The poet and artist Dmitri Prigov
The violinist and conductor Vladimir Spivakov
The conductor Valery Gergiev
The rock musician Yuri Shevchuk
The movie director Nikita Mikhalkov
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
That is the case of the artist Pavel Filonov, one of the leaders of the Russian avant-garde before the revolution, who moved from his early works, influenced by German Expressionism, to meticulously crafted kaleidoscopic paintings where the eye slowly discovers outlines of people and objects. He called these works “formulas”
Filonov is much less known in the West than Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, and other Russian avant-garde artists. Filonov’s manifestos are even more mangled than Malevich’s coarse and clumsy statements. He never traveled to the West and sold practically nothing, hoping that all his works would one day be displayed in a special museum in Leningrad.
Filonov wanted, as he wrote in his diary, first published almost sixty years after his death, “to give all my works to the state, the party, the proletariat.”11 But the Party replied that “Filonov is a bourgeois artist. A ruthless struggle is being waged against him, and filonovism will be uprooted.”12 Even Filonov’s portrait of Stalin, vastly superior to Picasso’s famous likeness of the ruler, remained unwanted.
Filonov modeled his life after revolutionary artists of the past, like Van Gogh. Tall, pale, and ascetic, with a biblical prophet’s fanaticism, Filonov was surrounded, in the tradition of the Russian avant-garde, by loyal students whom he taught for free. There were not many commissions and the artist was often hungry. His diary entry of August 30, 1935, is typical: “Seeing that my money was coming to an end, I used the last to buy tea, sugar, shag tobacco, and matches and began, not having money for bread, to bake pancakes from the white flour I still had. On the 29th, having economized on the flour, I baked my last pancake, preparing to follow the example of many, many other times—to live, not knowing for how long, without eating.”13
When the Germans began the 900-day siege of Leningrad in September 1941, no one even thought of evacuating Filonov, unlike Shostakovich, Akhmatova, and Zoshchenko (whom Stalin considered valuable cultural cadres then). Tending to his paralyzed wife, who was twenty years his senior, Filonov, fifty-eight, was among the first to die in early December, as soon as the famine began in Leningrad. As survivors of the siege explained, “The men died first, because they are muscular and have little fat. Women, even small ones, have more subcutaneous fat.”14 Filonov’s wife died in 1942. Between December 1941 and February 1942, more than a quarter million Leningraders died of starvation.
One of Filonov’s students recalled: “When Filonov died, I was dystrophic myself, but could still move, so I dragged myself to his house. He lay on a table in the cold room, majestic among his paintings, which still hung on the walls.”15 There are now precious few works by Filonov available on the art market (the great majority are in St. Petersburg at the Russian Museum), but when one appears, it is valued in the millions of dollars.
Tsvetaeva’s suicide in evacuation and Filonov’s hungry death in besieged Leningrad, depriving Russian culture of two of its geniuses, went practically unnoticed in the war years that plunged the country into a sea of despair and suffering and took tens of millions of lives. These were tense times. Still, Ilya Ehrenburg, whose numerous propaganda articles in the army newspaper
The loosening of the ideological noose that Stalin had sanctioned was intended to unite the country in the face of mortal danger. Stalin also made an alliance with the Orthodox Church: as a former seminarian, he understood the enormous spiritual potential of a religious appeal.
Among those for whom, in the words of Pasternak, “the war was a cleansing storm, a breath of fresh air, a portent of deliverance,” was Andrei Platonov, considered by many today as the greatest twentieth-century Russian prose writer after Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov. (Joseph Brodsky felt that Platonov was on the level of Joyce and Kafka; sometimes he would add, “and maybe, higher.”)17
Filonov and Platonov could be considered twins in art, although there was little physical similarity. Filonov was tall and had eyes that his friend the poet Khlebnikov described as “cherry-like,” and his voice was beautiful, deep and rich. Platonov had childlike blue eyes, was short, and spoke in a muffled voice. Both had high foreheads and piercing eyes, but fanaticism dominated in Filonov’s charismatic appearance, while broad-faced Platonov, who could be sarcastic in his youth (especially when drunk), became withdrawn over time, more and more resembling his favorite character, the Russian “hidden man.”
In his works, Platonov often depicted frenzied and inarticulate “non-Party Bolsheviks” like Filonov, while the writer himself, with his sullen proletarian looks (as a friend once put it, Platonov could easily be taken for a drunkard waiting outside a liquor store for someone to split the price of a bottle), would have fit into any of Filonov’s expressionist urbanist drawings.
Platonov was born to the family of a locomotive engineer in 1919, and at the age of twenty he volunteered for the railroad Unit of Special Assignments (ChON), the notorious Bolshevik punitive corps. He began publishing his work early, and in 1927 his novella “The Sluices of Epiphany” (a parable about Russian folk wisdom and the willfulness of the authorities) caught Gorky’s attention. Encouraged, Platonov sent Gorky the manuscript of his masterpiece,
Gorky’s sympathetic response makes Platonov’s dilemma clear: “For all the indisputable high qualities of your work, I do not believe that it will be published. That will be prevented by your anarchic mindset, apparently a trait of your ‘spirit.’ Whether you wanted it or not—you have given your depiction of reality a lyrical satirical character, which, naturally, is unacceptable for our censorship. For all your tenderness toward people, they are colored ironically, and appear before the reader not so much revolutionary as ‘eccentric’ and ‘half- witted.’”18
Gorky’s prediction came true:
In 1931, Stalin, who followed the Soviet literary magazines closely, read Platonov’s novella “Benefit” in
