Alexander Volkov Art

Alexander Nikolaevich Volkov was an avant-garde Russian painter and poet. Volkov was born in Fergana, near Tashkent in the Russian Empire. His father, Nikolai Ivanovich Volkov, was a lieutenant-general in the medical corps, and his mother, Feodosia Filippovna Volkova-Davydova, by some accounts, was a gypsy camp follower. Between 1888 and 1900, he studied in primary schools in Tashkent. Between 1900–05, Volkov was enrolled with the Second Orenburg Cadets Corps. In 1906, he started his college study in the Physics and Mathematics Faculty at the St Petersburg University but abandoned it two years later to join the studio of Vladimir Makovsky, who at the time was an instructor at the Superior School of Art at the Imperial Academy of Arts. A big influence on his artistic development was his attendance at the private studio of M.D. Bernstein, where some of his teachers were Nicholas Roerich, Ivan Bilibin and Leonid Sherwood.