Gen. Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov

Lavr Kornilov was esthetically interesting. Out of an oriental yet complicated breed, albeit his mother having been Polish. He was short and wiry compared to his fellow commanders. He was one of the top generals in the Russian Imperial Army before the revolution and played a short but prominent role serving under the Kerensky’s Provisional Government and stepping against Bolshevik Red Army. He was a conservative deep to his bones, yet crazy enough to attempt coups and enterprises far beyond his own means. A short motion picture shows him, a bandage across his wounded head, freed and triumphantly carried by his soldiers out of a Bolshevik jail. He was popular, in the maelstrom that had invested Russia by 1917. This portrait is out of a photograph taken in a square in Moscow in 1917, Gen. Kornilov addressing a crowd while standing on a cabriolet horse carriage. The nude woman, with oriental Russian features too, is adjoined as a playful sight. The same model appears in other paintings. The small red airplanes flying over the square are non original too, but a homage to Aleksandr Deyneka’s mosaics “A night and day of Soviet sky”, Mayakovskaya Metro Station, Moscow.