I went too far ahead in my story. I read “Gulag Archipelago” when I already was in Art College. During the year preceded the entering exams I took lessons from the artist V.A.G., a short, bold and bearded painter working in Levitan’s style, originally from the Volga. Perestroika began, I was fourteen; the five girls who studied with me (all older than me) were completely different from my schoolmates. At that time I was reading about the lives of Russian artists of 19th -20th centuries.; V.A.G.’s studio and the old suburb in the centre of Moscow, with the big Patriarchal cathedral and tiny yellow ocher and blue mansions under the snow provided the illustrations for my reading. Of course I imagined myself to be one of those artists and, to the exaggerated horror and irony of my mates, would even buy the 10 kopecks pirozhok with the meat “because they did it as well after a hard working day, a century ago”.
I was surrounded by the churches, on the paintings of Russian artists and in the Moscow streets and yet I did not ever give any thought to what was happening inside them. I do not understand how it is possible but it was so. And yet, since about eleven years old I felt that there must be something else, something beyond the visible – some meaning.
I passed the exams for the College and found myself in a totally new place. They were only idiots around – just like me. My much older brother, a super-conservative KGB officer, experienced something like a culture shock when he was helping me bring my heavy works to the college building. At the entrance he saw a group of “milk suckers” smoking suspicious looking cigarettes and waving at me (one of them being friendly addressed the officer as “hi dude”), on the ground floor – a very relaxed man with the long hair, on the first – a black guy (a student from a brother country) embracing a blond girl and on the second floor, the most unfortunate, a student who was literally climbing the corridor walls. He ran along the corridor starting at one end and then would throw himself onto the wall at the opposite end, helping himself with his arms and legs and even managing to gain some height – an idiosyncratic method to perk creativity up. My brother was stunned with what he saw, and I can still hear his voice shouting at mother “How could you allow her to do anything with that mad house?”
There would be no need to describe the atmosphere of my Art College if it did not coincide with Perestroika. It was the time when the closed doors and windows were opened or smashed overnight: the books of prohibited authors would be published non-stop, a new one every day: Pasternak. Mandelshtam, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Hodasevich, Brodsky, etc. TV began showing “alternative” foreign movies. The students were mostly from intelligentsia families thus the conversations were circulating around these new things. The cotton wool of the dull school years dropped off. The air changed – the spring air (melting snow, wet black brunches with the pods about to break) was felt even in winter and summer. We were drunk with freedom.
At the Art College I started studying philosophy (especially Nietzsche, others discussed solipsism) and mythology (for some reason concentrating on Scandinavian and German). I also began wearing my mother’s cross – why I have no idea, I was not baptized. My brother gave me the book of Renan about Jesus in which he was portrayed as a sentimental, rather weak human and his disciples – as deluded individuals, victims of a silly, although attractive, illusion. I did not know anything about Christianity (somehow the books of Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Leskov, etc left me completely oblivious to the soil they grew upon) but I felt disgusted and even enraged. I did not know anything about Jesus but I knew that Renan was lying.
While visiting our relative we met another one, a completely lay person who offered my mother to buy a copy of the Gospel from her, out of blue – “I got an extra one in Sergiev Posad” she said. Mother bought it (I still remember that very fine book in a bright blue leathery cover) and I tried to read it. “In the beginning was the Word…” – the first chapter of The Gospel of St John overtook me but I could not understand it. I could only guess something but was unable to grasp it.
We had one year course called The History of Russian Ancient Art, which translated into normal language as The History of Russian Christian Art. That course influenced my choice of the theme for my diploma project, a series of posters and secondary designs for the exhibition of restored icons (I was studying graphic design). The design was my interpretation of the icons – their rhythm, colour schemes. (While typing these words, I suddenly realized that the idea of the posters was quite symbolic: from grey emptiness to the gradual filling of the space with the light and colour, towards the fullness of the image.) My supervisor I.I.A. was a devoted Orthodox but I did not know that at that time. I am not sure if I read Iconostasis by Fr Pavel Florensky because of her or discovered it by myself – I am not even sure if I read it at that time or later but it is somehow connected with her in my mind. Sergiev Posad had a special significance for Fr Pavel Florensky; for me it was the place of the first pecking of the Holy Spirit, when I saw the church cupolas through the cotton wool for the first time.