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B O R I S K O S A R E V
K H A R K O V 1 8 9 7 – 1 9 9 4
Boris Kosarev – studied at the Kharkov Arts Institute from 1915 to
1918. Towards the end of his course he became a member of the
Cubo-Futurist 'Group of Seven', contributing to joint exhibitions and the
album Seven + ree. He spent summer 1918 at the Sinyakova dacha
in Krasnaya Polyana, meeting the Futurist poet, Velimir Khlebnikov.
e influence of Maria Sinyakova and Ukrainian folklore is evident in
his drawings ree Hamlets, Two Villages and Village Pastoral. Kosarev
moved to Odessa in 1920 but returned to Kharkov in 1921 and
subsequently concentrated on theatre and cinema, designing sets for
Mikhail Lossovsky's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's e Star-Child in 1922,
and assisting director Oleksandr Dovzhenko on the Soviet classic Earth
in 1930 (an album of Kosarev's superlative photographs of the filming,
which took place near Poltava, was recently published by the Oleksandr
Dovzhenko National Film Centre in Kiev). Kosarev was evacuated to
Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, during World War II; landed a Stalin Prize in 1947;
and taught in Lvov 1948/9. His final decades were spent back in his
native Kharkov where in 1985, aged 88, he gave a rare interview to mark
the 100th anniversary of Khlebnikov's birth.