One Russia, Two Chinas. George FetherlingЧитать онлайн книгу.
bragged that, in contrast to “the period of stagnation from Stalin to Chernenko,” all disciplines might be recognized and rock and roll might even be perceived as an official export. Yet people like Bicapo didn’t receive aid from the cultural arm of the government. Some other apartment artists (so called because they were forced to show their work at open houses rather than in galleries) had become prosperous through overseas sales—part of the new vogue for Soviet art in the West, a by-product of Gorbamania. “Sometimes the neighbours would call the police when they saw a foreigner come up the steps,” Maria said. Bicapo, for his part, was in a group called the Kindergarten Artists, because for a time he and a few friends supported themselves as night guards at a day-care centre and school.
Like two million other Muscovites, Bicapo and his mother shared their apartment with another family, or they used to. One fellow tenant died, two others moved away. So now he had his studio space next to his living quarters, on the top floor of an apartment building that was built as recently as the 1930s but looked to be covered in at least a century’s worth of grime. The lobby smelled of urine and the lift was broken; the stairs were lighted only partway up.
The essence of his current work involved the intersection of fire, water, and music. To explain “Bicapo consciousness,” he first lit candies around the room and struck a series of chimes he had made by suspending different lengths of steel pipe from the ceiling; the sound lingered and then merged with that of a cassette tape he put on, one track of which consisted of the same chimes, while the others were strange sounds I could not identify, half human perhaps and half inorganic, climaxing in what might be screams. All this while two small beer kegs suspended from the ceiling were dripping water into a pair of shallow receptacles that looked like prospectors’ gold pans, only larger. Also hanging from above was a circular wire basket in which the artist had put six or eight fuel pellets and ignited them with a blowtorch. The heat rising from the basket caused a large aluminium printing plate, slung over a wire as a blanket might be slung over a clothes-line, to vibrate. A microphone connected to an amplifier was placed down a two-metre section of plastic flexi-pipe, the sort used for household plumbing, which pipe was dangled from a light chain and tilted, so that one end, the one with the mike, was close to the water pans, which continued to fill up, drip-drip-drip. Bicapo then passed the blowtorch along the length of the pipe, varying the size of the flame. The sounds picked up by the microphone varied accordingly. Clearly this was how he made the sounds that I heard on the tape; other tracks—of hammering and sawing, for example—had been mixed in later.
“I first did this with 10 metres of metal tubing at a construction site,” Bicapo explained. “I inserted one end of the tube into a fire while a woman sang opera.” This was not so much mere street theatre; he was quite earnest about musical structure and the mixing of created and found sound, but his high seriousness was more apparent from his conversation than from his writings on the theory of his art. He allowed me to look at a draft manifesto that described Bicapo as “radiant, equilibristic, superconducting super-rapid interaction momentary understanding.” But his English orthography slipped in a handbill that he let me take away with me, which declared: “The water is drip, the fire is burn. Losting primordial human natur is manifest when thousands of Bicapo and Dzoings are sound. I am mystacal artist through my madness I am penetrate heavens and listen musik of sky forest.”
I wasn’t able to determine what Dzoings were.
I struck gold on the midnight train to Leningrad.
Like all the other overnight trains, such as those to Helsinki, Vilnius, or other points north and west, this one, called the Red Arrow, had compartments with two berths each, side by side, and I found myself sharing with a woman in her seventies, dressed in a very middle-class manner but with a ratty old cardigan over her suit. On her left lapel she had affixed pins or medals, ones I had never seen in that country of military decorations—both cameos of someone (not Lenin), one black, the other red and black. I asked her what they were, and she told me that they showed her membership in the Soviet Academy of Science and its Italian equivalent. “I do not usually feel disposed to wear insignia but today was different,” she said. She was a retired mathematician, and the occasion was a gathering of the clan in Moscow, from which she was now returning home. She spoke the English of someone who had learned it before the Great Patriotic War—might almost have learned it before the Revolution, the last time Russia was part of Europe.
How long had she resided in Leningrad?
“It has been my home uninterruptedly since 1947.”
Then she had not been there during the war, during the Nazi siege lasting 900 days?
“But I was there, yes. I was a young student, and I took very ill. The German circle around the city was complete except for one small opening, and I was evacuated and taken back to Moscow. When I recovered, I continued my studies there.”
We talked for many kilometres. She sat perfectly upright; her eyes shone, and when she broke into a smile, as she did at every opportunity, the change in her expression took up the slack that the years had given her face, the lower part in particular.
I asked her how she had come to receive the pin from the Italian academy.
“It was given to me two years ago, I believe it was, when I travelled there for that purpose. Things were not always as you find them now. There is libéralisme in the Chamber of Deputies and throughout the government; it is in the air. But this was not always so,” she said, taking advantage of her understatement to smile again. “I was the first woman mathematician to become a member of the Soviet academy.” I gathered that her discipline was almost as much a barrier as her gender, and that even after she was elected there were still more obstacles to overcome. “Perhaps six years ago the international symposium was held in Montreal, but I was not permitted to go.” But with the Gorbachev ascendancy, the mood changed instantly; the trip to Italy was her first and so far only visit to the West.
Finally we grew tired of talking. She put out the lamp, saying merrily, “There is too much illumination in the carriage.” We lay back on our respective bunks. Whenever we passed through a town during the night, I could see her head silhouetted in the flickering light. It looked as though it belonged on an ancient coin.
As it happened, I saw Leningrad in strict sunshine, which it is possible to do only 65 or at most 100 days of the year. This good luck no doubt contributed to my general impression that Leningrad was on balance one of the handsomest cities I had ever been in. I mean the old central city, which became the capital in 1712, a few years after it was founded, and retained the distinction for 200 years. But even the outer districts, with rusty factories in the Soviet manner, were not without a 1930s late modernist charm. They made you forget for a moment how northern a city Leningrad really is, with its Baltic air and immense skies. When you move beyond the city—and such is the density that you don’t have to move very far, considering that there are five million residents—you run into forests of white birch.
When leaving Canada, I had stuffed a bag with expendable secondhand paperbacks for consumption in queues and waiting rooms (and learned when I arrived that they made welcome gifts as the appetite for English books was hearty every where I went). Quite by chance I came upon a passage in Walden in which Henry David Thoreau enumerates his reasons for choosing to settle at Walden Pond. “No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving,” he writes. “It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.” But it’s not like that at all, at least not in the warmer months. The Neva is a broad river that cuts a deep blue pattern through the heart of the city, augmented by small canals that suggest a miniature (and cleaner) Venice. On both banks of the river, for as long as one can see in both directions, are perfect baroque buildings from the 18th century and classical ones from the early part of the 19th. Many are painted in pastel shades—not, as in Portugal, say, to display them-selves best in direct sunlight