Mykola Filimonov: sketch of the artist’s “portrait”

Abstract

The relevance of the study lies in the need to revive the memory of the Ukrainian artist M. Filimonov, whose name has been forgotten today. In the 1920s his activity was at the center of the musical life of Kyiv, but geographically was not limited to the borders of Ukraine — the singer also performed in Russia and Latvia. Perhaps one of the reasons for the musician’s almost complete oblivion was the fact that Filimonov was repressed in the 1930s , like many other representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

Main objectives to reconstruct the life and career of the singer, composer, and teacher M. Filimonov. It was possible only with the documentary evidence and memoirs of contemporaries that have been found at the moment.

The methodology provides for the use of the reconstruction of a creative biography (to restore the life path and the creative portrait, to identify factual errors in reference sources), as well as a historical, retrospective and systematic analysis of archival sources, classification and interpretation of facts, their generalization (to describe various areas of the artist’s activity).

Results and conclusions. Based on archival documents, the article reconstructs and maximally details the facts of the life and work of the Ukrainian singer, composer and teacher M. Filimonov. The artist’s personal correspondence, personal documents and portrait photographs, comments, photographs of colleagues, memoirs of the artist’s contemporaries have been introduced into scientific circulation. In addition to the article, a list of his works was drawn up, the music manuscripts of which were preserved in the personal fund from the collection of the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine. At the moment, only the first attempt at reproducing the «portrait» of M. Filimonov has been proposed. Of course, this “sketch” can and should be supplemented with biographical details — in particular, about the artist’s childhood, about his performing work as a chamber and opera artist (considering individual creative seasons, the singer’s repertoire, press reviews etc.), about his composer’s opuses (although would be based on the works preserved in the archives). A separate area of research can be the characterization of M. Filimonov as a teacher in various institutions of Kyiv in the 1920s –1940s .