Marc Chagall plaque, St. Petersburg

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This plaque commemorating Marc Chagall was unveiled March 28, 2014. It is imagined by designer Vyacheslav Bukhaev as a palette splashed with dollops of color. At the time I photographed the plaque and environs in May 2018, they were looking rather drab. Perhaps that was mostly due to the fact that the entire building at 7 Perekupnoi Pereulok was looking rather shabby. Who knows the last time it had been painted, and huge chunks of plaster were falling away all over the place. On top of this, there were two, not one, but two, big trucks parked right in front of the building, making it almost impossible to get a good angle for photographs. As such, this may be as dreary a set of photos as I have ever posted on this blog site. But you get what you get, and I can only offer what I got. I won’t ever be in St. Petersburg again, so this is the best I’m going to do.
Chagall (1887-1985) lived in St. Petersburg during two early periods of his long life, from 1906 to 1910 when he was a student, and from 1915 to 1918, when he was already establishing himself as a major new painter. We know that he moved from Vitebsk to St. Petersburg in September 1915 to serve in the Military Industrial Committee. And we are told in a timeline put together by the surely reliable Tretyakov Gallery that he left with his family for Vitebsk in December 1917 (that would have been shortly after the revolution, or coup, as it is now often called by historians).  As such, I don’t know why this plaque has him living here into 1918, unless the family cut out quickly in December and their furniture and belongings were sent along after them following the New Year. In any case, Chagall would appear to have lived here for about two years and four months. He and his small family occupied Apt. No. 20.
The Culture.ru site writes about this period in Chagall’s life, which coincided with both the end of World War I and the change of regimes in Russia: “Service in the Petrograd Military Industrial Committee saved the artist from being sent to the front. At this time, Chagall rarely worked on paintings: he had to pay much attention to work and family. In 1916, he had a daughter, Ida, with Bella. In rare moments, when Marc Chagall was in the studio, he painted views of Vitebsk, portrait’s of Bella, and canvases dedicated to the war.”
Paintings made by Chagall during this time include: “The Lovers,” “The Lovers in Gray,” “The Lovers in Pink,” “Bella with White Collar,” “Purim,” and others. The spirit of St. Petersburg continued to inspire him as late as 1942, a time when he surely would have known that Leningrad, the new name of his former home, was trapped in a deadly blockade. That year he made a painting called “A Fantasy of St. Petersburg,” the backdrop for Scene IV of the ballet Aleko at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico.
After returning to his hometown of Vitebsk, Chagall was named the Commissioner for Arts of Vitebsk province, and in 1919 he founded the Vitebsk Art School.

I had the good fortune to collaborate on some work based on Chagall’s paintings for The Firebird in the summer of 2010. It was a natural for me since I had been more than a casual fan since my teens. Of all the many paintings and posters that travelled with me from home to home in my peripatetic youth, a huge cardboard print of Chagall’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” stayed with me longer than most, always finding a place of honor on my apartment walls. That aside, however, my wife Oksana Mysina and I were invited to take part in a new outdoor summer spectacle being created in 2010 at Double Edge Theatre in western Massachusetts. Director Stacy Klein had a lifelong love affair with Chagall and his work, and this was part of a larger exploration of Chagall and other Russian and Jewish influences on her and her company. They took Chagall’s Firebird paintings, originally done as backdrops for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, as a starting point, and worked their way toward their own story based loosely on the ancient Russian fairy tale. Oksana was asked to join the acting company for the summer, and I was tasked with organizing and fleshing out a script based on work already done by Jennifer Johnson, Matthew Glassman and the rest of the troupe.  As we neared opening night, Carlos Uriona approached me and said that his character, a Mephistophelian sort of chap, needed something inspired to speak as he tried in vain to lure a rebellious disciple to his death in a dramatic scene played out in and on the pond at the Double Edge Theatre farm. Could I, perhaps, find him a poem to recite? As rehearsals had unfolded, I was especially taken by Carlos’s wonderfully natural actor’s instincts, very much in line with folk theater, and I said, “How about if I write you one?” Carlos, always ready to take a chance, said, “Do it!” Thus appeared in the world the short poem that follows below. It is probably more of a world influenced by The Master and Margarita than by The Firebird, but then, Double Edge had once performed a summer spectacle based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, too, so there were lots of influences flowing around us at the time. Carlos, by the way, inhabited this short poem beautifully as he miraculously walked across the water before his character sank beneath the surface and perished… I think he enjoyed performing it. I loved watching him give it life before it brought him to his death…

So, here in the mists of endless time,
Where time does naught but end and end,
Where only darkness is reflected,
I bring you now, my brazen friend.

You have rejected everything I offered,
Although I offered wealth and power,
And so I bring you to this place of death,
Where every creature meets its final hour.

Text and photos © copyright 2020 John Freedman. Poem “So, here in the mists of endless time” © copyright 2010,  copyright renewed 2020 by John Freedman.

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Alexander Vertinsky plaque, Moscow

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Few individuals in the history of Russian culture have lived more dramatic lives than the great singer and songwriter Alexander Vertinsky (1889-1957). It all began before he was born.
Vertinsky was the second child born scandalously in Kiev to Nikolai Vertinsky, a lawyer, and Yevgenia Skolatskaya, the daughter of the head of Kiev’s assembly of nobility. Vertinsky, Sr., was married and nothing he could do would convince his wife to agree to a divorce. The situation – this was the end of the 19th century, after all – was, indeed, dramatic. Alexander’s sister Nadezhda was separated from her brother and given to an aunt in the father’s family. Alexander was turned over to his maternal aunt, a severe woman who hated Alexander’s father, was extremely strict in her dealings with the young boy, and who told him that his sister was dead. His mother died when he was three; his father, who apparently spent much of his last years sitting by his lover’s grave, died when Alexander was five. Not the easiest start in life far a young boy, although this was just a prelude.
The story that follows is packed with details that I could never have collected without the help of a few good websites, Know Everything, Peoples.ru, and Russian Wikipedia. I doff my cap to them all. (Although I should point out that the sources differ on dates occasionally, with some claiming he moved to Moscow and began his film career either in 1912 or 1913. In unclear instances, I tend to side with Wikipedia, rightly or wrongly.)
Vertinsky received a good education, at least at first, studying at the No. 1 Gymnasium for aristocrats. His classmates included the future writers Konstantin Paustovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov. But Vertinsky’s independent nature was not to be tamed. For kicks he began stealing money that pilgrims left as honors on the graves holding the remains of saints at the Kiev-Pechersky monastery. He was caught and kicked out of school, and, when he refused to quit doing it, his aunt kicked him out of her home. His saving grace was a love for theater and music. He tried out his acting chops first and, when that failed, he took up singing. A chance meeting with an old friend of his mother gave him another “in” to high society. She took him under her wing, inviting him to her house where he met such individuals as Marc Chagall, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, the poet Mikhail Kuzmin,  and the painters Kazimir Malevich and Natan Altman. This, apparently was an environment that began to serve and feed Vertinsky’s talent. His new benefactress helped him get a job as a theater critic and he turned out to be very good at it. He became well-known in Kiev with his notices about performances by Fyodor Chaliapin and others. He also began publishing short stories. When he had saved up enough money by the age of 24, he set out for the bright lights of the big city of Moscow. His primary goal was to make a career in literature, but first he made an astonishing discovery – his sister Nadya was not only still alive, she was an actress in the theater! Alexander began performing and directing, all the while continuing to write stories, poems and short plays, often under the influence of Alexander Blok and the Symbolists. An attempt to enter the Moscow Art Theater school ended in failure when the auditioning master Konstantin Stanislavsky complained that Vertinsky could not properly pronounce the letter “r.” This hardly stopped him. He made his debut in silent film in 1913 and, when World War I began, he volunteered as a medic. There he applied some 35,000 bandages to wounded soldiers before he was wounded slightly himself and sent back to Moscow where he learned that his beloved sister had died of an overdose of cocaine. Nevertheless, Alexander wasted little time getting his career going again, continuing to act in films and making his Moscow debut as a singer in 1915 at the Miniature Theater. A crucial choice was made to dress and make Vertinsky up as Pierrot, and it stuck, becoming his own personal image forever after. His early repertoire was based on the poetry of others, but he also began slipping in a few of his own songs, too. Before long he had become a star in his own right.

Vertinsky’s songs reflected the age in which they were written – one of violence, uncertainty and fear. The usual characters that he wrote about found themselves alone and vulnerable before a hostile world. There was a note of fatalism in Vertinsky’s voice that, together with his unique, personal sound of deep regret and profound understanding, gave his songs enormous emotional impact. It is not surprising (I say as I leap-frog over all kinds of interesting biographical details) that Vertinsky would increasingly feel himself an outcast in Moscow in the years after the Revolution. Even though the rhetoric was not even close to what it would become in the next decade/decade and a half, it was plenty to alienate Vertinsky almost immediately. Here’s a little story worth repeating from Peoples.ru:
“Following the Bolshevik Revolution Vertinsky came to the conclusion that he would never get along with the new government. His romance titled ‘What I Must Say,’ written under the impression of the deaths of three hundred cadets in Moscow, aroused the interest of the Cheka [secret police], which summoned the actor to explain his sympathy for enemies of the Revolution. Legend has it that Vertinsky responded to the Chekists indignantly: ‘It’s just a song, and anyway, you cannot forbid me to pity them!’ He received a clear and concise answer: ‘If necessary, we can forbid you to breathe!‘”
Shortly thereafter Vertinsky – who was now a nationally famous singer – set out on a protracted tour through the southern regions of the new Soviet Union, as far from Moscow as he could get. In 1920 he slipped out of the country on the good ship Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, and set foot in the safety of Constantinople. He began performing there with success for the growing emigre population, but, being a restless soul, he kept moving, visiting in coming years Romania, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Germany. When in Poland he made an attempt to return to the Soviet Union but was refused a visa. He settled in France from 1925 to 1934, where he, once again, became an enormous star. Yes, he was supported by the huge Russian emigre community, but the French, with their love of style, art and literature, took him in as well. He continued writing his beautiful, sad songs of longing, regret and stoicism, creating one of the greatest oeuvre of popular songs in the world.
In 1934 Alexander set sail for New York on the good ship Lafayette. He never felt comfortable in America’s financial capital and set off on tours that took him to Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. There was an attempt to get him started in Hollywood as an actor, but his lack of knowledge and deep dislike of the English language were a barrier that could not be breached. There is a tale that Marlene Dietrich, seeing how Vertinsky struggled with English, suggested that he just “get a grip on himself” and learn the language. He couldn’t, however, and ended up turning down the offer to act.
Disillusioned with the States, Vertinsky set sail for China in October 1935. It was a decision that would change his life, and the history of Russian/Soviet performing arts.
He set up base in Shanghai where he continued to perform, and, even, for a short while was the owner of a cabaret. But life was getting more and more difficult, and when he unexpectedly received an invitation from the Soviet consulate in Shanghai to return home, he was intrigued. He even began writing for a Soviet newspaper. Still, the road home was not easy. His final papers from Moscow were delayed, in large part because of the beginning of World War II, and so, when he married his second wife Lidia Tsirgvava in 1942, he was still in Shanghai. Vertinsky was then 53; Tsirgvava, the daughter of a Soviet official in China, was 20. Their first daughter Marianna was born several months later. When Japan invaded China Vertinsky made still another, now desperate, attempt to return home. He wrote Stalin’s right-hand man Vyacheslav Molotov, who immediately made arrangements for Vertinsky and his family to receive traveling papers. They were given an apartment in a prestigious building on Tverskaya Street (occasionally and exaggeratedly called Moscow’s Fifth Avenue or Champs Elysses) in building No. 12. You see that building here, as photographed in the fall of 2016.
Just a few months after arriving here in Moscow in 1943, the couple’s second daughter Anastasia was born. Both Marianna and Anastasia would become successful actors themselves, Anastasia, especially, becoming one of the Soviet Union’s most popular actresses in the 1960s and 1970s.
Vertinsky himself found an uncomfortable mix of success and alienation upon his return to a nation that had nothing to do with the country he left in 1920. He was allowed to act in films and to give concerts, and yet, he was kept on the outside of mainstream Soviet cultural life. His songwriting muse pretty much dried up in this period. One source claims he wrote barely two dozen songs over the last 14 years of his life.
In 1956, the year after Nikita Khrushchev launched his de-Stalinization campaign, Vertinsky wrote to his wife:
“Look at this whole story with Stalin. It’s false, base and disingenuous, At the convention Khrushchev said: ‘Let’s stand in honor of the 17 million people who were martyred in the camps.’ How do you like that?! Who, when and how will the ‘mistakes’ made by these scums ever be repaid? How long will they continue to  mock our Motherland? How long?”

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky Bust, Wiesbaden, Germany

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Today we break the rules a bit, always an occasion for celebration. This is my 270th entry on this site and it will be the first time I will write about photos taken by another. It has always been my rule to use only photos that I take of places I have been myself and seen with my own eyes. But when my wife Oksana Mysina told me she was going to be performing on tour in Wiesbaden with her theater company, all the little rules in my head broke down. Wiesbaden! Dostoevsky was in Wiesbaden! Dostoevsky lost “all his money” (or so they say) in Wiesbaden! Dostoevsky wrote his novel The Gambler about the last time he ever played there, thus getting out from under a terrible contract with a nasty publisher, while finding a good wife and, even, perhaps, some happiness, into the bargain. Wiesbaden! Oksana, my own wife, almost my own flesh and blood, would be right there at the casino (her hotel and theater were located right across the street from it)! How could I justify not taking advantage of this? I could not. And I would not. That became even clearer when I did some armchair research and learned that a bust of Dostoevsky by the Russian emigre sculptor Gavriil (a/k/a Gabriel) Glikman was erected right there beside the casino on February 3, 1997. As it happened, Oksana’s hotel was located directly across the street from the bust – Oksana could just walk out the door, cross the street, and spend time with Fyodor Mikhailovich, if she chose.
Of course, to put this into perspective, you have to know a little about Oksana, whose most famous performance (running now for 22 years) is a one-woman show based on the character of Katerina Ivanovna (Marmeladov’s wife) from Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. Staged by the great Kama Ginkas in 1994, K.I. from ‘Crime’ is one of the key landmarks of Russian theater of the last three decades, and it continues to play to full houses today. As such, there are not many on this planet who have spent more time in an intimate, artistic embrace with the great writer than Oksana. Figure that my friend Oliver Ready recently spent a couple of years translating Crime and Punishment for Penguin books. Okay, a couple of years of intimacy. Oksana has been inside Dostoevsky’s head, and has carried him around in hers, for over 22 years… Shall we talk about accomplishments?
In fact, while Oksana was walking around the bust photographing it, she called Ginkas on the phone to tell him where she was. As such, the photos you see here bring together Ginkas, Oksana and Dostoevsky all in a single breath or two. Moments like that are what give life its sheen, you know.

A bit about the bust itself. Gavriil Glikman created it in 1994 as you can see by the inscription on the back of the neck in the photo immediately above. The plaque on the front of the pedestal indicates that Glikman gifted the sculpture to the casino in 1996, which may well be true. But it would appear that the actual installation and unveiling of the bust took place on February 3, 1997. Glikman is an interesting figure. He was born in in 1913 in the Vitebsk region (that is, not far from Marc Chagall’s home turf), and Russian Wikipedia tells us that, as a child, he would go to Chagall’s workshop in Vitebsk and watch the great painter work. When he was in his ‘teens his family moved to Leningrad, which is where he spent the greater part of his life. Known primarily as a sculptor, many of his closest friends – Dmitry Shostakovich, Yevgeny Mravinsky – knew that he also painted. However, because his personal style did not fit with the demands of Soviet art, he rarely if ever showed this work. We are told he made an attempt to exhibit his paintings in 1968 and ran into trouble serious enough that his career was threatened. Glikman emigrated to Germany in 1980, settling in Munich in 1982. He lived in Munich until his death in 2003.
The story of how exactly this bust ended up where it did has eluded me. Why 1997? (The 225 years since Dostoevsky’s birth mentioned on the plaque seems a kind of far-fetched date to me.) Why Wiesbaden (the fact Dostoevsky lost tons of money here hardly seems the proper reason to commemorate the great writer)? One Russian blog site puts forth the conjecture that Glikman ran up a bigger bill than he could pay to the casino and the two sides agreed to write the debt off for a sculpture in exchange. It’s an attractive explanation, but I see absolutely no corroboration anywhere in any other sources. One Russian-language travel site suggests that a visit to Wiesbaden by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1990s is the impulse that set things going. A journalist who had been with Gorbachev told Glikman about Dostoevsky’s Wiesbaden connections, etc. That sounds thin and unconvincing – at least on the level that the story is told. Would Glikman, who had painted and sculpted Dostoevsky many times before, really not have known about the Weisbaden connection?
Whatever the backstory may be, the bust is a powerful piece of work. It is incredibly, I would say, aggressively, and, of course, entirely purposefully, crude. Bits and pieces of face, along with bits and pieces of bronze, pile up in the wrong places, out of line, and out of whack. Eyes are crooked, as is the nose and mouth. The ears are big chunks slapped on the side of the head. The haircut is almost humorous to me, rather like Dostoevsky’s mother put a bowl over his head and cut off everything that stuck out below it. All taken together this image epitomizes the power of character, a vessel of suffering and deep-seated intelligence. It all adds up to Dostoevsky as we rather expect he was.
One thing surprises me greatly, however. Look at the second photo below, particularly, and you will see how beautifully and how naturally this Dostoevsky melts into the surrounding ecology, the trees, the leaves, the bushes, the sky. Dostoevsky, in this setting, is just another element of nature. And that is what is so unexpected. This is a writer who rarely wasted his powers of description or observation on nature. Dostoevsky never gives us those convoluted, head-spinning descriptions of fields and forests that Tolstoy and Turgenev are so famous for. Dostoevsky is always rummaging around in the heads of his characters (rather like Oksana rummages around inside his in order to play K.I. from ‘Crime’). He never – or almost never – has the time or inclination to notice flowers blooming or trees growing. There is, of course, that famous exception in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan exclaims to his brother Alyosha, “Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky…” Konstantin Mochulsky, in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, wrote that, “Leaves, ‘little sticky green leaves,’ are a favorite symbol of Dostoevsky’s. For him all the beauty of God’s world is contained in this humble image. A little green leaf is to his heroes the most irrefutable proof of the existence of God and the coming transfiguration.” But you see how it works in Dostoevsky – he comes back to this one image, never feeling the need to expand it. In fact, even in The Karamazovs he trots out his beloved sticky, green leaves, jumps to a generic declaration of love for the blue sky, and then leaps back into people, their deeds and what their enigmatic hearts hold.
So it is that the image of Dostoevsky blending so organically and naturally into the green world around him in the park behind the casino at Wiesbaden is a revelation. For Dostoevsky, indeed, was a work of nature himself. A huge, powerful, moving, exciting, irritating, thrilling piece of nature. Look how beautifully he blends in with the flowers – the flowers! – in the last photo below. He stands virtually unseen at the far right and there is something wonderful and right in that. Then watch the video at the end that Oksana made so I could feel as though I had actually been there. Instinctively (they have been inside each others’ heads for over 22 years!) she spins around him, ending by spiraling up and directing our sight at the sticky green leaves of a tree canopy above, and on through them into the blue sky that Dostoevsky claimed so to love.
In short, don’t tell me I haven’t been here! Thank you, Oksana, for the virtual trip.

 

 

“Mayakovsky” bust et al, Laguna Beach, CA

“That’s not Mayakovsky!” you say. And you’re right. It’s not. But that is the Nutcracker Himself right there across from Not-Mayakovsky. And despite the fact that it was a German – E.T.A. Hoffmann to be exact – who first imagined the nutcracker as a character, where would the Nutcracker be without the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky? And when you have been outside of Russia for nearly a month, as I have, and you see a hard chiseled face with a bit of a futuristic look in his eyes, you just might be fooled for an instant into thinking that this stoney bust I found at the Madison Square Garden Cafe in Laguna, CA, was of Vladimir Mayakovsky. I didn’t cling to that mistaken belief very long. My wife ridiculed me hard enough and quick enough to take care of that. But even by the time I left the cafe after a fabulous plate of Eggs Benedict I still thought this bust could easily be mistaken for some other Soviet Realist hero, say, one of the characters out of Alexander Fadeyev’s famous novel The Young Guard. If you want to test my hypothesis you can compare this bust to some of the sculptures of Fadeyev and his characters, about whom I wrote in this space a couple of months ago.

But in Laguna, CA, you don’t have to settle for fake Mayakovskys or oversized Nutcrackers if your Russian culture fix is getting thin. Later on the same day that I photographed “Mayakovsky” I ran across something more substantial as my wife and I passed by the Fingerhut Gallery on Coast Highway. I looked up through a window into the second floor where I saw some beautiful paintings by the Moscow painter Sergei Smirnov (1953-2006). I’ll admit I did not know Smirnov or his paintings, but what we discovered in Laguna makes me wish I had. He had a beautiful, subtle stroke that allowed him to paint women’s portraits with a touch of the Russian icon in them as well as a whiff of Eastern mystery. I went up to the second floor to look at the paintings you see here as well as several others, and I learned that Smirnov’s last two paintings were created on commission from Mr. Fingerhut himself, who was a big fan and patron. As I was told, Smirnov always left a newly-finished painting to dry two days  before he would go back and put on the final touches. The night he completed his last two paintings in 2006, he signed them and set them aside to finish in two days. The next day he reportedly enjoyed a big meal with his family and lay down to sleep happily. He never awoke, and those two paintings he made for Fingerhut were his last. If anyone is interested, there are numerous signed and numbered prints of Smirnov’s works still on sale at the Fingerhut Gallery, as well as a rare sculpture that has a price tag of $15,000. The top price that a Smirnov painting grabbed at the Fingerhut Gallery, I am told, was around $65,000.
This was an interesting enough discovery for me, but there was still another surprise waiting for me on the second floor of that gallery – a trio of signed, colored Marc Chagall illustrations on biblical themes. In all, today wasn’t a bad day for Russian culture in my life. From a fake Mayakovsky to three real Chagalls, all just a few steps from each other on California’s Pacific Coast Highway.
This all reminds me of a phrase one of my favorite aunts once uttered as we walked through the verdant Connecticut woods one summer day about two decades ago. Flowers were blooming and underbrush was thick beneath spreading canopies of trees laden with leaves. My Aunt Jen, who is now 103 I might add, looked down at the ground and happened to find a flower that she didn’t expect at that time of year and she uttered a phrase I have quoted whenever possible ever since: “That nature,” Aunt Jen exclaimed, “it just pops up everywhere!” Doesn’t it? It’s just like Russian culture in my life.