The Handwritten Legacy of Luka Arefievich Grebnev

Abstract

The article deals with the works of Luka A. Grebnev, a famous figure of the Old Believers of the Vyatka region in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, one of the leaders of the Fedoseyev community. He is known as the organizer of Old Believer printing houses. Grebnev was an expert in singing notated with kriuki and prepared proposals for its reform in the 1920s. He organized a school in the Staraya Tushka village for the children of Old Believers, where they were taught literacy and kriuki singing. Grebnev also created icons from metal, copied and designed books. Icon painting took a significant place in his work. This article introduces into scientific circulation two handwritten books, copied and designed by L. A. Grebnev, which show the stages of his development as an icon painter. The first book is the “Icon-painting original,” obtained during an archaeographical expedition to Vyatka by researchers of the Library of the Academy of Sciences. This book was copied by 12-year-old Luka and contains his first sketches of icon fragments. The second book, designed already by an adult artist, is the Canon miscellany with six miniatures of the icon-painting type from the private collection of V. V. Smirnov. If the “Icon-painting original” has a direct indication of the creator’s name, then determining the authorship of the Canon miscellany required evidence. It was established by comparative analysis of the book’s copyist script and several manuscripts from the collection of the Laboratory of Archaeographic Studies Ural Federal University, which belonged to Grebnev’s hand.