russian-literature

"Each illustration is protected by an interleaf made of blush tracing paper, an old book tradition often used in the livre d’artiste. This creates the peculiar effect of a curtain, behind which we can discern, as if in a haze, the full-page illustrations printed in a brownish ink on cream-tinted watercolour paper <...> The frontispiece shows the silhouettes of the Singer Company Building on Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg, where Dom Knigi (“House of the Book”) is located, and the Kazan Cathedral. Above them float the artist’s moving eye."

"...important direction in contemporary Russian artists’ books, following precedents set by the Futurists, is the fusion of poetic and artistic talent in artist-authors blessed with Doppelbegabung. <...> An artist who achieved equal mastery in more than one medium and combined an expertise in different arts is Parygin. His poetic collections Pesok (Sand, 1989), Zelenaia kniga (The Green Book, 1989), Tsvetnye zvuki (Coloured Sounds, 1990) and Moia mansarda (My Attic, 1990) represent an attempt to synthesize text and plastic figuration in books where literary and visual languages are calculated to have a simultaneous effect on the reader/viewer."

"These works are not conventional anthologies of poetry but clearly belong to the genre of artists’ books in which all the elements are united by a common idea. Although these are early works by Parygin, the artist managed to give each of them a distinctive tone that contributes to a polyphonic sound, characteristic of his book art. The first of these four books was Sand. It creates a feeling of the passage of time, like the grains of existence running through an hourglass."

"The main visual effect is created by the inclusion of the text into the space of decorative-illustrative elements made up of processed photographs, reproduced by means of xerography, each representing views of the city from the attic window. <...> The book gives the impression of unity and was created in the spirit of the Futurist artists’ books, which the artist acknowledged as one of the key sources for his own creative approach."

"A sheet of graphic ‘sounds’ alternates with a poem printed on recto (the sheets’ versos remain blank). The visual elements work as an independent ‘text’ that prompts certain analogies between colour and sound, with which the early twentieth-century avant-garde also experimented, not only in painting, but also in music. Thus, colour is not only a decorative element but it also provides the main ‘sound’ of the book and adds different layers of meaning."

"Every artist had to include in his spread his or her statements. Every work shows its own dynamic between the image and the text. This dynamic forms the whole impression. Working on words the artists used handwriting that is typical for an artist’s book. The book is full of versatile balance between its visual and text components. Through its rhythmical structure, all the sheets become one piece of art. "City" is built upon free interpretations and reflections about community as an environment for communication. The project invites you to talk and to think about the meaning of the world and our place in it. "City" is an example of the artist’s book that shows multidimensionality and endlessness of this art direction."

"I’m entering the hall staircase, going up the stairs. Graffiti on the walls, windows with remnants of Art Nouveau stained-glass. The elevator cab door slammed and a shadow of a man standing on the landing dashed upstairs. He is wearing a trench coat with his collar turned up and a hat drawn over his eyes to hide his facial features. Spying, obviously an agent. I’m going to the poet Viktor K., I’ve brought him a banned book published abroad. Viktor has long been under suspicion of the "authorities" for underground press. I see: the door of a communal apartment is swinging open half a flight above and two dwellers, who have grappled in a fight, are tumbling out of it screaming and swearing. The agent is not reacting to what is happening, he’s got a different task. He is standing motionless, one hand in his pocket, with a bright yellow glove on the other one. These impressions from fifty years ago gave an impetus to create a lithograph. For half a century, the interior of the hall staircase and the stairs have not changed, but now the surveillance over the house and its inhabitants is carried out by video cameras instead of agents. Warning, video surveillance, the signs on the house walls say obligingly."

"All artists who took part in our project expressed their ideas about the city deeply and imaginatively and someone did it more than once. Their works of art don’t need any comments, explanations or additions."

"[Kandinsky] began writing prose-poems, composing 38 altogether between 1908 and 1912. In 1913 these were published by Piper Verlag under the title Sounds, accompanied by colour and black-and-white woodcuts. in these Dadaistic poems, Kandinsky employs a method borrowed from young children's early attempts at speech; through constant repetition and babbling words are emptied of their meaning, so that only the pure sound remains. It is Kandinsky's aim to uncover this "pure sound" of language, the sound which "sets the soul vibrating."

"Near the Egyptian Sphinxes’s steps on the Neva River banks, you feel presence of the mankind thousand-year history, which these creatures brought with them. The space of the city was filled with new meaning and life, new myths and legends. Artists found new images, began to learn speaking and expressing themselves in a new way through the classical city. The city of huge squares, wide streets. dark backstreets and well courtyards; black shadows fantasy; white nights that distort reality. When I realized it all, I began creating my Mythology of the city. And I hope that it will be a worldwide language for all those who love and appreciate the city of St. Petersburg."

"I see City as a Spider that moves with us on the web... Spider is one of the oldest symbols between life and death as a "continuous sacrifice", as Schneider well noted. Its threads symbolize the duality of our world, in which Spider is a demiurge that connects the eternal and the finite. In the Upanishads, web thread symbolizes the sacred sound Om. In one of Akutagawa's stories, Buddha throws a thread into Hell to a criminal who didn't kill a Spider. Spider is both a God and Executioner, and this makes it similar to City."

"Project "City" by Alexey Parygin and Timofey Markov is sure an example of livre d'artiste with all its classical characteristics from the form (portfolio with impressions) to the choice of participants who mostly see this work as a kind of experiment, just an episode in their artistic work. Inviting new authors to play with the idea of a book is a very positive decision that provides a lot of new ideas. The chosen subject — “urban theme” — connects the project with its prototype, because the city was one of the most popular and actual subjects for collections of printings. Some format restrictions are traditional for such a project: Their size of paper is defined. And the sheet doubled up. Actually, each participant of the project is invited to decorate a page-spread. The difference is in the absence of any literary text. Furthermore, the subject is given abstractedly: Just a city, without any personifications, details, geographical coordinates. It forms a huge field for reflection and gives every artist the maximal freedom to narrate about his personal connections to the city. Thirty-five voices, views, private stories about the city, thirty-five visions and arts to be in and with it. The visual part is completed with the words the artists tell about the city. These sentences are not always connected directly to the printed impressions but they give more volume and depth to them anyway."

"The correlation between the text and the artist’s book is an interesting subject. Beginning with projects of Vollard some artists prefer to work with the literature text of others. Surrealists, Dadaists and futurists often wrote texts for their projects on their own. Later pop art showed that the literal part is not so important. The artist’s book exists on it’s a unique kind of art. It articulates its own textuality that usually is not connected with any interpretations of some texts coming from outside. It speaks with its volume, weight, materials, construction and disputes with the traditional book. The artist’s book can reflect its past as a medium for an alien text or can forget it at all. It always embodies the ideas of the art direction that is the working field of the artist who creates it. First of all the artist’s book is a reflection of its author as an artist. Exclusive nature of which is reflected in each individual copy. That is why there should be as much personality as possible in every artist’s book. Moreover, the artist should better be a good one."

"The participants of the project are from different generations and art movements: from fine aestheticism to popular brutalism. Artist even chose types of paper to work on. This freedom to express themselves gave artists a possibility to create their subjective spaces inside the concept that works as the objective reality of the project plotted out by Alexey Parygin."

"A white sheet of time, on which the sunlit city appears as a relief imprint. Thick golden air with poplar fluff. Time has stood still. House number 29a. Yellow square of the wall. Small square of the window, which is cramped. You are flying away beyond the fence of the Childhood House on the wings of a memory bird. Grass-blade days are woven into a tangle of years that rolls along the road of memory. A unique, vivid image of the home town from the distant childhood, the Home from which you flew away forever. The town of my childhood."

"Megalopolises. Plans. Building plans. Yellow. Street lineature. Labyrinths of yards. Pigeon flocks. Green. The geometry of squares. Dead zones. Subway burrows. Red. Meaning signs. Dim light. Noise. Voids. Black. The work transformed itself in the process of manifestation. The pictograms appeared almost by accident — naturally. Text: Parking / Diner / Bird / Airport / Disabled / Attention / Parking / Motel / Bar / Attention / Cat / Bird / Diner ... Recoded, literally: art, like all modern culture, lost its clear value criteria, meaning and purpose of movement long ago. City. One of the main problems of modern society is the almost complete loss of the ability to self-cognition and self-identification. City. Civilization is degrading. The agony still continues, maintaining the illusion of life, but it does not change the merits of the question. City."

"Kawarga-Skete. To anyone climbing inside the tower, the ascent is symbolic. Working one's way through the monstrous structure of a factory… rising up through a column of industrial scrap and waste… then standing aloft in the cupola space between sky and earth — free of the intrusions of materialism. Sounds from the composer Kryptogen Rundfunk reign from within this biomorphic cell — focusing the journeyman on the scattered fragments of the self — washing him down with nature's own elements."

"Artist in big city / City is a huge anthill, in which the artist, overcoming obstacles and dangers, resists temptations and rushes towards his success against time. My subjective city is a punk quest in the format of a classic board game. Having thrown the dice, you can try your fate: reach the finish line or get stuck in the labyrinth of the octopus city forever."

"Sheet from the album “Forms of the Future”, based on the texts of Russian self-taught scientist and visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who recreated a project of an ideal society and city of the future in his books. The left side of the sheet is devoted to selection of ideal city residents for dormitories, the right side is a description of a high-tech house equipped with an autonomous life support system. Rewriting the scientist’s texts by hand, the artist as if reincarnates into him, trying to grasp and hear the cosmic flows that controlled Tsiolkovsky."

"Сity is a fertile theme for any artist. And the city I live in is especially good. Here you can find plots to suit any taste: if you want you can paint and draw its grand views of beautiful architecture, rivers, canals, bridges ... Or well courtyards, firewalls, which I have not seen in other cities and towns. And a variety of subjects — on the streets, in cafes, bars. In the title of my graphic sheet I used a quote from an interview with a famous poet, friend of Joseph Brodsky, former Leningrader Yevgeny Rein: “What is a glass of vodka? It liberates the soul ...."

"The music I play is not really the music I would like to play”, my favorite saxophonist Art Pepper once said. The lithograph, which I began to do for the "City" project, was completely different in my idea, but for technical reasons beyond my control, I had to make a compromise, leaving the original scheme, having decorated it with a rainbow of night city advertisements giving hope that everything will be mighty fine in the future, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night will be Saturday night. In "Edichka" Limonov wrote literally the following (I am quoting from memory): The money that old dotards like Dali, Shagal, Miro have from selling their pictures is not enough, to make even more money they put their lithograph masterpieces on sale in thousands of copies. Bearing in mind the financial aspect, I would object to Kharkiv native. You might clench eggs between your legs failing to fry them on a hot stone. Lithography is not just a multiplying technique; the final product has a flavor that can not be achieved with a conventional frying pan. I demonstrated this together with the printer, although I deviated from the original conception."

"Order and randomness arise under the influence of the creative act in the context of a certain approach to forming and are the fundamental principles of creation that have an ontological basis in art. The metaphor of letter — Littera, architectural integration and synergy of metaphors — columns of a chaotic set of a ghost city, a carrier of randomness information code. Typographic metropolis — Babylonian Chaos of letters spontaneous arrangement like a thesis and antithesis of harmony and order of newspaper columns in the form of eternal city. Randomness is divine, because it is not made by hands, it is not subject to man, unlike order. There is something mystical about the randomness code. The idea of the involvement of ontological “order” and “randomness” in forming is a universal approach to creative act. Thus, the "effect of randomness" is created in the process of creative experiment with printed form and printing. The categories of "order" and "randomness", being the basis of the beautiful, manifest themselves as aesthetic paradigms of the unique author's printing and visual art."

"The plasticity idea «form draws form», expressed by Vladimir Sterligov in the late 60s of the last century, is being honed in lithographs. This is an attempt to find inseparable plastic penetrations of depicted forms. An attempt to ensure that one detail of a drawing becomes part of another. Flowing into each other, they should make a strong visual composition. The main task is to create a single graphic organism, when a drawn object gives life to another one. In this case, there is an interpenetration of silhouettes, where the foreground, middle ground, and background become a single whole. Light, transparent drawing, on the one hand, and a found plastic construction, on the other hand, the way I see it, complement each other, making a graphic sheet both airy and convincing."

"In London, the red route is road marking used to indicate bus priority area. I found myself In East London at the turn of the 2000s. The East End was lively and diverse back then, and I enjoyed wandering there. I was particularly impressed by the railway bridges over the streets - a piece of iron crossed residential quarters whimsically. Car repair shops, pubs, warehouses and shops were built into space under a flyover. Another artery cutting off the East End from the rest of the city was the Regent Canal. I photographed two- and three-story residential blocks, bridges, parked red cars and roaring double-deckers. There was much red: buses, hydrants, telephone booths, bridge trusses and road markings."

"There are two cities on the Earth, where I feel at ease and free — Paris and St. Petersburg, or rather, St. Petersburg, my hometown, where my family has lived since the middle of the 19th century, and Paris, the city that I visited 30 years ago for the first time, and that has become familiar and close to me. It so happened that I basically visit Paris in autumn or spring, Parisian autumn resembles a rainy St. Petersburg August, Parisian spring — a rainy St. Petersburg June. I really like to draw rain, blurred outlines of houses, their reflections in the mirrors of sidewalks, flickering reflections of multicoloured lights that revive the grey-pearl landscape, silhouettes of pipes, blackening wet tree trunks, foliage dissolved in a grey-asphalt sky. It is in such weather that the boundaries are erased not only between objects but also between cities — you do not always immediately realize where to rush in the morning — to the banks of the Seine or the banks of the Neva."

"A city is a narrative — either lyric, or impressionistic, or futuristic and gnarled space that rattles, clinks, and clatters like an iron plate. A city is by no means just a landscape. A city is a social and cultural environment. A city is a labyrinth. A city is an illusion. A city is a memory. A city is a utopia. A city is an abstract idea. Urbanistic poetry and prose on the verge of post-urbanism. A large city is usually Babylon: a blend, which is sometimes eclectic; a juxtaposition of contrasts; a dialogue and a conflict at the same time. A unity generated by differences. Some things are "old" about it and some things are "new". A city deprived of development is boring; a city deficient in historical context is sapless. That said, a city without a clear architectural idea is featureless and provincial."

"The idea of the book, presented hereby was established a couple of years ago by Alexey Parygin, famous artist, collector and specialist in art history who also made unique scientific research about the technique of engraving. He became a curator as a result of a big project "City" created by thirty-five Russian artists of different generations, who were chosen and invited by him. Aesthetic vision, clear knowledge about all techniques of printmaking, great communicating skills and the reputation, allowed Alexey Parygin to make an important step and to show different aesthetic and technical approaches to the subject."

"Alexander Solzhenitsyn"

"Boris Pasternak"

"Mikhail Bulgakov"

"Alexander Pushkin"

"Ivan Turgenev"

"Mikhail Sholokhov"

"Russian literature has long been familiar with the notions that a writer can do much within his society, and that it is his duty to do so."

"Один мой знакомый поляк назвал русские буквы стульчиками. На этих стульчиках сидят апостолы русской литературы. Некоторые стульчики оказались электрическими."

"Russia is old; her literature is new. Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far as it interests the world, begins in the nineteenth. Russian literature and American literature are twins. But there is this strong contrast, caused partly by the difference in the age of the two nations. In the early years of the nineteenth century, American literature sounds like a child learning to talk, and then aping its elders; Russian literature is the voice of a giant, waking from a long sleep, and becoming articulate. It is as though the world had watched this giant's deep slumber for a long time, wondering what he would say when he awakened. And what he has said has been well worth the thousand years of waiting."

"But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading."

"Let us not expect Russia to do what she is incapable of, to restrict herself within certain limits, to concentrate her attention upon one point, or bring her conception of life down to one doctrine. Her literary productions must reflect the moral chaos which she is passing through."

"But I hope you know I go on about these things not simply to extol the virtues of my own country but to speak to the true greatness of the heart and soul of your land. Who, after all, needs to tell the land of Dostoyevsky about the quest for truth, the home of Kandinsky and Scriabin about imagination, the rich and noble culture of the Uzbek man of letters Alisher Navoi about beauty and heart? The great culture of your diverse land speaks with a glowing passion to all humanity. Let me cite one of the most eloquent contemporary passages on human freedom. It comes, not from the literature of America, but from this country, from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak, in the novel "Dr. Zhivago." He writes: "I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats -- any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death -- then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But this is just the point -- what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel, but an inward music -- the irresistible power of unarmed truth." The irresistible power of unarmed truth. Today the world looks expectantly to signs of change, steps toward greater freedom in the Soviet Union. We watch and we hope as we see positive changes taking place."

"Nikolai Gogol"

"Feodor Dostoevsky"

"Leo Tolstoy"

"Russian language"

"Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country despite her great literature."

"I calculated once that the acknowledged best in the way of Russian fiction and poetry which had been produced since the beginning of the last century runs to about 23,000 pages of ordinary print. It is evident that neither French nor English literature can be so compactly handled. They sprawl over many more centuries; the number of masterpieces is formidable. This brings me to my first point. If we exclude one medieval masterpiece, the beautifully commodious thing about Russian prose is that it is all contained in the amphora of one round century — with an additional little cream jug provided for whatever surplus may have accumulated since. One century, the nineteenth, had been sufficient for a country with practically no literary tradition of its own to create a literature which in artistic worth, in wide-spread influence, in everything except bulk, equals the glorious output of England or France, although their production of permanent masterpieces had begun so much earlier. This miraculous flow of esthetic values in so young a civilization could not have taken place unless in all other ramifications of spiritual growth nineteenth-century Russia had not attained with the same abnormal speed a degree of culture which again matched that of the oldest Western countries."

"[I]t redounds to the honour of Russian literature that the leading spirits of that literature were the most efficient adversaries of slavery."

"I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came upon myself, was Russian literature. I've always felt very much enthralled to writers like Dostoevsky, especially, and Chekhov. In later years, modern Russian poets like Pasternak and Mandelstam and Akhmatova have meant a great deal to me. Poetry more than prose."

"From mid-1988, the growing weakness of the Soviet state, and the division and confusion of the government’s response to nationalism, was accentuated by the strength of nationalist sentiment, especially in the Baltic republics, the Caucasus republics, and the western Ukraine. This sentiment had been manifested from the mid-1980s in increased opposition to Communist rule. The waving of national flags and singing of national songs became more frequent. On 23 August 1989, two million people formed a human chain between the capitals of the Baltic Republics. The Soviet idea of a limited flowering of national cultures as part of a wider concept of a unified Soviet people, a policy adopted in 1923, had proved a total failure, although, during the late Soviet period, some Russians resented the ‘internationalism’ of the Soviet Union wherein resources, money and technical know-how were handed over by Moscow to the non-Russian sectors. There was also resentment over the foreign accents that the non-Russians had when speaking Russian in the army and elsewhere. Moreover, an explicitly conveyed sense of Russian identity had emerged by the late 1960s with the derevenshchiki (ruralists): Russian writers such as Valentin Rasputin. Without tackling the censorship head-on, what the derevenshchiki tended to do was to decry the baneful effects of Soviet Communist modernisation upon the older rural way of life and its values. By the later 1970s, different strands of Russian national identity, expressed in the form of resentment over the perceived shunning of Russian cultural values, emerged with other writers."

"The critics were seized with the impression that Russian authors did not merely write novels, but celebrated mass as it were, with the "why and wherefore" ever present in all they wrote."

"Only in Russia [under the Soviet Union] poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"