Archeology of Literature

Irina Zatulovskaya presented an unexpected gallery of Russian writers

The epigraph for the exhibition in the ruined wing of the Museum of Architecture could be Mandelstam’s lines: “On the glass of eternity has already fallen / My breath, my warmth. / A pattern will be imprinted on it, / Unrecognizable for quite some time now. / Let the dregs of the moment flow down, / There is no sweet pattern cross out." The artist depicted classics of Russian literature using ancient objects, shapes and textures. Numbering about thirty. The basis for the images was chosen by Irina Zatulovskaya using her favorite method. An old spinning wheel, or a mirror, or a chessboard, or a reliquary, or leather snowshoes, thrown away by someone, were found by themselves and found by the artist. And on these, on the one hand, half-erased, half-decayed, ruined, on the other hand, they have become primordial matter and primordial form, therefore, objects involved in eternity, Zatulovskaya paints tender, simple-hearted portraits of Russian writers in the childish naivety of execution. Each has its own basis, its own text. Gogol is depicted on a semicircular gilded lunette that once crowned the front door. Khlebnikov - on a wooden well cover. Symmetrically from the handle of the lid there is a skull. Dostoevsky - in an icon case with an Orthodox cross. In an antique frame - Leskov. Mandelstam, of course, on hewn stone... The objects themselves with portraits inhabit the space of the outbuilding-ruins of MUAR just like native ones. They settle in niches, cracks, crevices of old brickwork. They are the substrate of memories: memory and commemoration.

Actually, Irina Zatulovskaya presented the conflict of transforming a moment into eternity. The faces, as if on holy icons or children's drawings, having lost everything instantly cloudy, brightened into faces and lay on the glass of eternity with a gentle warm breath. And it’s very scary - as if in a minute or two they will disappear here, and we will never see them again. After all, earthly optics are not enough to contemplate Eternity.

In today's Russian culture, classical Russian literature in many cases has ceased to be a trace of living breath, and some creators rather see it as an icy pattern on frosty glass (ice, as is known from the fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” is a deceptive emblem of eternity). For comparison: just for Alla Demidova’s anniversary they showed the television film “Children of the Sun” based on the play of the not very great, but very talented in other roles, Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Recorded in 1985. Script by Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Directed by Leonid Pchelkin. Empathizing with the phenomenal accuracy of psychological nuances in the acting of the actors (Demidova, Simonova, Alexander Lazarev, Smoktunovsky, Stupka, Gundareva...), I thought: this is how much the tradition of Russian literature should be a meaning for all of them, a true breath of life. But let’s look at today’s “Zhivago”... That same worldview is obviously presented as an archival rarity. With a cool manneristic defamiliarization. If we move in a spiral, in a new manifestation of Russian classics, no less, all hope lies in the hot young theater of Sergei Zhenovach...

It is curious that people who love Russian culture not out of obligation, but out of conscious choice, found another unplanned meaning in Zatulovskaya’s “literary program”. The young American philologist Brian Droitkur concluded that the faces of writers generalized beyond recognition are a bold conceptual move. In his opinion, the artist wants the viewer to be a co-author and, in accordance with his upbringing and heartfelt inclinations, in the same portrait, independently recognize those who are dearer and closer to him. So, in the kyoto there may be Dostoevsky, or perhaps a young Solzhenitsyn with a beard. Only the images of Gogol and Pushkin are always archetypal.

PHOTO: This is Khlebnikov

Sergei KHACHATUROV