Grechukhin: Difference between revisions

In the Grechukhins’ flat, the smell of tobacco is barely perceptible. For sometime now the head of the family has preferred the non-aromatized types of tobacco and, apart from him, no one else in the flat smokes. It’s a typical flat in a typical dormer suburb of St. Petersburg. From outside, you would never guess that this was the home of Russia’s chief master pipe-maker (the title is unofficial, but for many years it has been beyond doubt and disputed by no one), and only a couple of dozen briar pipes found in one of the rooms without any of the reverence due to their origins provide a slight hint as to the profession of the head of this household...

No, the real connection came a bit later. What happened was that during the 1970s my mother worked as a fire service inspector, and her area of duty included the arts workshops in the Smolensk District of St. Petersburg. One day, she got a visit from the legendary Alexei Borisovitch Fyodorov for permission to open a pipe-making workshop. At the time, I was eighteen years old, had finished my schooling and was trying to get a place at the Mukhina Academy, but failed the selection board. So my mother asked Fyodorov whether he would consider taking me on as a pupil. And, as it happened, Fydorov was looking for two apprentices.

'''He took you on without any selection process?'''

I hope he understood me... But in any case we had to go our separate ways so we could work without treading on each other’s toes.

Well, that’s only natural, I suppose. I mean, I had an academic education and I’d learned a lot about drawing when I was still a kid. I’d imbibed the concept of proportion with my mother’s milk, so to speak. I was accepted as a member of the Union of Artists twenty years ago for a collection of pipes made of mahogany. But the old man... excuse me for saying this, but he was completely self-taught. A self-taught genius, mind you.

At the end of his life he put the triple stamp on everything.

'''And you?'''

Incidentally, that reminds me of a true story, which sounds more like an anecdote. At the first ‘Slow Smoking’ competition that was held in St. Petersburg four years ago, I was the honorary chairman of the jury. When the competition was over, one of the competitors – a very striking man of about sixty – triumphantly announced that he was the possessor of a unique collection that contained six Fydorov and four Grechukhin pipes. Then he proposed that the next competition should be held in memory of those two great pipe masters, Fyodorov and Grechukhin. I timidly raised my voice from the hall and said: “Excuse me, but I’m not dead yet...” You should have seen the man’s face – his eyes almost burst out of their sockets. It turned out that the poor chap, who was about ten years older than me, had bought the pipes a quarter of a century ago and put me among the classics – and, as we all know, the classics are supposed to be dead...

Well, I’m in no hurry to get to the next world, I can assure you... But the point I’m getting at is something else. I started making pipes years ago and worked on them for about nine years without a break. I must have turned out about three thousand at the very least. But then what? It’s not so much that I got tired of doing it, but suddenly I felt like trying my hand at something else, while remaining a free agent. I’ve never in my life received wages or a salary, only payments...

'''St. Petersburg – Moscow'''

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