Muse was almost forty years older than the artist. An elderly society lady, the widow of Mayakovsky's friend, spent the last 17 years of her life next to an underground painter
Lilya Brik wrote about them like this:
“The Sinyakovs are five sisters. Each of them is beautiful in its own way. They used to live in Kharkov, their father was a Black Hundred, and their mother was an advanced person and an atheist.
All five were smart and talented. Futurism was born in their house. Khlebnikov was in love with all of them in turn, Pasternak was in love with Nadya, Burliuk was in love with Maria, Aseev married Oksana.”
Ksenia Sinyakova, or, as she was called, Oksana, was the wife of the poet Nikolai Aseev, and at a respectable age - the muse of the underground artist Anatoly Zverev. From all sides, the positive Aseev, laureate of the Stalin Prize, sang of Oksana's youth:
I can't live without you!
To me and in the rain without you - dry, I'm in the heat without you - shame.
To me without you and Moscow is a wilderness.
Asocial Zverev drew her old age. He saw in this old lady a beautiful blue-eyed girl with long braids, for whom the poets of the 20s went crazy, he was jealous of her, tormented her and absolutely could not do without her.
Aseev
Ksenia Sinyakova was born in 1892 in Kharkov and studied at a music school when Nikolai Aseev arrived in Kharkov to enter the university. She was wonderful. And he, Aseev found out that in the Sinyakovs' house they love art and began to visit them. After graduating from a music school, Oksana went to Moscow to enter the conservatory. A few years later, Aseev proposed to her. They got married in a small village church, overcoming the resistance of the priest: the bride was too young. Oksana lived with Aseev for almost 50 years, was very happy and infinitely loved. In separation, he wrote her these letters:
Oksana supported her husband in everything, always took care of him and was an ideal writer's wife. Aseev and she - it was, indeed, a wonderful couple. Against the background of many writers' families, they stood out for their decency and dignity: they eschewed intrigues and squabbles, did not write denunciations, did not betray themselves and others, and were always a reliable rear for each other.
Zverev
After the death of Nikolai Aseev, Oksana behaved with great dignity. In it and on its eighth destyak, a beautiful and secular lady was visible. She never chatted with her neighbors on the bench of her writing house, she was royally polite and very kind to everyone. She was engaged in the literary heritage of her husband and, it seems, was not particularly interested in anything else.
Was it a romance, or it's all about the compassion of a kind soul for a dying talent, no one knows for sure. It seems that it all started like this: two drunken bohemian artists decided to visit Ksenia Mikhailovna Aseeva, well-known throughout Moscow. An elderly lady greeted them with benevolent curiosity, invited them to her apartment, stuffed with antiques and paintings in solid frames, and seated them at a beautifully served table. Thirty-seven-year-old Zverev, dressed in some rags, looked at her with wide eyes and suddenly exclaimed:
So this amazing relationship began.
After a couple of days, even Oksana's angelic patience snapped, she sent the artist to go where she came from. Soon he returned, sat down at her door, as if in an ambush, shouting that he could not live without her. Oksana was ashamed in front of her neighbors, and she again let the drunken genius in. In the spring I took him to the country. There, the genius began to drink much less and work much more. He endlessly painted Oksana, painted some strange country still lifes, self-portraits … In the autumn they returned to Moscow, and Oksana settled the artist again.
They did not want to shock anyone and did not invent anything. They really needed each other. Zverev wrote touching poems to Oksana:
Hello sunshine my light
blue with shadow.
Love has one answer -
hello Xenia.
…Hello rose and color
cute forget-me-not.
My advice to you always
take me from Sviblov.
But of course this couple was the perfect gossip. They were spied on, talked about with sanctimonious pursing of lips, gasping and rolling their eyes. Moreover, the artist was defiantly and wildly jealous of Ksenia Mikhailovna for the memory of Aseev, made wild fights, threw his portraits and books out the window.
Neighbors called the police. Oksana, a touching old woman, ran after the policemen, asked to treat Zverev more gently:
Sometimes Oksana could not stand it and kicked the artist out, sometimes he disappeared for a long time himself, but always returned, pretty shabby and downcast. Ksenia Mikhailovna brought him back to life and devotedly cared for him, as she once did for the sick Aseev.
One night, Zverev wrote fifty letters to his Muse and then walked around the city, dropping them into all the mailboxes that came across along the way.
When Ksenia Mikhailovna died in 1985, Zverev grieved terribly. She was the biggest affection in his bohemian-anarchist life, and they were together for 17 years. The artist survived his Muse by only a year and died at the age of 55, leaving more than 30,000 works. Zverev was called the Russian Van Gogh, a symbol of the new, free art and one of the brightest avant-garde artists of the 20th century. It was difficult for him to cope with life, and without Oksana it became completely impossible. The artist spoke about her: