Pyotr Nilus
Encyclopedia
Podolia
The region of Podolia is an historical region in the west-central and south-west portions of present-day Ukraine, corresponding to Khmelnytskyi Oblast and Vinnytsia Oblast. Northern Transnistria, in Moldova, is also a part of Podolia...
- 23 May 1943 Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
) was a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n impressionist painter and writer.
Pyotr was born to a russified Swiss family in their family estate in Podolsk guberniya. At the age of seven he moved to Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
where he studied at the local Peter and Paul real school and attended art classes of Kyriak Kostandi
Kyriak Kostandi
Kiriak Kostantinovich Kostandi ; ; –31 October 1921) was a prominent Ukrainian painter and an art scholar. A member of the Russian realist artistic movement Peredvizhniki Kiriak Kostantinovich Kostandi ; ; –31 October 1921) was a prominent Ukrainian painter and an art scholar. A member of the...
. Then he attended the Imperial Academy of Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
in Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
and participated in exhibitions of Peredvizhniki
Peredvizhniki
Peredvizhniki , often called The Wanderers or The Itinerants in English, were a group of Russian realist artists who in protest at academic restrictions formed an artists' cooperative; it evolved into the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions in 1870.- History :In 1863 a group of fourteen students...
.
In 1920 he emigrated to Paris where he worked until his death in 1943. Pyotr Nilus was friend with Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin , was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel . Other well-known works include Moloch , Olesya , Junior Captain Rybnikov , Emerald , and The Garnet Bracelet...
, Ivan Bunin
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry...
. For the first years in Paris they lived in the same house. They led an intensive correspondence; there were published more than one hundred letters of Pyotr Nilus to Bunin
Pyotr Nilus is often confused with his relative, notorious antisemite and the first publisher of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fraudulent, antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for achieving global domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the twentieth century...
Sergei Nilus
Sergei Nilus
Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus was a Russian religious writer and self-described mystic....
. In fact Pyotr was not antisemitic and in 1906 together with Korney Chukovsky
Korney Chukovsky
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His poems, Doctor Aybolit , The Giant Roach , The Crocodile , and Wash'em'clean have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children...
actively participated in the efforts to help Jewish children, victims of the Odessa pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...
.