Eighty years ago, in December 1926, Mykola Eduardovych Saks was dying in exile in the German town of Zoppot. On Jan. 1, 1927, the Berlin-based Russian newspaper Rul [Steering Wheel] published his obituary: “Nikolai Eduardovich Saks was a great Russian artist and a person of rare spiritual beauty. He devoted himself entirely to art and worked, despite his 77 years, with youthful fervor until the last day of his life.” Unfortunately, the name of our fellow countryman, a native of Katerynoslav, who lived and worked in the Dnipro area until he emigrated, has been undeservedly forgotten.
Saks’s canvases enjoyed tremendous success at the Paris Salon and in London, where he displayed paintings he created in India and on the island of Ceylon. Saks had a well-rounded education and mingled with the finest representatives of his epoch. He was a close friend of Ivan Turgenev and Vsevolod Garshin with whom he corresponded. When he lived in Paris, Saks befriended Victor Hugo. The Ukrainian landscapist Ivan Pokhitonov, who emigrated early in his career, painted the only portrait of Saks, who kept it as a cherished memento of his friend.
Ten days before his death on Dec. 19, 1926, St. Nicholas Day, Saks was seen working on a painting of the Trinity Cathedral in his native Novomoskovsk, which he painted from a sketch made 45 years earlier. He spoke passionately and in detail about the history of this wonderful cathedral built by the Zaporozhian Cossacks. “A premonition of death obviously compelled him to work on this final painting, which took his thoughts and soul to his homeland and other native places, for he pined for Russia and wished to die in his native land,” reads the obituary in the newspaper Rul.
Mykola Saks was born in Katerynoslav on March 13, 1849, into the family of a doctor. His father Eduard died when little Mykola was only six months old. The researcher Victor Kleist established that the Saks merchant family came from Germany. The family established strong ties with the Ukrainian lands. The future artist’s grandfather, the German merchant Hryhoriy Saks, settled in the district of Kremenets in what is now the Volyn region of Ukraine.
Mykola’s father, Eduard Hryhorovych, a Lutheran, was born in 1802. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Imperial— Royal University in Vienna, he was awarded the title of doctor after passing an examination at the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy of St. Petersburg in 1826. That same year he began working as a district doctor in Poltava gubernia. In 1836 the future artist’s father was appointed an inspector of the Katerynoslav Doctors’ Board. The following year the Medical and Surgical Academy of St. Petersburg found him worthy of the title of medical surgeon. In 1842 he was appointed an inspector of the Tobolsk Medical Board, and in 1846 he was promoted to collegiate advisor.
Mykola’s mother was Pulkheria Matviyivna Bulharchyk (1809 — 1886), a Ukrainian woman of the Orthodox faith. The family raised 10 children: Sofia, Maria, Lidia, Valerian, Erast, Vladyslav, Leonid, Oleksandr, Volodymyr, and Mykola. All of them were baptized in the Orthodox faith, even though their father was a Lutheran.
Mykola was the youngest child and, as it later turned out, the most gifted. The Saks family lived in a two-story building in central Katerynoslav. Although nothing seemed to prophesy misfortune, the family’s breadwinner died suddenly in October 1849, leaving the mother to raise the children singlehandedly.
Mykola was not the only one of his family to be enrolled in the classical high school for boys in Katerynoslav. Two of his elder brothers graduated from there in 1863, and Mykola in 1869. Among his peers were many interesting personalities: the Strukov brothers, the future governor Volodymyr Kolenko, and two members of Narodna Volia, Osyp Aptekman and Solomon Kats (the future famous Romanian writer Kostiantyn Dobrodzhianu- Heria). Some of them became defenders of the regime, while others declared war on it. Thus, already in his youth Saks was associating with a variety of people.
In 1870, Mykola’s nephew Eduard Brodsky (1851 — 1919) finished the same high school. The son of Mykola’s sister Sofia Saks, who was only a few years his uncle’s junior, Brodsky would become famous in his gubernia and beyond its borders as a cultured owner of agricultural lands, a leader of the district gentry, and a trustee of the high school that he once attended. There were many cultured landowners in Saks’s family: Vasyl Mahdenko, who was no less famous in the gubernia, would become the godfather of Mykola’s child. Mahdenko was the subject of high praise in the diaries of Volodymyr Vernadsky.
After completing high school in Katerynoslav, Saks traveled to the Russian capital in the footsteps of his elder brother Volodymyr, who graduated from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1868. Mykola studied at the same faculty from 1870 to 1871. He withdrew after realizing that he was not destined to become a lawyer. Instead, he enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied until 1877.
We can only guess the reasons that forced the gifted young student to quit the academy after five years of study, when graduation was only a short time away. The most likely reason was his difficult financial situation. This follows from a letter Saks sent in 1876 from Novomoskovsk to the academy’s board, which was discovered in the archives. Mykola wrote that unless he was given a scholarship, he would not be able to continue his education. In any case, the following year he finished a course at the academy.
Mykola Saks paid tribute to his epoch by taking part in student revolutionary circles in the 1870s. However, he discovered his calling in landscape painting. While still a student, in 1874 Saks was awarded a small silver medal by the Imperial Academy of Arts for his landscape sketches. Saks also displayed several of his paintings in academic exhibits: Forest (1878), Village on the Outskirts of Petersburg (1881), Sheep in the Steppes of Little Russia (1882), and View of Ekaterinoslav (1886). His painting Village on the Outskirts of Petersburg was displayed at the 1882 All-Russian Exhibition in Moscow.
In 1880 — 1882 Saks lived and worked in Paris, where he was a member of the Society of Russian Artists in Paris (full name: Society for Support and Charity for the Benefit of Russian Artists in Paris). In the French capital Saks befriended the famous seascape painter Oleksiy Petrovych Boholiubov, grandson of the famous writer Aleksandr Radishchev. He also developed a close friendship with Ivan Turgenev. The Society of Russian Artists was founded in Paris in 1877, and Turgenev was its secretary; Saks became his assistant.
Among the society’s members were such famous cultural figures as the sculptor Antokolsky, the artists Kharlamov and Pokhitonov, and others who helped popularize Russian culture in France. Its members organized literary and musical soirees that visiting Russian artists, writers, and performers eagerly attended. They were just as popular among the French artistic public. Turgenev often read his works at these gatherings.
This is how Saks recalled the society: “When I came to Paris, this society already existed, uniting the best artists, writers, and musicians. This society operated under the auspices of the tsar’s son (later Tsar Alexander III); its chairman was Ambassador Count Orlov, and its secretary Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. One year after my arrival I was elected to assist the secretary and was lucky to work together with Turgenev for over two years.”
After his return from France in 1882 Saks married Oleksandra Mykhaylivna Kyrylova, who came from a wealthy family. They lived on their estate in the village of Andriyivka (Saksovka) in Mahdalynivka volost, which was part of Novomoskovsk district of Katerynoslav gubernia. Today this village is part of the raion center of Mahdalynivka in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
The Saks couple had two daughters. Vira was born on May 1, 1883, and baptized on May 3 in St. Nicholas Church in Mahdalynivka. The girl’s grandparents were the couple’s relatives: “Konstantin Yakovlev Brodsky, titular advisor of Verkhniodniprovsk district, and Emilia Karlova, wife of gubernia secretary Kyrylov of Kobeliaky district in Poltava gubernia. Kostiantyn Brodsky was the husband of Sofia Saks, the artist’s sister, while Emilia Kyrylova was a relative of Saks’s wife. Unfortunately, Vira, the couple’s firstborn, died of diphtheria before she was six years old.
Another daughter, Hanna, was born on Aug. 10, 1893, in the Crimean city of Alushta and baptized on Sept. 15. This time the godparents were representatives of the Mahdenko family, who lived in the same district as the Saks family: Vasyl Petrovych Mahdenko and his sister Hanna Petrivna Mahdenko. Mahdenko owned a villa in Alushta, which is now part of a health resort. It is likely that the Sakses stayed at this villa.
In the spring of 1892 the English Club of Katerynoslav hosted a one-man show of Saks’s paintings. A review of the exhibit appeared on April 16 in the newspaper Ekaterinoslavskie gubernskie vedomosti [Ekaterinoslav Gubernia News], entitled “On the Exhibition of Paintings by the Artist M. E. Saks.”
The review noted: “Thanks to the sympathies of the chairmen of the local English Club, on Easter Sunday the club’s wonderful hall hosted the opening of an exhibit of paintings and sketches by the landscapist M. E. Saks. All proceeds from the exhibit, as reported earlier, went to the local Charitable Society. We are sincerely gladdened by the artist’s responsiveness to this good deed,” the review read.
The exhibit featured 47 paintings, 9 pen and ink sketches, and approximately 20 pencil sketches. Some scenes were repeated in his paintings and sketches, progressing from simple drawings to more complex paintings. According to the reviewer, “this technique is especially instructive for young aspiring artists, because it illustrates the path that an artists covers and the obstacles he overcomes; it shows the progress of his self- improvement. For this reason, for example, Saks’s tree is a tree and not a collection of leaves; and his air is air, not emptiness.”
The reviewer also pointed out the idea behind the exhibit: “Saks’s works are interesting in his accurate portrayal of different locations as geographical material for the study of our south (City of Katerynoslav, Town of Novomoskovsk, Along the River Orel, Along the River Alma, Monastery in the Crimea, and others). At the same time, they have an attractive ethnographic aspect as a wonderful illustration of the lifestyle of our poor masses.
“Take a look at the small painting Village on the Outskirts of St. Petersburg (Ligovka?) [Lykhivka — Ed.] Under the grey skies you can see, as though after a pogrom, half-destroyed, sooty, earthy-black, and rotten plank roofs that overhang dingy, almost invisible windows almost entirely hidden behind heaps of dung. Listen, somebody’s voices are calling out to us:
...life is patient,
life is silent like an autumn night,
humiliated, and oppressed by poverty.
“Right across this life a train is rushing full steam ahead, and in the foggy distance a church is shining with its golden domes, like a distant ray of hope for a better future. There is as much affliction in an entire series of paintings depicting our local peasant life (In My Vegetable Garden, A View from My Garden, Village of Hryhoriivka, Along the River Chaplynka, and others).
“Under our ‘Italian’ skies, where life is so divine and wonderful, where the sun is so bright and the water is like a mirror, again we are shown the same blackened, tattered, rotten, thatched roofs of tiny Little Russian clay-walled huts with tiny windows, reed fences, under such medieval, constantly burning roofs, in such cramped rooms, which the artist has portrayed so true to life, apparently out of love for what is so close and native to us, but sorrowful. Lastly, we draw the attention of visitors to the exhibit to several paintings and sketches that offer what is arguably the first artistic portrayal of our memorable antiquity — the seven-domed Zaporozhian Cathedral in Novomoskovsk.”
These words end the review of the exhibit of Saks’s works. I must note that the cathedral in Novomoskovsk has nine domes, not seven. Incidentally, who is this anonymous reviewer? Since the editor of the newspaper in 1890-1895 was Yakiv Heorhiyovych Hololobov, we may assume that he is the author of the review. In 1912 Hololobov was promoted to deputy governor of Poltava and later became the governor of Volyn and Krasnoyarsk until 1917, by which time he still shared populist beliefs.
Where can Saks’s creative heritage be viewed today? Only one of his works is on display in his native Dnipropetrovsk. In 1990 the local art museum bought his painting Wayfarers (A Road to the Cathedral). In the painting’s foreground are a green slope and a road that draw the viewer’s gaze into the distant hills. Walking along the road are the brightly sunlit figures of an old man and a youth wearing peasant clothing. In the middle ground are figures of travelers and a group of tall trees with transparent crowns. In the distance beyond the hills, red brick churches with golden domes stand against the backdrop of a blue sky. In the bottom left corner of the painting is a signature: N. Saks, 1909.
A few years ago the journal Russkoe iskusstvo [Russian Art] carried an article entitled “Album of Mykola Saks,” which revealed the minor sensation that the artist’s album had finally been discovered. The Russian poetess Valentina Sinkevich, who lives in the US, presented an album of drawings Originalnye risunki razlichnykh khudozhnikov, avtography [Original Drawings by Various Artists, Autographs] belonging to Mykola Saks to the Soviet Culture Fund, created 20 years ago.
The article reads: “That Saks was a gifted master and not only a person with a big, kind soul, is evidenced, for example, by the landscape of the outskirts of his estate Andriyivka, which is found in the album. Thanks to his impeccable pencil technique, the artist accurately conveyed scenery: the river, trees, and the bush — all of which seem to be saturated with moist and incredibly fresh air.”
Saks’s album, which was recently published in Moscow, includes drawings by Kostiantyn Savytsky, Ivan Pokhitonov, Mykola Sverchkov, Yosyp Krachkovsky, Ivan Selezniov, Mykola Pymonenko, and Oleksiy Boholiubov. Mykola Eduardovych Saks, the article reads, was a person of large caliber, kind and hospitable. He wanted very much to recreate Boholiubov’s Parisian center on his Andriyivka estate in his native Katerynoslav gubernia.
Moving to his estate from France, he brought along his album containing records, drawings, and watercolors by his friends, with whom he had socialized on the banks of the River Seine. Andriyivka invariably hosted poets and artists, who came for artistic meetings, including those returning from the blessed “capital of the world.” All of them continued to draw in the familiar large book, which already contained such ingenuous lines dating from 1879:
Dear friend, I am departing
from Paris, from Paris.
Perhaps never again
Will I see it.
My heart, why are you so sad?
Oh Paris, Paris, Paris.
From then on the main motif of the album’s imagery is Ukraine, its groves, fields, and portraits of local citizens wearing national costumes. After the bustle of Paris, the artists immersed themselves in the tranquility and silence of Katerynoslav’s nature. Glued into the album are Garshin and Turgenev’s letters to Saks. For a long time the compilers of the complete works of Turgenev did not know about his letters until they learned about them from Valentina Sinkevich:
“I have the original letter. I received it after the death of Zinayida Vasilyevna Monastyrskaya, Saks’s adopted daughter. They both left Russia in the 1920s. Saks died in Danzig in the late 1920s, while Monastyrskaya emigrated from Germany (Hamburg) to the USA in 1950. Saks kept the original letter in the album with the original drawings of artists, most of whom participated in traveling exhibits. This album, which Mrs. Monastyrskaya gave me, contained two more letters from Turgenev to Saks. In 1965 they were given to the Soviet Union. Monastyrskaya told me that in Russia Saks lived mostly in Kyiv and in his estate outside Ekaterinoslav. According to her, while he was living in Paris, Saks acted as Turgenev’s secretary.”
In 1908 Saks divided his estate in Katerynoslav gubernia among the peasants, retaining a house with 50 desiatinas (135 acres) of land. A teacher at the Mahdalynivka secondary school, the late Ivan Mostovy, collected materials on the life and work of his famous countryman and used the recollections of local elderly people to create a painting of Saks’s estate before the revolution. In 1972 he recorded the reminiscences of Hanna Markiyanivna Veremiyenko, a resident of the village Maryivky:
“I knew M. E. Saks well, because I occasionally worked in his house. Saks had his own estate. Before the revolution he had 25 desiatinas of land (this contradicts the obituary in Rul, which claims that he owned 50 desiatinas). A large house (dubbed ‘the new chambers’) stood practically above the pond — clay-walled on a brick foundation and under a tin roof. The house had 12 rooms. The house was surrounded by a garden, and an alley led all the way to the pond. There was a bathhouse at the end of the alley, near the pond. The garden also stretched along the pond.
“Not far from the house, which stood in the garden, there was an old house dubbed ‘the old chambers’— clay-walled, with a thatched roof. Near the old house there was an outbuilding under a thatched roof. Inside this outbuilding was a large room with a large window facing north. Saks would paint in that room. During the revolution Saks left his house. When he left, he said that we would live in the house and that soon everything would belong to the people.”
The idealistic artist was wrong. The landlord’s estate was probably plundered and looted by an angry mob — a fate that befell most of the estates in the Dnipro region. According to Mostovy, many of Saks’s paintings “were lost in the tumultuous revolutionary years. His last two paintings from the prewar years were on display in the secondary school of Mahdalynivka. One was called Good for the Bees and it was amazing. In the painting the artist recreated the warm summer sky and a meadow with a variety of wildflowers and a barely perceptible village on the horizon. The other painting, I recall, was a grand, romantic, mountainous landscape (Crimean? — Author). A tragic fate awaited these two paintings during the German occupation. They were destroyed in flames along with the school that the Germans burned down.”
During the Civil War Saks and his family moved to the Crimea. In those years his son-in-law Marko Mykolayovych Medysh and his daughter’s godfather Vasyl Mahdenko also lived there. Volodymyr Ivanovych Vernadsky, then the president of Tavria University, left interesting descriptions of these people. The following is an entry from his diary, dated April 13 (26), 1920:
“Strange meetings: there is an interesting chemist here — Mark Mykolayovych Medysh. His laboratory is clean, but it is hardly functioning. Medysh is a new person here: his young predecessor Hryhorovych died. Medysh has been close to our family since childhood. His grandmother Yuliya Petrovna Medysh in Kharkiv was a good friend of our whole family, especially my mother. She was the principal of the girls’ high school — a very wise and kind person.”
The archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences contain letters from Saks’s son-in-law Marko Medysh to Vernadsky (their correspondence stopped abruptly in 1927). After the Crimea, Medysh and Saks’s daughter Hanna traveled to Belarus (Gorky, Orshansk district), where an agricultural academy was being organized. In 1926 he hoped to travel to Germany to work there for two months (while his father-in-law was still alive), but the trip did not take place. Then Saks’s son-in-law and daughter moved to Krasnodar, where Marko Medysh fell victim to the repressions in 1938 and died. During the war Hanna remained on occupied territory, and in 1943 she was sent to Germany together with her son Vadym. The artist’s daughter died in 1969 in the US.
The following quote from Vernadsky’s diary concerns the 66-year-old zoo technician Vasyl Mahdenko, Saks’s friend and the god-father of his daughter Hanna:
“Two other meetings... In the crowd I was impressed by an original, respectable, and authoritative figure of an old man of average height with a full, grey beard. He turned out to be Vasyl Petrovych Mahdenko. I have known this name since childhood. He is a cousin of S. A. Korolenko. And my name is well known to him... He is a former very wealthy landlord in Novomoskovsk district (8,000 desiatinas), who managed his economy wisely. He devoted all of his life to cattle breeding. He worked to recreate heirloom Ukrainian cattle breeds. He succeeded admirably.
“Discussions with him are very interesting. Now, despite all the efforts by the central Bolshevik government, everything that needed to live has been almost entirely destroyed. The main destroyers are the local peasants: these brutish, wild, drunken cannibals, who are so numerous everywhere. The peasants have preserved only eight cows. He is a fervent believer in heirloom Ukrainian livestock. He is now an assistant zoo technician because he used to direct a division at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. He is a very interesting and beloved figure in Russia.”
Unfortunately, Saks, Mahdenko, and other fascinating and beloved figures in this country were rejected by Bolshevik Russia. However, with their hearts they remained with their native land that had rejected them.
Before his death Mykola Saks, an ethnic German, but a son of the Ukrainian land, painted the Cossack Cathedral in Novomoskovsk. His heart stopped beating 80 years ago.
