xenia viii

Did iconography come as one of the facets of your profession?

This was God’s will, and it has its prehistory. 

In about 1994, a global crisis happened in my life, first of all a creative one: I couldn’t paint pictures; second, the object of my love left me, slamming the door loudly; third, I nearly stopped breathing from asthma. But mainly, I understood that this whole bouquet of misfortunes was the result of my former, stormy life. 

But the Lord never abandons us. Seeing that I could not get through this without God’s church, on January 24th, the feast day of Blessed Xenia, I literally crawled to her chapel, stood through the services with great difficulty, and afterwards felt significantly better. 

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When finally I stopped feeling like a half-dead invalid, and began to breathe more or less normally, the question came: How should I live from now on? Should I change my profession at age twenty-nine? 

But painting was not just a profession for me: for eleven years, I had worked like one obsessed sixteen hours a day, in order to become a painter. If I were to change professions, it would mean that all my labors and sacrifices were in vain, and my whole life up to that point was meaningless. 

Once, I had heard about Diveyevo and St. Seraphim of Sarov, and I decided to go to him for the answer to my inner question, although I didn’t have any idea what a monastery was, or a pilgrimage. 

I went with a friend. 

We arrived at Nizhny Novgorod without complications, but then… 

Instead of a pleasant three-hour ride in a comfortable bus, we stood thirteen hours in a gigantic traffic jam due to a fierce snowstorm. No sooner had this torture on the road ceased, than torture from snowdrifts began. For the first - and I hope last - time in my life, I tumbled into snow up to my neck.

I remember the first few days in the monastery like a nightmare. 

It was very hard. 

But it was there that I was born again. 

The women we stayed with, and with whom we formed a friendship within the two weeks we were in Diveyevo asked me one day: ´Well, you are an artist. Perhaps you could paint me Blessed Xenia?´... This request turned out to be absolutely providential. 

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Fr. Vladimir Shishkin came to me personally in the church when he saw my confusion. I explained my situation, and he said that he did not bless me to paint an icon ´just like that´, that this is something that must be studied, and therefore he blessed me to go to the iconographic work group of Andrei Zaprudny in Tver. 

He said it and then ran off on his business. I asked him as he ran away, ´Batiushka, what about my parents?! After all, they are Muslims, they won´t understand, and won´t let me go to a strange city´... He just waved his hand as he walked, and said: ´The Lord will take care of it!´ 

Fr. Vladimir turned out to be right: the Lord took care of it, so that my parents calmly accepted the news that I was going to study in Tver. True, I didn’t tell them exactly that this was a school of ecclesiastical arts. 

Having stepped upon the path of Orthodoxy and a new profession... 

I always felt God’s help and Providence for me.


~bron~