"LENINGRAD COURTYARD"
Oil on canvas on cartboard, 50x70 cm.

I painted this study after my return from a winter trip to Petersburg, called Leningrad in those years. I used to live on Kronverk and after spending all day long in the Hermitage in the evening I would walk over the Niva river, pass by the Peter and Paul fortress and the "Watcher" torpedo boat monument and finally dived into a labyrinth of cortyards. As I was told, the sun does not come inside them even in summer. In Moscow I did not see such an inhuman habitation. Thus Dostoyevskiy’s permanent depression, the 1917 explosion become understandable. In such a cortyard I made the painting and inscribed "It’s good that there is the sky above all that man creates".