Муниципальное бюджетное общеобразовательное учреждение

«Тобурдановская средняя общеобразовательная школа

имени Анатолия Ивановича Миттова»

Канашского района Чувашской Республики

Из плана-конспекта урока-экскурсии по школьному музею

A FAMOUS ARTIST FROM TOBURDANOVO

(A Guide for English-speaking Visitors of the School Museum)

Урок в 8-м классе проведен 17.10.2017

Учитель английского языка

Александрова Тамара Николаевна

Село Тобурданово

2017

A FAMOUS ARTIST FROM TOBURDANOVO

( A Guide for English-speaking Visitors of the School Museum)

Dear guests! Welcome to our school museum! I am K, an 8^th form student. Our secondary school is named after Anatoly Ivanovich Mittov. No wonder that the central hall of the museum is dedicated to our famous countryman.

I’m going to tell you about Anatoly’s parents and his family.

Anatoly Mittov was born in our village of Toburdanovo on the 13^th of December, 1932. We are going to celebrate his 85^th anniversary this year.

Anatoly’s parents were collective farmers. His father Ivan Maksimovich took part in World War I. He was captured by the Germans and spent three years in Germany. For about a year he was kept in a camp for prisoners of war. Later on a German landowner used him as a worker in his farm. There Ivan learned to manage different agricultural machines and mechanisms. He and a group of other Russian captives ran away and walked across Germany and Poland to Russia. Ivan Maksimovich was mobilized and took part in the Civil War. Не returned home only in 1921.

Ivan Mittov was very industrious. He was a real Jack of all trades: he could repair different agricultural machines as a skilled mechanic, he was a miller and a bee-master. There were a collective farm’s apiary and the Mittovs’ apiary in the nearby forest. He was a respected carpenter and joiner. Ivan Maksimovich was a strict but loving father of his four sons. Anatoly was the third of them.

Anatoly’s mother Feodosia Vladimirovna was a christened Tartar, she came from the nearby village of Tyaberdino. She could freely speak Tartar, Chuvash and Russian. She married Ivan Mittov in 1914, and waited for seven years for her husband to return from prison and the fronts of the Civil War! She brought up her children strictly following old Chuvash patriarchal traditions. Being a strong-willed woman, she taught them to obey and never contradict the elderly. Feodosia Vladimirovna was dearly loved by her husband and children. However hard it was, the Mittovs found means to give all four sons higher education.

Ivan Maksimovich died in 1969 and Feodosia Vladimirovna five years later. Anatoly’s younger brother Vitaly Ivanovich Mittov lives with his family in Toburdanovo.

Good day, dear guests! My name is Irina Belskaya. I’ll tell you some facts from the artist’s biography.

Anatoly enjoyed drawing, that’s why after finishing the seventh form of our Toburdanovo School he entered the Cheboksary School of Art. He graduated it in 1952. Anatoly wanted to be a professional artist. But it was not easy to enter an Arts Academy. For two years he had been teaching arts at our Shaltyami village school before he became a student of art and engraving at the Leningrad Institute of Arts named after Repin. He graduated the institute in 1961.

In 1961 he returned to Cheboksary and was given a job of an arts teacher at Chuvash State Teachers Training Institute. He did not work long at this institute. In 1965 Anatoly Ivanovich began working as books designer at the Chuvash Publishing House.

He respected Chuvash artists M. S. Spiridonov, N. K. Sverchkov, Yu. A. Zaitsev, I. T. Grigoryev and highly evaluated their works. He liked the works by his contemporaries V. Ageyev and V. Petrov. But Anatoly was not a very communicable man. There were not many friends of Mittov among Chuvash artists. His true friend was Gennady Aigi, a world-known Chuvash poet. In 1966 Anatoly Mittov married Olympiada Tallerova.

Unfortunately, Anatoly Ivanovich did not live a long life. He got seriously ill while he studied in Leningrad. He suffered severe ear-aches. Two serious surgeries in 1961 and 1962 did not relieve constant pain. The artist learned to bear the pain stoically. But by 1969 the illness had progressed and led to a brain disease. Anatoly Ivanovich Mittov died in 1971. He was buried in our Toburdanovo village cemetery.

Good afternoon! I am Christina Yeremeyeva. It’s my turn to show you the reproductions of paintings by the outstanding artist.

During ten years of his professional activity Anatoly Mittov created a number of paintings and engravings which placed him among outstanding artists of Russia. His style of painting reminds you the style of the great Russian artist Nikolay Rerikh. Some of his pictures have something in common with the pictures of the well-known Lithuanian artist Churlenis, some with the paintings of the famous Georgian artist Pirosmani. Many connoisseurs find certain features of Persian miniatures, some say golden backgrounds in Mittov’s paintings were typical for the Byzantine art. Even ascetic Scandinavian motives are found in Mittov’s works. But everybody agrees that one could hardly confuse his paintings and pictures with any other artist’s. Mittov’s paintings and book illustration have their own specific style. It is based on thorough knowledge of the world art and deep respect of his own Chuvash people’s customs and traditions. The series named “A Plough and a Harrow”, “The Ancestors’ Land” prove his love to his native people and his motherland. Chuvash embroidery, wood-carving, bead- and silver-craft, Chuvash folk songs and tales, Chuvash youth’s traditional singing and dancing in a ring are the background of Anatoly Mittov’s artistic style. He used mainly black, dark brown or blue, green, yellow and red colours, typical of the world-famous Chuvash embroidery. His works have the same rhythm which is characteristic for the artistic folklore of our people. It is expressed not only in his series “Singing and Dancing in a Ring”. There is rhythm in the composition of the “Stacks” as well as in placing the people at the “Dinner Table”. The artist painted and drew his pictures to show human passions, human emotions, world outlook of the Chuvash. Life has never been easy for the Chuvash, it was and is full of hardships and privations. But hope of the better never dies, and our people never cease toiling in the fields and plants to make life better. Anatoly Mittov became our national artist thanks to the unity of the national subject matter of his art and the national form of its expressing. Not many Chuvash artists succeeded in that.

Good day! My name is Nikita Paikin. Let me continue our story.

A. I. Mittov did not become a popular artist in his life-time. Most of arts critics and those who were authorized to choose pictures for exhibitions could not or did not want to understand Mittov’s individuality. His paintings and most of the drawings were so different from the generally accepted! The young artist had very few commissions. His paintings, exhibited in 1965 and 1966 republican art exhibitions, were not justly appraised. They did not exhibit any of his works at “The Great Volga” zonal exhibitions neither in 1964 nor in 1967. Only in spring of 1969 Mittov was commissioned to paint three pictures on the motives of the poem “Narspi” to be exhibited at that year’s “The Great Volga”. During that summer he painted several of his best landscapes: two “Forests”, two “Rural landscapes”, two “Stacks”, and “On the Pasture”, “Boys on the Meadow”, “Harvest”, “Two Rings Dancing and Singing”. For any of us it is clear from the first sight that Anatoly Ivanovich painted his native landscapes. It is so easy to recognize our Toburdanovo in these pictures! Besides these works, he presented the “Dinner in the Garden” and “Waiting for the Wedding Train”, which had been painted in 1965. The last two paintings and one of the “Stacks” were exhibited, and all three of them were highly evaluated both by critics and visitors of the exhibition. Alas, that was the first and the last life-time official acknowledgement of A.I. Mittov’s success…

I’m Angelina Kuzmina. Let me summarize:

As it happens, artists with their own outlook and their own style of its expression are often justly esteemed only after their death. The first personal exhibition of Mittov’s works was organized in Cheboksary in 1972. In 1973 visitors from all parts of the USSR and abroad enjoyed his paintings and drawings exhibited in Moscow. Then there were two more personal exhibitions in Cheboksary and Novocheboksarsk. All of them were successful. Local and central newspapers and magazines published a series of articles devoted to Mittov’s life and art. There were several approving publications in foreign mass-media, which named Anatoly Ivanovich among the most remarkable Soviet artists of the 1960s. In 1976 the Chuvash Publishing House edited the great poem “Narspi” by Konstantin Ivanov. The book had been designed by Anatoly Mittov. He had been working over the drawings and illustrations of his favourite poem for about ten years. In 1977 the artist was posthumously awarded the first degree diploma of the All-Russian Books Exhibition for the design of the book. It has become classical, and art students learn drawing and book designing using “Narspi” as a manual.

Nowadays A. Mittov is an internationally known artist. 33 of his paintings and drawings have been bought and kept by the State Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow. A number of them are regularly exhibited in this world-famous gallery. You can see and enjoy Mittov’s works at the art galleries in Cheboksary and other cities of Russia. There are dozens of scientific papers by Russian and foreign arts critics analyzing them and definitely placing Anatoly Ivanovich among the most outstanding contemporary Russian artists. In 1990 the Chuvash Publishing House edited the book “Mittov (1932 – 1971)”. It is one of the books most frequently borrowed from our school library.

And now, please, study a number of reproductions of works by Anatoly Ivanovich more thoroughly. We aren’t much of art connoisseurs, so we won’t even try to evaluate them. We’ll just give you a chance to make up your own impressions.

Thanks for your attention!

Appendix

Anatoly Mittov (in the centre) with his parents and brother Vitaly (1956)

Anatoly Mittov and his elder brother

A group of art students (Lenindrad, 1956).

Anatoly Mittov is standing the second from the left.

Narspi Setner

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Singing and Dancing in a Ring

Stacks

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