Читать книгу One Russia, Two Chinas - George Fetherling - Страница 10

2

Arts and Letters

If the press was in a state of flux, changing and growing according to no discernible plan beyond whatever tomorrow might bring, so too were the arts—but for some additional reasons. When liberalism is in the ascendant, art and culture always tend to flourish, as the energy pent up in more restrictive times is given an appreciative outlet, with results that are variously youthful, contagious, and self-intoxicating. The sexual revolution that was sputtering to a regressive and ignoble conclusion in the West, as AIDS and other factors ended the long holiday of public sensuality, was just beginning in the Soviet Union. Sex and nudity were now almost de rigueur in Soviet feature films and especially on the stage, “even in pieces from Chekhov and scenes from Shakespeare,” I was told. But this also had to do with the depoliticization of art and the concurrent rise of the free market in culture and everything else. Public art, sanctioned art, subsidized art—it still had to be justified by what I more than once heard called conjuncture, or theoretical grounding in the social here-and-now for reasons of national pride. But partly this was force of habit. Soviet readers, for example, liked novels about politics, old ones and new ones, indigenous or foreign. Yet the demands that art be used to laud and justify the achievements of socialism—the basis for social realism in art—was already way in the past, and much of the job of simply promoting politics and community had been taken over by the newly free press. The bureaucracy was therefore cutting back on some kinds of arts spending. Gorbachev took a bold pro-arts initiative, for example, when he appointed a prominent stage and cinema actor as culture minister. One of the minister’s first important interviews revealed that many theatre companies would have to find free-market ways of contributing to their own keep. He also noted, with what mixture of emotions I found impossible to know, that the trend of so many professional artists letting themselves be subsumed into politics and public service was, well, a sort of double-edged sword. (Not long after my trip, the new culture minister led a performing artists’ protest against the state of Soviet culture—in effect, against his own policies.)

So I set out to try to learn something of the current state of the arts, not just their political economy but also, so to say, their texture. I began at the point of easiest access, the offices of Oktyabr. They were located in Pravda Street, so named because much of the opposite side of the quaint tree-lined boulevard was occupied by that newspaper and its giant printing plant and various affiliated buildings, like the “palace of culture” (concert hall and all-purpose performing arts centre) and “sanatorium” (health club) for the use of its employees, such as most of the largest industries, unions, and professions enjoyed—another manifestation of the older, more rigidly planned approach to culture.

Oktyabr was in an old mansion with a large shady garden in front. Inside it looked like literary magazines every where: secondhand furniture; proofs, files, and manuscripts in permanent disarray; a few dedicated people, though more than one would find on a similar journal in the West. I drank glasses of tea with Nina Loshkareva, the deputy editor-in-chief, and Inessa Nazarova, the executive secretary. Another employee, a young copy editor, married to an editor at an encyclopedia publisher, kindly volunteered to take me the following day on a tour of Old Moscow, which carries many of the same associations as Bloomsbury, with a little bit of Soho thrown in. It was once the student quarter, but Moscow University long ago relocated to the Lenin Hills outside the city.

In this part of Moscow, abutting the famous Arbat, with its colourful shops, small cafés, and ensnared tourists, there are unexpected pieces of the architectural past, including a great many with literary, artistic, or musical associations, around every corner. One stately classical mansion in Vorovsky Street is said to be the model for the home of the Rostov family in War and Peace; it had become a kind of retreat of the Association of Soviet Writers. Nearby is the House of Writers, a club and meeting hall, where I was invited a number of times. It was formerly a Masonic lodge, and the rich panelling in the dining room is carved with such motifs as the double-headed eagle of the tsars, while the cellar is a bar. I sensed that this was to Soviet writers what the Groucho Club is to English ones—there is a delicate ego system at work there.

The area is rich in museums dedicated to such figures as Pushkin. When one of the foreign embassies, which are also centred here, wanted to build on a small park, the protesters erected a sign indicating that the tree in the centre of it had strong associations with Pushkin, thereby mocking them-selves while preserving the spot. We also stopped at the place where Pushkin was married. My guide called it the Church-of-Jesus-Christ-Going-Up-in-the-Air, which I took to be the Church of the Ascension. It was being restored, but there was some debate as to whether it should be a museum or a living church; there was recent precedent for either, as Gorbachev had returned some old monasteries to the Russian Orthodox Church and caused some of them to be restored as well. Which brings home the fact that there are political currents even in the museum field. Only in the past few months had the state made a museum of the house occupied from 1843 to 1846 by Alexander Hersen, the revolutionary editor who spent most of his exile in England. He has risen from relative obscurity partly because it turns out that he was the first person to employ the word glasnost in the contemporary sense.

However refreshing such communion with the past—and to me it was one of the major pleasures of Moscow, to an extent that quite took me by surprise—my task was to report on the present. And so, over the course of several more days, I set out to make my rounds.

Book publishing was another point of entry. Western writers and readers all know the stories of how the classic Russian writers are revered, and even read, by the true proletariat as well as the allegorical working class, and how contemporary Soviet writers, or those who carry the seal of approval, saw their works gobbled up in editions of many hundreds of thousands of copies; how writers are debated, argued about, and accorded signs of importance such as in North America are only ever given to figures in big business, entertainment, sport, and crime. There is some truth in this supposition, but of course the situation is rather more complicated—as bad as it is good. In any event, the kind of Soviet publishing North Americans were most familiar with, the English-language editions of Soviet and Western writers associated with Progress Books in Toronto or International Publishers in New York—the loving editions of Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, and so on, with their flimsy paper, mundane design, and quaint 1950s hot-lead typography—turned out to be another area, surprise, that was undergoing rapid change. Such was what I learned from a visit to Alexei Faingar, one of the editorial department chiefs at Progress Publishers, the state’s foreign-literature works and, with 1,500 employees, the country’s biggest publishing house. Each year it brought out 600 titles in 50 languages, and another 100 in Russian, in the fields of literature, history, politics, law, and the sciences.

Faingar was a beautifully tailored man in his fifties, polylingual, relaxed, and sophisticated, with the look of a shrewd negotiator and a keen judge of a fluid marketplace. He looked like any European publisher you would expect to find at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We met in the boardroom.

“How are the books selected? Ah, that is a complicated process, but I would say that we rely one-half on our editors here and one-half on out-side specialists living in Moscow. The latter may work in some academical institution, as in, to take an example, the Institute for the United States and Canada. As for ourselves here, I offer as an illustration my own department, which is concerned with essays, works of quality journalism, and so on. We try to use every possible source of such literature, even private sources. We read foreign periodicals, especially the book-review sections; we have a special department for ordering what might be of interest, and we have [hard] currency for the purpose. As a result, we can plan a year’s activities.” When he spoke, in early spring 1990, he was engaged in planning his 1992 releases. On subsequent days I spent some time in the foreign-language bookshop in the same building . Recent releases in English literature included a selected writings of Evelyn Waugh, a lesser novel of Robert Penn Warren’s, and an anthology of journalism with the status of literature that included a long extract from Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. I perceived no common thread with respect to ideology—perhaps those days had already gone—nor with respect to the usefulness of the texts as teaching aids. Taste was the only basis for selection obvious to me.

The typical press run for a work of mass literature was 50,000 copies, a figure that corresponded roughly to Canadian numbers if you allowed for the fact that Canada had less than 10 percent of the Soviet Union’s population. For the blockbusters, as many as half a million copies might be printed, while for specialized or scientific works, the total might be as few as 5,000 copies. Soviet publishers didn’t ordinarily maintain extensive backlists of popular titles, but printed a book hoping to sell it out so they could move on to the next. People shopped for books as they shopped for food, gobbling up whatever was available on that particular day. So at least some small part of what outsiders took to be the average Soviet’s voracious appetite for culture and learning was the buy-now-and-hoard-for-tomorrow-it-will-be-gone mentality. (I keep remembering the sight of a stylishly attired woman on a trolley-bus, opening her expensive Western handbag in search of a five-kopeck ticket to reveal a half dozen of some vegetable—it looked like a cousin of the rutabaga—caked in mud, just as they had come from the farmer’s field. Whenever Soviets saw valuable goods being vended, they joined the queue and bought some, for these goods would soon be worth more than rubles.)

Not all that long ago it was commonly supposed in the West that Soviet publishers of foreign writers were motivated by a desire to show the West in an unfavourable light and would undertake athletic feats of editing to satisfy this ulterior motive. I remember Peter C. Newman showing me the Russian-language edition of The Canadian Establishment; it was a mere fraction of the length of the original, presumably because it retained only the material about Bay Street operators calculated to suggest that they are the norm of Canadian society. More recently, I know, the Soviets had published, without any interference or manipulation, Canadian writers whose unflattering views of the Soviet Union were well known. One house, for example, made a selected poems of Al Purdy available. Which is not to suggest that the Soviets rushed to find a special affinity with Canada, whatever geo-cultural logic there might be in such twinning. “Our geography section has published such writers as Farley Mowat on your northern regions,” said Faingar on eue, “and I read and enjoyed his book on the Second World War [And No Birds Sang], but in the end we didn’t publish it. I confess that Canadian literature is our weak point. We learn not enough of it.” He left the impression that Canadians themselves must take more of the initiative. This led us to discuss the whole question of payments received by authors, a topic in which I have a permanent interest, though one, sadly, that is rather more theoretical than not.

In the past, Soviet publishers would withhold royalties on Russian translations of Western books but permit an author to come in person and collect some or all of the money in his or her account, for spending inside the Soviet Union. In the 1960s many a fur hat and many a case of vodka were bought under pressure of deadline by poor drudges from the West with rubles burning a hole in their pockets. The clerks at the GUM Department Store in Red Square must have seen them coming for miles. But in May 1973, a dozen years before glasnost, the Soviets finally joined the Geneva Copyright Convention and now dutifully send foreign authors their royalties on books published after that date. Payments are made in the foreign currency of the writer’s preference. Some time soon—a few months or a few years? I wasn’t able to pin anyone down—they were expected to become signatories of the Berne Convention as well and then pay up on books predating 1973. Of course, publisher-author relations had always been touchy, with some writers, Americans particularly, refusing to cooperate with the Soviet Union. Tom Wolfe, for example, would not permit Progress to print a large portion of The Right Stuff, though he relented and allowed them to produce his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

In the West writers receive a percentage—usually 10 percent—of the retail price of the book, but in the Soviet Union they were paid according to the number of “signatures,” which in the Soviet equation amounted to approximately 25 pages of typescript, as well as the “circulation,” or size of the print run; actual sales, or the speed of sales, were irrelevant. This allowed the publisher to calculate the sum in advance (and pay 25 percent of it on signing the contract, 35 percent when typesetting was completed, and the final 40 percent on publication). But all this would change soon, for the whole process of getting the books to the readers was undergoing dramatic alteration, like so much else in the country. Formerly all newly printed books from all publishers went to the Book Union, a monopoly trade organization that supplied all the shops and took one-quarter of the retail price. And those prices, like all other financial details, were set out by Goskompechat, the state committee for publishing, printing, and book-selling. “But two days ago,” Faingar informed me, “the directors of 300 houses met in this building to establish the Soviet Publishing Association,” with the purpose of finding a way to arrive at prices based upon what the market will bear. “This may be the beginning of the end of the Book Union’s monopoly on bookselling,” he said. “Maybe in a year’s time there won’t even be a state committee for publishing.”

Far more so, I believe, than in literature, Moscow at this time was particularly rich in the visual arts, and I was fortunate to be able to see a variety of new work and various related activity. I was most pleased, for example, by a visit to an art auction preview, though it was a rather anemic affair by Western standards, held in an ugly, mostly vacant light-industrial space down by the river that bore the same name relationship to the London and New York sale rooms as the dreariest Moscow café bears to a four-star restaurant. But it was rewarding in a number of ways. Although without doubt much of Russia’s movable past—books, pictures, antiques, and the like—was destroyed during successive revolutions and wars, it was probably not subjected to a deliberate policy of mass destruction except briefly when the Bolsheviks took power (quite a different situation from China’s during the days of the Red Guards). Rather, it simply became irrelevant; Lenin’s mission after all was to build a new world; new was the operative word. That the export of all art and antiquities of the remotest consequence was prohibited for so many decades contributed to the strength of the pool, as did the low level of disposable income. Now, in the secondhand bookshops, and not just those found among the upscale souvenir places in the Arbat, the European custom of selling old books under the same roof as pictures and prints seemed to be creating some bargains for collectors. Nothing of great importance in the art-historical sense, perhaps, but plenty of attic clutter from late tsarist times, which in shop windows or in the auction preview I mentioned hung side by side with minor contemporary work—not amateur but not really professional either—from which it was often indistinguishable in terms of manner.

This is an important point, it seems to me: the sheer force of accumulated tradition is a question young artists there must come to terms with. The response that painters and sculptors formulate is one of the many factors that determine whether they will be official artists or avant-garde ones. The former term did not change its meaning much under perestroika; such artists are not like those in the Stalin era, working on huge murals of heroic workers marching behind tractors, but they did resemble the social realists of old in that they were members of the U.S.S.R. Artists’ Guild or a similar body. Avant-garde takes a little more defining, and I was lucky in having a skilled explainer who could also get me inside studios representative of the two types of artists.

Maria Pustukhova, 26, was born in the closed city of Vladivostok in the Far East when her mother was the first woman in local television there; her father was a creative writer who then became a journalist with Pravda, which brought the family to Moscow when Maria was 12. Shopping trips to Prague helped her to cultivate the Western appearance admired by Soviet young people, at least of those in the big cities, but her look was altogether more stylish than the usual blue jeans and Reeboks. She was an art critic and art historian. “I live for the avant-garde,” she told me as a plain statement of fact, without any of the faux-drama such phrases carry in English. She and I scampered along to a small street behind Starokonyushenny Lane, where the Canadian embassy is located, to the two-room basement apartment that Alexei Mironov used as his sculpture studio. The space, quite separate from the flat where he lived, in another part of the city, was crammed with works in stone, clay, wood, plaster, and various metals. Sometimes a painter friend used the space as well, and as we descended the dark steps we caught the faint smell of turps, which all studio-hounds love, whether they admit it or not.

Mironov, not yet 30, got a sound start. Both his parents were recognized artists, and he graduated from the Stroganov College of Industrial Design when he was 22. For monumental works he sometimes employed assistants, in the traditional manner. Maria told me going in, “He is very rich for an artist”—to the extent that he owned an automobile, or did until quite recently. By Soviet standards he was richer in experience: he had been to the West. He was represented in several public collections in the Soviet Union and in private ones there and elsewhere. In the past couple of years he had been able to accept invitations to visit Britain—first Glasgow, then London—where he had pieces in group exhibitions.

I noticed that like many of the young artists whose work I saw, Mironov used quite a lot of found materials (one exhibition of kinetic Rube Goldberg-like structures included a room-size contraption that incorporated everything from hand saws to skis to an old pram). I was bound to ask whether this element was part of his aesthetic or indicated that the flow of normal supplies was tenuous. “Not problem getting what I need,” he replied. “I deal with, you know, Soviet robbers.” He laughed, but I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, for he was a nervously gregarious fellow. Later he played Russian folk songs on his guitar and poured brandies all round and offered slices of what I first took to be a piece of wood, for it looked like a carpenter’s leavings, but turned out to be an Armenian meat, spiced within an inch of its life—and of ours.

What impressed me about Mironov’s work was not only its range but its range of sincerity. Maybe intensity is a better word. His painted wooden figures of contemporary everyman and everywoman, often with right angles redesigning the human form and commenting perhaps on the angularity of big-city existence, struck me as the most deeply felt, followed by some very personal pieces in stone or wood, such as a torso of his wife when she was pregnant with their son, who was now three. But the same person could also commit an enormous plaster bust of Peter the Great, of the sort appropriate to a schoolroom long ago—not as one of his many lucrative commissions but totally self-assigned. The spectrum was so broad, East to West, contemporary to traditional, that it was almost a kind of doubt. Mironov couldn’t be more different from Harry Vinogradov, a true underground and decidedly unofficial artist who, for reasons that did not quite survive the translation process, signed himself Bicapo.

At 32 he was of the same generation as Mironov. His great-grandfather was a famous St. Petersburg mystic and faith healer, who was sent to Siberia where in 1937 he was killed. Vinogradov/Bicapo carried on some of the same fascination with the idea that madness was sometimes connected to saintliness, a proposition that runs deep in Russian culture. “All people have to do rituals,” he said, “to help them to re-establish relations with nature.” His head was shaven, like a penitent’s or a prisoner’s rather than like a skinhead’s, and he affected unusual modes of dress. One day, he recalled, he was wearing a scarf over his head with a hat jammed down over top of that, and a police officer took him to task, saying, “You’ll never be another Marc Chagall unless you have a proper smoking suit.” The cop didn’t know that at that moment Bicapo was naked under his coat.

He studied architecture, found work as a draughtsman, but gave it up “because it was an impossibility for one of my temperament—I prefer the status of a free artist.” A number of Soviet painters found the term free artist useful. It suggested people who were not direct descendants of the old avant-linegarde of 1910—30, of the Kandinskys, Komardenkovs, and Konstamntinovs who paralleled the modernists in the West, but rather of the artists whose work, in one especially notorious incident, was ordered destroyed by Khrushchev in 1962—an entire group show ground up by bulldozers.

The point was not necessarily that Bicapo worked in art forms that the state did not recognize. Nor that performance art was exactly a state priority, though the ministry of culture now bragged that, in contrast to “the period of stagnation from Stalin to Chernenko,” all disciplines might be recognized and rock and roll might even be perceived as an official export. Yet people like Bicapo didn’t receive aid from the cultural arm of the government. Some other apartment artists (so called because they were forced to show their work at open houses rather than in galleries) had become prosperous through overseas sales—part of the new vogue for Soviet art in the West, a by-product of Gorbamania. “Sometimes the neighbours would call the police when they saw a foreigner come up the steps,” Maria said. Bicapo, for his part, was in a group called the Kindergarten Artists, because for a time he and a few friends supported themselves as night guards at a day-care centre and school.

Like two million other Muscovites, Bicapo and his mother shared their apartment with another family, or they used to. One fellow tenant died, two others moved away. So now he had his studio space next to his living quarters, on the top floor of an apartment building that was built as recently as the 1930s but looked to be covered in at least a century’s worth of grime. The lobby smelled of urine and the lift was broken; the stairs were lighted only partway up.

The essence of his current work involved the intersection of fire, water, and music. To explain “Bicapo consciousness,” he first lit candies around the room and struck a series of chimes he had made by suspending different lengths of steel pipe from the ceiling; the sound lingered and then merged with that of a cassette tape he put on, one track of which consisted of the same chimes, while the others were strange sounds I could not identify, half human perhaps and half inorganic, climaxing in what might be screams. All this while two small beer kegs suspended from the ceiling were dripping water into a pair of shallow receptacles that looked like prospectors’ gold pans, only larger. Also hanging from above was a circular wire basket in which the artist had put six or eight fuel pellets and ignited them with a blowtorch. The heat rising from the basket caused a large aluminium printing plate, slung over a wire as a blanket might be slung over a clothes-line, to vibrate. A microphone connected to an amplifier was placed down a two-metre section of plastic flexi-pipe, the sort used for household plumbing, which pipe was dangled from a light chain and tilted, so that one end, the one with the mike, was close to the water pans, which continued to fill up, drip-drip-drip. Bicapo then passed the blowtorch along the length of the pipe, varying the size of the flame. The sounds picked up by the microphone varied accordingly. Clearly this was how he made the sounds that I heard on the tape; other tracks—of hammering and sawing, for example—had been mixed in later.

“I first did this with 10 metres of metal tubing at a construction site,” Bicapo explained. “I inserted one end of the tube into a fire while a woman sang opera.” This was not so much mere street theatre; he was quite earnest about musical structure and the mixing of created and found sound, but his high seriousness was more apparent from his conversation than from his writings on the theory of his art. He allowed me to look at a draft manifesto that described Bicapo as “radiant, equilibristic, superconducting super-rapid interaction momentary understanding.” But his English orthography slipped in a handbill that he let me take away with me, which declared: “The water is drip, the fire is burn. Losting primordial human natur is manifest when thousands of Bicapo and Dzoings are sound. I am mystacal artist through my madness I am penetrate heavens and listen musik of sky forest.”

I wasn’t able to determine what Dzoings were.