Candle held: wax souvenirs of emigrants and surrealism of the Bolsheviks

Was there surrealism in the USSR, how the Covid era affected the life of a small candle shop, and why did El Lissitzky criticize the architecture of the Kazan Railway Station? The answers to these questions are in the new books of the month. Izvestia read them carefully and chose the most interesting.

Surrealism in the land of the Bolsheviks

Alexandra Selivanova, Nadezhda Plungyan

The funny and slightly absurd title of the book, referring to Lev Kuleshov's classic film "The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks," only at first glance seems like a joke. In fact, it couldn't be more serious. Actually, all this collective work (not all the authors of the articles are listed on the cover) is devoted to answering the question of whether there was surrealism in the USSR. And if so, in what ways?

The impulse to create the collection was the exhibition of the same name, organized by the Avant-Garde Center and the gallery "On Shabolovka" back in 2017. But this is not a belated catalog at all, although there are color reproductions of the exhibits here too, but a group reflection on topics raised eight years ago that still excite the imagination.

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After all, what is surrealism? It's not just a style, it's not just juggling a few signature images associated with Salvador Dali. It is the construction of an imaginary reality, and through it, the highlighting of those oddities, absurdities, hidden desires and fantasies that permeate everyday life anywhere. Even in a state with a dominant Marxist-Leninist ideology, seemingly alien to all Western "isms."

From the book, the reader learns that the Surrealists were, for example, Malevich's students, and partly himself. That elements of this style broke through even into purely utilitarian publications like the Atlas of Blood Transfusion or propaganda posters. And anyway, it's not for nothing that they joked in the USSR — "We were born to make Kafka come true." So, to paraphrase Dali, who declared "Surrealism is me," after reading the collection, one can admit: "Surrealism is us."

Candles of the Apocalypse

Tatiana Zamirovskaya

Back in the 2010s, writer and music journalist Tatiana Zamirovskaya left Belarus for the United States and got a job at a gift candle store. Zamirovskaya described everyday incidents from the shop's life — the antics of eccentric customers, funny incidents, and the like — on a popular social network. The author's irony and observation, a special intonation that paradoxically combines cynicism and tenderness, brought the blog fame.

Now the notes are collected in a book, and this is not just a formal attempt to monetize online popularity (publications that are just printouts of posts have long been a separate, admittedly not the most respected genre), but an attempt to assemble a complete image from the pieces of the mosaic. Which, for all its seeming mundanity, reflected an entire epoch.

The turning point is a pandemic that is changing both the whole world around it and the cozy little world in which the characters of the book live. It is this event that turns out to be the apocalypse referred to in the title. And although it would seem that covid has long been behind us, in a previous life, Zamirovskaya's text can be read as a kind of universal recipe for survival.: modest, not pretentious, a little escapist and, most importantly, relevant in any turbulent times.

A fertile region. Paul Klee

Pierre Boulez

This year, the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Pierre Boulez, one of the greatest composers and conductors of the 20th century. But if many music lovers know his recordings, and some even heard the master perform live (he came to the USSR with his bands in 1967 and 1990), then Boulez's theoretical legacy has practically not been published. The only small collection was published a long time ago and has become a bibliographic rarity.

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The new book, however, only partially closes the gap. This is just a drop in the bucket, considering the total volume of Boulez's writing. But she's extremely curious. The fact is that Boulez here is not talking about music (at least, not only about it), but about painting. Paul Klee is an artist of the first half of the last century, whose work showed the key trends of the era: from expressionism and abstractionism to surrealism. Boulez, however, points out that Klee wanted to become a violinist and even played in an orchestra. And he claims that musical principles underlie his artistic method. As a result, he comes to an unexpected confession: "What Klee succeeded in plastic art, I tried to repeat in music, giving the ear something that would provide it with listening mobility and at the same time force it to immobility."

In general, this is the book that will help to better understand both Klee and Boulez himself.

Overcoming art. Selected texts

El Lissitzky

The figure of the artist, architect, and designer El Lissitzky has often been the focus of attention of art connoisseurs in recent years. It is enough to recall the grandiose retrospective of the artist, which unfolded simultaneously at two venues (the New Tretyakov Gallery and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center), the discovery at VDNH — right on the street — of his original building, designed to advertise the pavilion "Fishing". Well, the group exhibitions with the participation of various of his works cannot be counted at all. Perhaps, along with Alexander Rodchenko, Lisitsky is becoming the main artist of the constructivist era in the minds of the mass audience. And it is quite logical that, following the texts of the aforementioned Rodchenko, a collection of Lisitsky's journalism appeared on sale.

Here are his reports, read on various occasions, and notes in the Soviet periodical press. In particular, Lisitsky writes to the Krasnaya Niva magazine, a weekly supplement to the Izvestia newspaper (article "Americanism in Soviet Architecture"). And all this is not dry theorizing, but emotional, sometimes highly polemical statements on a variety of issues. Lisitsky criticizes the architecture of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge and the Kazan Railway Station, proposes a revolutionary project of "horizontal skyscrapers" (long buildings lying on a thin "leg" around which there may be roads, pedestrian zones, and so on), discusses book design, and so on. His reflections are easy to read, but more importantly, these seemingly disparate texts become a kind of reflection of the era itself.