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His grandmother’s brother, Grandpa Leontiy, was a professional folktale narrator, and from his early childhood the future writer lived amid the rich word-creation traditions of the Russian North. Stepan Pisakhov started composing and recounting his tales quite early, but rarely put them down on paper. The peculiarity of his texts, which were first and foremost intended for listening audiences, was conditioned by their spoken origin.
Only in 1924 were his tales from the Northern Munchausen cycle published in the collection On the Northern Dvina. In 1927 northern folktales recorded and commented upon by Stepan Pisakhov were published in the almanac “Sovetskaya Strana”. In 1938–1940 Pisakhov’s own tales (in two volumes) first saw the light in Arkhangelsk.
The geography of Pisakhov’s active creative scope stretched from Novaya Zemlya to Cairo. For an artist he had received myriad impressions from his travels as a young man in Italy, France, Turkey and Egypt. Yet his major focus, both as a writer and an artist, was his native North - its images, folklore and speech. Pisakhov explored the coastline of the White Sea, visited Novaya Zemlya, the waters of the Yugorsky Strait that connects the Barents Sea and Kara Sea Seas, and took part in Arctic expeditions.
Most of his tales are set in the village of Uyemsky, a few kilometres upriver from Arkhangelsk. The protagonist and narrator of the tales, a Pomors peasant from Uyma, has the name of Semyon (Senya) Malina.
Pisakhov, along with Aleksandr Borisov and Tyko Vylka, is considered to be the founder of Russian Arctic painting, and initially his works were featured prominently in the Arkhangelsk Museum of Fine Arts. In 2008, the Stepan Pisakhov Museum was opened in Arkhangelsk, and his paintings were then transferred to this museum.
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