![]() ![]() Even the liturgical discipline that I experienced seemed to me special: it trains character but without frightening one. Parents could lose their jobs doing such a thing, but the KGB thought the retired baboushkas were fairly harmless!įather Zenon recalls in an interview with Mikhail Serdyukova that being in church at the age of three he was struck by the beauty and mystery of the services: “I remember very well receiving communion there, and the unusual atmosphere – I had never seen such a thing anywhere else: quiet, beautiful and inexplicably mysterious. As was often the case in communist times, he was taken by his grandmother to church as a child. His father was a shepherd and his mother an accountant. This fact may well have influenced his later belief that Russian iconography has to go back to its Byzantine roots if it is to reach again the heights it obtained in the fifteenth century. In interviews he has often pointed out that this area was once a very large Greek colony. He and his family lived in the Mykolayiv region near Odessa, in the small town of Pervomais’k. A short biographyįather Zenon – in the world Vladimir Theodore – was born in southern Ukraine in 1953, so the first thirty-eight years of his life were spent under atheistic communism. If any reader can correct or add to my researches I would be most grateful. Since very little is written in English about Archimandrite Zenon, I would like to introduce you to his life and thought and icons. Their icons are children of a creativity fed not by the isolated self but by the Holy Liturgy. But iconographers such as Father Zenon open vistas, show us through their work that the tradition is alive. Isolationism can take the form of believing that one epoch of one culture is the most spiritual and therefore the only one really worth emulating, or that the iconographer’s calling per se is always to copy the work of past great epochs. Seeds are meant to be carried away from the mother tree, to grow in fresh soil.Īs interbreeding produces deformity, so isolationism stilts iconography. They have not from timidity remained forever under the roof of their master, a safe but sad course. But in the fullness of time they leave home and develop their own voice. Such people immerse themselves in the existing body of medieval icons as a student before their master. To be a great iconographer requires not piety alone, nor skill alone, but the two wedded. They breathe the holy light and air of the Liturgy, inner prayer, the Holy Spirit of God Himself, and unite this life to great artistic gift. ![]() ![]() They feed directly from the sources, seeking the spirit rather than the form of medieval icons. And, understandably, it is the same masterpieces that are endlessly reproduced, which has the unfortunate effect of debasing the very works we love so much.īut then such people as Father Zenon arrive, who open wide the doors and windows of this stale room and show us what an authentic tradition is. While most contemporary iconographers reject the sentimentalism and naturalism of nineteenth century work, and copy Byzantine or medieval Russian icons as an antidote, most of us are essentially still copyists, and all too often bad copyists. This is an understandable reaction to the many centuries’ debasement of the tradition, but it is a reaction and not a healthy state in which to remain. He unearths the secrets of masterworks, makes them his own, and then he paints without apparent labour.Ī spirit of tentativeness, if not fear, still dominates the icon revival of the past century. He is constantly learning from different icon traditions, Western as well as Eastern, exposing himself to new influences – first the Moscow school of Andrei Rubliof, then earlier Byzantine work, then Romanesque, Armenian, and more recently, from works of Ravenna and early Rome. Archimandrite Zenon in 2008 at St Nicholas Cathedral, Vienna.Įvery once in a while an iconographer appears who is free yet traditional, a wind of freshness, a new plant in a forest of conformity. ![]()
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