The birthplace of charcoal burners and a refuge for artists
How a Ural village became a magnet for progressive Soviet artists, and why their children are now returning to where their fathers once worked.
Today, all that remains of the artists' legacy in Volyn, Sverdlovsk, are ramshackle huts and rare art objects. The village's history has almost come to an end: only eight people live there permanently.
Fifty years ago, the village was already dying—locals were leaving due to lack of work, and houses were being sold for next to nothing. Suddenly, artists began buying them up. Over the course of ten years in the 1970s, at least fifteen creative people moved to Volyn, including iconic Sverdlovsk region artists Gennady Mosin, German Metelev, Anatoly Kalashnikov, Misha Brusilovsky, and others. Some wanted to escape the bustle of the city and the excessive attention of the authorities, while others simply enjoyed spending time with friends in nature.
"NotMoscow" and It's My City They traveled a hundred kilometers from Yekaterinburg, spoke with the painters' ancestors, and tell the story of a place that became a kind of Boldin for Ural artists.
Birth, death and new life
The village of Volynkina—as Volyny was formerly known—appeared at the same time as Akinfiy Demidov's factory settlement, which later became Staroutkinsk, in 1729. At that time, the factory needed peasants to mine ore and transport it to the plant. Later, they became charcoal burners—people who burned forests to extract charcoal from the wood and delivered it to the plant.
In the 19th century, the Stroganov industrialists acquired the plant. They used the Staroutkinsk facility as a subsidiary for their other enterprises in the Urals. In the 1920s, the Soviet government nationalized the workshops. Alexey Mosin, son of the artist Gennady Mosin and a historian, claims this was the best time for Volyn. According to the recollections of long-time residents, there were two schools, a club, shops, and a medical and obstetric station there at the time.
In 1934, the Novotrubny Plant was built in Pervouralsk, the closest large settlement to the village. It needed workers, and many were attracted by the prospect of living in the city, so people from nearby towns and villages began moving to Pervouralsk.
As a result, Volyn began to fall into disrepair even during Soviet times: by the 1960s, schools were closed, and the majority of the population consisted of pensioners. The only remaining attraction in the village was the Sokolyonok Pioneer camp, which essentially launched a new phase of life in Volyn.
In 1972, two artists from Sverdlovsk, Aurora Sosnovskaya and Evdokia Savitskaya, came to work in the village. The women spent the entire summer there, painting walls in the camp and laying mosaics, while simultaneously holding plein air painting sessions on the banks of the Utka River, sketching, and marveling at how houses in such a beautiful location, with its picturesque banks and hills, were selling for next to nothing.
After a summer in the village, both artists dreamed of owning a dacha there. But in Soviet times, this wasn't so easy: it wasn't always possible to buy a place where you wanted. Artists were able to purchase houses for their creative pursuits, but only in certain locations, and Volyn was not one of them.
They had to ask the authorities for help. Everyone managed to reach an agreement, despite the purchase being somewhat illegal, recalls Alexey Mosin.
"The issue was resolved through a personal agreement between the chairman of the regional Union of Artists and the district leadership. [It was agreed] that the houses in the village would be used not as living space, but as personal creative dachas. However, they were not officially registered as dachas or creative bases. They remained in this unofficial status until the 1990s, when privatization became possible," explains The author of the work on Volyn artists, associate professor of the Ural State Art University Elizaveta Netreba.
Sosnovskaya and Savitskaya told their studio colleague, Nina Kostina, about purchasing houses in Volyn. Kostina visited them and, impressed by the place, also bought a building there, which was being sold "for firewood." She paid 150 rubles—slightly more than the average Soviet salary in the 1970s.
"The houses were so cheap that Kostina recouped the cost of her purchase with the harvest: she simply sold all the potatoes she grew in her garden over the summer," recalls Alexey Mosin.
Volyn today. Photo by NeMoskva
Other Sverdlovsk painters then began moving to the village. Initially, they came for plein air paintings and festivals, but the desire to work outdoors among friends prompted many to buy dachas. Moreover, Elizaveta Netreba asserts, there was a trend among Sverdlovsk artists at the time toward reflecting on local culture and embracing traditional ways of life.
Houses and plots were purchased informally, often for firewood, and local authorities turned a blind eye. Thus, a dozen and a half painters and graphic artists found their place in the village. Not only from Sverdlovsk but also from Moscow, among them Gennady Mosin, German Metelev, Misha Brusilovsky, Anatoly Zolotukhin, Vladimir Syskov, Spartak Kiprin, Anatoly Kalashnikov, and others.
Other creative people soon began buying dachas here, such as Uralsky Rabochy journalist Georgy Ustinov and Sverdlovsk Film Studio documentary filmmaker Valery Savchuk. Due to increased demand, the average price of houses in the village increased from 150 to 800 rubles over the next ten years, recalls Anna, Herman Metelev's daughter.
She says that some of those who settled in Volyn were so close that it “resembled family ties.”
An imperfect "perfect world"
Artists began to come to Volyn for the entire summer: some spent their vacation hunting and fishing, others organized plein air painting sessions, and still others worked on urban projects.
"For example, my father, together with the artist Vladimir Chursin, sketched the mosaics for the hall of the Youth Palace right in their hut in Volyn. For some reason, they felt more comfortable doing this than in the city workshops," Mosin recalls.
Meetings of artists in the village were not always cultural.
"They'd visit first one, then a second, then a third house, and by evening, about 30 people would be at the Brusilovskys'. It was endless conversation, meetings, and drinking. Unfortunately, my father, like many of our artists, had a drinking problem since his student days. I myself saw people fall under the table because of their condition. Back then, it wasn't considered anything strange; all artists smoked and drank. It was a general principle: to be successful, you have to drink with the client, with the artists, with the boss," recalls Anna Metelyova.
The locals—and in the 1970s, pensioners, workers from the Staroutkinsky plant, and their children continued to live in the village—at first received their new neighbors with distrust, dismissively calling them city dwellers.
"There was a feeling that, to them, city dwellers were second-class citizens: they didn't understand anything, they were economically illiterate. So, in some matters, it wasn't shameful to deceive them," Mosin says.
Before going to bed, the artists tried to lock all the doors, Metelyova recalls. There were cases of thieves breaking into homes while the owners were away. For example, the Metelyov family had small items like bath towels and aluminum spoons stolen several times.
They managed to find common ground, though. The artists offered to help the locals with repairs and gave rides to the store in the neighboring village.
"The house where we live is on a hill, so we and our neighbors had water problems. My father arranged with an excavator operator to make a small pond. We ran a hose and pump through it to pump the water uphill. He also had a motorcycle, and he drove the locals to get groceries or to the post office," Mosin recalls.
Some people here were inspired by rural views to create illustrations. For example, считает According to USUAA associate professor Elizaveta Netreba, for Gennady Mosin, the natural, everyday, and architectural elements seen in Volyn became "an important source of natural material" and were embodied in drawings for Bazhov's tales.
She also considers Mosin's landscapes painted around Volyn to be "special": they "magnificently convey the atmosphere of the Ural nature." Many artists who visited the village have entire cycles of paintings dedicated to Volyn.
Some remained there to live and work year-round. One such artist is Anatoly Zolotukhin, who creates atmospheric landscapes of the Volyn region, which, as Netreba writes, reflect "his vision of an ideal world."
Volyns as depicted by Ural artists
"I wrote what I wanted and was poor."
For many artists, Volyn became a refuge and a refuge—much like Pushkin's Boldino, says Elizaveta Netreba. The desire to escape the state's excessive attention to the countryside was entirely natural, given that relations with the authorities were not always easy.
Thus, in 1964, Mosin and Brusilovsky collaborated on the painting "1918." The work was criticized for its unconventional portrayal of Lenin, which depicted him as fierce and menacing, rather than the gentle "friend of all children." The painting was a challenge to Vladimir Serov, the first secretary of the then Union of Artists, who specialized in depicting the leader and whom, according to Brusilovsky, Mosin disliked.
Despite this, says Mosin Jr., the painting was selected for participation in the Venice Biennale in 1966, but with one condition.
Before sending the painting to Italy, the then-Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, asked that the image of Lenin be slightly softened. Misha went to Moscow to prepare the painting. For five hours, he pretended to correct the image, but in the end, he made no changes, and the work was sent to Italy without a single correction.
Mosin was supposed to present the painting at the Biennale. But, as his son recounts, shortly before the trip, unknown individuals, presumably from the KGB, came to his father's studio and began convincing him that he could face provocations in a capitalist country. For example, that he would be "forced" to bring something "forbidden" into the Soviet Union. He declined the trip. As a result, he never visited any other country in his life.
Mosin's work was nevertheless appreciated by the functionaries of the time; he frequently received government commissions and worked in his own studio on Lenin Street. Brusilovsky's work, however, rarely fit into the canons of Socialist Realism. He was denied his own studio for a long time, often found himself without commissions, and was forced to simply help out his colleagues to earn any money he could.
"The culture was highly ideological: if a work deviated from the ideological canon, the painting wouldn't get anywhere. You wouldn't get a commission, so you'd be broke. That's what happened with Misha Brusilovsky. Many managed to maneuver, but he didn't. He simply painted whatever he wanted and lived in poverty. His saving grace was that other artists always included him in their teams. [For example,] many made mosaics, where the number of artists sometimes reached 15 people," says Anna Metelyova.
Works by Misha Brusilovsky
In 1984, Brusilovsky created the controversial painting "Pig Farm of the Golubkovsky State Farm." In it, the young artist timidly looks up at stately milkmaids holding pigs. Communists from the Union of Artists criticized the artist for incorporating a biblical image of the Madonna and Child into the work, but instead of a baby, he painted a piglet. Boris Yeltsin, then First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee, also publicly condemned the painting.
Increased state attention to the personal lives of artists was a common feature of the era. In addition to monitoring their work and travel, telephones in homes were tapped, says German Metelev's daughter.
"Dad had a diplomatic nature; he always managed to reach agreements. But, of course, there were always some controversial situations. I don't know the details, but our phone was tapped, and the KGB offered to let my father become an informer. That was the norm. Dad refused, and for a while afterwards he feared the consequences of his refusal," the interviewee recounts.
Works by German Metelev
Metelev's past was complicated. He was born in 1938 in Sverdlovsk, where his mother had moved from Tyumen. She arrived alone and pregnant after her husband, Sylvester, a manager at a gold mining company, disappeared. She knew what had happened to her husband, but never told anyone, until her death, says Anna.
"Most likely, he was repressed, and his grandmother was severely intimidated. Incidentally, his grandfather came from a family of priests. Perhaps that was the reason," the artist's daughter suggests.
What is Stalin doing in the artists' village?
Volyn is unique not only because it once served as an art residency, but also because it's one of the few places to retain Joseph Stalin's name in its street names.
"We have a stereotype now that the main streets of populated areas were always named after Lenin. But there were many streets named after Stalin, they just changed their names during the 'thaw' [when the personality cult was debunked]. I think the name was retained here simply because the village is very small," says Mosin.
There are only three streets in the settlement. The one named after the leader appeared in the 1930s. Both locals and artists were indifferent to it. Mosin recounts how his father, for example, always sought to "disengage himself from this topic," separating family, creativity, and friends from the state. He understood that "some kind of relationship with this machine was possible," but "he didn't allow pressure." This, according to our interviewee, was the case for everyone in his circle.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, local residents were divided into three camps. Most took a neutral stance, others—including relatives of those repressed—called the street a disgrace, and still others were proud of its uniqueness, as there were practically no such people left in Russia.
In the early 2010s, local resident Vasily Chigirinsky restored all the street signs bearing Stalin's name. Stalinist Gennady Shevarov even filmed the event. film.
"I only learned that our village had a Stalin Street when I was an adult," says Anna Metelyova. "It's no longer important. The village is practically deserted, so who needs it [the name change]."
"Well, why change it?" Alexandra Kalashnikova agrees. She has other reasons: "It's our history, especially since this man led the country to victory in the Great Patriotic War. I checked, there are 17 such streets in the world, most of them in Georgia."
The sign for Kalashnikova's house even has a metal bas-relief with an image of the leader.
Signs of life
The influx of artists into the village ended by the mid-1980s. Summers were bustling with activity, but the number of people living there year-round continued to decline. Electricity was periodically cut off due to energy savings, and even the medical center building was sold to summer residents. The only entertainment left was weekend movies at the village club.
In 1993, the Staroutkinsk plant was privatized, iron production declined, and the blast furnace was frequently idle. The last workers left the village. Even the artists found themselves in a difficult situation in the 1990s: some sold their houses in Volyn due to financial problems, others were forced to work nonstop in their city studios. Others grew old and simply could no longer travel to the village frequently.
Today, little remains to remind us of the artists: a multi-colored pencil-shaped fence near the Kalashnikov house, erected after the death of the head of the family, Anatoly; a woodpecker sculpture attached to one of the pillars; and a memorial plaque on the house of Gennady Mosin.
Only Anatoly Zolotukhin remains from the former group in Volyn, but, as Mosin says, he barely communicates with others. Everyone we spoke to asked us not to disturb him, so we decided not to visit the artist. He built a studio on the property and still paints there, even sending his works to exhibitions in Yekaterinburg, though he refuses to attend the openings.
Artist Gennady Mosin and his son Alexey. Photo: 1 — from the Ernst Neizvestny Museum, 2 — from "NeMoskvy"
Anatoly Kalashnikov visited the village until his death in 2012. The property and house now belong to his daughter, Alexandra. She rebuilt the previous century-old house, which had begun to fall apart after her father's death, preserving the original layout.
"Our previous house, although old, always felt very cozy. I didn't want to lose that atmosphere, so I commissioned an identical log cabin from the builders. I kept the layout of both the interior and the surrounding areas: horse and sheep pens, hay storage, even though I don't have any animals. I only added a second floor and an attic," Kalashnikova says.
Artist Anatoly Kalashnikov and his daughter Alexandra. Photos: 1 — Max Gurevich, 2 — NeMoskvy
Like her father, Alexandra is a creative artist and divides her time between her Yekaterinburg apartment and her Volyn house. She admits that over time, she increasingly desires to live in the countryside: she can better concentrate on her work there, and the cost of renting a studio in Yekaterinburg is high—starting at 20 rubles, excluding utilities.
The interior of her home is unusual: some cabinets have been replaced by Soviet refrigerators, and on the second floor, a working 19th-century loom, gifted to the artist in exchange for one of her paintings, can be found. Stuffed forest birds hang in the corners. Alexandra says she loved hunting with her father as a child, and now it's a hobby: she hunts and makes her own stuffed animals.
Photo: A scarecrow, interior furnishings, and a painting by Anatoly Kalashnikov. Photo by NeMoskva
The artist is deeply distressed by the fact that the village she loved since childhood has almost died.
“There’s nothing here now to suggest that this place was once a center for progressive artists,” she admits.
At the same time, she strives to preserve the memory of the settlement. For example, in 2021, she organized a large exhibition about Volyn, for which she collected archival photographs of the village, works by artists, and publications about painters from newspaper archives.
German Metelev and his wife Zoya Malinina also returned to the village and lived there from spring to autumn every year until German's death. It happened unexpectedly: according to his daughter, a couple of months earlier, her father had decided to give up alcohol. During the May holidays, he was stacking firewood, was very tired, went to the bathhouse, lost it, drank beer, and died the next morning. He was buried in Volyn, as he had wished.
German Metelev and his daughter Anna. Photo: 1 — from the Ernst Neizvestny Museum, 2 — from "NeMoskvy"
During his lifetime, Anna says, her father didn't allow any changes to the house: neither a toilet nor running water. He was one of those people who, as his daughter puts it, wanted to "fully experience the village atmosphere." Both the toilet and running water were installed after his death.
They also built a studio next to the house. It's now Anna's studio. As a teenager, she viewed trips to Volyn as exile, but now she comes here every summer to paint.
