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Nadezhda
Nikolaevna Rusheva

Russia • 1952−1969
(January 31, 1952, Ulan Bator, Mongolia - March 6, 1969, Moscow)
Nadezhda Rusheva was born in Ulaanbaatar in the family of Soviet artist Nikolai Konstantinovich Rusheva. Her mother was the first Tuvan ballet dancer, Natalia Doydalovna Azhikmaa-Rusheva. In the summer of 1952, the family moved to Moscow. Nadya began to draw from the age of five, and no one taught her drawing, also before school she was not taught to read and write. At the age of seven, as a first-grader, she began to draw regularly, each day for no more than half an hour after lessons. Then, in one evening, she drew 36 illustrations of Pushkin's "Tale of Tsar Saltan" while her father was reading this favorite fairy tale aloud to her. In May 1964, her first exhibition of her drawings was organized by Yunost magazine when Nadya was in the fifth grade. After this exhibition in the same year in the magazine № 6 there were the first publications of her drawings, when she was only 12 years old. In 1965 in №3 of "Yunost" magazine the first illustrations of thirteen-year-old Nadya were published for a work of fiction - the story by Edward Pashnev "Newton's apple". Ahead were the illustrations for the novels "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy and "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov and fame of the future book designer, although the young artist herself dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. Over the next five years of her life, she had fifteen solo exhibitions in Moscow, Warsaw, Leningrad, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and India. In 1969, on Lenfilm was filmed a film "You as the first love ...", dedicated to Nadezhda Rusheva. The film was not finished. She died on March 6, 1969, in the hospital due to a ruptured congenital aneurysm of a cerebral vessel and subsequent brain hemorrhage.
Her works include illustrations to the myths of Ancient Hellas, works by Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Bulgakov. All in all, the works of about 50 authors were illustrated.
Among Nadia's sketches are several that depict the ballet "Anna Karenina. This ballet was actually staged after the artist's death, and Maya Plisetskaya danced the lead role in it.
Her drawings were made without sketches, she always drew them at once, without using eraser. "I see them beforehand... They appear on the paper, like watermarks, and all I have to do is draw around them," Nadia said.
Nadia left behind a huge artistic legacy - about 12,000 drawings. It is impossible to calculate their exact number - a significant portion was dispersed in letters, hundreds of sheets the artist gave to friends and acquaintances, a considerable number of works for various reasons were not returned from the first exhibitions. Many of her drawings are kept in the Leo Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, the Nadia Rusheva branch museum in Kyzyl, the Pushkin House of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, the National Cultural Foundation and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
There were more than 160 exhibitions of her work in different countries: Japan, Germany, USA, India, Mongolia, Poland and many others.
She is buried in the Pokrovsky Cemetery in section one. There is a monument on her grave, where her picture "Centaur" is reproduced.
Nadia's drawing "Centaur" became the logo of the Autonomous Nonprofit Organization "International Center of Non-fiction Film and Television "Centaur," which prepares and conducts the Message to Man Film Festival. The annual Golden Centaur and Silver Centaur prizes are based on this drawing. In 2003, a monument to the Centaur was unveiled on the stairs of the St. Petersburg Cinema House.
Her name is given to Educational Center #1466 (former Moscow School #470), where she studied. The school has a museum of her life and work.
october 21, 1982 the Crimean astronomer LG Karachkina discovered a small planet number 3516, which she named after Nadia - 3516 Rusheva.
There is the Nadia Rusheva Pass in the Caucasus.

Bibliography: Album "Graphics of Nadia Rusheva" - Fine Art, Moscow, 1976. Compiled by: Nikolai Konstantinovich Rushev. Text writer: Georgy Viktorovich Panfilov.
The Last Year of Hope. Memories of my daughter. Author: Rushev N. K. - M.: THEIS, 2007.
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