Letters to A. N. Benois (Russian: Письма к А. Н. Бенуа; full title in the later reissue Письма Н. К. Рериха к А. Н. Бенуа, 1917, 1936–1939 гг.) is a published collection of letters by the Russian painter, writer and public figure Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh, 1874–1947) to the painter, critic and art historian Alexandre Benois (Aleksandr Nikolaevich Benua, 1870–1960). The edition presents Roerich’s side of an exchange between two leading figures of the Russian Silver Age. It documents the revival, after a long silence, of a relationship that began in the milieu of the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) movement.
Authorship and subject
The author is Nicholas Roerich, the St. Petersburg-born artist, archaeologist and theosophically inclined thinker known for his stage designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Britannica describes him as a Russian painter, writer and scenic designer, best known for his set and costume designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
The addressee, Alexandre Benois, is described in the volume’s preface as one of the central figures of early twentieth-century Russian artistic culture: a well-known painter, critic, and ideologist of the World of Art society, of which Roerich became chairman in 1910. Roerich and Benois had known each other since their school years. Benois, Walter Nuvel, Konstantin Somov and Dmitry Filosofov, the later core of the World of Art circle, studied at the same gymnasium (the private school of Karl May). Benois, however, recalled that at school he had little contact with Roerich, who was younger and not part of his circle.
Contents and chronological span
The letters fall into two distinct periods. The first is a single letter of 1917, written from Sortavala (Serdobol) in Finland on 25 May of that year. In March 1917 Roerich and Benois had become members of the Commission for the Arts headed by Maxim Gorky. The 1917 letter belongs to this revolutionary moment and shows concern for the fate of artistic property and cultural monuments during the upheavals of that year, including reports of the burning of an old estate house at Bologoe.
The second and principal group dates from 1936 to 1939. After a break in their communication lasting from 1918, Roerich was the first to write, in 1936, to his associate from the World of Art; over three years he wrote Benois seventeen letters. The archive of Roerich’s correspondence in the Roerich museum catalogue lists these seventeen letters, dated from 24 June 1936 to 14 March 1939 and sent from Naggar, Kulu, in India.
The motivation for renewing contact was Roerich’s campaign for the protection of cultural treasures. At his initiative the “Red Cross of Culture” was created, which began the Pact for the protection of cultural monuments; wishing to enlist politicians and cultural figures of world renown, he turned in 1936 to Alexandre Benois, who had by then lived in emigration in Paris for ten years. The letters accordingly return often to the Roerich Pact and its Banner of Peace. In one of them Roerich sends Benois pamphlets about the Pact, along with his latest book, Nerushimoe (“The Indestructible”), which again insists on what is imperishably dear to all. Another letter offers the Museum library a Riga collection devoted to the Banner of St. Sergius of Radonezh and a pamphlet on the Pact for the Protection of Cultural Values.
The tone of the 1936 letters is conciliatory and emphasizes common purpose. An excerpt from the opening letter of 24 June 1936 speaks of artists travelling in one direction as “no longer enemies” and of hearts growing more friendly the longer the shared road. Elsewhere Roerich writes of serving together “on the field of culture,” presenting this as a stimulus to joint work. He also mentions that in India he now receives the Paris émigré daily Poslednie Novosti, so that he can follow Benois’s articles. Benois’s articles there were his regular “Art Letters” (Khudozhestvennye pisʹma), which, according to a Russian Museum exhibition catalogue, were printed weekly in the 1930s and 1940s.
A relationship of contrasting temperaments
A commentary in the collected edition of Roerich’s letters observes that these 1930s letters are especially interesting because the two men differed in temperament and in their views on many questions. It adds that although Benois had made a number of critical remarks about Roerich, it was Roerich who made the first approach after the long interruption. The same commentary notes that at one point Roerich alludes to a review by Benois that had appeared in the Paris émigré press, later reprinted in the Soviet collection Aleksandr Benua razmyshliaet (Moscow, 1968).
Preface and editorial apparatus
The volume opens with a preface that is itself by Roerich: a short essay of 1937 titled Ob Aleksandre Benua, ego slavnoi semʹe, kartinakh, postanovkakh i istorii iskusstva (“On Alexandre Benois, His Glorious Family, Paintings, Productions and the History of Art”). In it Roerich surveys Benois’s long career and the artistic dynasty from which he came. He remarks that it is rare for a whole family to produce so many remarkable figures in the arts, naming Benois’s father, the architect Nikolai Leontievich, and his brothers Albert, a watercolourist, and Leonty, an architect and rector of the Academy of Arts. The essay recalls Benois’s exhibitions and organizing work on behalf of art.
The letters themselves are held in several Russian collections. The edition draws on letters held in the Russian Museum, the Benois Family Museum, and the Central State Museum of Literature and Art. The Benois Family Museum is in Peterhof, outside St. Petersburg.
Publication history
The book was published in St. Petersburg in 1993. A bibliographic entry gives the title as Pisʹma k A. N. Benua (1917–1939), St. Petersburg: Serdtse, 1993. The text posted on the Russian Roerich-related website Etika vo mne gives the imprint as St. Petersburg: the Roerich Museum-Estate in Izvara, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and the Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1993. A further citation for the same publication identifies it as issue 4 of the series N. K. Rerikh. Pisʹma k A. N. Benua, St. Petersburg, 1993. The editorial notes in the 1993 St. Petersburg edition are credited, in a citation in a Russian dissertation abstract, to E. V. Alekseeva, L. V. Korotkina and A. A. Malygin.
In 2011 the text was reissued as an electronic and print-on-demand edition by the Moscow publisher Direct-Media. This edition is listed as 84 pages, ISBN 9785998949142. The letters have also been reprinted in editions of Roerich’s wider correspondence, including the multi-volume Pisʹma (Letters) of Nicholas Roerich, and are available online in the “Letters to various addressees, 1930s–1940s” section of the Russian site Etika vo mne.
Significance
The collection is a source for the later years of Roerich’s public activity. It shows his efforts, from his base in the Kulu Valley, to recruit prominent émigré intellectuals to the cause of the Roerich Pact, signed in Washington in 1935. It also records the reconciliation, undertaken at Roerich’s initiative, with a former colleague from the World of Art, whose own memoirs and criticism are a principal source for the history of that circle. Because only Roerich’s side of the exchange is printed, the book is chiefly a record of his own views on culture, art and the defence of cultural heritage, and of how he addressed one of the leading arbiters of Russian artistic taste.
