Stories & Legends

Tatlin's life was closely connected with navigation. As a teenager, he ran away from home and, working as a cabin boy, sailed on a steamship, making a voyage along the route Odessa-Varna-Istanbul-Rize-Batumi and back. Later, Tatlin entered the Odessa School of Merchant Shipping and spent a whole year sailing as a "sailor apprentice" on a sailing ship. After completing art school, he continued working as a sailor, traveling to cities along the Black and Mediterranean Seas.

Tatlin had a musical talent. He learned to play the guitar and accordion, but his favorite instrument was the bandura, a stringed folk instrument of wandering musicians in Eastern Ukraine. Tatlin made his own banduras. In 1913, he was offered to go to Berlin to participate in the Russian handicraft exhibition as a "blind" singer-bandurist. According to his recollections, the exhibition was successful, and visitors touched his shirt, shook his hand, and thanked him. Tatlin also claimed to have played the bandura for Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Tatlin went to Paris to meet Picasso, a dream he had after seeing Picasso's reliefs in the French magazine "Soirées de Paris." They were introduced by Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, a friend of Tatlin. According to the legend, Tatlin introduced himself as a Russian sailor boy looking to earn some money. He wanted to get to know Picasso's works and his techniques first hand. He told Picasso that he really liked what he saw and that he was interested in art. Afterward, Picasso gave Tatlin several tubes of paint, and they bid each other farewell warmly.

The trip to Europe convinced Tatlin to abandon painting. Tatlin began to create constructions which, in their radicalism, surpassed even Malevich's non-objective compositions. He transformed his concept radically, adding materials such as metal, fabric, and pieces of wood to his sculptural works, renaming them "counter-reliefs," thus demonstrating that art could be anything, well before Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades”

"Letatlin," a flying apparatus powered by human muscle force, is one of Tatlin's major works. While working on its creation, he studied the anatomy of birds. There are memories from contemporaries about birds being present in the artist's dwelling. German artist Georg Grosz recalled visiting Tatlin: "I visited Tatlin again, this lanky jester. He lived in a tiny, old, dilapidated apartment. Chickens he kept slept on his bed. In one corner, they laid eggs." A neighbor of Tatlin in Kyiv remembered that the artist "lived with a stork and raised frogs."

After several tests of Letatlin, a meeting was held with aviation experts. Design engineers said that the aircraft has “too low efficiency.” Tatlin objected, "Try talking to a crow; maybe it will listen to you and, because of the low efficiency,' it will stop flying and start walking.

One of the students in the “SVOMAS Free Workshops” recalled how Tatlin encouraged his students during classes when there was a shortage of food and firewood for heating in Moscow: "On certain days of the month, Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin entered the workshop, holding a piece of black bread under his arm... took a knife from his boot and cut us a large slice of bread, sometimes giving us an onion, saying at the same time, 'Your work is hard and serious, so you need support.'