Nordman biography

In those years, in M, she and Repin were inseparable: the artist spent all his free time with her, wrote and painted her portraits, enthusiastically spoke about her talents and, in general, as they say, did not aspect her soul. I do not remember the case when he left without her somewhere for a concert or on a visit. In the memoir literature, it is customary to interpret this woman about Repin as an eccentric of bad tone, who introduced a lot of loud and petty bustle into the biography of Repin.

But I have observed her life closely for several years and, although I can’t refute the verdict passed to her, I still consider it my duty as far as possible to partially protect her memory. The first family of Repin, in its unculture, showed little interest in his work, and Natalya Borisovna began to collect all the literature about him since the year, made up the most valuable albums with newspaper clippings about each of his paintings.

In addition, he repeated more than once that one of his most brilliant successes - the composition of the “State Council” - he owes Natalya Borisovna: she accepted to heart the difficulties that he met when writing this picture, and helped him with his advice, as well as photographs taken by her. The famous environments in the foams she had had a lot of good: they gave Repin the opportunity to work concentrated on all other days, not afraid of any visitors because business dates were also confined to the environment.

In general, she introduced into his life a lot of useful reforms, which he often mentioned with gratitude. Repin always gravitated to educated people, and Natalya Borisovna knew three languages, versed in music, and sculpture, and painting - not without reason he loved to attend all sorts of concerts, vernisages and lectures in her society. She was what a social woman called, he met her with Princess Tenisheva, but constantly declared herself a democrat, and this, too, could not but attract the sympathy of Ilya Efimovich to her.

And most importantly - she was hardworking and active, and Repin, always outraged by the parasitic idleness of her first family, praised the laborer of Natalia Borisovna. But all her spiritual qualities were spent in vain because of the three fatal disadvantages, which, in essence, destroyed her. Firstly, throughout its spiritual warehouse it was a bright sectarian. She always needed to fanatically believe in some single recipe for saving people and loudly preach this recipe as a panacea from all social ailments.

At one time, she was a combat suffry and made her feminism religion. Then she began to preach the "emancipation of the servants." Then - vegetarianism. Then - a cooperative organization of labor, perceived as the gospel of life. Then decoctions of fresh hay as healthy, nutritious food. Then the so -called "magic chest", that is, a box sheathed with pillows and stuffed with hay. All this was ridiculous, but sincerely.

She sacredly believed in all her innovations and the first became their victim. When she rebelled, for example, against fur coats and furs that made up, as she expressed, the “privilege of wealthy classes”, she was clothed in some fierce frost into some thin coat, hit by pine chips, and assured that she was much warmer than us, wrapped in “skins of animals”: ​​after all, they give chips warm when we burn them in the stove.

This "pine fur coat" brought her a cold, and the soups from hay - anemia.

From a ruddy, siege woman with a fresh and round face, as she was a few years before, she became so thin that she seemed to be the embodiment of consumption. Her vegetarianism was very harsh: she did not eat eggs, did not drink milk. Thus, there is no doubt that there was no shadow of cunning in her sermon. But her sermon was too loud - and sufficiently tactlessly. That was the second drawback of Natalia Borisovna, that for all her devotion to the great person with whom her fate associated, she did not find complete satisfaction in serving his glory.

She herself had a too colorful personality, who could not be cherished, but on the contrary, for any reason, she longed to declare herself. Natalya Borisovna did not even try to separate her name from Repin, and he was involved in all her culinary and other innovations. I heard with my ears in the Crimea, in the sanatorium, how, having received the news that Repin died, one widow of the professor, the old woman, said the other: “The same thing that the hay was ate.” Hearing this monstrous characteristic of Repin, of course, I could not help but think that Natalya Borisovna, in essence, was to blame for such a reputation.

The whole yellow press - the "Petersburg newspaper", "St. Petersburg sheet" and "Birzhevka" - included its eccentricities among its favorite sensations, mainly because its famous name could fasten to them. Rozanov wrote in one Pasquil that this woman "swallowed" Repin as a whole. Prorokova, - described the ridiculous details of the house "Penate", that is, a life arranged by Natalia Borisovna.Announcements, posters that called on guests to engage in self -service hung everywhere, like: “Do not wait for the servants, there is no”, “Do everything yourself”, “The door is locked”.

The guest read: "hit the gong, enter, undress in the front." Having fulfilled this order, the guest came across the following announcement: “Go straight” - and found himself in the dining room with the famous table, on which a circle spun, replacing, according to the mistress, serving the servants. Here, different dishes were laid on special shelves, and dirty dishes folded into the boxes.

In turn, at the table, different people poured soup at whom the lot will fall. He did not know how to famous with this difficult duty was fined, forced to immediately make a speech, always with the presence of some interesting idea. You can once play such a comedy for laughter. But when the performance continues all his life, he was accumulated by the servant in the house of the vein, all these numerous dishes made from hay could not appear on the table to appear on the table by the hand of the mistress of the Penat, and she herself after the guests of the guests of the soap washed the dishes.

The servant did all this, only outwardly the matter was portrayed so that they did without outside help. "Natalya Borisovna did not even occur to her then that she was damaged by the name of Repin. She was sure that she used this name not for her own benefits, but solely for the sake of promotion of beneficial ideas that should bring happiness to humanity. But, having accepted a newspaper for glory, she Little by her ambition, obviously not satisfied in her youth, she liked to be a fashionable figure, and immediately a third of her shortcomings - the erased and elaborate taste.

The “cranberries” were not in harmony with a simple, artless Repin style that seemed to be some kind of alien growth on Repin’s biography to such an extent. All this is so, but I must admit that, in spite of everything, it was a pity for her so in vain died. In essence, it was not an evil and not a stupid woman. Forever she was busy about some orphans, forever helped hungry careers, unemployed teachers, as evidenced by many of her letters to me.

The best thing that can be said about her: she often did not look like her brochures and pamphlets. She read excerpts to me from her diary, dedicated mainly to Repin and his environment, and I was surprised by her talent: so much was a keen and well -aimed humor, so much fresh female observation. And in her other scriptures, something not quite hopeless is felt. She did not write much, since she became a writer only in the forty year of her life.

In the year, her story "This" with illustrations by Ilya Efimovich was published. In the year - the "Cross of motherhood", also with its illustrations. In the year - "intimate pages." She also wrote plays. To produce these plays, Ilya Efimovich acquired the building of the country theater at the Ollie station - in essence, a vast wooden barn, which Natalya Borisovna called Prometheus.

Her plays staged in this barn, of course, did not make a collection of "Prometheus" I remembered that the young Mayakovsky spoke there; Once, on the stage, Prometheus was performed by a play by a troupe of the Armed Forces. Meyerhold, who came with him from Teriook, but it is impossible to call them mediocre. In a word, as the closest neighbor of Natalia Borisovna, who watched her for several years every day, I have the right to insist that her personality was not exhausted either by “magic chests”, nor “soups from hay”, and to the one who wants to condemn her for bizars and elaborates, still would not hurt to remember that she paid her life for them.

She proved the nobility of her attitude to Repin by the fact that, not wanting to burden him with her serious illness, she left the penalties - one, without money, without any valuable things, she retired to Switzerland, to Locarno, to the hospital for the poor. There, dying on a bed, she wrote me a letter that, after so many years, worries me as if I had just received it. She disappeared without a trace, as if she had never been in the world, and life, having removed me from her everyday life, still neatly, a brush, shoaling behind me and then flew further, laughing and jubilant.

I was already flying on the abyss, hit a few cliffs and suddenly found myself in an extensive hospital there I realized that no one needed me in my life. It was not me who left, but the belonging of penalties. Everything died around. Not a sound from anyone. ”She refused the money that Ilya Efimovich sent her. We, Ilya Efimovich’s friends, tried to assure her as if she should be a fee for the first edition of the Repin book, which had once been published under her nominal edition.

But she did not accept this money. I can’t imagine it,” she wrote to me from the same locar, “I have for her.It is easy for you to imagine how far I am from the issues of the publishing house and how amazed I am amazed by such a strange phenomenon wrote poetry at 40 degrees "Song of Breda" a terrible thing, from which it is cold on the back. However, a month later, "she died a month, in June, and for the sadness that I experienced when the mournful news came to me, I realized that despite all her quirks and oddities, there was a lot of things in it that I loved her.

Repin visited her grave in Switzerland, went to Venice and, returning to Kuokkalu, entrusted the economy of his daughter. Ilyinichna. He honored the memory of Natalia Borisovna with a small article written in his usual pyphirambic style. It is possible that he was yearning for the deceased, but the very tone of his voice, with which he told visitors on the first Wednesday that from now on other orders would begin in the foals, showed how he had recently depressed the orders instituted by Natalia Borisovna.

Previously, Ilya Efimovich abolished the vegetarian regime and, on the advice of doctors, began to eat in small numbers meat. The poster was removed from the front: “Lie down in Tamtam! Only on a tea table stood an orphaned glass piggy bank for a long time, where the previous guests of the penalties awarded for a fine for violating one of the prohibitions of Natalia Borisovna had to lower the copper.

Now this piggy bank was empty, and everyone immediately forgot about its purpose“ Life in art ”.