Stepan Erzya — sculptor with roots in the Russian Empire
Stepan Dmitrievich Nefyodov, who took the name Erzya, was born on 8 November (27 October, Old Style) 1876 in the village of Bayevo, in the Alatyr district of the Simbirsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Mordovia, into an Erzya Mordvin peasant family. He chose his pseudonym after his people, the Erzya. From the early 1890s he was apprenticed in icon-painting workshops in Alatyr and Kazan, decorated churches in the Volga region and attended the Kazan art school.
From 1902 to 1906 he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Sergei Volnukhin and Paolo Troubetzkoy, and first exhibited at the school's student exhibition in 1903. He then spent years in Italy and France, working in marble, before returning to Russia, where after 1917 he executed monuments in Yekaterinburg, Baku and Batumi. In the early 1920s he began to work in wood, first Caucasian oak and walnut.
In 1926 he went to Paris and stayed abroad, and in 1927 he settled in Buenos Aires, according to the foundation that bears his name at the invitation of the President of Argentina. The Argentine years, from 1927 to 1950, were the longest period of his career. There he found the materials he would use for the rest of his life: the extremely hard South American woods quebracho, algarrobo and urunday, for which he devised a special working machine and method. He used the grain, roots and growths of the wood in his sculpture, sometimes leaving natural fragments untouched, and was particularly known for symbolic portraits and images of women; his works of these years include portraits of Moses, Beethoven, Tolstoy and Lenin and Daughter of the Incas (1941), now in the Russian Museum.
In 1950 he returned to the Soviet Union, bringing about 300 works with him, and in 1954 held a large exhibition in Moscow. He died in his Moscow studio on 24 November 1959, aged eighty-three, and was buried in Saransk. A museum of fine arts named after him had opened there on 26 June 1958, and holds the largest collection of his work, more than two hundred pieces.
"Left Russia in 1926 on a trip to Paris and stayed abroad, settling in Buenos Aires in 1927; returned to the USSR in 1950."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Bayevo, Alatyr uyezd, Simbirsk Governorate (now Mordovia, Russia)
Born Stepan Nefyodov in 1876 into an Erzya Mordvin peasant family in Bayevo, in the Simbirsk Governorate, he trained as an icon painter and at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and took his pseudonym from his people.
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Bayevo, Alatyr uyezd, Simbirsk Governorate (now Mordovia, Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.