Tombstone to V. E. Borisov-Musatov

Tombstone of V. E. Borisov-Musatov is a monument made of brown granular granite, installed at the burial site of the Russian artist Victor Borisov-Musatov, on the high bank of the Oka on the outskirts of the city of Tarusa in June 1911. The sculptor of the tombstone, the modernist Alexander Matveev, was a contemporary and friend of Borisov-Musatov, and created the tombstone the previous year. It depicts a sleeping nude boy; among local residents, in artistic literature and in mass media, it is known as the Sleeping Boy. According to a legend that has spread among Tarusa residents, the tombstone depicts a teenager whom Borisov-Musatov tried to save from the water. The artist himself allegedly caught a cold in the process, which led to his death. The tombstone has repeatedly become the object of close interest from researchers of Alexander Matveev's work and Victor Borisov-Musatov's biography. In particular, the Soviet art historian Alfred Bassekhes called the monument an "elegiac response" of the sculptor to the "quiet charm" of the artist's paintings and considered it one of the key works of the most significant period of Matveev's creativity, according to the researcher, which fell in the second half of the 1900s – early 1910s. The monument on the bank of the Oka has found reflection in Russian culture. In particular, the plot of th

Monument data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).