Russia, Art, and Exile

Before he was a monk of Mount Athos and an elder of Essex, Sergei Semyonovich Sakharov was a Russian painter — born in Moscow in 1896 into a devout Orthodox merchant family, trained in the Moscow art schools, swept up in the catastrophe of the Revolution, and carried into the exile of the Russian emigration, where in Berlin and then Paris he pursued painting at the highest level. This file establishes the life of the artist and exile up to the threshold of his departure for the Holy Mountain.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (20th-c. elder; disciple of St Silouan)

Birth and Family

The future Archimandrite Sophrony was born Sergei Semyonovich Sakharov in Moscow on 22 September 1896 (Old Style), the son of a prosperous Russian family of the merchant class (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, biographical introduction; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, ch. on Sophrony). He grew up in the ordinary piety of pre-Revolutionary Orthodox Russia: he would recall in later life that as a child he prayed, with the help of his nanny, for long stretches — by his own account up to three-quarters of an hour at a time — and that this early habit of prayer left in him a sense of God as living and near (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, opening autobiographical chapters; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002). The household belonged to the world of devout Moscow Orthodoxy, and the boy’s first religious formation was that of the Russian Church on the eve of its catastrophe.

This childhood piety matters for the theologian he became, because Sophrony himself read his whole life as a movement of loss and recovery: the prayer of the child, abandoned in youth for the impersonal mysticism of the East, and then recovered — transfigured — through repentance and through the encounter with the personal God of the Bible. The continuity he claimed was not naïve; he insisted, rather, that the God he sought through years of non-Christian meditation was the same God who had been near to him as a child, and whom he had ceased to recognize (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988; see The Search for the Absolute).

The Painter

Sakharov was, before anything else, an artist of genuine gifts. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and at the Academy of Fine Arts, and painting was for him in his youth not a pastime but a vocation pursued with the seriousness of an absolute calling (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, biographical introduction; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). He understood art, in his own later reflection, as a kind of striving after the eternal through the visible — an attempt to seize and hold beauty that bordered, in his telling, on a religious quest in its own right, and that he came to see as standing in tension with the worship of the living God (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on art as a rival absolute). The seriousness with which the young Sakharov took painting is part of why, when he turned from it, he turned so completely.

His artistic formation also left a permanent mark on the elder. The aesthetic sensibility — the disciplined attention to light, form, and the human face — reappears in the iconographic work of his maturity: Sophrony designed and oversaw the iconography of the church and refectory at his monastery in Essex, developing a distinctive style, and his sense of the human face as the locus of personal presence informs his theology of the hypostasis (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, on the iconography; see The Hypostatic Principle). The painter never entirely disappeared into the monk; he was, in the words of his interpreters, an iconographer-theologian whose theology of the person bears the imprint of a lifelong attention to the face (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The precise institutional details of Sakharov’s artistic training are reported with some variation in the sources, and the honest course is to note the variation rather than to harmonize it. [Disputed: the biographical accounts agree that Sakharov received a serious academic training in painting in Moscow before the Revolution, but differ on the particulars: Nicholas Sakharov (*I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002, biographical introduction) and the Essex monastery's notices speak of study at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and at the Academy of Fine Arts, while some popular accounts compress or rename these institutions; no source supplies a documented matriculation record, and the dates of his study are given only approximately, in the years before and around 1917]. What the sources agree on is the substance: that the young Sakharov was a trained and exhibiting painter, not an amateur, and that he gave to art the kind of total devotion he would later give to prayer.

The depth of that early devotion is the theologically significant point. Sophrony came to regard his years as an artist not as a neutral apprenticeship but as a form of the same absolute seeking that would later carry him through Eastern meditation and at last to Christ. Art, for the young Sakharov, was an attempt to break through the visible to the eternal — and the recognition that it could not finally do so, that beauty seized on canvas remained a beauty that died, was part of the disillusionment that turned him toward a more radical search (Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, 1988, on the inadequacy of art before the eternal; Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, ch. 1). The painter’s vocation was thus, in Sophrony’s own retrospect, a first and failed absolute, and its failure was instructive: it taught him that nothing created — not beauty, not art — could be the resting-place of a soul made for the uncreated God (see The Search for the Absolute).

Revolution and the Road into Exile

The Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed shattered the world of Sakharov’s youth. Like the great wave of the Russian intelligentsia and the cultured classes who could not or would not live under the new order, he left Russia — part of the emigration that scattered Russian Orthodoxy across Europe and, in doing so, carried the Russian theological tradition into the West (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the emigration; on this milieu, see The Patristic Revival). He departed Russia in the early 1920s, passing first through Italy and Berlin before settling, as so many did, in Paris (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, biographical introduction).

The exact texture of these years is recorded only thinly in his own writings, which dwell far more on his inner spiritual struggle than on outward events; the biographical frame is supplied chiefly by Nicholas Sakharov’s study and by the monastery’s accounts. What is clear is that he arrived in the West not as a refugee seeking only safety but as an artist intent on pursuing his vocation at its center, and that center, for a painter of the Russian emigration in the 1920s, was Paris.

The chronology of the emigration is reported with the imprecision usual for a private individual swept up in mass displacement. [Disputed: the sources place Sakharov's departure from Russia in the early 1920s and his arrival in Paris around 1921–1922, but differ on the intermediate stages and exact years; Nicholas Sakharov (*I Love, Therefore I Am*, 2002) and the monastery's accounts give a route through Western Europe before Paris, while the precise dates of each move are not fixed in any primary document, since Sophrony's own writings pass over the outward journey almost in silence]. The silence is itself characteristic: Sophrony the writer was interested in the geography of the soul, not of the railways, and the reconstruction of his outward movements depends almost entirely on the later scholarship and the recollections gathered at Essex rather than on his own pen.

Paris and the Russian Emigration

In Paris, the capital of the Russian emigration and of European art alike, Sakharov pursued painting seriously and with recognition. He exhibited his work in the major Parisian salons — among them the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne — placing him within the professional artistic life of the city in the early-to-mid 1920s (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002, biographical introduction; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Paris in these years was at once the heart of the European avant-garde and the gathering-place of the Russian religious renaissance in exile: the city of the St. Sergius Theological Institute (founded 1925), of Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Lossky, and the émigré rediscovery of the Fathers. Sakharov stood at the crossing of these two worlds — the world of art and the world of the Russian Church reconstituting itself abroad.

Yet Paris was for him a place of crisis as much as of achievement. It was during these years that the spiritual search of his youth reached its breaking point: the pursuit of the impersonal Absolute through Eastern-influenced meditation, the anguished re-encounter with the personal God of Exodus, and the decision that art could not be his absolute. The outcome of that crisis was not a return to the salons but a departure from them: in 1925 Sakharov left Paris and the world of painting for Mount Athos, exchanging the easel for the monastic habit (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am, 2002; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; on the inner crisis that drove the decision, see The Search for the Absolute). The painter who had exhibited in the salons of Paris would spend the rest of his long life — sixty-eight years — as a monk.

The biographical record of Sophrony’s first three decades is therefore less a chronicle of external events than the prehistory of a conversion. The merchant’s son who prayed as a child, the disciplined art student, the exile who exhibited in Paris — all of this Sophrony himself read backward from the monastery as the long preparation for the one thing he came to regard as decisive: the turning of his whole being toward the living and personal God. That turning, and the crisis through which it came, is the subject of the companion file.

References

Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988. (Autobiographical chapters on the childhood prayer, the vocation of art, and the search.)
Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (Biographical introduction: birth in Moscow 1896; the painter’s training; emigration; the Paris salons; departure for Athos 1925.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Chapter on Sophrony: the artist of the emigration, the Parisian milieu, and the turn to Athos.)