Nowhere
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.
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