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# In the House at 35 Tavricheskaya, One Floor Below Vyacheslav Ivanov's "Tower", Where All Symbolist Petersburg Gathered on Wednesdays, a Drawing School Operated from 1906
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-dome-na-tavricheskoi-35-etazhom-nizhe-bashni-viacheslava-ivanova-gde-po-sredam-sobiralsia-ves-simvolistskii-peterburg-s-1906-goda-rabotala-risovalnaia-shkola/
- Published: 2026-06-25T18:01:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:46.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Coming Up, Art, Museums, Observations, Education, Saint Petersburg

In the house at 35 Tavricheskaya, one floor below Vyacheslav Ivanov's "Tower", where all Symbolist Petersburg gathered on Wednesdays, a drawing school operated from 1906\. The school was founded by Elizaveta Zvantseva, a pupil of Repin and Serov. By the turn of the century the Academy of Arts had ossified, and young people in search of a modern system made their way to her. Three great men taught there. Bakst set the "beautiful line" and open colour, until he left for Paris. Dobuzhinsky breathed mysticism into enchanted minds and taught the psychology of the urban landscape. From 1910 the school was headed by Petrov-Vodkin, with his theory of local colour, the icon-like three-colour scheme and spherical perspective.

Zvantseva's pupils were impossible not to recognise: a bright palette, expressive form, a capricious line.

The young Chagall, who studied under Bakst, passed through the school. The exhibition at the Museum of Russian Impressionism includes several of his watercolours from this period. But what drew me were the names that later seem to have dissolved into the soulless notion of a "circle": Sergey Kalmykov, Nadezhda Lermontova, Yulia Obolenskaya, Magda Nachman, Natalya Grekova, Nikolay Tyrsa, Mikhail Matyushin, Olga Rozanova. There were many women artists, perhaps half of the whole school. And most of their names I heard for the first time, although they too changed the language of painting in the 1910s.

The school was not confined to Petersburg. Voloshin rented a flat from Zvantseva, his wife Margarita Sabashnikova sat at the same easel, and in summer the pupils travelled to him in Koktebel, where Nachman painted the only portrait of Tsvetaeva made in her lifetime. Thus a single drawing studio joins the whole Silver Age with invisible threads.

Elizabeth Hart, the future Polunina, came to Bakst from the Paris studios and left to become a designer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Her portrait of Voloshin is on display in the exhibition.

A separate story is my beloved Sergey Kalmykov. In 1911 he, a pupil of Petrov-Vodkin, painted bathing red horses, and a year later his teacher created *The Bathing of a Red Horse*. Kalmykov afterwards calmly insisted, addressing future biographers: "On the red horse our dearest Kuzma Sergeyevich portrayed me." A man who died in obscurity in a clinic in Alma-Ata and was made famous posthumously had thus told us in advance where exactly to look for him in the history of art. The exhibition has several of his less emblematic lithographs and a youthful drawing.

*Zvantseva's School. A Laboratory of Modernism* runs at the Museum of Russian Impressionism until 4 October. It is the first systematic attempt to look at her studio as a coherent phenomenon, and not merely as a footnote to three great teachers.

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