Mikhail Shemyakin left his homeland more than thirty years ago. During this time, he managed to take root in Paris, move to New York and, finally, settle in the small American town of Claverack, not far from the legendary Hudson River.

Mikhail Shemyakin was born on May 4, 1943, spent his childhood in Kaliningrad. Before being expelled from the USSR, Shemyakin lived in Leningrad, where he worked as a restorer in the Hermitage. Coming home, Shemyakin painted still lifes from meat carcasses.

Naturally, it could not do without drunken gatherings and dances around these very carcasses. The authorities could not like the artist’s inadequate behavior from their point of view: Shemyakin was kept in a mental hospital for a long time with a diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia. In 1971 he was expelled from the Union. For him, it was the best way out – to leave the “unromantic” country at that time.

Another important reason for the expulsion of Mikhail Shemyakin from the USSR was a new movement invented by him in a communal apartment littered with carcasses, called “metaphysical synthesis”. In general, its main idea can be expressed as follows – there is no culture of different peoples, there is only one culture for all, you just need to find its common, deep foundations. Could this be understood in the USSR in the seventies?

In the West, the new trend was further developed. He received numerous academic and doctoral degrees. And, of course, this influenced his own artistic creativity. In search of “the foundations of life and culture,” Shemyakin studied the cultural images of various nationalities and made numerous sketches.

Naturally, a person whose philosophical views are based on the unity of different cultures could not possibly be a citizen of only one country. Shemyakin became a citizen of the world. A world without a single state – its homeland. He was able to purchase a building in St. Petersburg for a branch of his Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of Creativity.

Being expelled from the Soviet Union, he practically started everything from scratch, managed to make a name for himself and enter the history of world art. By the age of 59, he became the owner of several honorary doctorates, including those from the University of San Francisco (USA) and the Academy of Arts of Europe (France), and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, received the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 1993, the Presidential Prize in 1997. and the Petropol Prize in 2001.

The most unusual and spectacular scenery for the ballet was created by Mikhail Shemyakin for The Nutcracker in 2001. This is an avant-garde show with sausages, a tureen, a boar’s head, and mechanical puppets. The artist’s goal was to revive the mood of Hoffmann’s fairy tale of the grotesque and monsters.