p A mere week after my pupils started work at their “School of Joy" I asked them to bring along drawing books and pencils so that we could draw. The next day we went out onto the lawn in front of the school. I asked them to look around and tell me what they could see that was beautiful. Then I suggested that they should draw what appealed to them most....

p Quiet descended. The children were completely absorbed in their drawings. I had read a great deal about methods for teaching drawing and now here I was confronted with reallife pupils. I soon realised that children’s pictures and the actual process of drawing were an essential part of their emotional and cultural experience. Children do not simply transpose onto paper something from the world around them; they live in that world, walk into it like creators of beauty, and they take true delight in beauty. (10, 44)

p The essential starting-point for appreciating painting is firsthand observation of Nature. In order to understand, feel and come to love painting, the individual’s emotional awareness has to be developed, and that takes quite a while, and the ideal place for this is the world of Nature. (12, 307)

p There are pictures that are beyond a young child and these should be studied at a later age, but there are no pictures that can be enjoyed in childhood and then do not warrant a “second look" later in life. There is nothing simple or ordinary in true art.... “Ordinary” pictures such as Shishkin’s Rye, Savrasov’s The Rooks Have Come to Roost, Levitan’s Golden Autumn and Birch Grove, Yuon’s Afternoon in Late Winter and Plastov’s First Snow should be enjoyed by young children and teenagers; each time there will be something new to appreciate in them. Repeated study of pictures is a source of enrichment, it nurtures the emotional memory and heightens our capacity to appreciate beauty. Precisely this repeated exposure to works of fine art gradually makes it an integral part of young people’s emotional and intellectual experience. This is why at each new stage in a pupil’s intellectual, emotional and aesthetic development he should be introduced to new works of art and at the same time turn again to pictures studied previously. (12, 308)

p By the time they have reached Class 3 and definitely Class 4 boys and girls have started to 260 put together their own small picture galleries. They have started to collect reproductions. I was glad to see how eager they were to look at these pictures. This individual experience within the world of art is far more important than the organisation of school “galleries”, etc. If pictures are hanging on school walls for months at a stretch pupils soon stop noticing them .... (12, 309)

p When working with pupils in their teens teachers should pay particular attention to those paintings which reflect man’s complex and infinitely varied inner world. I gave pride of place to pictures depicting moral fibre and man’s moral victories in his fight to uphold lofty ideals.... It is of course necessary to discuss pictures in far more detail and at a far more profound level with pupils of this age group than with small children. (12, 309)

p Stirring thoughts with regard to the history of our Homeland are aroused by such pictures as Vasnetsov’s Heroes, Grekov’s Off to Join Budyonny’s Detachment, Serov’s Siberian Partisans, Prorokov’s At Babiy Yar. Deep hatred of fascism and the forces of evil are summoned up by Kukryniksy’s Finale, the work Buchenwald Victims by the anti-fascist German sculptor Cremer and Prorokov’s picture entitled Mother. I drew attention to the patriotic idea of loyalty to the Homeland and fortitude in the struggle with the enemy. Boys and girls are moved by valour and an uncompromising stand against 261 the enemy. I first made a study of Cremer’s group of sculptured figures with pupils in Class 5 and later we returned to it every year. Each time the boys and girls picked out new details in the emotional power of those figures plagued by hunger, torture but still unvanquished. (12, 310)

p An important place in the work carried out by our team of teachers is accorded to techniques designed to develop the individual’s capacity to feel and to sense in their hearts the shades of emotion, their ability to discern in the eyes of others sorrow, humiliation, suffering, bewilderment and loneliness. Most important of all pupils must be taught how to discern and sense in the eyes of their neighbour the latter’s need for human sympathy and help.... Eyes provide us with the vital mirror of thoughts and feelings. Whatever picture we might choose to study I always would direct the teenagers’ attention to the eyes of the figure depicted in the artist’s work. (12, 311)

p Eyes are an infinitely complicated world of thoughts, feelings and emotions. A whole series of discussions connected with looking at pictures was centred round that world. (12, 312)

p Our school was fortunate enough to obtain a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper. A number of discussions were devoted to that picture—-I called the pupils’ 262 attention to the complex emotions aroused by Christ’s announcement that one of those present would betray him reflected above all in the eyes of the apostles. Absorbed in this study of emotions boys and girls forget, of course, that they are looking at a picture on a biblical subject. They are aware of the complex world of human passions, the clash between good and evil, nobility of spirit and moral fall implicit in betrayal. (12, 312)

p The evenings devoted to Leonardo da Vinci’s pictures Mona Lisa and Madonna with a Flower, and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna were enthralling occasions for the medium-school pupils with an atmosphere of rare poetic inspiration. I talked to them of the possible reasons behind the smile immortalised by the artist in the lips and eyes of Mona Lisa. In this work the eyes are particularly profound and endowed with poetic expressiveness. The moment captured by the artist in the eyes of the young woman is a whole world of feelings of its own. It was not easy to find a word which would conjure up in the boys’ and girls’ imagination the poetic concept of those vague and fleeting emotions without which the heart remains deaf to poetic feeling.

p Those discussions devoted to Raphael’s pictures though demanding were also a joyful time for me and filled with enchantment.... The more fitting words I used to find to single out the eternal truths of this earth which raise man up above God, the more powerful and 263 moving was the impact of the beauty of art and the beauty of human feeling on those children___In the image of the holy virgin who offers to the world as a sacrifice to save mankind a part of her very self, her very own son, my pupils came to appreciate the supreme beauty of this world—the power of a mother’s love. In the eyes of the mother are not only anxiety and awareness of suffering to come; the shape of her mouth belies not only humble acceptance of the inevitable but also firm resolve. There is no other work of art in the world in which eyes express so strikingly the power of a mother’s love. I. Kramskoi referred to the Sistine Madonna as a portrait embodying the thoughts of the people of the whole earth. He maintained that even when mankind ceased to believe in God, even then that picture would not lose its great value. This thought of Kramskoi’s serves to express the universal human relevance of Raphael’s creation. (12, 312-14)

p At the time when the pupils in my care were approaching manhood and womanhood we turned many times to that work of Raphael’s, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Vermeer’s Reading Girl, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Ingres’ Spring, Rubens’ Helena Fourment and Portrait of the Chambermaid of the Archduchess Isabella, Serov’s Girl with Peaches, Borovikovsky’s Portrait of M. I. Lopukhina, and Yaroshenko’s Girl Student. I am firmly convinced that when vague desires and urges first come knocking at young hearts it is most 264 important to bring out the full beauty of woman as the supreme and universal embodiment of human beauty. I attempted to help those boys and girls to view with awe that beauty and regard it as something ideal and inviolate, and that young girls should be filled with a sense of intimate purity. No amount of moral exhortations . . . can help noble and lofty sentiments take root in young hearts if words are not accompanied by the beautiful image, by art. (12, 314)

p Beauty speaks to our hearts independently of any words and does not require explanations. We delight in a rose as a complete entity, and its beauty would vanish were we to pluck the petals from the flower and analyse the essence of that beauty. There is no need to explain to an adolescent what is clear of itself. Let him imagine himself in the world in which the hero, whose image has captured his heart, lived and overcame the evil forces. (12, 204)

Beauty is an instrument for fostering a sensitive conscience. As a young child, and more and more as he grows up, a child should learn independently to appreciate beauty and his aesthetic awareness should be gradually heightened more and more throughout his life. (14, 2)