over, I entered the school and saw a beautiful red-haired girl, a secretary, who asked, ‘Boy, what do you need.’ ‘I want to study for an artist.’ ‘The exams are over, come next year.’ Suddenly the door opened and headmaster Ivan Antonovych entered. He saw me: ‘Why are you here?’ I told him. ‘Tamara, look through the list.’ Then he said, ‘An artist is a broad notion. We have a shortage of students on the sculpture department. Do you want to study there?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ So, I was enrolled without any exams.

“At that time Odesa School had a very high level of teaching. I discovered all kinds of art. I started to love theater, I learned to feel music and enjoy this feeling. I wanted to learn more – I spent much time in libraries, where I studied the history of music and dance. I even took up ballet in the Opera Theater – the ballet master accepted me for character dance, and I was pirouetting. I got so much keen on it that I neglected my studies at school by the third year. Then the headmaster invited me and said: ‘Mykola, make your choice.’ And I chose sculpture.

“After the school I went to Kyiv, where I entered the Art Institute. And painting was a complicated and subtle thing for me, I was fond of it, but I was terribly afraid of colors. This is a special gift, a special feeling, an unskillful person should not take up painting. Now I have come to color and I thought that I am very bold, but I am gratified with the fact that this is no painting, rather painted drawings, and graphical works. Pastel and pencil are graphic materials, so I don’t break the taboo I set for myself. And in sculpture I felt that I understood something, I made some successes back at the art school, and later I created many worthy things. These days it keeps coming, a little.”

KURBAS AND BULGAKOV

Please, tell us how you came to the image of Les Kurbas.

“I became fond of Kurbas back at the beginning of the 1960s, when his name came to light due to the Thaw. Yurii Yakutovych, Oleksandr Hubariev, and I decided in 1964 to go to Solovky to learn more about Kurbas. We were living in a former prison cell – a camping site was made of the prison. The windows overlooked the huge courtyard of the Transfiguration Monastery for men. There was a monastery church with no domes – it served as a dining room for the convicts. That is how a holy place was turned into a hell. We saw the prison cell of Petro Kalnyshevsky, the last commander of the Zaporizhian Sich, who spent 28 years in this hole and died in Solovky at the age of 112. We saw the hermitages, the churches, we painted a lot. Yet we did not find out a thing about Les Kurbas back then. A pure soul, he staged performances, involving the professional convicted actors, and a director came from Moscow to see his productions.”

Is it true that the monument to Les Kurbas in Prorizna Street was established owing to Bohdan Stupka?

“In my studio I had a plaster sketch of Les Kurbas, and Roman Balaian always enjoyed looking at this work. One day he saw in Stupka’s office, when the latter became Minister of Culture, Kurbas’s portrait and asked: ‘Who’s this?’ ‘This is great Les Kurbas.’ ‘This is not Kurbas. Kurbas is in Mykola’s studio.’ ‘Bring him here.’ Roma came to my studio with a driver, they put the sketch into the car and brought to Stupka. He liked it and asked to live it for a couple of days. Later Stupka phoned the then mayor of Kyiv Omelchenko, and I got an invitation to the Kyiv City Hall, after which everything went like clockwork.

“By the way, I had the same thing with Bulgakov. I became fond of his work after his novel The Master and Margarita was published. That was an event of colossal scale, we read this work several times, and Bulgakov became a very attractive personality for me. I made several versions of his portrait and there was a sketch in the studio. And when the officials from the Culture Department came to my studio to see Voloshin’s memorial plaque, they paid attention to Bulgakov: ‘Let’s make it.’”

Today it is impossible to imagine Bulgakov’s Museum without his monument nearby.

“Yes, this is a place for him, near his house. Bulgakov was not a public man, he was intimate both in terms of his essence, and his lifestyle. And the way he sits, his legs and arms crossed is not accidental. I wanted to reveal his inner state: a knot, a knot, a rope – and that’s it, he was practically bound for his whole life and he never broke out. He had very few periods of joy and happiness during his life, he suffered much more. His tender soul demanded very much, he expected much, and many of his expectations never came true. This is the way a person’s fate is created, as well as the circumstances: something depends on the person’s nature, s/he gives impetus to some things, and hinders some other things. I contemplated this, based on the analysis of my own life. I have always been lucky, I have always hoped to get something, and it did come true. This is destiny. Bulgakov could change something, but his upbringing prevented him from doing this. It determines the destiny and brings some corrections. I am a person of peasant upbringing, I am open-minded, I accept many things, later I filter them, I throw away the rubbish, I go ahead with my visor open. Because of his intellect and psychical constitution he complicated much in the analysis of the current events. A great hindrance in his life, it greatly helped him in his creative work. His resistance to life found an astonishing expression in literature.

“That was a hard time, he found himself in the turning point. Many people with bifurcated mind, like his, perished. I escaped this lot, in that difficult time I was simply living, surviving in natural circumstances, my psychic developed in a completely different way. And it means a lot in the life of every person, how we react, have presentiments, plan, and assess things of the past. Everything depends on our inner psychic.”

MAGIC OF AUTHENTICITY

Artist Danylo Lider said that when he saw your works for the first time, they immediately touched him with their absolutely normal realism and magic of authenticity.

“We used to be neighbors: Danylo was born 40 kilometers away from my village. He was a giant, a mystic and very earthy dreamer. When he posed for me, we were talking much, and via mysticism he revealed simple thing. I have a series of graphic works ‘Trees,’ he liked them very much, he came and examined them: ‘Oh, how you felt this!’ and found there the presentiment of Chornobyl, as if they were caught in a bright flash of light. These stunning willows used to grow around a lake in Holosiievo, there are none of them left, but I kept painting them anew. I have a total of 25 of these sheets of paper, I have given them others as a gift, six of them have left, I want to show them at the exhibit.”

You have been lately working on the memorable sign to legendary dancer Serge Lifar.

“I have recently finished it, it can be molded in bronze, but I have no money for this. I am waiting for better times. And a good place has been found for it in the Academy of Dance. A cascade of stairs, a passage to the hall, with the upper light, it will look good there on a polished-stone pedestal.”

Your series of pastel drawings “Search of the Truth,” created in the mid-1990s, called a wide response, and now you have come back to the Gospel plots. Why?

“I am working on the new series in colored pencils, it has different compositions, a different range of colors. It seems to me the result is more interesting: the works are lighter and more fanciful, lyrical, like they should be in this myth. I’ve been offered to exhibit these works in the Chocolate House, I need to find a sponsor to publish the catalogue.

“I am thoroughly studying the Gospels, I reread the Old and New Testaments. I want to illustrate the life of Christ and create pictures for all periods of his life. I have been to Israel twice, and it impressed me with the feelings, the mirages on the verge of visions. The situation in that land is merciful, there is something special about it, but I don’t know what exactly. But I have felt well this merciful thing: I am on the Biblical land and I was extremely happy to step on it.

“I have a pastel drawing, A Sermon near the Sea of Galilee, with a mountainous landscape in the background, those are Golan Heights, when I came there I was impressed to see that I guessed the color and contours of the hills so precisely. And when I came to the Judaic desert, I saw that Bedouins resemble my pictures very much.

“In the Louvre there is a the huge canvas by Veronese Wedding Feast in Cana, which depicts Golan Heights, the palace, the feast, tens of characters, columns, statues, gold. And that was a poor village, it has not changed: small houses, small spaces. Leonardo’s Annunciation is luxurious! It depicts a lady in rich clothes, but there was nothing of this kind in impoverished Palestine. Do you remember The Presentation of the Virgin Mary by Titian? But at that time the church looked quite different than the imagination of present-day people depicts it, and Solomon’s first church was not wealthy, it was not luxurious. I was thinking on how to show human moment, but without pompousness. In The Last Supper I placed the disciples on the floor: Ancient Jews were lying during the dinner, according to the Roman principle, but they could not lie in that room, because it is too small – I saw it. They were sitting secretly like plotters, and the feeling of secrecy should be present on paper. So, in all of my works – Nativity of Jesus, Escape to Egypt, Leaving for Egypt, Sermon on the Mount, Pieta – I decided to remove the cover of layers, I took the essence as the base.”

IN THE MORNING I COME TO THE STUDIO, SIT DOWN, AND DRAW. AND I FEEL IMMENSELY HAPPY

Your studio is one of Kyiv’s legendary places. They say it used to be called “Salon-Tavern-Confessional.” Many different people have been here, actors, litterateurs, scholars, sportsmen…

“When we were friends with Serhii Parajanov, he brought Roman Balaian to my studio, and we became friends forever. Parajanov left, and Roman and I stayed. Circumstances are more powerful than we, and these days it is hard to reach the level of circumstances – the scale of values has changed. And Roman and I are quite ironically-minded, we have a feature to ponder the events and play up any topics, we ridicule many things. I have met with very wealthy people, communicated and bathed in their warmth and intellectuality. This is my huge luck in life. The moment of communication with a person is first and foremost for me, I can put aside my work and complete it later. I have got much warm response, I enriched myself, and these people were drawn to me later. Everything started with my offer to make their portraits. I made a portrait and we stayed friends.

“A person is sitting on the podium, I am working, we talk, and s/he opens himself/herself. On the whole, when people stop noticing the attention on themselves – this always takes place because of the monotonousness of the process, I model, find something, at first we communicate, but then the person shrinks into his/her shell. S/he changes before my eyes: his/her muscles relax, the corners of the mouth go down. S/he starts thinking about things of his/her own, I look and see: the person has retired to his/her shell and as a rule becomes sad. It is almost every time so. S/he becomes sad and troubled, and I understand that s/he has many problems. Besides being a specific kind of person, s/he is being oppressed by some forces s/he wants to escape from. This is the feeling I have. Then I start talking again – and s/he comes back.”

Are you a cheerful person?

“Very much. Life is a great gift granted to me and I appreciate it very much. And I love it. How can one not love life? What can you love then? Positive mood is my obligatory condition, because there are much more good things than bad things in life. You simply need to see this. I want to finish Wives who bring peace. In the morning I come to the studio, sit down, and draw. And I feel immensely happy. Then I notice that it is already evening. And tomorrow I will come to work here again.”