The Year of Literature in Russia-2015: Paintings by Arcady Plastov, written on the works of Leo Tolstoy, are presented at the exhibition in Moscow

In the center of Tolstoy on Pyatnitskaya-12 (the Leo Tolstoy State Museum, Moscow) is opened the exhibition "Arkady Plastov. "Reading Leo Tolstoy"…".

The exhibition first presents outstanding paintings and drawings of the artist of the XX century Arcady Plastov of the collections of the Leo Tolstoy State Museum, from the personal collection of the artist's family, the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Following Tolstoy, his great epic "War and Peace" Plastov in his works showed the Great Patriotic War of 1812 as a popular tragedy, the people's war and the people's victory.

At the same time the image of Leo Tolstoy first appears in his work. In 1953-1954 the artist does a great gouache "The meeting of Tolstoy's with the blind".

Plastov appeals to the image of the writer in the painting "Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana School" (1959), where young Tolstoy is surrounded with kids. The resemblance to Tolstoy is obviously in a hero in the illustration for the story "Hunting Forest of bondage".

Reading Tolstoy, Arkady Plastov embodied in his work the last portrait of the Russian peasantry, the historical archetype of the class, destroyed in the twentieth century, preserved in the art of disappearing images of Russian life.