…We were struck
deeply by everything: shape of the master, his picturesque cloths, the
richest graphics, and taken place, in studios, conversation with Gennady
Dobrov. We distinctly realized that met not simply the interesting person,
but some enormous phenomenon. We tried to transfer this shock feeling
in a twenty-minute plot "A parable about ten righteous persons",
passed on TV channel "Good evening, Moscow! " on August 9, 1990.
… He took up the
subjects the others were afraid to touch upon, the subjects that were not
just out of the sphere of art but were opposite to art; he took up dreadful,
mutilated, almost hideous subjects, and he did it fearlessly as well as a
surgeon comes into a ward of the seriously wounded without any fear. He chose
a human suffering as a material: destinies of war veterans, genocide victims,
misery, deprivation, insanity. He looked into the eyes of the dumb,
deranged, nameless people who had lost everything, even their past, he looked
into the eyes of children and old people mutilated by wars, - and saw the
greatness and the beauty in them, a true level of a person, the very core of
a person that is revealed only in the enormity of sufferings. ... And the paradox
is; that there is nothing disgusting, repulsive, insulting the feelings in
this dreadful material the artist turns to – just on the contrary, in
Dobrov’s paintings a man is may be in the most best degree – is a
person. Using Thomas Mann’s
terminology, this talent is enlightened, what a high spirit is in the
portraits of his heroes forgotten by us, often extorted from the society,
living as though on the other, shady side of Big Life. Behind all this is the
deepest faith in the bright divine in man; and through distorted with
suffering faces emerge – saints...
The master is sad,
but the world around him, the air itself seems light – by the power of his
love, infinite compassion he could make the most bitter grief in pure gold
art.
Tatiana Nikitina,
screenwriter, literary critic, member of Trade Union Committee of the Moscow
drama.
