Artist Viktor Anatolyevich Korolkov (178 works)

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Viktor Korolkov was born on October 17, 1958 in Khabarovsk into the family of a military man. Lived in the glorious city of Penza.
In 1981 he graduated from the Penza Art College. K. A. Savitsky. Since 1996 - member of the Union of Artists of Russia.

While still a student at the local art school, he began to visit the capital’s museums - first in Kyiv, then in Moscow, then in St. Petersburg - to look at paintings by the great masters of the past. What attracted him most were the epic images: the deities of Hellas, Egypt, the ancient Germans, Scandinavians, heroes of the Old and New Testaments. But one day in the museum Korolkov contemplated “The Last Day of Pompeii” by Karl Bryullov. And then suddenly a strange thought appeared to him: where are the gods and heroes of our national time immemorial? Several paintings by Vasnetsov, Semiradsky, Roerich - that’s all that the aspiring artist remembered. Korolkov thought deeply and began to remember what he knew about the ancient Slavs, about the pagan deities. It turned out to be nothing at all. And he decided to start educating himself. “Poetic views of the Slavs on nature,” a three-volume work by Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev, published in the middle of the 19th century, he studied the books of Anichkov, Zabelin, Korinfsky, and two thick volumes by Academician Rybakov devoted to paganism. And his eyes opened to the world of God, like a baby’s.

It turns out that in the distant reaches of the past, there, beyond the mountains of time, ideas about the incredible, miraculous, and supernatural already existed among our ancestors. The heroes of the fairy-tale epic freely command the elements, with the help of magical spells they overcome illnesses, easily predict the future, sit in diamond revolving palaces, from the windows of which the entire Universe is visible.

Brownies, mermen, werewolves, mermaids, goblins, kikimoras, barnyards - a whole host of sometimes good and sometimes evil creatures, later branded with the nickname "evil spirits" - invaded the life of the pagan every now and then.

At the end of the 80s of the last century, Viktor Korolkov began the main work of his life - he began to “build” a multicolored pantheon of the pagan past of our ancestors. And over two hundred such paintings were created. They decorated the albums “Acts of the Celestials”, “Encyclopedia of Slavic Mythology”, “Pushkin’s Fairy Tales”, “Encyclopedia of Russian Legends”, “Russian Legends and Traditions”, “Vedic Rus'”. And for the illustrations for the anniversary edition of the pagan poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” the master from Penza was awarded the title of Pushkin Prize Laureate in 2000. Exhibitions of paintings by Viktor Anatolyevich Korolkov, who died untimely (five years ago), were held in Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk, Crimea, Belgrade, and Baghdad.

Viktor Korolkov’s paintings refer to the historical past of Primordial Rus'. This is a protective field of beauty, a form of inspired protest against the oblivion of our difficult history.

In the last years of his short life, the master again turned to Russian classics. Colorful illustrations were created for “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and for “The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov” by M. Yu
. Lermontov and to “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” by N.V. Gogol.