The series conceived and compiled by Isaak Kushnir.
Text - L.Gurevich.

Arefjev's circle includes Alexandr Arefjev and his friends: Rikhard Vasmi, Valentin Gromov, Vladimir Shagin, Sholom Shwarz, i.e. five painters which at the second half of the 40's decided to be independent. This album is devoted to them.

It is known that in Stalin's epoch there were creative people "unfinished off by accident", bearers of culture, which were formed as persons before the October revolution and terror. After N.S. Khrushhev's report the men of sixties', the children of "the Thaw", emerged. And our heroes were raised and formed at the dead of the totalitarian epoch that is why they were straight-out towards both the dominant doctrine and permitted art. They looked at world without ideological blinkers. They actualized themselves creatively out of the bounds of the official art. They didn't wait any changes. They spiritualized their own lives and induced into out reality their understanding of the high art, the nerve-strain, the ultimate self-rigorousness.

A human and cultural fact now named, as Arefjev's circle is dramatic in many respects. The creative liberation of the painters is dramatic despite the fact that the post-war situation didn't afford any ground for it. Under their bravado of bolterness, which attended their destinies, the intensity and high professionalism of their works is dramatic as well. At last that fact is dramatic that five teenagers, whose destinies occasionally met in the walls of the post-war High Art School, which according to philistines being these half-educated persons could not win professional status, are the brightest painters of the post-war art in the Soviet time chronicle.

It may be confirmed that the appreciation is undoubted for the absolute majority of those who knows the post-war painting of Leningrad. However the acceptance of Arefjev's circle has till been limited within this rather narrow set.

A required art study has not been made. They have not been entered into the art history of the XXth century, their role and place in art has not been defined.

The text of this book tends to enter facts and testifies including those that up to now last in oral stories. Wherein a source of citations is not specially indicated, it is a talk record of a compiler with anybody of the said painters of their familiars. In order to pass the climate, the cultural and human context of the phenomenon we give also information about Arefjev's circle in a wider sense, i.e. about their friends and familiars.

Lubov Gurevich,
Mikhail Ivanov