Paweł Muratow

Paweł Pawłowicz Muratow, born February 19, 1881, in Bobrow, Voronezh County, Poland, October 5, 1950, in Waterford, Ireland) - Russian writer, traveler, critic and historian art.

He received his education at the St. Petersburg Corps of Cadets, serving in the military from 1904 to 1905. He traveled throughout Europe, working in the museum from 1906 to 1914, being friends with a young generation of Russian artists and intellectuals.

He participated in World War I, for which he was decorated with orders. After the war he returned to his artistic interests. He founded the Italian Research Society (owned by Studio Italiano), where lectures were held with well-known writers and cultural historians (in the spring of 1921 his last presentation was Aleksandr Blok). He also participated in the activities of the Committee for Helping the Hungry, for which in 1921 he was arrested together with Boris Zajcewo and other members of the Committee. As a result of growing terror, he left Russia, initially in Germany, in 1923 he settled in Rome, 1927 moved to Paris, where, He was a founding member of the Parisian company "Icon."

Before the outbreak of World War II he went to Great Britain, where he prepared, among other things. a monograph on wartime activities on the Soviet-German front and about the history of the Caucasus Wars in the nineteenth century. Shortly before his death, he moved to Ireland, where he died of a heart attack.

Muratow's most famous work is his two-volume book, the fruit of the author's journey to Italy, titled " Italian paintings (published in Berlin in 1911, 1912, 1924). The author of the erudition of polyhistory describes places, works of art, mystical moods of Italian culture and tries to determine its meaning in the history of Europe. In addition, he wrote historical novels and acted as an art critic.

Muratov's works have never been more elaborate and publicized, but they were considered by many to be first-rate. Berlin's "Paintings of Italy" discovered by Karol Szymanowski has become one of the most important readings of Polish theorists of the arts and writers, such as his cousin, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz or later translator Muratow to Poland - Paweł Hertz.

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