Предлагаем вашему вниманию отдельные отрывки на английском языке из книги “Nicholas Roerich”, которые содержат наиболее интересные факты, связанные с жизнью и творчеством великого живописца.

EARLY YEARS

Roerich. Scandinavian in origin, the name means “Rich in Glory”. According to the family legend, it dates back to the time of the Vikings. One of the early Roerichs was head of the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century. Others served as politicians and military leaders.

On October 9 (September 27, old style), 1874, Konstantin Roerich received congratulations on the birth of his first son. The boy was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church, his mother’s religion. The priest plunged the infant into the font, placed a gold cross around his neck, and gave him a name of Nikolai (Nicholas), which means “one who overcomes”.

Nicholas, his younger brothers, Boris and Vladimir, and their older sister Lidia, grew in a large, cozy apartment on the University Embankment in St. Petersburg.

Summers and winter holidays were spent at the Roerichs’ country estate, Isvara, about fifty-five miles southwest of St. Petersburg. In the living room at Isvara, rising high above copies of paintings by the Dutch masters, was a picture of a magnificent snow-covered mountain lit by the setting sun. Only many years later Nicholas Roerich discovered that the mountain in that painting was none other than the sacred Himalayan peak Kanchenjunga.

Kanchenjunga. 1924. Tempera on canvas. Nicholas Roerich Museum in New-York.  One of Roerich’s many paintings of the Himalayan mountain he first saw depicted in Isvara.

In 1883 Nicholas passed the entrance exams in the gymnasium of Karl von May in St. Petersburg. In his childhood he would often become ill with bronchitis. Finally, after his third year at the gymnasium, the family doctor prescribed a radical cure – to spend time outdoors in the winter – and suggested that he take up hunting.

Roerich’s love for hunting inspired him to write sketches and stories describing the nature seen by the hunter at all hours and seasons.

Ivan the Woodsman, 1984. Drawing.

Young Fox, 1894. Drawing.

In 1893, at age 18, Nicholas Roerich graduated from Karl von May’s Gymnasium and passed the required exams for entry into both the Academy of Arts and the law faculty of the famed Imperial University.