Climbing the walls
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.
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