Portrait of a Gentleman Wearing a Dressing Gown (Jascha Golowanjuk), 1943

Lotte Laserstein

Narrator: In the portrait of the author and friend Jascha Golowanjuk, we find a gentleman sitting in a chequered dressing gown with his head turned slightly towards us. There is something very graceful about his posture, and the way he holds a cigarette between his fingers, how the ring-clad hand rests on his thigh. His reflective gaze seems directed inwards.

Golowanjuk was born in Odesa in 1905, the son of a poor Jewish family. He was considered a very talented violin player and sent to the conserva­tory in Saratov in 1913, at the tender age of eight. He was then cared for by a Danish-Russian aristocrat who fled from Bolshevik Russia to Denmark with him and his wife in 1919. Golowanjuk was subsequently sent to a music conservatory in Vienna, and later to the Royal Danish Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, where he graduated in 1925.

He came to Sweden in 1929 and became one of the country’s first “immigrant” authors. Many of his over forty books were huge public successes. Despite his literary successes, he felt like a strange bird most of his life. Due to his sexual orientation and his vicissitudinous background, Golowanjuk did not fit into the conformist Swedish society, where homosexuality, moreover, was illegal until 1944.

Laserstein and Golowanjuk first met in 1940. Their warm friendship was mostly maintained through correspondence. Jascha appreciated Lotte as an artist and she even designed the covers of three of his books; Främmande Fågel, Drömhandlaren, and Mimosan blommar om vintern.

Laserstein’s sensitive portrait of Golowanjuk radi­ates great human warmth and respect. They shared the fate of exile and the feeling of not blending into Swedish society.