Stepan
Grigorievich Pisakhov

Writer, folklorist, ethnographer, artist. He began as an artist, studied in private workshops in Paris and St. Petersburg, traveled a lot. Since 1899, the participant is thin. exhibitions abroad and in Russia. He constantly lived and worked in Arkhangelsk. He took part in polar expeditions. Since 1924 he published northern Russian tales and tales in his own arrangement. Author of collections of "Tales" (1937, 1949), "Tales, Essays, Letters" (1985), etc.

Pisakhov is an amazing storyteller. There is no impossible for his hero Senya Raspberry. He wants to - he will brew beer in the star rain. He wants to - in a bathhouse in the sea he will go for fish. It will be necessary - from the swamp on the gun will shoot. Or he’ll fly to the moon with the help of a samovar, and there he’ll almost die at the hands of the angry “moon women”.

Unusually, Pisakhov was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1939. The Pisakh texts were in the hands of Fadeev and Karavaeva. And instead of discussing, as expected, the merits and demerits of these texts, they began, interrupting each other, reading fairy tales one by one. They could not stop. And the audience was dying with laughter, almost sliding to the floor.

His language is pure, pristine. Centuries breathe in this language. That is probably what the Novgorodians said, four hundred or five hundred years ago, inhabiting the White Sea coast.

It is difficult to imagine a man as if he had come from the depths of centuries, as a rosy-cheeked youth. For him there is a familiar image - the image of an old man. But this old man often has young eyes. So it was with Pisakhov. Everyone remembers him as an old man. His eyebrows are remembered - scary, disheveled, angry (and in the eyes - a cunning, and a kind smile in his beard).

The storytellers in the North have always been treated with great respect. During the fishing, the storytellers were paid two shares: one for participating in the fishing, the other for telling. Surviving the northern night, which lasts six months, without a fairy tale, it would probably be very difficult.

But he coincided with his fate, Pisakhov realized and loved her far from immediately. Since childhood, he dreamed of becoming an artist. Studied in Petersburg. They remember that he spent the night and slept in the Hermitage. Exhibited in Arkhangelsk, St. Petersburg and Rome. After one such exhibition, Repin, who found out how much the young artist was in poverty, invited him to work in his workshop.

Unfortunately, recently Pisakhov has been undeservedly forgotten. His books are hardly reprinted. Until now, there has not been a single monograph about Pisakhov, except for a short biographical essay published in Arkhangelsk at the end of the fifties on his eightieth birthday.