The Death Artist

While creating the Soviet Union's most iconic sculptures, Sergei Merkurov had a shadow profession – casting death masks of its elite.

Photos courtesy Anton Merkurov

Sergei Merkurov was working late one night in his Moscow studio, bundled in furs against the winter cold, when the phone rang to tell him he was being sent on a secret assignment.

He thought his time had come.

A black car pulled up, and men in military uniforms pushed the sculptor inside. With relief, he realized there were 10 officers – more, surely, than was necessary to get rid of one man.

It was January 21, 1924. Russia didn't know it yet, but Vladimir Lenin, the father of the revolution, was dead.

Upon reaching Lenin's estate, the men abandoned their car and approached in a horse-drawn sleigh. Merkurov's hands were shaking as he was ushered to the table where the leader's body lay still following his fourth stroke. The house's mirrors were shrouded in cloth, in keeping with the old superstition that a dead man's soul could be preserved in his reflection and return to haunt the living.

Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, emerged from the shadows.

"You were supposed to sculpt Lenin's bust," she whispered. "Now, you must make his mask."

Yakov Sverdlov

 

The plaster cast Merkurov created would serve as the blueprint for thousands of statues across the Soviet Union.

From his childhood in an Armenian village, Merkurov went on to create some of the Soviet Union's most iconic images. His massive Lenin and Stalin statues stood in Tver, in Yerevan, and even in New York; they stood in the very inner sanctum of Soviet power, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in the Kremlin. It was Merkurov who designed the gargantuan Lenin that was to crown the Palace of Soviets, the unrealized utopian project of the Stalinist era.

But it was Merkurov's shadow career that laid his path to power – and secured it while others fell. After being called to make the death mask of Leo Tolstoy, Merkurov became the court death mask sculptor for nearly all the top henchmen of the new Soviet state. Lenin, Krupskaya, Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, Georgian revolutionary Georgy Ordzhonikidze, Central Executive Committee chairman Mikhail Kalinin and Leningrad boss Sergei Kirov were but a few of the leaders whose final images were preserved by Merkurov's hand.

His handiwork was not limited to political leaders, with cultural luminaries including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky, Andrei Bely and Sergei Eisenstein also immortalized in masks. His total output is thought to be around 150 masks.

Merkurov was a flamboyant, idiosyncratic figure, a child of Europe's turn of the century modernist explosion. As a young art student, he studied under Auguste Rodin, whom he idolized (and whom he would imitate for the rest of his life with his lustrous facial hair, earning him the nickname "the Beard").

He was a cosmopolitan, hobnobbing with Bolshoi dancers, avant-garde director Vyacheslav Meyerhold and author Mikhail Bulgakov. He was a mystic who was possibly an early disciple of his cousin, the esoteric guru George Gurdjieff.* He was a peasant, maintaining a Moscow farm where he tended cows and kept a piglet in his bed on cold winter nights. He was an energetic administrator who served as director of the Pushkin Museum.

But Merkurov's career coincided with an age that demanded conformity, and the times would shape his artistic path. His more colorful early ideas, such as a sculpture of Marx being carried by elephants, were rejected, and he skirted dangerously close to removal. Instead, he adapted his talents to the leadership's whims, throwing himself into the monumental propaganda that communicated Lenin and Stalin's cult of personality to the masses.

Stalin's death would put an end to many of Merkurov's statues – most of the monumental works, especially those of Stalin himself, were destroyed. But it was his masks that were his true legacy – the greatest embodiment of an ancient art, cast in the shadow of a nation forged in blood.

 

Merkurov was born in 1881 in Alexandrapol, an Armenian town now called Gyumri. He grew up in a sprawling, Mediterranean-style home (now the ramshackle Merkurov House Museum) that included a vineyard and a tandyr for baking fresh bread. The household was composed of an extended family of 50, headed by Merkurov's grandmother.

Merkurov described his early memories of his hometown in notes for a never-published autobiography. "Sultry heat. A town square. Dirty watermelon peels under my feet. The air sings with the aroma of pears, melons and apples."

Merkurov left Gyumri to study at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. Political upheaval forced him to flee the Russian Empire for Zurich, where he began studying philosophy at age 21. It was there that he met the Swiss sculptor Adolf Mayer, who encouraged him to study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

In Germany, where he studied from 1902 to 1905, his teachers recognized his talent for sculpture and encouraged him to pursue it. He studied the classics of ancient Egypt and Rome in European museums, but it was his months in Paris studying under Auguste Rodin that changed his life. Rodin's moody expressionism and shadowy contrasts colored much of Merkurov's early sculpture, such as "The Five Symphonies of Beethoven." After completing his studies he traveled across the Caucasus, giving lectures on Rodin.

Long before his brush with the master, however, Merkurov had been drawn to sculpture – and from the beginning, it was connected to death. As a child, Merkurov would gaze at a pair of stone tombstones at the local church in Alexandrapol, which depicted two angels.

"One holds down the deceased with his legs, a frightening sword in his hand," he remembered. "The other holds by its hair the soul that he has just pulled out of the sinner's dissected breast."

He gazed at the angels to the sounds of his mother's wailing, booming church bells and a groaning crowd praying for rain. He danced to the bells, earning a rebuke from his mother: "You were restless (nespokoyny) in my womb, and they'll do the same to you in the tomb."

"I didn't understand," he wrote. "It was fun to dance to the bells! But my mother frightened me with the avenging angel. Large, stone, gloomy – at night, in my dreams, he frightened me, and I awoke in a cold sweat."

In his early years as an artist, Merkurov made money by sculpting tombstones. His early brushes with death would stay, but they would take him far from the stifling church in Alexandrapol.

 

On a cool night in 1907, a locomotive hurtled toward the monastery at the foot of Mount Ararat. On it was Merkurov, assigned to an unusual commission by the church. After he passed through the dark gates, bishops in black robes led him to the room where Mkritch Khrimyan, the beloved Armenian patriarch, had just died.

They locked the door behind him. At age 26, Merkurov was about to undertake his first mask.

As moonlight streamed through the window, he looked at the bed, seeing the familiar full beard and long nose. He pulled the patriarch up to a sitting position, resting his skull on the headboard. "Terrifying. It's the coldness that tells you," Merkurov wrote.

After the plaster had set, he reached to lift up the mask. But in his nervousness, he had forgotten to lay a piece of string on the man's face, the technique that allowed it to be pulled off. Frantic, he beat it with a hammer to break it apart.

The dark slapstick continued when he realized that he had accidentally covered all of Khrimyan's beard, which stubbornly held the mold. Merkurov struggled to pry it off, holding the body between his legs. (Dexterity with facial hair would later become one of Merkurov's trademarks).

The worst shock was yet to come. Having finally pulled the mask off the face, Merkurov looked down to see two open eyes staring back at him.

Merkurov's knees gave out. Looking into the patriarch's eyes, he remembered that as the plaster hardens, it becomes warm, causing the facial muscles to relax.

He tried to get up, but his legs were paralyzed from nervous shock. In the morning, a knock on the door from the bishops brought him back to consciousness.

 

Death masks are derived from the burial rites of ancient Egypt, when an idealized likeness of the dead was created to accompany him into the afterlife. The tradition came to Europe in the 14th century, with England's Edward III the first king to be honored with a death mask, which was exhibited atop his coffin. In the European tradition, casts were made directly of the face. This more accurate likeness was then used as the basis for monuments, and the masks themselves were then preserved in museums and libraries.

The technical process was simple. The artist rubbed down the face with grease, plugged the nose and ears, laid a piece of string down the center of the face and poured on plaster. When the plaster had set, the master used the string to lift the mask off in two pieces. This plaster mold was then used to cast one or more masks out of a more enduring material, typically bronze.

In Russia, the first death mask was made of Peter the Great. Masks gained popularity in the 19th century, with the faces of famous figures, including Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Gogol preserved for posterity.

It was Merkurov, however, who elevated the ancient practice into an art form.

While the centuries-old tradition had been to simply cast the subject's face, Merkurov cast the entire head and hair, as well as the hands. With this basic record as a model, he would create a full-blown sculpture, adding stylized elements.

Merkurov "created a new art form that had never existed before him, and would never be repeated again," said death mask historian Dmitry Shlyonsky.

After Merkurov's bumbling first attempt with Khrimyan, it was with his mask of Leo Tolstoy that would win him international attention.

 

In 1910, not long after arriving in Moscow, Merkurov picked up plaster and grease at a local shop before boarding a train to Astapovo, the village station where Leo Tolstoy had just died.

He emerged into the hectic din of journalists and disciples congregated at the train station. Several of Tolstoy's associates spotted the strapping Armenian, and led him to the silent room where the author of War and Peace lay still.

"The first thing that attracted my attention was his half-opened right eye and thick, crossly raised brow," Merkurov later wrote. "A stern, frowning face."

Not wishing to entrust their guru's face to only one sculptor, Tolstoy's son Sergei ordered for two artists to be summoned to cast masks. Merkurov was forced to wait while another artist made the first mask. Entering the room, he saw that his predecessor had left plaster on the writer's face, and that his mask had caved in several spots.

He set out to improve on his predecessor's work. "I wanted to imbue the plaster with every cavity, every wrinkle and every line, exactly as it had stiffened on the dead man's face."

The first mask made of Tolstoy "captured the noble features of the old man who'd just died," Shlyonsky said. "But Merkurov, he imbued it with the stormy, thoughtful, departing, soaring soul of Tolstoy."

Merkurov's mask was displayed at a Tolstoy exhibit staged in Moscow in 1911, where it caused a major stir. It was displayed, complete with the strands of hair from Tolstoy's beard that had stuck to it, alongside a somewhat grisly sculpture Merkurov had made that showed Tolstoy in his death throes.

Leo Tolstoy

 

The exhibit was attended by Moscow's press and high society, introducing Merkurov to the figures who would elevate him to prominence.

Journalists praised "the striking resemblance and relief of the familiar features," and commented that "the mask was not only of the face, but of most of the head."

Merkurov's mask served as the basis for a striking new sculpture of Tolstoy, his beard flowing, his shoulders stooped and his hands habitually tucked into his belt. The sculpture's playful portrayal would cause it to be rejected for several sites in Moscow before ending up at Tolstoy's Moscow house museum, and then a public park (where it would eventually be replaced yet again).

 

Unfortunately, Merkurov's extant papers contain accounts of only a handful of the many masks he produced. But those that are described, perhaps unsurprisingly, have an air of the macabre.

One night, he received a 3 a.m. call from a weeping woman, who'd heard of his Tolstoy mask and begged him to make one of her husband.

Initially hesitant, Merkurov soon acquiesced. He arrived to find the man lying on a bed in a cold, disarrayed room, his throat cut. His wife, wrapped in her husband's old beaver coat, had embalmed the corpse herself. She had been living with it for 12 days; when visitors came, she told them he was sleeping.

After the mask was done, she pleaded with him: "Please don't tell anyone that he died – they'll take him from me, and I'll never forgive you."

 

After the Tolstoy exhibit, Merkurov's studio at Tsvetnoy Bulvar began attracting attention. In its center stood his granite Tolstoy statue, as well as new commissions of Dostoyevsky and other figures (Merkurov's use of granite was innovative, as the material was rarely used in Russian sculpture at the time).

In 1915, an impressed writer for Russian Illustration magazine remarked after his visit: "there's only one thing the artist doesn't know – what to do with his works." That was about to change.

"The revolution flung open the doors of my studio," Merkurov wrote.

As Russia's civil war died down, the victorious new government set about consolidating its rule by creating new landmarks. Merkurov's sculptures attracted the attention of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the erudite new culture commissar. Lunacharsky recommended Merkurov to Lenin for a statue of Karl Marx that was to stand opposite the Bolshoi.

Merkurov's extravagant design didn't go over well. He positioned Marx riding atop four elephants, a reference to Hindu mythology. "Such an unexpected motif seemed very strange to all of us, including Vladimir Ilyich," Lunacharsky wrote.

But Lenin had taken a liking to Merkurov, granting the extravagant Armenian a plot of land in Moscow's Izmailovo to live on ("observe the peasants," Lenin advised). Merkurov wrote Lenin a letter requesting a bull; chuckling, Lenin granted him an enormous beast named Grozny, "confiscated" from the Russian patriarch's dacha at Cherkizovo.

As one visitor to Merkurov's menagerie commented, "his studio is simply a barn." Merkurov could often be seen bustling around the grounds, caring for birds, a cow, horses and goats. He kept up the Caucasian hospitality of his childhood home, always ready to set a table for visitors.

Sergei Merkurov

 

 

Merkurov had a few brushes with danger in his early years. During the violent Red Terror of the 1920s, his apartment was searched, and many of his personal papers were confiscated. But the next day Dzerzhinsky himself called Merkurov to say that the Cheka had been mistaken by one letter; they were supposed to investigate "Merkulov."

His mask of Lenin, however, sealed his place in the Soviet firmament. This mask, too, began with a scare. Upon laying his hands on Lenin's head, he stopped cold. There was a pulse.

Terrified, he summoned a doctor, who took Merkurov's hand and pressed his fingers against the cool table. "It wasn't Lenin's pulse you felt, but your own," he said.

The sculptor also made a cast of Lenin's hands, the right of which was still clenched after a second stroke that had left the leader partially paralyzed.

Merkurov's mask of Lenin became a valued relic. Before the funeral, he made 20 bronze copies and distributed them to Lenin's inner circle, including Trotsky and Stalin.

His sculpture of Lenin on the tomb wasn't as well-received as that of Tolstoy. In honor of the 10-year anniversary of the October Revolution, he created a sculpture titled Death of the Leader, in which Michelangelo-style nudes with rippling muscles carried the dead Ilyich, also naked to the waist, on the funeral plinth. It was removed from the exhibition, and replaced with a clothed version.

After Stalin's removal of Anatoly Lunacharsky from the culture post, Merkurov feared for his career. He wrote a panicked letter to Gorky. "I can't live like this anymore," he pleaded. "I'm suffocating. The persecution has gone to intolerable lengths."

However, Stalin kept him around to oversee the new artwork of Socialist Realism. Merkurov was awarded the biggest commissions of the time, including the Lenin and Stalin statues at the 1939 World's Fair in New York and the 25-meter Lenin and Stalin duo that heralded the infamous Moscow-Volga canal, whose forced-labor construction claimed many thousands of lives. In his personal letters he grew grandiose, often comparing his titantic statues to that of Bismarck in Germany.

"My monuments on the Volga will outlive me and many others," Merkurov mused in a letter to his wife on July 27, 1937, just as Stalin's Terror was getting into full swing. "For thousands of years, life will flourish around them."

His biggest coup of all was the 100-meter-tall statue of Lenin – or as Merkurov called him, "the greatest genius of all human geniuses" – for which the Palace of Soviets, on the bank of the Moscow River, would serve as the towering pediment.

Merkurov viewed the commission as his life's work: "I understood that this would be the culmination of the career of the sculptor to whom this figure was entrusted," he wrote in a 1938 article in Izvestia.

Once he'd secured it, it became his obsession. Aided by a team of 20 workers, his Izmailovo home and studio piled up with dozens of different Lenin designs. He conversed frequently with Kliment Voroshilov and Nikita Khrushchev about the project, as well as Stalin himself, agonizing about subjects such as whether or not Lenin should point.

The scale was epic: the ear alone was five meters tall. Merkurov dreamed of casting the sculpture in red copper covered with electrum, an alloy of gold and silver.

As his contemporary Alexander Gerasimov would put it, "while creating this work, he was on fire."

Not least among the reasons for Merkurov's glow was his proximity to power. "I don't know if I've written to you about this yet," he wrote to his son (in fact, he already had). "Josef Vissarionovich saw his own statue at Gorky Park that I made for New York and said, ‘Yes, a great master.' And Kliment Yefremovich [Voroshilov] added, ‘I told you, the Beard [Merkurov] is unparalleled.'"

Soon after, Merkurov began receiving phone calls asking if he was getting enough to eat, or "did I need a car or gas." In quick succession, he was accepted into the Party.

World War II put an end to the Palace of Soviets plan. But up until the end of 1948, Merkurov was still working furiously on the project. Its cancellation was a bitter disappointment. In a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, he described the dozens of models lying in Izmailovo, including the 10-meter head. "I'd like to receive your orders about what I am to do with this all this work."

 

As the number of Merkurov's major works grew, so did his death mask commissions. He prominently displayed the masks on a large wall in his studio – to the shock of visitors, some of whom found "the traces of the final struggle," as Gerasimov put it, too visible for comfort.

In photos taken for a never-realized album, some masks – such as that of Central Executive Committee secretary Andrei Ivanov, and Bulgarian puppet leader Georgy Dimitrov – look positively serene (especially the latter, with his gently upturned lips and lustrous mustache). Others, however, were decisively haunting, such as numismatics expert Alexei Oreshnikov, who had the gaunt, deeply lined face of a medieval martyr, and anti-religious writer Yemelyan Yaroslavsky (editor of the atheist journal Bezhbozhnik), whose face was frozen in a pained whimper.

Merkurov was also fond of giving away masks as gifts. When Tolstoy's secretary Valentin Bulgakov visited in 1951, he offered Bulgakov a mask of Tolstoy's son Sergei, as well as his casts of Sergei's hand and leg.

"I must confess that I was frightened at the prospect of receiving so many body parts that belonged to my departed friend, the older son of L.N. Tolstoy, even if they were only casts," Bulgakov recalled. "Fortunately, it seems that S.D. Merkurov later simply forgot about this promise."

At least some of Merkurov's famous future subjects knew they would be immortalized by the sculptor's hand.

In one of Merkurov's last conversations with Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet said, "Sergei, if you die before me, I'll write a poem about you and shout it from the rooftops. If I die first, make me the best mask you've ever made."

Not long after, Mayakovsky shot himself. Rumors swirled that he had been murdered. Fueling the speculation, Merkurov's mask recorded the poet's mysteriously broken nose. His mask of another famous poet who committed suicide, Sergei Yesenin, had a dent in the forehead, contributing to a similar legend of foul play.

Merkurov described making death masks as a "difficult obligation." "Each mask was a very difficult experience for him," his son wrote, especially if he knew the deceased. He would always return home from an assignment "looking awful."

But over time, it became a job like any other. Writer Yuri Olesha described how Merkurov cast Andrei Bely's mask at the House of Writers. Bely "seemed embarrassed to be buried under a white mound [of plaster]," Olesha wrote.

"You did Tolstoy's mask?" someone asked Merkurov. He said yes. "How did it turn out?"

"The beard stuck to it," Merkurov said with a shrug.

On one memorable occasion, Merkurov became the subject of a prank at his profession's expense. One night, he got the call that an actor friend of his had died, and set out for the house, shaken.

As he approached the corpse, which was lying under a sheet, the body suddenly sat up and handed him a glass of champagne. "There was no other way to get you to leave Izmailovo at this hour!" the arisen man exclaimed, to collective laughter.

Merkurov was called on to make masks of a remarkable range of figures. German socialist Clara Zetkin, organizer of the first International Women's Day; polar aviator Valery Chkalov; Lenin's sister, Maria Ulyanova; propagandist Georgy Plekhanov; Lenin actor Boris Shchukin; satirist Ilf; military painter Mitrofan Grekov; poet Maximilian Voloshin; geologist Vladimir Vernadsky; surgeon Nikolai Burdenko – sooner or later, they all wound up under Merkurov's "white mound."

But his complete output remains unknown. When Stalin erased early revolutionary figures from historical memory, their images had to be destroyed as well – even the dead ones. "Some masks were certainly destroyed," according to mask expert Shlyonsky.

 

Merkurov continued working hectically after the war. From 1944 to 1949 he served as head of the Pushkin Museum, where he oversaw the display of artistic masterpieces taken from Nazi Germany in the Pushkin's halls.

He raised eyebrows by hanging a Rodin painting of a nude in his office rather than the expected Stalin portrait. "Merkurov, what is this adoration of the West?" one visitor admonished. "Why, don't you like it?" Merkurov replied.

In 1950, Merkurov suffered a heart attack. He soon returned to working and hosting visitors, but remained in poor health. In January 1952, he made his last death mask, of Khorloogiin Choibalsan, the "Mongolian Stalin." But he wouldn't make it to Stalin's mask.

On June 8, 1952, Merkurov died. Another artist was called on to make a cast of the master himself.

Less than a year later, Stalin himself died – and with him, a large part of Merkurov's legacy.

Merkurov never had the warm personal relationship with Stalin that he enjoyed with Lenin, though they did occasionally correspond. After the war Merkurov wrote to ask whether he would prefer a statue of himself in full Generalissimo regalia, or simply an overcoat. "Just an overcoat," Stalin responded.

However, while many in Merkurov's illustrious circles fell victim to the purges, Stalin left the Armenian sculptor untouched. His subservience to power seems to have played a role in his good fortune. In 1952, he cautioned "silence" to Zinaida Manakina, Alexander Kerensky's secretary, after she was released from the Gulag and began criticizing the state.

But Merkurov also risked himself to protect the fallen. He secretly sheltered Manakina upon her return from exile, when she was still stripped of the right to live in Moscow. Whenever the doorbell rang in the Merkurovs' apartment, she would hide in a room with their fearsome Caucasian shepherd, whose barks scared off any would-be entrants. Merkurov also reached out to several other victims of the Terror after their return from the camps. He and his wife helped raise at least one orphaned child.

In February 1951, Merkurov's 70th birthday was feted with a special meeting of the presidium of the Academy of Arts, although the sculptor himself was too sick to attend. At the time of his death, the Pushkin Museum was planning a major retrospective of his work, which was to include a display of 100 death masks.

When Stalin died, however, Merkurov quickly became an uncomfortable symbol of an era the new leadership was struggling to erase. The Pushkin exhibition was canceled, and many of his major works were destroyed.

The writer Vasily Grossman was present in 1961 for the dismantling of his Stalin statue in Yerevan. "Of course, this tremendous god in an overcoat is a splendid work of Merkurov's," Grossman wrote in an essay. "Maybe it's his best work. Maybe this is the best monument of our era.

"For it is a monument to the era – the era of Stalin."

As tons of ammunition were unleashed at the monument, "the shining, scorching smoke wafted around the bronze legs of the master. It seemed as though the Generalissimo was commanding his artillery for the last time."

The eternal glory Merkurov had dreamt of went up in smoke.

 

Merkurov's son Gennady described him as two artists: the one an energetic young disciple of Rodin who studied in Zurich, Munich and Paris, and flourished with dreamy sculptures of thinkers and artists. The other was the official, "made to order" artist who churned out one Lenin statue after another. "The era awarded him too many commissions," he lamented.

But it was through his death masks that he was able to preserve his strange seed of creative talent. Thanks to the Soviet leadership's quest for immortality, Merkurov was able to achieve his own.

Gennady Merkurov was never able to publish his father's papers, many of which were destroyed over time. In 2012, Anton Merkurov, the sculptor's great-grandson, finally published what his grandfather had assembled in a self-funded, limited-edition print run.

Today, Merkurov's masks are divided between the storage rooms of Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, a death mask collection in Kiev, and his House Museum in Gyumri, which is awaiting renovation. Anton Merkurov is trying to raise funds to display the most famous masks outside the country, as well as finally publish a death mask album.

A few stones lie in the woods of Izmailovo park, in a long overgrown secluded area whose privacy attracts the homeless. A plaque with the sculptor's name is the place's only landmark. A recent visit to the spot revealed old shoes, an empty tent, and clothing laid out on the pile of stones instead of a bustling studio where a 10-meter Lenin head once stood, awaiting its triumphant ascent. RL

* See sidebar, below.

 

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