The curators of the exhibition managed to captivate the most diverse public with the beauty of wooden masterpieces. Photo: Mikhail Sinitsyn
The Kizhi cemetery at the exhibition “Opolovnikov. Restorer of Russian wooden architecture”, dedicated to the outstanding Russian restorer and held in the wing-Ruin of the Museum of Architecture, received a separate room. Here are the same old plows, photographs recording the progress of the restoration, sections of the domes.
Alexander Opolovnikov, who was invited to Karelia in the late 1940s by the Department of Architecture of the Council of Ministers of the Karelia-Finnish SSR, considered the restoration of Kizhi churches to be the main business of his life. . On his initiative, the Kizhi Museum-Reserve was created, to which monuments of wooden architecture from the surrounding islands, and not only, were brought (and many were thus saved from destruction).
But before all this, there was a project for a cogeneration plant that bears his name. Stalin, 1938: a drawing by a fifth-year student at the Moscow Institute of Architecture opens the exhibition. During the war, Sergeant Opolovnikov built military camps, until in 1943 he was sent on a business trip to the Arkhangelsk region “… to fix valuable monuments of wooden architecture.” Since then, he has dedicated himself solely to wooden architecture.
And in the second room – the first “washing” (drawings of architectural objects that allow you to understand the scale of the structure) of Karelian temples and chapels. With Opolovnikov, even simple one-dome churches in the context and with measuring figures here do not look like working materials, but artistic graphics.
As an architect of the Office, Alexander Opolovnikov explored the monuments of wooden architecture throughout Karelia and at the exhibition you accompany him from temple to temple, from drawing to design …
Here is the design of the wooden Assumption Church in Kondopoga, which Opolovnikov called “the swan song of folk architecture.” No one except time touched the temple, and the restorer in 1948 did not recreate anything, he only restored, strengthened, put in order. But the descendants of Alexander Viktorovich failed to save him: a tall, light and ideally thought-out church of the 18th century was set on fire in 2018 and burned to the ground in a matter of minutes.
Alexander Opolovnikov studied about 300 monuments from Karelia to Yakutia, and he himself took part in the restoration of 60, and not only with a pencil, but also with an ax in his hands. He didn’t put down his pencil, even when he had a stroke in the late 1970s. Using his measurements, he began painting pictures. One of them, with the image of the Church of the Savior on Indigirka, is in this exhibition.
