After finishing the Art College I was compulsorily attached to “a design lab” for three years as “a young specialist” – a Soviet tradition. The place was also very Soviet – people worked on “bubble” projects filling up the time with endless teas, smoking, and touring the lab territory. There was very little work for me; I could not understand why I could not be at work only as long as there was actual work for me to do and why I had to simulate the activity. I spent hours in the library, “for the purpose of studying foreign design journals”, reading about Vedanta, Jainism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Vivekananda, Ramacharaka (the library somehow had an abundance of books on those topics), Western philosophy – anything but Christianity. My place of work and me were an absolute mismatch. The cotton wool returned to its place.
I suspect now that Perestroika affected mostly so-called creative intelligentsia and the places it existed; other layers of the country remained almost untouched. Perhaps normality requires time to be accepted and absorbed. I can only speculate of course: most of the time I was feeling idiotic because of my perpetual existential shock with anything that was not freedom and relatively normal relationship between people. It was normality that I experienced with the people in my early childhood, the atmosphere in the Art College, and which I felt at the rock concerts of those who had just came out from the underground during Perestroika years.
Eventually I managed to escape and found the perfect job: I would be an artist on call. The company contacted me when they had work – graphs, posters, etc, I picked it up and did it at home while listening to records (big black disks of classic and avant-garde music) and recently discovered Radio Orpheus. The latter transmitted highly cultured voices talking about composers and played rare records. I also regularly visited I.I.A. for the purpose of showing her my works and unconscious sips of normality. She tried to convince me to enter Poligraficheskiy Institute which she finished in the past. I went to have a look at the Institute on the outskirts of Moscow on a cold, snowy winter day and got shortsightedly lost. When I found it at last it appeared to be so dull that I did not even enter in.
Somewhere in these generally nonsignificant years there happened my visit to the flat of an Orthodox Jew with my friend, also a Jew but an atheist, who had to pick up a book. (Together with that friend we attempted, during the August putsch in 1991, to convince the solders sitting in the tanks near the Revolution Square metro station, to disobey the command of their generals – a bright moment.) The flat was dark, smelled of soup, and its windows were dirty but the whole impression was oddly positive. Somewhere in its twilight I distinguished a small man in yarmulke and black suite. The impression was brief but somehow strong; soon after that I began reading about Judaism (it felt convincing, warm and comforting) but I soon returned to the Eastern religions and finally embraced Buddhism.