"Belarus has nothing to do with it!" Leonid Parfyonov answered the question of whose Chagall he is
The well-known Russian journalist Leonid Parfyonov gave a long interview to Irina Shikhman for the YouTube channel "A pogovorit?" Standing by Marc Chagall's grave in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, he, among other things, reflected on the creative legacy and belonging of the famous artist. Belarusians, he is convinced, have absolutely no connection to this artist.
"Some time ago, maybe three years, there was a Chagall exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna. There were many pieces from Japanese collections, which I couldn't even imagine, and there was so much of Russia! I had never seen so much snow, wooden fences, soldiers with samovars in Chagall's work. [...] And of course, he carried all of that. It's a strange thing when it comes to the question of what comes from childhood, from youth. How he [carried through] this Vitebsk, this Yiddishland, this cosmos, some very small settlement (according to the 1897 census, 65,871 people lived in the provincial center of Vitebsk – in the realities of that time, the city was not small at all; the population of Minsk, for example, was 91,000 – Nasha Niva), from which one can create an entire cosmos in the world of an artist," Parfyonov reflects.
Irina Shikhman, in connection with this, asks him a question:
— By the way, about nationality. Whose artist do you consider him to be? Russian? Belarusian? (In the last word, irony is clearly audible. – Nasha Niva).
— No, no, — Parfyonov decisively objects. — Belarus has nothing to do with it! He is a Russian and French artist of Jewish origin. Jewishness, of course, is very strong, but the school of his training, to which he belonged — that, of course, is the Russian Silver Age, and then pre-war Paris, before the First World War."
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