by Masha Gessen
I’ve spent my whole life doing the dishes
And writing highfalutin poetry
From this, my wisdom and judiciousness
Therefore my character, so mild and steady
I understand the water flowing from my faucet
Outside my window, it’s the people and the state
If I don’t like something, I just forget about it
I keep my mind on things that I can tolerate.[1]
He took turgid Soviet language, which Nadya had been unsuccessfully trying to use, and made it his own: he bent it, molded it, made it funny, and even more incredibly, made it poignant. This made Prigov and the Moscow Conceptualist school different from any writers Nadya had read or seen before: they did not turn up their noses or turn their faces away from official Soviet culture but, acknowledging its thoroughly false nature, made hay—that is, art—out of it. They reappropriated Soviet expressions like collective action—the Moscow Conceptualists staged a series of performances under that title in the 1980s—and other staples of Soviet officialdom, as Prigov had done with the bureaucratic habit of addressing people by their name and patronymic; he made it his artistic name.
Nadya added the Moscow Conceptualists to her extracurricular list of “reading for the soul.” And she decided to apply to the philosophy department of Moscow State University. “The philosophy department appeared to me as paradise,” she wrote to me from prison, “a place where everyone (or so I thought) was a researcher and an experimenter and everyone had his own little pocket Chernyshevsky, his own little critical thinker.” (Nikolay Chernyshevsky was a Russian materialist philosopher.) Nadya’s mother said the philosophy department would be hell. She started smoking in the apartment and having constant extremely loud telephone conversations to give Nadya a taste of life in a dormitory. In fact, after sixteen-year-old Nadya miraculously gained admission to the philosophy department despite having no connections in high places, she was assigned to a dorm room with two pious Russian Orthodox fourth-year students who made dorm life feel infinitely better than home. Otherwise, though, the philosophy department was hell.
It took a few letters back and forth to get Nadya to describe precisely what was wrong with the philosophy department—other than everything. It seemed a topic she found almost too distasteful to discuss. “I was flummoxed,” she finally wrote, “by the students’ immaturity, the irresponsibility of their worldview, their mediocrity, their constant readiness to act true to type, to stick to the norm, their lack of passion—of something that would be authentic, eccentric, outside the norm.” Nadya herself stuck to the philosophy department student norm for one semester. “I hate that time and I hate who I was during that time. And I cannot understand how people can spend five years out of their finite lives in such a talentless, slavish, bureaucratic manner.”
At the start of her second semester, Nadya met Petya. He was older—twenty—and in his fourth year in the philosophy department, and he was worldly in a real and almost unfathomable way. When he was a teenager, his parents had accepted an extraordinarily generous offer from friends in Toronto, who had suggested sending their troubled adolescent to stay with them and go to high school there. After two years, Petya spoke near-native English; then he spent a year in Japan, where his father was working at the time. He had actually seen the poststructuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler give a talk on the University of Toronto campus. He used the phrase contemporary art—words that Nadya had held sacred ever since she first saw Prigov—as though they belonged to him. Or he to them.
Like anyone who ever met Nadya, Petya was struck first by her looks: she looked perfect—like a circle drawn with a compass looks perfectly round or a cut diamond placed on velvet looks perfect with the light falling directly on it. She was tall and taut and curvy in all the places that are theoretically appropriate for the qualities of tautness and curviness, and in practice she inhabited this perfection with perfect ease. She had long straight brown hair that shone as hair should shine, and she had a perfectly symmetrical face with large brown eyes and a striking, mesmerizing mouth with full, fleshy, exaggerated lips. Which she used to speak.
“What struck me—aside from the way she looked,” said Petya, acknowledging the obvious, “was that she was this girl from Norilsk, a first-year student, and she had an idea of who the Moscow Conceptualists were. You have to understand that as far as the aesthetics chair of the philosophy department was concerned, Andy Warhol was edgy.” Whereas Petya and Nadya knew that Andy Warhol was ancient history, Moscow Conceptualism was the past, and they were the future.
TWO
War
“THEORY WRAPPED ME in an entire climate of description. Theory was simply, shoulder-shruggingly, the only thing that helped me to see what I was and where,” writes the American memoirist Marco Roth. “Part of what Theory promised was an idea that another world was still possible, not in some mythical afterlife, but on this earth, now, that the life around me did not have to be the only one. There was no fixed human nature except to take in and shape what was around us. And almost everything around us was now the result of some sort of human endeavor, like the soy formula I’d been nursed on. We were culture and artificiality and engineering all the way down. What was made could thus be unmade.”
I recognized that description. And this too: “Semiotics is the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism—with sex and power.” This from Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot.
Nadya described it as “getting shivers.” This happened to her when she read the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Even in 2007, long after the generation of students who felt they had discovered Theory had grown old enough to write about it wistfully, and long after the humanities had been declared dead in the West, repeatedly, it made her feel like the world was becoming clearer and infinitely more complicated at the same time. It was exhilarating.
The world outside Moscow State University at the start of 2007 was just as stultifying as the world inside it. Vladimir Putin, once a low-level KGB staffer, was in his eighth year of running the country. His luck showed no sign of running out. The price of oil, which had grown nearly fourfold since 2000, had begun its steepest climb yet: it would nearly double in a year. Russia was flooded with money. Luxury boutiques could not keep goods in stock. Nor could the Bentley dealership that had opened up a block from the Kremlin: the country’s yearly quota of the latest model would be bought up in a matter of days—for cash. Russia’s most popular writers were a man and a woman who authored what barely passed for fiction about the lifestyles of the Russian rich. Each commanded a million dollars a book and they could not keep up with reader demand.
The liberal right wing—the economic reformers of the 1990s—had started out on and by Putin’s side, then a number of them broke ranks, tried to establish opposition parties, and failed. In the years it had taken them to change their minds, Putin had systematically disassembled the country’s electoral system and taken over all federal and most local television channels, so that there was little left for opposition politicians to work with, or for. The left-wing establishment—the Communist Party and its satellites—was firmly and comfortably in the Kremlin’s pocket. In 2005, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of Russia’s most respected and beloved men, announced he was giving up chess to take up the cause of toppling the Putin regime. He found himself unable to rent a hall anywhere in the country. He did, however, succeed in hammering together a ragtag coalition that staged a series of street protests called the Marches of the Disagreeable. These dissipated in 2008 after the police started detaining known activists in the days leading up to scheduled protests.
In December 2006, at the end of Nadya’s first semester in Moscow, more than five thousand people showed up for a March of the Disagreeable, for which a permit had been denied by the authorities. They tried to force their
way through a police cordon; more than a hundred people were detained. Four months later, as many as a thousand activists were detained as they left their homes to go to another banned march. Still, about five thousand people showed up and several hundred managed to break through a police cordon and march for about half a mile before the protest was broken up by police. To Petya and Nadya, who took part in some of these protests, it did not exactly feel like change was in the air but it was at least clear that they were not the only people in Russia who would speak out against the suffocating political uniformity, the overwhelming mediocrity, and the obsessive consumption of Putin’s Russia.
———
PETYA’S BEST FRIEND, Oleg Vorotnikov, a philosophy department graduate, had been trying on the role of contemporary artist. Oleg’s wife, Natalia Sokol, was a physicist turned photographer, and in 2005 they had formed what they called an art collective, though it appears to have comprised only the two of them and it is not entirely clear what kind of art they did—or, really, whether they did any. Now the two couples, Oleg and Natalia plus Petya and Nadya, would form a new art group. By February 2007, they settled on a name: Voina, or “War.”
There remained the question of what this art group was going to do. It was definitely not going to rebroadcast the message of the opposition, which was as stilted as any set of political clichés anywhere—it was a miracle this language had inspired anyone to come out into the streets. The small art scene hardly offered an alternative. The scene was dominated by commercial giants like AES+F, a four-person art group that represented Russia that year at the Venice Biennale with a video called “Last Riot,” in which planes collided without bursting into flames and gangs of staggeringly beautiful teens clashed without shedding blood. The art world’s emerging star was Victor Alimpiev, who created ethereal works that looked like traces of snow against a pleasantly gray sky and who emphasized that his work was in no way tied to current events or, more generally, to the place and time in which it was created. A group called the Blue Noses provided an alternative to the high gloss of the mainstream art scene; its work was all irony all the time, which basically meant it was a collection of caricatures.
It was not the artists’ or the politicians’ fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union’s fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad—and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, which preceded it. In Zamyatin’s utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: “Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State.” Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after his death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.
A few other artists were struggling with the same issues. Petya had spent some months helping the performance artist Oleg Kulik mount a large collaborative show called I Believe. The show was preceded by a series of collective soul-searching sessions during which each participant strove to identify what he believed in. Petya found this approach unnervingly and embarrassingly modernist. Here was another complication: these philosophy students (and one physicist) wanted to use their intellectual tools to deconstruct what they were confronting, but the shifty and shifting language resisted deconstruction. In the summer of 2007, they went to see Prigov.
———
PRIGOV LIKED THEM—of course he did—and happily agreed to perform with them. This was to be Voina’s first real action, after six months of talking all the time, and once throwing cats (actual live stray cats) over the counter at McDonald’s in a joint action with the art group Bombily (“Gypsy Cabs”), which was really just Kulik’s stepson Anton Nikolaev, a former student who emailed me links to footage of Voina’s actions. Voina called him the Crazy One.
Prigov was going to get inside a fireproof metal safe and Voina members were to carry the safe with the poet up twenty-two floors in the main building in Moscow State University. The entire time, Prigov was to be in conversation with himself, presumably in his usual melodic, prayerlike manner. He wrote a piece to launch his monologue:
The image of him who sits in the closet, in a shell, in a case, is long familiar. He has gone into hiding, he has gone underground, he is doing his work in secret; the work of his soul and of his spirit is concealed from outside view. He is like Saint Jerome in his cave when the ray of Providence enters to take him up to the heavens. So has the man in the closet waited long enough for the moment of his ascension, when he shall be taken up to the twenty-second floor and this shall be his reward for the pain and suffering inflicted by the world and for the feats of his spirit, as yet undisclosed. No plain worker of the ordinary physical world—no one whose job it is to transfer regular physical or fleshly burdens from one place to another—could be entrusted with the labors of this ascension. It would be a day’s work for them, whether their remuneration was miserly or generous. No, the higher power demanded the untrained hands of those for whom this labor would be a heroic feat, the work not of muscle but of soul and spirit.
The piece was called Ascension and reflected the spirit of excessive symbolism with which Voina would imbue its first action. Moscow State University’s main building, one of seven Moscow skyscrapers modeled on the Manhattan Municipal Building in a blatant act of architectural plagiarism, is one of the city’s tallest buildings, sitting atop its highest hill. So the top of that building is truly as high as one could rise in the Russian capital. Several thousand gulag inmates were used in the construction of the building, and the twenty-second floor actually housed a temporary lagpunkt (labor camp unit) when work inside the building was under way. Although the philosophy department was located in a different building, the main building still symbolized all of the university—and all of Russian education, and all of Russian knowledge, and much of Russia’s ambition. And it would be by the tender, untrained hands of former and current Moscow State University students (not unlike the untrained hands of inmates who had built the university) that Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov would finally be installed at the pinnacle of Russian culture, albeit in a fireproof safe.
They could not find a fireproof safe. They decided to make do with an oak wardrobe—homey and not as heavy as a safe, but a solidly symbolic enclosure still. On July 6, 2007, Voina waited for Prigov in a Moscow bookstore café. Prigov was two hours late.
The he called, laughing: “I have somehow landed in a hospital. I’m in intensive care.” Voina went to see him. He seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny, and so did the young people who crowded around his bed: they were willing to think whatever Prigov thought. Ten days later, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, aged sixty-six, died in the hospital.
Voina had a wake. Instead of ascending to the twenty-second floor, they descended into the Moscow Metro—another symbol of Soviet monumentalism and architectural gigantism. They boarded the circle line at the scarcely inhabited midnight hour and quickly set up red plastic picnic tables, which fit perfectly between the benches that run along each side of the s
ubway car. They covered the tables with white tablecloths and rapidly distributed place settings, bottles of wine and vodka, and traditional Russian bitter and sweet wake fare. Anton the Crazy One approached other passengers to offer them food and drink (all declined). Oleg Vorotnikov recited an early Prigov poem:
My ambition is serving as compost
For the future, more rational sort,
So a youth, full of merit and purpose,
Grows tall in my fertilized dirt,
So a youth, incorruptibly, proudly
Has disdained shady foreigners’ pay,
Realizes all madness around him,
Yet declares “I love you,” come what may.[2]
“It was a total installation,” Petya told me, using a term coined by the émigré Russian artist Ilya Kabakov to describe installations that represent segments of a larger narrative. “It was our first experience of working with public space, intended to bring life into it. The Conceptualists pushed the boundaries of language and we pushed the boundaries of public space.”
The Wake, or The Feast, as Voina named it, is my favorite among their actions because it was heartbreaking. There were about a dozen people at the picnic tables. They were very young and amped up, like kids who are having a party while their parents are out of the house. They looked shaken, small, and alone—exactly the way people feel when someone they love has died. They succeeded in capturing the very essence of a Russian wake, a party of maudlin abandon. Or rather, they captured the spirit of the post-Soviet wake, which, like most post-Soviet rituals, combined a memory of Russian traditions with bits of Soviet officialdom. It was a perfect tribute to Prigov. It was also a perfect preview of the future of Voina, which would become best known for making the private public.
