In the "victory" May days we once again speak about the Great Patriotic War. For decades we have remembered relatives and fellow townspeople — boys and girls, fathers and mothers — who in June 1941 unexpectedly became soldiers and defenders.
Museums preserve the "living" memory of the war — in audio and video recollections, in recordings, documents and photographs. In the collection of the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda museum-reserve, alongside such testimonies, there are paintings by a local artist — "sketches of the years of hardship" seen through an eyewitness's eyes. At the start of the war Anatoly Ivanovich Yahrugin had only just turned five, and he greeted Victory as a nine-year-old who had been forced to grow up early.
"The events of that time were engraved so deeply in his memory that later they 'spilled over' onto his canvases. They depict the daily life of rear-area Alexandrov; in one you can even make out the museum in the background. This is the painting 'Women of the Alexandrovsky District during the 1941–1945 war who collected and supplied fuel to institutions and residents of the district.' The artist painted it from his childhood memories of attending Kindergarten No. 1, where his mother worked as a nanny. All the staff were sent to gather firewood. In winter the women felled trees by the roots, and in spring the logs were floated down the Seraya River. They were then hauled out with grappling hooks in town, stacked into piles, loaded onto trucks and distributed to organizations. The artist deliberately depicted the moment when the logs are pulled ashore at the foot of the architectural ensemble of Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. It was precisely here that the riverbed widened and there was convenient vehicle access," says Irina Korotkova, collections curator of the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda museum-reserve.
On two other canvases — the long-awaited meeting of the victors. Soldiers returned home in freight trains that stopped at practically every station. They were greeted everywhere with ceremony, with an orchestra and flowers. This moment is captured in the painting "Coming Home with Victory, Hello Motherland." And in the painting "Return with Victory" we see the moment when the defender meets his family. The soldier lifts his little son high — a boy who grew up without him. Nearby are the elderly father and the beloved wife. Chickens roam the yard, the vegetable garden has been dug, the field beyond the outskirts has been plowed — that peaceful, half-forgotten life of the war years to which every person aspired.
The works of A.I. Yahrugin are imbued with a special perception of the world. They are distinctive in every aspect, beginning with their unusually wordy, childishly "detailed" titles. Specialists classify his work as naive art, but it is precisely because of this that we can see the wartime today through the eyes of the child he was at the time.
Press service of the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda museum-reserve.
