by Masha Gessen
HERE IS WHAT I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art—something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts—a great work of art is always a miracle.
The temporal borders of this miracle were fuzzy. Certainly it had begun earlier than the morning of February 21, 2012, when five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow to stage what they called a “punk prayer” against the backdrop of its over-the-top gaudy, gilded interiors. It had begun earlier even, I thought, than the fall of 2011, when a larger, ragged-edged group of women started to call themselves Pussy Riot and engage in punk rock performances. It had begun, in fact, years or even many years earlier.
To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast. A constant state of discomfort is a necessary but insufficient condition for protest art, however. One also has to possess a sense that one can do something about it, the sense of being entitled to speak and to be heard. I asked Nadya where she got that.
Our communication was awkward: we had no more than a passing acquaintance before she was arrested (soon afterward I realized with a jolt of regret that she had “poked” me on Facebook—an attempt at communicating I had cavalierly ignored in part because I was unsure how one responds to being “poked”), and now I wrote to her in the penal colony, knowing that my letters as well as Nadya’s responses would be seen by the censors. “I am trying to understand the origins of the independence of your thinking and your ability to shape your own education…” It was not just the expectation of the censors’ eyes that made my writing feel stilted; it was also the fact that I was using a pseudonym, one suggested by Nadya in a rare note smuggled out past the censors. In it, she laid out the terms of our correspondence: never mention writing a book or any intention of publishing our correspondence; bear in mind that the letters will be read by censors; consider using a pseudonym—say, Martha Rosler. So I came to sign my letters with the name of a contemporary American feminist artist who I am sure had no awareness I was using her name as a cover-up.
Hello, Martha,
On the subject of independent education and the origins of a rebellious personality type. A significant role in my story was played by my father, Andrei Tolokonnikov. He managed, amazingly, to focus my vision in such a way that now I am able to find things that are interesting, challenging, and curious anywhere at all. That includes the experience of being incarcerated. My father gave me the ability to receive all kinds of cultural production, from Rachmaninoff to the [ska punk] band Leningrad, from European art-house film to Shrek. At the age of 4 I could distinguish a Baroque building from a Rococo one, and by the age of 13, I loved [Venedikt Yerofeyev’s profanity-filled novella of alcoholic rumination] Moskva-Petushki and [nationalist opposition activist, former émigré writer and poet known for sexually explicit writing] Limonov. The lack of censorship in my education and, in fact, the concentration on that which could not pass the censorship of official Russian education pushed me to be passionate about possessing knowledge that privileged the culture of rebellion.
Nadya’s writing, I assumed, was stilted for some of the same reasons as mine: she was writing for me, for the censors, and for eventual publication in a foreign language. She was also writing about things rarely discussed in Russian, at least rarely discussed with the earnestness that her work—and my enterprise—seemed to demand. In addition, there was something profoundly wrong with the power dynamics of our epistolary relationship. I wrote to her by e-mail, using a service called Native Connection (no hint of irony here either). When I sent a letter, I had the option of requesting a response and putting a page value on it. I asked for three pages the first time and it proved insufficient, so from that point on I always asked for five. Each page cost fifty rubles (roughly $1.70) and the amount for the requested number of pages was immediately deducted from my Native Connection account. In essence, I was giving Nadya writing assignments—and paying for them.
A few days after I sent my letter by e-mail, Nadya would receive a printout of it along with blank pages in the quantity I had requested. She would write her responses in longhand—her script got smaller and harder to decipher if she was running out of space or more sprawling if she was running out of things to say with a page or so still to go—and I would eventually receive scans through the Native Connection website. If Nadya chose not to fill a page at all, she would have to write “Opportunity to respond rejected” on the blank page—and I would receive a scan of that as well.
ANDREI SHARED NADYA’S IDEA that he had been the architect of her independence, her personality, and even her art. “I am an expert in the upbringing of girls,” he informed me. “I approach it as a total performance.” He added that he had “authored the words ‘holy shit,’” the refrain that had been the ostensible source of some of his daughter’s problems.
Andrei came out of the woods to talk to me. For more than a decade he had been living in a friend’s house about an hour outside of Moscow. He called it his lair, and he said he cleaned it once a year. Our interview fell between these annual cleanings, so he said a visit was out of the question. Instead, I picked him up by the side of the highway and we drove around looking for an eatery that had both heat and electricity: less than fifty miles from Moscow, we were on the disintegrating fringes of civilization.
Andrei was born at civilization’s true fringe, in the world’s northernmost large city (where large is defined as having a population over a hundred thousand). “Half the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,” Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin. In Norilsk, this was literally true. Founded in the mid-1930s, the city served as the center of Norlag, the mining-and-metallurgy arm of the gulag. Though the number of prisoners decreased in the 1950s following Stalin’s death and the Norlag was officially dissolved, forced prisoner labor was used in the mines through the 1970s.
Andrei’s father had been on the guards’ side of the prison fence. He had landed in Norilsk after World War II as a Party worker. He was, according to Andrei, a well-known and roundly hated Norilsk character. The young Andrei hated everyone back. “When I was five, I remember seeing elderly intellectuals in the streets—former Norlag inmates. Then they all died off, of course, and all that was left was bydlo.” Dictionaries suggest translating that Russian slang word as “cattle,” but that word does not come close to conveying the concentration of disdain and disgust educated Russians pack into the epithet for their compatriots: it is “white trash” but more derogatory, “redneck” but more frightful.
Andrei was educated as a doctor (this did not require nearly as many years or as much effort as an American medical education—and in his case, very little effort indeed was expended), but he did not feel like working as a doctor or, really, working at all. He thought of himself as an artist, though he was not sure what kind of art he should be making. He finagled his way into the Arts Institute in Krasnoyarsk, the nearest truly large city, as a correspondence student in music; he pretended to play the piano. During one of his visits to the institute, he met Katya. She was, unlike him, “an actual musician,” he told me; she played piano. She would even go on to study at a conservatory, and then to teach music to schoolchildren. She was generally more serious and better grounded than Andrei, and this pronounced difference between them might have ended their marriage sooner or prevented it altogether had it not been for one thing: they were oblivious, because they drank. Everyone in the Soviet Union did, more drunks and more drinks with every passing year. In the early 1980s, Soviet rulers came and died in quick succession—Brezhnev died, then Chernenko, then Andropov—but not before promising to do something about the epidemic of alcoholism. Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in 1985 and launched an all-out war on the drink. Andrei and Katya, then newly in love, drank. And drank. And drank. And had Nadya.
She came as a surprise, conceived on a night of heavy dri
nking and arriving on Revolution Day, November 7, 1989, one of the most vodka-soaked days of the year. By then, Gorbachev’s war on alcoholism was at its peak, with the vineyards in the south razed and vodka rationed across the land. So for many Soviet citizens it was a day soaked in industrial alcohol, cologne, or, as was the case with Andrei, medical spirits. No one had been expecting Nadya. She was given the name Nadezhda, which means “hope,” and parked, for the next few years of her life, with Andrei’s mother, Vera, which means “faith.”
Vera lived in Krasnoyarsk. Katya lived in Norilsk. Andrei lived in various places; when Nadya was conceived and born, for example, he was living in a village outside of Arkhangelsk, in the very north of the European part of Russia. He had a gig as chief doctor at a rural hospital, unfettered access to medical spirits, and rare access to his wife. “That’s part of the reason we parted ways. I think that distance is important and a relationship works better when people take breaks from each other.” The distance in this case exceeded a thousand miles. “I guess Katya had a different opinion. She said I killed the woman in her. It’s a strange accusation, though I’m not a woman, so I wouldn’t know. And anyway, it’s not like she was wasting time herself.” All the more reason to be surprised by Nadya’s arrival.
Shipping the baby off to Krasnoyarsk was not an unusual arrangement: young Russian couples often placed their children with grandparents, who themselves had likely been raised by their parents’ parents. Katya showed up at regular intervals, while Andrei was always anything but regular: “I am a holiday. I was always highly prized—both because girls always privilege men and because I provide a contrast to the women’s strict ways.”
In the early 1990s, Andrei moved to Krasnoyarsk and Katya followed him. They had plans, a friend who had secured funding for a medical center, a view to making a home for their family. But the Soviet Union collapsed, and soon so did the friend’s funding scheme, and Andrei and Katya’s marriage. Andrei left for Moscow. Katya took the child and returned to Norilsk.
———
NORILSK WAS A DARK PLACE. Forty-five days out of the year the city fumbled in the pitch-blackness of polar night; for another six months the blackness took turns with a gray haze that was neither day nor night. And when polar day arrived in May, it exposed snowbanks hardened by the winter and blackened by the fine particles with which the metals plants showered the city year-round. As the snow melted, more blackness emerged—all the way to the banks of the Norilskaya River, where some natives swam despite temperatures that rarely exceeded fifty-five degrees, even in July. The banks were coarse sand and rocks filled with the metals that made Norilsk the mining mecca it is. And one of the ten most polluted places on the planet.
In the summers, Andrei yanked Nadya out of the darkness and transported her to hectic Moscow or the green leafy outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, where his mother still lived. Some summers, Katya finagled a ticket to a seaside summer camp in the Russian south and informed Andrei of its location so he could find a rental cot nearby and take Nadya out of camp for a few weeks. The colorful, warm, light-soaked environments in which Nadya spent time with Andrei no doubt enhanced the magical effect of father “the holiday.”
“She would come and see ducks [in a Moscow canal] and she wouldn’t just say, ‘Ducks!’ She would ask, ‘Are these real ducks?’ She lived at the end of the earth, her only image of duck was virtual, like a computer-generated sign,” Andrei told me. And then he would commence his performance. How did he do it? Andrei took the question very seriously: self-effacement does not run in the Tolokonnikov family. “A hypnosis teacher of mine used to say you have to aim your arrow low: all this talk of superego or social phenomena makes no sense; what makes a difference is the biological, reptilian, sleeping life of the brain. The trick is to awaken that sleeping volcano—that is where true creativity begins. That’s what I worked on. Of course, I might have gone overboard. She might have taken my instruction too literally. But we will see what happens when she is released from prison.” When Nadya returned from a visit with Andrei at the age of seven, Katya’s new husband, Misha, demanded to know what Andrei had done to the child: a wallflower had been transformed into a rebel.
For most of the dark majority of her year, Nadya studied. “She was a straight-A student,” Andrei told me without a hint of pride or admiration. “She would spend five or six hours a day studying at home. There is a picture of her sleeping at her computer. I don’t know where she got it: certainly not from me or her mother. And it’s not like her mother made her study. It may have been a way to escape from reality, by running not into the street or to bad company, but to textbooks.”
By her penultimate year of secondary school, Nadya had worked out an autodidact program she followed rigorously. “My education began the moment I came home from school,” she wrote to me. “I would sit down with alternative textbooks I had ordered from the library, books on literary criticism and books for the soul.” For the soul she read turn-of-the-century Russian existentialist philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, as well as Sartre, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard. Whatever gave Nadya the idea she should be reading these books—I was never able to pin her down on this matter in our correspondence—the books gave her ideas. “During regular classes I was either dying from the emptiness of what was going on or actively fighting to impress upon the school administration the primacy of the critical impulse in education.”
Whatever ammunition Nadya used in this fight—this too she would not describe in detail, possibly for fear of arming her jailers with the means to assail her character in her endless court and disciplinary hearings—it led to conflict. One time she was directed to write an explanatory note to the school principal. Instead of the standard acknowledgment of wrongdoing and assurances of reform, Nadya wrote a paragraph on the importance of “crisis, watershed moments” in the development of young people. “I have devoted myself to creating such critical moments,” she wrote. “And I do this solely out of concern for the school, so it may develop faster and better.”
That particular incident centered on a jar of glue. The way Andrei remembered Nadya telling him about it, she had borrowed the glue from a classroom windowsill to use on a school project. The way a former teacher recalled it, still outraged, Nadya had taken a jar of linoleum glue being used by repair workers and moved it to a girls’ bathroom—“she was just testing the teachers, but technically it was theft and the policeman told us if we had filed a report she would have gotten two years.” I do not know what Nadya remembers of the glue taking because we could not correspond about something that could, however absurdly, be considered a crime.
The principal summoned Nadya to his office over the PA system. She took the opportunity to lecture him on her crisis-fosters-growth theory. “He didn’t understand a word of it but asked me angrily why I had signed my statement the way I did.” Rather than the customary juvenile “Nadya Tolokonnikova, grade 11A,” fifteen-year-old Nadya had signed “Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda Andreevna,” as an adult would have. The principal demanded she rewrite her statement and append a proper signature. “This is exactly the way my relationships with representatives of the state have developed ever since,” she wrote to me in a letter from her penal colony.
The books or Andrei or both—and something else too—gave Nadya the idea, rarely expressed in Russia, especially in Norilsk, that things could be different—and she demanded that they be so. When she was fifteen, she submitted an article to Zapolyarnaya Pravda (“The Truth Beyond the Arctic Circle”), the local daily, and the paper published it under the headline WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO? It was a poorly organized, cliché-ridden rant that condemned Nadya’s contemporaries for being shallow and unmotivated, blamed this on all sorts of factors including the popularity of a transvestite singer on television, attributed Marx’s maxim that “social being determines consciousness” to the wisdom of Nadya’s mother, but concluded, incongruously, with a call to dare effect change because, after all, “It’s a wonderful
life.” When I found the article, I was reassured to learn that Nadya had not come out of the womb quoting Theory, as I had at times suspected, but had been a haphazardly informed and typically judgmental adolescent—just an unusually active one.
The triumphant publication of the article—no Tolokonnikov had ever been in print before—gave either Nadya or Andrei or both the idea that she could be a journalist. Moscow State University’s journalism department preferred its applicants with a few publications to their name. Andrei and Nadya collaborated on several pieces they submitted to a Krasnoyarsk paper as Nadya’s. There might, however, have been more Andrei than Nadya in them, for the editor rejected them, saying that journalism dealt in fact, not fantasy—an assertion that still appeared to offend Andrei’s sensibilities when he recounted the story to me seven years later. Nadya would not be applying to the journalism department.
———
IN THE MID-1990S, the mining giant Norilsk Nickel, by far the city’s largest employer, was privatized by a pair of emerging oligarchs. In a few years, the junior partner, Mikhail Prokhorov, decided to become the hands-on manager of the plant and the man who would modernize not only production but the very lives of workers. He inserted himself into Norilsk housing construction, the planning of Norilsk leisure, and the city’s cultural life.
As it happened, Prokhorov was unusually close to his older sister, Irina, whose publishing enterprise he had started funding with some of the first money he made years earlier. Irina Prokhorova started and ran the country’s best and biggest intellectual publishing house, putting out books, a scholarly journal, and a more-popular intellectual magazine. In 2004, when Mikhail (who generally left the reading of books and other lofty pursuits to his sister) launched a culture foundation, he asked Irina to run it—and to bring the intellectual wealth of her publishing house to Norilsk. For years, when light started dawning in Norilsk, Irina would put together a large group of Moscow writers, artists, and photographers and airlift them to Norilsk for weeks of performances, lectures, and seminars. This was how Nadya saw Prigov. Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov was a visual artist, a performance artist, and a Conceptualist poet, and he sounded, looked, and moved like no one Nadya had ever seen before. He once explained, “I don’t produce text, I produce artistic behavior.” He wrote poems like:
