Nadezhda Peshkova

Biography

In the portrait that Pavel Korin finished in 1940, Nadezhda Peshkova sits in a dark dress, legs crossed, in an old armchair with carved gilded arms, a book in her hand. Korin made the first sketch for it in December 1934 in the Crimea, at Tesseli, drew her at Gorki outside Moscow in September 1936 and many times more, until he found the position of the figure, the hands and the objects around her. It is one of the few portraits of women in his work. The canvas is in the Tretyakov Gallery, at the Korin House-Museum; in its composition it recalls Repin’s portrait of Maria Andreyeva.

Korin was her teacher as well.

She was born on 30 November 1901 in Tomsk, née Vvedenskaya, the daughter of a urologist, Professor Alexei Vvedensky; there were eight children. When she was twelve, the family moved to Moscow, to Patriarch’s Ponds. Nadezhda attended the French gymnasium on Suvorovsky Boulevard and then the Vakhtangov studio, together with Chaliapin’s daughter. She had known Maxim Peshkov, Gorky’s son, since her school years. In 1922 they went abroad together with Gorky and married in Berlin; from Germany the family moved to Czechoslovakia, then to Italy. Her father-in-law gave her the nickname Timosha when she cut her hair short. Faina Ranevskaya explained it this way: coachmen in Russia were called Timofey, and their curls stuck out from under their caps. Her daughters, Marfa (1925) and Darya (1927), were born in Italy. It was there, in Gorky’s house, where the painter Valentina Khodasevich and Benois stayed as guests, that Peshkova, together with her husband, began to study painting.

In 1932 the family returned to Moscow. She had met Korin a year earlier: Gorky visited his studio, suggested calling the painting he was planning “Departing Russia”, and the next day invited the Korin brothers to his house on Malaya Nikitskaya Street. Under Korin’s guidance Peshkova painted with enthusiasm, and in 1935 she travelled abroad with him to see the art collections of Paris and London. In 1937 she painted Korin’s wife, Praskovya Tikhonovna, in Chuvash dress. In 1976 this portrait was bought from her daughter Marfa for the Chuvash State Art Museum in Cheboksary.

The portrait was her favourite genre. Images of Gorky and his friends by Peshkova hang in the Gorky museums in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. Her exhibition at Patriarch’s Ponds included portraits of Maria Andreyeva, Faina Ranevskaya, Vsevolod Ivanov and others of her circle. The pilot Mikhail Gromov, a neighbour at their dachas, recalled that writers, artists, actors and musicians gathered at her house, and that Korin was the closest of all to the family. He also told how Peshkova painted his wife in a riding habit, and the portrait came out so well that it was shown at an exhibition of Moscow artists in the Central Exhibition Hall. Peshkova was a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. The descriptions available to me give no dates for most of these portraits, and as far as I can tell no full list of her works has been compiled.

In May 1934 Maxim Peshkov died, and two years later Gorky was gone. Nadezhda Alekseyevna stayed with the family in the Ryabushinsky mansion at the Nikitsky Gates, built by Fyodor Schechtel, where her father-in-law had lived and worked. During the war she was evacuated to Tashkent and worked in a hospital. She lived in the mansion until 1965, and the last twenty years went into the Gorky museum: the apartment museum in this house came about largely through her efforts and opened in 1965.

She herself was painted by Boris Grigoriev, with her daughter in “Motherhood”, and by Valentina Khodasevich, and Sergei Konenkov modelled her in his “Peshkov cycle”.

Nadezhda Peshkova died in Moscow on 10 January 1971. She is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery beside her husband and her mother-in-law, Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova.