Inherited Exile as a Grammar of Belonging: Andrey Bělocvětov-Theakston in Prague

This article uses the life and artistic formation of Andrey Bělocvětov-Theakston as a microhistorical lens on second-generation Russian émigré identity in twentieth-century Prague. Its concern is not the genealogy of the Belocvetov family in itself, but the ways in which family memory, Orthodox background, Russian-language education, and uncertain legal status were reworked into a locally rooted and cosmopolitan artistic identity. Born in Prague in 1923 into a Russian émigré family whose post-revolutionary trajectory connected imperial Russia, Riga, Buenos Aires, Prague, Yugoslavia, and the United States, Bělocvětov-Theakston never knew Russia as a lived homeland. He encountered it as an inherited symbolic world: a name, a baptismal tradition, family memories, and the social environment of emigration. His education at the Russian Reformed Real Gymnasium and his training under Russian émigré artists such as Grigori Musatov and Nikolai Bakulin gave this inheritance institutional and artistic form. His later life, however, unfolded chiefly within Prague-based networks around figures such as Josef Sudek, Jan Zrzavý, and Karel Lidický. The article argues that Bělocvětov-Theakston’s identity is poorly captured by either the preservation of an unchanged Russianness or a linear model of assimilation into Czech society. His biography instead reveals a process of cultural translation shaped by urban belonging, artistic practice, friendship, institutional vulnerability, and changing political regimes. It thereby offers a focused case through which to examine a broader anthropological problem: how descendants of exile make a viable social world from an inherited displacement they did not themselves experience.