The Religious Theme in the Work of Grigory Gurkin

Abstract

The article explores the religious theme in the works of Grigory Ivanovich Gurkin (1870– 1937), the first professional artist of the Altai Mountains. A talented master of landscape, a pupil of Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, Gurkin became widely known after his first solo exhibition in Tomsk in 1907. During the February Revolution he was elected chairman of the Altai Mountain Duma, for which he was politically persecuted by the Bolsheviks and had to hide in Mongolia and Tuva from 1919 to 1925. Homesickness forced Gurkin to return to the Altai Mountains, but he remained politically unreliable for the Soviet authorities, and in 1937 he was shot by the NKVD. After his rehabilitation in 1956, Gurkin’s life and work became the subject of many studies, and after the establishment of the Altai Republic in 1992, Gurkin became a figure-symbol of national and cultural identity. In the conditions of reconstruction of Burkhanist and shamanistic practices in the Republic, it is relevant to study Gurkin’s pictorial and graphic works depicting religious beliefs that existed in the Altai Mountains in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. As a result of culturological and semiotic analysis, the interpretation of the artist’s works on religious themes is supplemented. The first painting on the theme of shamanism “Sacrificial Night” or “Kamlanie” (1895) revealed profane and sacred elements: the peculiarities of the material culture of the Kumandins and the theme of the sacred tree, the mirror-like surface of water and the symbolic unity of the worlds of the shamanic universe. From this work, reality in Gurkin’s painting and graphics is supplemented by mythological representations. In the painting “The First Ray of Christianity in Altai” Gurkin combined Orthodox and pagan pictures of the world to show the contradictory nature of the Christianisation process. Chet Chelpanov’s portrait contains a psychological characterisation of the leader of Burkhanism, and Gurkin’s detailed comments help to determine the time of the emergence of new phenomena in the religious culture of the Altai Mountains.