V–A–C Sreda online magazine continues its three-month programme dedicated to the earth and its different meanings, associations, and interpretations in culture, art, folklore, and science.
In this issue, we publish a text by the jewellery historian Vladimir Ivanov on the Soviet sculptor and master stone cutter Vasily Konovalenko. Many myths and legends surround the artist’s life and work, and Konovalenko’s personality itself was full of contradictions—a renowned sculptor, he was also a set designer for ballets in major Soviet theatres and a master craftsman of Fabergé forgeries.
Ivanov creates a portrait of a talented artist with a complex fate that reflected the peculiarities of the late Soviet Union—a land of men and myths.
The sculptor Vasily Vasilivich Konovalenko is often seen as the link between the masters of the House of Fabergé and contemporary jewellers. A number of major publications in both Russian and English have been dedicated to his work, however, despite an abundance of material, much in the artist’s story remains unclear, and key moments in his biography, for example, his involvement in the Zinger-Nikolaevsky case at the start of the 1970s—a case this article examines separately—are rife with conjecture and false rumours.
Konovalenko strove to create myths about himself, casting himself as the fairytale “Danila-master.” He substantially retouched his biography, most of all the part relating to his family’s fate during the war years, a particularly sensitive subject in the postwar USSR. It is no accident that the sculptor based his “stone-cut” biography on his work on the sets for Sergey Prokofiev’s ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad. Trying on the clothes of the “Danila-master, ” Konovalenko proclaimed himself the hero of a new, post-Stalinist period—a self-made man and rebel single-handedly overcoming the inertia of the social order in which he lived. But who really was Konovalenko, and what truth is concealed by Pavel Bazhov’s tale of Danila?
As biographers have often emphasised, Vasily Konovalenko came from the lower social classes—he was born to a family of peasants in the village of Petrovka, which, until the revolution of 1917, was a part of the Taurida Governorate. Konovalenko moved to Leningrad in 1951 and almost immediately took up a post at the Kirov Theatre—one of the most important theatres in the USSR. It was here that he became involved in productions, for which he would design the sets and produce sketches. This said, Konovalenko saw his work for the theatre more as a profession, ensuring him an income.
Konovalenko’s career as a theatre artist took off in the 1960s: after he joined the Union of Artists, he was given his own workshop on Vasilyevsky Island and put on ballet productions in various cities across the USSR. There is no need to talk of any kind of opposition on Konovalenko’s part: he made his career as a successful Soviet artist–decorator, playing by the existing rules. However, it was at this time that his interesting transition from theatre art to stone cutting took place, with which the most mysterious episode in his biography was connected—the forgery of Fabergé figurines and his involvement in the Zinger-Nikolaevsky case
Konovalenko made a brilliant career as a theatre artist, but it was hardly ballet productions that led him to the art of stone cutting. During the second half of the 1960s, the Western world was overcome with a fever of interest in pre-revolutionary Russia, and, in particular, in the creations of Fabergé. This interest was shared by a part of the Soviet party elites, the artistic intelligentsia. A “grey” antiques market formed in the USSR, meeting the demands of the “proto-bourgoisie” within the country and also working abroad. The story of the Zinger-Nikolaevsky group would come to form an important episode in the illegal trade of works of art. The Zinger-Nikolaevsky group was the first to begin the major underground production of jewellery and stoneware “in the old style, ” and to carry out a subsequent reselling, in part abroad. One area of the group’s activities consisted in manufacturing forgeries of various Fabergé creations—and Vasily Konovalenko was directly involved in this. The group introduced Kovalenko to work with stone, putting all the necessary conditions at his disposal: equipment, access to stones, and opportunities to sell his creations.
The circumstances of this criminal case came to be widely known through their dramatisation in the film The Shepherd Boy with the Cucumber, a part of the Investigations by Experts series that was shown on state television in 1979. This said, the investigation files have remained closed, and those directly involved in the case have never made public statements about it. The family of the artist never mentions the Zinger-Nikolaevsky case, considering those involved the victims of the socialist system and Konovalenko only an accidental witness. The persons involved in this major case were people who were connected to Konovalenko by close ties of friendship: Eduard Zinger, a dentist who had legal permission to work with the precious metals from which dental crowns were made, and Naum Nikolaevsky, a employee of the Design Institute in Moscow.
One more source of information about this case is Hustling on Gorky Street, a semi-documentary book by the emigrant Yuri Brokhin, an entire chapter of which— “The ‘Successor’ to Fabergé”—is dedicated to the activities of Naum Nikolaevsky. The author of the book refers to the fact that he worked as a scriptwriter for documentary films, and consequently had access to the case files, as well as having been acquainted with the persons involved. Nikolaevsky is said to have headed the laboratory at the Institute of Mining Affairs of the Academy of Sciences, and to have dealt antiques since his student days. He saw his first Fabergé creations in an antique shop in Leningrad and purchased an agate hippopotamus with silver hooves.
At first, Nikolaevsky sold his works through a vendor at a Moscow antiques shop he was acquainted with, after that through a diplomat who paid him in gold coins and put his works up for auction in Europe and the United States. Telling truth from conjecture in Brokhin’s book is no easy task—most likely, Brokhin united all those involved in the case in the figure of Nikolaevsky, and Konovalenko is only mentioned at the end of the chapter, almost accidentally.
This said, there is no doubt that the Zinger-Nikolaevsky group was engaged in the manufacture of stone-cut figurines “in the Fabergé style”—investigators transferred a whole collection of such creations to the State Historical Museum. Among them were three large stone-cut figurines: Woman in a Shawl, Coachman, House Painter, figurines of animals quite large in comparison with those by Fabergé himself—a hare, a cat, a hippopotamus, a bear, a rhinoceros, a dolphin, mice, elephants—as well as a signet ring and decorative, carved coats of arms. Images of these objects can be seen in the online catalogue of the State Historical Museum.
In the end, Marina Postnikova, an expert heading the department of precious metals at the State Historical Museum, stated that the objects had a “museum significance.” Postinkova, it seems, considered all these figurines, or a part of them, to be genuine Fabergé, or at the very least the work of pre-revolutionary stonecutters.
However, in reality, the crudeness of the stonecutting work and middling quality of the materials used leaves no doubt: before us are forgeries. Their historical value lies in the fact that they are the first stone-cut Fabergé forgeries in the USSR. Postnikova’s mistake is unremarkable: the stonecutting work of Fabergé was not studied at that time in the Soviet Union and there were no similar works in the State Historical Museum collection, which meant Postnikova could only have used illustrated publications by Kenneth Snowman, a jewellery art researcher, and by Henry Charles Bainbridge, a specialist on the work of Karl Fabergé. It is worth noting that Konovalenko drew on these same books as sources when manufacturing the forgeries. Here is how his daughter recalls working with a Fabergé album in a library collection on his instructions:
The book was printed in English. It seems he had undertaken a serious study of this theme, because there were figurines there. It’s a very long time since I held the book in my hands, which is why I don’t remember exactly what I translated, but it was interesting and everything was very clear: in general, it is from the Latin that we take the Russian names of minerals and stones. He asked me to accurately translate the names of the stones from which the figurines were made, along with their accurate dimensions. In order to do that I had to go to the central library, because it was specialist literature, and wasn’t freely accessible…
One of the figurines, Matchmaker, is mentioned by Géza von Habsburg, an leading specialist on the work of Fabergé:
…He [Naum Nikolaevsky] appeared in Geneva at the end of the 1980s in the guise of a collector wishing to sell a Fabergé matchmaker figurine at auction.
The researcher ascribes a whole gallery of forgeries, more than 100 objects, to Nikolaevsky and Konovalenko. A number of them, according to the academic, were manufactured by an “unusually gifted craftsman”—this collection, beginning from the middle of the 1970s, changed hands many times.
At the end of 1973, completely unexpectedly, a personal exhibition of Vasily Konovalenko opened at the Russian Museum. Despite the fact that there are no documents about the organisation of the exhibition in Konovalenko’s archive, its story roams from book to book, recalling the plot of a magical tale: an unexpected meeting with the writer Sergey Mikhalkov and his wife Natalya Konchalovskaya, as well as the protection of Mikhail Solomentsev, Chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers. Konovalenko’s wife’s memoirs are discussed by the historian of jewellery art Valentin Surlov, the historiographer of the House of Fabergé Tatiana Fabergé, and the political functionary Viktor Ilyukhin.
We took three works and went to Moscow […] Sergey Vladimirovich was overcome, amazed, and fell in love with these miniatures. He said that only the Fabergé masters would have been able to do something like this. Mikhalkov invited us to his home—he wanted Natalia Petrovna Konchalovskaya to see Vasily’s works. Natalia Petrovna—a true expert in the history of art—said that Vasya needed to be helped immediately. […] Mikhalkov and Konchalovskaya decided to begin by showing the works to the Chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers, Mikhail Solomentsev. […] The decision was immediate: an exhibition at the Russian Museum in Leningrad.
In the memoirs of Sergey Mikhalkov, the story is told differently:
My friends somehow introduced me to an eminent gemstone carver—Vitaly [this is how Mikhalkov noted Konovalenko’s name in the text—author’s note] Konovalenko, who lived in Leningrad. He brought a whole collection of brilliantly executed genre small-format sculptures on themes from Russian fairytales and fables […] And there the law enforcement agencies accuse the skilled craftsman of that most sinister crime of those years, private entrepreneurship […]
Meanwhile, sharp foreigners were already offering the sculptor twenty-five thousand dollars for each of his works. But he refuses to sell, he doesn’t want to. He is forty-two years old—everything is before him… I admit that when I saw how skilfully he executed his work based on my fable The Fox and the Beaver, I definitively melted and understood—he needs to be helped, and I set off to the Vice Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR Vyacheslav Ivanovich Kochemasov. I explained to him how talented Vitaly Konovalenko was, and he agreed to look at the sculptures.
As I expected, the collection had a great effect on Vyacheslav Ivanovich. The result? An exhibition of the master’s works opened at Leningrad’s Russian Museum.
Mikhalkov saved Konovalenko from the law enforcement agencies twice: the first time before the exhibition at the Russian Museum, that is, from prosecution in the Zinger-Nikolaevsky case, and, after, after the case. Who were these “friends” who introduced Mikhalkov and Konovalenko: someone from the Zinger-Nikolaevsky group, or people from the KGB aware of the circumstances of the case? One also cannot exclude the possibility of Konovalenko having made a deal with the investigators.
Mikhalkov also mentions Vyacheslav Kochemasov, responsible for cultural relations with foreign countries at the Council of Ministers. It is through the logic of the creation of cultural and economic ties with countries in the West that one can arrive at an explanation of the sudden and intense promotion of Konovalenko’s work after the exhibition at the Russian Museum. The artist received the VDNH gold medal, designed the exposition for the Almaz-74 exhibition in Sokolniki, had notices written about him in newspapers and magazines, which also published photographs of his works, and a documentary film about him was even shot.
Immediately after the exhibition at the Russian Museum, Konovalenko’s sculptures were sent to an exhibition in Moscow, to the Coloured Stones Salon at the Ministry of Geology of the USSR. From July 1974, Vasily Konovalenko became the main artist of the Salon, where he headed the Laboratory of Small Forms. The logic of the authorities can be made out in the statements of a prominent of organiser of geological explorations, Aris Turing, Konovalenko’s patron and the initiator of the artist’s move to Moscow:
The president of the Abramov and Co. firm […] announced that the works of V. Konovalenko have a significant artistic and material value, being the embodiment and continuation of the traditions of the old Russian stone cutting masters; the artist himself has taken the art of processing hard, coloured stones to a new level, and his works, undoubtedly, mark a significant moment in the cultural life of our country.
The works of Konovalenko may become the starting point for the development of a qualitatively new branch in stone cutting—the creation of a series of highly artistic creations from hard, coloured stones […] the Ministry of Geology of the USSR considers it expedient to found a school of stone cutting masters for the artistic processing of coloured stones under his leadership.
The authorities’ plan lay in founding a Soviet analogue to the stone cutting workshops of Karl Gustav Fabergé. Konovalenko’s creations could become export items or serve as advertising material for the selling of coloured stones, the mining of which was carried out by the Sixth Production Union. It is worth nothing that beginning from the 1960s, the Western world had been overtaken by “Fabergémania, ” which increased interest in the art of stone cutting. The first buyers and first sales channels were even found—a foreign trade company that exported consumer goods as well as antiques from the USSR.
The authorities followed the path laid by the Zinger-Nikolaevsky group, giving legal status to what its members had been engaged in underground. An important role in this project was played by Turing—a person uncharacteristic of the Soviet nomenclature. An expert in and shrewd valuer of art, he studied at the philosophy faculty of Moscow State University and created a Soviet empire of semi-precious stones. As an experienced manager, he understood Konovalenko to be a lucky and timely find.
However, the authorities soon lost interest in their own initiative. What prevented the realisation of their ambitious plans could have been the criminal case opened by the Leningrad police after the exhibition at the Russian Museum. Mikhalkov’s memoirs state that the case was initiated by a denunciation. The remarkable testimony of Alexey Timofeev, a student of Vasily Konovalenko who worked with him in the Laboratory of Small Sculptural forms in Moscow, has been preserved:
I heard that the Leningrad First Secretary had asked Konovalenko to make a copy of a Fabergé. He declined, and this is why problems arose. For some time, people from Leningrad kept coming and asking:
—Can you do this or can you not?
—We can. But we will not do it.
Konovalenko was accused of using hired labour and of illegally working with precious metals. This was not about his use of gems, which were not prohibited, but about the small quantity of gold details in the figurines. Yet after the prosecutor’s investigation, the case was dismissed, and Konovalenko donated his works to the Ministry of Geology.
Another blow to the Fabergé “reincarnation” project was the decision of the USSR Ministry of Culture Commission for the Review and Evaluation of Works of Fine Art for Export. The working group was composed of artists and sculptors, as well as eminent Soviet art historians. The experts examined the 16 figurines exhibited at the Coloured Stones salon, and resolved: the commission “does not consider it possible to recommend the given works for sale abroad, as these works lack artistic significance.”
The commission remarked that “the ideological content of these works is completely unacceptable” due to its misrepresentation of the life of the Russian and Soviet people. It is interesting to note that these obstacles were not bureaucratic issues, but the rejection of Konovalenko’s art in the professional sphere. As a theatre artist, he had the recognition of his colleagues—most of all, of Leningrad painters—but in Moscow, among the artists of decorative and applied arts, the situation was different. One might suppose that in the eyes of his colleagues Konovalenko had the reputation of an “impostor, ” they may also have been offended by the aggressive publicity created for his works on orders from above.
A remark made by Yuri Dmitrievich Aksenton, one of the oldest Soviet stone cutters and a historian of the jewellery of Ancient Rus’, has been preserved—to a certain degree, his opinion can be considered to reflect the attitudes of the Ministry of Culture experts who assessed Konovalenko’s works:
His works were given a lot of publicity, exhibitions of Konovalenko’s works are held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and in the State Russian Museum, colourful catalogues and postcards are printed. […] The works of Konovalenko attract through qualities that are often absent in industrially-produced works. These are careful selection of stones, the precise joining of separate parts, the impeccability of complex volumetric processing and the high quality of the polishing of curvilinear surfaces.
However, the works of Konovalenko have not only not made any kind of contribution to the spiritual life of our country, they have inflicted great damage upon it, for, by repeating what was done by the court jeweller Karl Fabergé—a bast-shoe-wearing Rus’ begging for alms and fanning a samovar with his boot—they represented something that had ceased to exist since the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The figure of a beggar in gold bast shoes entirely accords with the ideas of neo-Slavophilia about the harmony between Tsarist and a “god-chosen” people, “the God-bearing people, ” but its appearance in the work of a Soviet artist can only cause bewilderment.
Interest in Konovalenko’s works on the part of export organisations indicates that carefully executed and complex objects can find demand on the foreign market.
The “Soviet Fabergé” project was shut down before it had even begun. After his departure from the Laboratory of Small Forms at the Ministry of Geology, Konovalenko found himself a “bird in a golden cage, ” a kind of “court jeweller.” On the one hand, Konovalenko was the very top of the hierarchy of the Soviet artistic intelligentsia: his works were bought up by the USSR Gokhran and commissioned by the country’s top party leadership. In Moscow, the artist received absolutely exceptional, privileged working conditions: financial support, a Moscow registration, organisation of the artistic process—and equipment for his workshop was purchased abroad. On the other hand, in the second half of the 1970s, with the end of the publications and exhibitions, Konovalenko’s work went into the shadows: he worked only for the Soviet nomenklatura, which could not have been unaware of the West’s increasing interest in Fabergé, and flattered itself with the idea that his successor had been found in the USSR.
The departure of Konovalenko and his family from the USSR in 1981 could hardly be called forced—most likely, the matter lay in unrealised ambitions: the artist felt himself to be underestimated. Twenty years later, in the 1990s, the Fabergé museum estimated the value of Konovalenko’s sculptures at between 100 and 125 thousand conventional units each. However, Konovalenko’s works were not sold at major auctions, which means their value has never been measured by the market. The sums that are constantly cited in the biographies became components of the myth that sets Konovalenko’s name in the same line as that of Fabergé, whose works sell for astounding sums of money.
Who was the “genuine Konovalenko”? Evidently, a person with a very complicated fate, in which the contradictions of the late Soviet period were reflected. Underground culture then competed with official culture, and a feeling of hypocrisy led to a search for the genuine. Konovalenko was always balanced between two worlds: he was a recognised artist, but he was also connected to the underground world, he was the “Danila-master, ” but he was also the “forbidden Fabergé.” Irony is characteristic of his stone-cut sculptures, as is kitsch—another characteristic of Soviet culture of that time.
Details of his biography and his lack of an official artistic education would not have allowed Konovalenko to establish himself in the Stalinist period. However, Khrushchev’s Thaw opened up new possibilities, and the young artist was able to take advantage of them: his theatrical career was the result not only of a great gift but also of the fact that the Soviet system was favourably disposed to workers from the Soviet republics, to those who had emerged from the lower social classes.
The exhibition at the Russian Museum was the first step towards the realisation of the large-scale project for a revival of the Fabergé firm that had arisen at the heart of the Ministry of Geology. The idea was to “promote” works made from gemstones created in workshops for their large-scale production and sale—in this way, the authorities made the underground business of the Zinger-Nikolaevsky group their own. Vasily Konovalenko was the driving force of this project.
On the one hand, the story of the “Danila-master” was called upon to legitimate the work of Konovalenko in the eyes of a wide audience, to connect it to folk culture, on the other, to smooth over inconsistencies in his biography, to make it full and understandable. However, there were appropriate conditions for the realisation of the project in neither the foreign market or within the country.
At the end of the Soviet period Konovalenko found himself in isolation, working exclusively for the Soviet elite. Paradoxically, the artist became a court jeweller, the “Soviet Fabergé”—to the extent and in the form to which this was possible in the decaying Soviet system that gave birth to Konovalenko and to a certain extent destroyed him.