{"id":977,"date":"2021-07-12T15:13:44","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T12:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/polenovo.ru\/history-of-polenovo-museum\/semejnoe-drevo\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T00:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T21:08:07","slug":"genealogy-table","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/history-of-polenovo-museum\/genealogy-table\/","title":{"rendered":"The Polenov Family History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vassily Dmitrievich Polenov belonged to the progressive Russian intelligentsia of his time. He devoted his whole life to art and education. True to democratic traditions, Polenov sought to make the art he served so selflessly accessible, understandable and useful to ordinary people. Education had long been a tradition in the Polenov family.<\/p>\n

The artist\u2019s great-grandfather on his mother\u2019s side, Nikolai Alexandrovich Lvov, was a brilliantly educated man of wide-ranging interests. A gifted architect, writer, musician, folklore collector and academician, Lvov was an active member of Derzhavin\u2019s circle and a mentor to young artists and writers. \u201cHe was full of intelligence and knowledge, loved the sciences and the arts, and was distinguished by refined and elevated taste. People engaged in literature and the arts came to him for advice and often took his judgment as law,\u201d wrote the poet Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin of his friend.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lvov\u2019s daughter, Vera Nikolaevna, the artist\u2019s grandmother, was keenly attentive to children\u2019s interests and needs and knew folk poetry superbly. Her stories and enchanting fairy tales had a great influence on the childhood interests of her grandchildren, Vassily Dmitrievich and his younger sister Elena Dmitrievna, who later became a gifted watercolorist.<\/span><\/p>\n

The artist\u2019s great-grandfather on his father\u2019s side, Alexei Yakovlevich Polenov, is known in the history of 18th-century progressive thought as \u201cthe first Russian emancipator\u201d. A lawyer educated at the universities of Strasbourg and G\u00f6ttingen, almost a hundred years before the abolition of serfdom he wrote a dissertation, On the Abolition of Serfdom in Russia<\/i>, in which he also called for universal literacy in Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

His son, Vasily Alexeyevich Polenov, was a writer, a graduate of the Academic Gymnasium, the organizer of the State Archive and head of the main archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and held the title of academician. He had the good fortune to know Alexander Pushkin while the poet was working on his History of Pugachev\u2019s Rebellion<\/i>. Pushkin\u2019s warm and flattering words about him have survived.<\/span><\/p>\n

The artist\u2019s father, the noted archaeologist and bibliographer Dmitry Vasilyevich Polenov, served as a young man as secretary of the Russian embassy in Athens. Keenly interested in Hellenic culture, he instilled in his son an ardent love of the art and architecture of ancient Greece, which stayed with him all his life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Polenov\u2019s mother, Maria Alexeyevna, a portrait painter and children\u2019s writer, created the special atmosphere in the family that shaped the interests of Vassily Polenov and his younger sister from early childhood. Polenov often said later that he had inherited his passionate love of painting from his mother. The educational traditions of the family in which the future artist grew up had a profound and beneficial influence on him.<\/p>\n

F. D. Polenov, from the book Polenovo: The V. D. Polenov State Estate Museum<\/i>. Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1982.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Polenovo: A Museum as a Family Business<\/h2>

Writing for The Art Newspaper Russia, Inna Shulzhenko tells the story of several generations of directors of the Polenovo museum. \u201cA house in the forest is a philosophy in itself. From the American writer Henry Thoreau to the Russian Soviet author Mikhail Prishvin, who survived thanks to a decision he made after his arrest in January 1918: \u2018How to live now? Like a mouse, like a mouse\u2026 Back to the city, face to the silence.\u2019 The psychology of a city dweller who goes off to live in the countryside and the forest changes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

Read the article<\/span><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vassily Dmitrievich Polenov belonged to the progressive Russian intelligentsia of his time. He devoted his whole life to art and education. True to democratic traditions, Polenov sought to make the art he served so selflessly accessible, understandable and useful to ordinary people. Education had long been a tradition in the Polenov family. The artist\u2019s great-grandfather\u2026","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1654,"parent":235,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-977","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=977"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1656,"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/977\/revisions\/1656"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/polenovo.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}