Defiant to the last ... Victor Melnikov, pictured inside his beloved constructivist house
A sad day in Moscow today with the burial of the painter Viktor Melnikov, who died on Sunday at the age of 91, writes Tom Parfitt.
Viktor lived nearly all his life in the unique house-studio on the Stary Arbat that was designed by his architect father, Konstantin, during a spectacular flourishing of creative arts in the 1920s and 1930s, before Stalin's purges.
I interviewed him last September, one of the final journalists to do so, when he gave me a three-hour tour of the house he had saved almost single-handedly from demolition. He was very sprightly and was proud of his strength ("feel that bicep," he said, offering an arm that felt like seasoned oak). Despite his age, it was a shock to hear that he had died.
And Viktor's death has wider ramifications, too. The house itself, a unique construction of two interlocking cylinders studded with rhomboid windows, is now subject to a scrappy inheritance battle between Viktor Melnikov's daughters: the fear is that one of them could sell it off to developers in defiance of his wish that it should be gifted to the state as a museum dedicated to his father.
Only a few hours after Viktor's death on Sunday morning his younger daughter, Yelena, and another relative tried to seize the building. "My father's body was still warm when they came to try and take the house," his eldest daughter, Yekaterina Karinskaya, told the Times in disgust. Sadly, the conflict will now be settled in court.
