Ilarion Golitsyn

To the opening of an exhibition of drawings, water-colours and engravings, including lino-cuts like this above, by Ilarion Golitsyn in a newly renovated annexe to the Pushkin Museum. I had no idea what to expect, but was charmed by the combination of unembarrassed cultivation amidst the scenes of socialist mess, overcrowding and misery, all of which was depicted in an observational rather than a polemical way.

Golitsyn, who was killed by a motorist in Moscow five years ago at the age of 71, was related to the lady with whom I first travelled to Russia in 1977. By another coincidence, he was the grandfather of a young lady, Anna Golitsyna, who works at one of the companies where I do language consulting. It was her father, also an artist, who organised the exhibition.

Ilarion Golitsyn was born in 1928 and spent his early years with his parents in and around the prison camp at Dmitrov where 100,000 people died building the largely useless Moscow-Volga canal in the mid-1930s. They were scions of two of the grandest pre-Revolutionary families in Russia, the Golitsyns and the Sheremetyevs, and so had been "repressed" by the Bolsheviks.

Golitsyn lived his later years in Moscow, earning his living by his art which depicted life as it went on in his flat (where Anna's parents now live) which was full of paintings of his family's illustrious ancestors, as well as life outside it. Water-colours of scenes inside the flat were on display as were drawings and engravings of scenes of life outside, both on the street and in more intimate surroundings like the family dacha. I have chosen "On the Terrace" as one of the most charming of these. It was produced in 1958.