Show all images on one page	#006279 Title: Scarlet Sails Artist: Knyazev Sergey Size: 19.5x15.5x4.5 Size (inches): 7.75x6x1.75 Price : $4590 SOLD!

"making so-called miracles with one's own hands"
http://scarletsails.gollandia.com/AboutAutor.htm

A NOTE ON ALEXANDER GREEN

Alexander Green is one of the most popular of all Russian writers in his native land. In 1965, his collected works appeared in the Soviet Union in a six-volume, hard-cover edition of which 463,000 sets were sold. In recent years repeated printings of from 100,000 to 300,000 copies of his most popular stories have sold out almost as soon as they were published. There are never enough copies available to meet the great demand for his works.
From his writings one does not recognize Alexander Green as a Russian. His pen name sounds un-Russian. His works, including SCARLET SAILS, are set in a mythical "Western" land where places have such un-Russian names as Caperna, Lisse, and Zurbagan, and people are called Asole, Grey, Longren, and Thomas Harvey.
The appeal of Green's writing is universal. It lies very much in the exotic, romantic, faraway atmosphere that he creates. Because of this he has been compared to Edgar Alien Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bret Harte. Yet Alexander Green was as Russian as samovars. He was born Alexander Grinyevsky, in 1880, in the Russian backwoods town of Vyatka and lived his entire life in Russia. The only foreign country he ever visited was Egypt, where he went on shore leave for a few hours in Alexandria from a ship on which he was employed. Green aspired to travel throughout the world, but he was never able to do so. He hoped to sail the seven seas, but in this, too, he failed, except in the richness of his imagination. Until his late twenties he was a failure in everything. He tried to become a sailor but did not make the grade. He prospected for gold in the Urals and found none. He worked in the rough and tough oil town of Baku as a roustabout and nearly died of the hardships he suffered. He enlisted in the Russian army and deserted. He became a member of the anti-Tsarist revolutionary underground and was arrested, jailed, then exiled.
It was after these experiences that he began to write, and as a writer he was immediately successful. From 1906 on, he began to be widely published in Russia. When the Revolution came in 1917, he had already acquired a considerable reputation. Yet, despite his fame, he nearly died of illness and hunger in 1921, after having served in the Red Army. It was in this period that he wrote SCARLET SAILS. A model boat that he saw in the window of a toy store in Petrograd (later Leningrad, now St.Peterburg) in 1917 or early 1918 inspired the book. He carried his manuscript with him while in the army and completed it during a slow convalescence from typhus. SCARLET SAILS was published in part in 1922 and in its complete version in 1923. It became a Russian classic, beloved not only by the young but by readers of all ages. It formed the basis for a beautiful ballet created in the late thirties and was made into a motion picture in 1961.
After completing SCARLET SAILS, Alexander Green went on to write many more books. In 1923 he moved to the Crimea, where he died of cancer at the young age of fifty-two. His short stories, novels, and tales of adventure are known to nearly all Russian readers, but none of his books is quite as popular or as beautiful as SCARLET SAILS.
Alexander Grin(or Green) (1880 - 1932) is a very special writer of a very peculiar talent of romantic imagination. His life, full of privations, fell on very hard and severe times of Russian history. Feeling very lonely among his colleagues - realists, who concentrated only upon the burning issues of the day, he was not heard in the thundering years of October revolution. Being not properly understood by his contemporaries, he lived in his own phantasmagoric world, let us call it Grinland, based on eternal values, those three "whales": Love, Humanity and Beauty of a human soul. As if to counterbalance the cruel reality, he populated his Land of imagination with generous people with their pure hearts opened for beautiful high intentions and their lives full of risk and adventures. He believed in fairy-tales coming true and kind magicians possessing the cherished secret of happiness. Most of his characters are incorrigible dreamers who know one simple truth: "It consists in making so-called miracles with one's own hands ... When somebody's soul conceals the seed of a flaming plant, a miracle, make this miracle for him, if you can. He will get a renewed soul and so will you." Grin, this Knight of a Dream, a poet of Beautiful Uncertainty, knows that for certain. So does Asoule, the main character of “Scarlet Sails”, whose belief in her exalted dream is so strong and passionate that it begins to come true. So does Gray, who knows how to make an "ordinary miracle" with his own hands. So do I, whose own life has been transformed under the magic influence of this book. And I will tell you something in strict confidence: this fairy story may penetrate into your own reality. There is one important "if": if you believe in miracles. Then it is quite possible that the flaming fire of Grin's romantic soul may light up the right way for the fairy ship of your Dream... I wish you a happy voyage! (Helen Sharif, translator).
The plot of the story is :
This "prince charming" tale is adapted from a novel by Alexander Grin about a little girl named Assol, who meets a wizard one day. He tells her that a ship with red sails will arrive , (sometime in the future} , to take her away to a new, happy life with a dashing young prince. She holds onto this prediction in spite of taunts and the ridicule of her neighbors. Meanwhile, the son of a local nobleman grows up to become a sea captain and falls in love with Assol. Sure enough, he decides the only way to win her heart is to unfurl red sails and head into port. Eleanor Mannikka.
As well-known and talented artist, Sergey Knyazev not just painted this interesting and very-detailed composition, but put in it some hidden sense.
As Sergey Knyazev has explained me- of course, there is not mistake, that a beautiful girl Assol is having a Book "The Scarlet Sails" in her hands- this allegory is only connecting the story with modern time... Under the tavern where the main characters have met- he also put his own initials- KC, which means Knayzev Sergey in Russian.
On the borders of a lid, Knyazev have wrote famous Alexander Grin's words from this novel:
I have understand one unsophisticated (simple) truth.
And it is in making so-called miracles with one's own hands...
A Smile,a Joy,a forgiveness and a correct word which was told in time!