Ballad of blue

For the Moscow exhibition “Square and Space. From Malevich to GES-2”, which runs until October 27

REFERENCE
What: Exhibition “Square and Space. From Malevich to GES-2.”

Where: Moscow, Bolotnaya embankment, 15, GES-2 space.

When: until October 27, 2024.

September 19, 2024 Thursday.

At the beginning of September, I was transported from my niece Natasha’s dacha to Moscow. And her heavenly flower garden still remains in my memory. In the center of this flower paradise is a tall, spreading pine tree. There are many beautiful pine cones in the grass underneath. They look like buds that open into magical flowers with wooden petals.

And above the dacha itself is the night sky, filled to overflowing with stars, constellations and August starfalls.

There are three quatrains about this. The first two are “white”, the third is rhymed:

*And the pine tree has buds of ripe cones

They break off and fall into the grass.

And there, numb forever from the heat,

Magically turn into flowers.*

*Their petals turn woody at night.

They are crushed by earthly gravity.

But their souls strive for Sineva,

Where the shooting stars of August sparkle,*

*In that eternity that pulsates above us,

Where do we go forever in the end?

There, in Sinev, man is immortal,

Showered with constellations like flowers.*

Well, everything is clear with the cones and with Sineva. But what does “Black Square” have to do with it? And here's what it has to do with it. Much earlier, Novaya Gazeta published my poem about the Black Square and ... Sinev.

November 7, 2010 Sunday.

The Ballad of Sinev

Well, the riddle of the “Black Square”,

Once made by a genius,

On the eve of world revolutions,

Let's leave it for posterity. Let them have

The soul stirs from that riddle.

And in our century this is all right:

We know how much that square costs -

And we've had enough. And I'm overjoyed

The oligarch who pays for it will

So that on Rublevka over his bed

It hung there for no one knows why -

But no one has this!

God be with him! I don't envy him

Not a penny. Do you know why?

I know the code for the Blue Square.

It contains the key to those transcendental heights,

That they are not subject to the dictatorship of money.

He is an eternal contemporary of selflessness.

And the gold of the Universe, maybe

There just isn't enough to buy it.

And therefore - for conscience, not for fear -

The blue of heaven is free for centuries.

And - like the soul, and eternal, and right -

Long live, let there be Sineva!

P.S. 2015

One of the readers of these poems then congratulated me on my parody exposing Malevich and his “Black Square”. This was very upsetting for me, who respected both “Black Square” and its author. If this is a parody, then it is based on speculation around the “Black Square” - both on the left and on the right.

In 2011, on the pages of Novaya, I had the opportunity to actively support the search for Malevich’s lost grave, and this year I sharply spoke out against Literary, which took on the unseemly role of “exposing” Malevich and his “Black Square”.

2015 has become twice the year of Malevich for us. May 15 marked the 80th anniversary of his death. December 19 will be the 100th anniversary of his “Black Square”. And this duality was accompanied by two sensations associated with Malevich.

First sensation

With the help of modern “high technology”, the lost burial place of Malevich was finally established. But this news went unnoticed by the media. Moreover, there were immediately hunters to disavow it. Why?

Recent years and even decades have been replete with dramatic examples of the attack on our shrines by the ever-consuming pursuit of profit. The lurid mansions of the precocious nouveau riche approached the protected boundaries (or even crossed them) of the Pushkinsky Reserve, Yasnaya Polyana, Spassky-Lutovinov, Arkhangelsky, Borodino Field...

For some reason, during the times of “shock therapy,” the “sacred principle of private property” was embodied in our country in the dehumanizing dictatorship of money. The desire of private capital to displace culture and history from tasty and very expensive land was undertaken with enviable stubbornness.

Few people already remember the sad events of the first post-perestroika years, when even the grave of Pushkin himself was under threat. The famous restoration architect, honorary citizen of Pskov Boris Skobeltsyn said then in his speech at the international conference “Let's protect culture from destruction and ignorance”: at that time the Svyatogorsk Monastery was returned to the church, and when “the monks returned there, something terrifying happened. First, five monks came with the governor Sergius at their head. And they threw out the memory of Pushkin from there.

The miniature Pushkin museum in the southern aisle was liquidated (the poet's funeral was held there). Moreover, there was even talk about removing Pushkin’s grave from the monastery.”

The then deputy director of the Pushkin Nature Reserve for science, Galina Fedorovna Semakina, told me: when the monks raised this issue, she went to one of the then leaders of the Pskov region. And he said: “If the grave gets in the way, we’ll remove it.”

These five monks, who were drinking and disorderly, were eventually driven out. The Russian Orthodox Church has long ago dealt with its dense ignoramuses. But the very tendency of grave-digging, of undermining the foundations of our culture, still will not come to naught.

Second sensation

Tretyakov workers discovered another image hidden under the “Black Square” (the first one was discovered earlier) and an inscription, apparently made by the artist himself, allegedly questioning his “birthright”. Experts deciphered the inscription as follows: “ Battle of blacks in a dark cave .” And this is a parody picture by the French humorist Alphonse Allais, very similar to “Black Square”, but written earlier.”

And the same media outlets actively commented on this news.

Of course, if we explain everything by saying that Malevich simply “borrowed” “Black Square” from Alphonse Allais, it will be difficult to explain many of the “oddities” that accompanied this story. Well, for example, Malevich’s different experiments with the same square and different dosages of black and white in it. One of the first options was, as you know, a square, diagonally divided into two equal halves - black and white.

Alle, who, living in the century before last, painted rectangles of canvases in different colors, and then came up with captions for them. He signed the black rectangle: “ The battle of blacks in a cave on a dark night .”

Main:

The inscription discovered under the “Black Square” and apparently made by Malevich himself about the same blacks in the cave does not speak of plagiarism at all, but only that he was aware of the many black squares and rectangles before him.

But, if you look at it, in all these cases the semantic load fell on the texts of the signatures. Malevich transferred the search for meaning to the image itself. This is simply a different line of behavior in art, thinking, and life. The key word is “supremum”. Translated from Latin - “highest”. The defining image is the Black Square. For Malevich, this is something like an astrophysical “black hole”, upon entering which - Dante’s: “Abandon hope, all who enter here.” A crematorium with the ashes of all previous art. A universe projected into one point, or rather into one black square in a certain proportional relationship, interaction with the white square on which it is superimposed.

October 5, 1993 Tuesday.

Malevich left us a definition:

“Suprematism compresses all painting into a black square on a white canvas.”

It is difficult to walk along this extremely sharp blade without being cut off, without stumbling into one of the extremes. Or in the statement that all this is a hoax, a deception of the working people, and you can stencil as many different squares as you like: black, green, gray-brown-crimson. Or - into almost physiological pain at the sight of how, in real time of our phantasmagoric year 1993, tanks are burning Malevich’s suprematist “Black Square” onto the “canvas” of the White House. This cannot be stamped using a stencil.

*Malevich is not to blame for this at all,

What a pittance we gave away Freedom,

When the parliamentary clock rose,

The youths shouted on the bridge: “Vivat!”

And the girls threw their caps into the air,

And Yeltsin’s tanks burned

The White House has its own black square.*

(The ending follows).