From the series "Walks and dialogues with Vladimir Glukhovtsev"

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the biography and features of the artist’s creative worldview and book graphics by Vladimir Glukhovtsev. The published materials were created by the scholar and poet Arkady Slutsky, who had been a close friend of the artist for thirty years. The methodological basis of the publication was the historical-biographical method, which allows revealing the features of the historical process through the analysis of various situations and micro-plots that arise in human life. Slutsky’s memoirs that he wrote over the last years of his life constituted the main factual outline of this article. The materials of the article were works of Russian and foreign philosophers and theorists of fine art, works of the classics of Russian literature. Consistently presented micro-plots (about the Glukhovtsev dynasty and the archive of Alexander Glukhovtsev (the artist’s father), about working on illustrations for “Alice in Wonderland”, “Traveling with Pushkin”, “Traveling to Prague”) reveal various features and events of the artist’s creative biography in a postmodern way. The research focuses on Glukhovtsev’s experiments in the field of book design, on his pedagogical activity and inner imaginative world. Slutsky describes and analyzes Glukhovtsev’s cultural environment in the context of the intellectual demands of Russian society at the turn of the 21st century, rich in turbulent sociopolitical events. The concept of factual presentation of the material is supplemented by oral history, the artist’s live speech, reproduced textologically from the phonograms of conversations with Glukhovtsev that Slutsky transcribed. A valuable part of the content of the article is the so-called philosophical and lyrical digressions, an attempt to comprehend everything that happened to the author and the character in space and time. The author concludes that the aesthetic searches of Glukhovtsev as a book graphic artist were focused on the structure of a book. The main task of the artist was the organization of the book space and the reading perception of the text rather than the interpretation of literary images. The artist sought to focus the reader’s attention in a special way, and for this he masterfully used a set of techniques for designing printing elements in his own authorial style. Having begun his career as a successor of the traditions laid down by the luminaries of the Russian graphics of the 20th century (Vladimir Favorsky, Andrey Goncharov, Mikhail Kupriyanov), Glukhovtsev eventually developed his own approach to artistic creativity, while being able to maintain a constant and lively connection with the academic tradition.