But as he waited, out of the confusion about him, out of the chaos in his mind, a voice rose, Boris Tumanov’s voice—the voice his daughter loved, or thought she loved, or hoped she loved—and despite himself, he found himself listening. And now this brittle, sensitive, floating voice began to sing other songs, unusual songs, songs that flowed without a perceptible melody, one verse spilling into another, words metamorphosing in mid- syllable, sometimes drowning despondently in the troubled strumming, sometimes soaring above a quiet lull— songs that were at times incoherent, at times jarring, occasionally lyrical and occasionally terrifying, but always gripping, always exacting a toll paid in raw emotion on the roads to their meaning—songs about the true color of souls dissected on a laboratory table in a secret government project; or a one-winged angel caught and exhibited in a cage in a Moscow zoo until set free by a drunken janitor; or a despairing genius walking on shards of glass to reach the gold at the end of a rainbow, only to meet there another unhappy, lost person with bleeding feet; or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one’s happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; or an old man who had wasted what talent he had for nothing, but now, at the very conclusion of his long, joyless, servile life, finally found the courage to fly—and was unable to stop crawling….
And the more he listened, the more his head swam and the more he knew these songs to be unlike anything he had ever heard, and yet in spirit—in their high-pitched mix of hope and anger and sadness and desire to change the world, to bring beauty into it—so much like the talks that had kept him up for dizzying twenty-hour stretches at the blessed gatherings of his own youth, his slightly postponed, second youth of 1956; and the intensely expectant faces around him were the feverishly serious faces of his past companions, his teachers, his friends, his brothers in awaited martyrdom if need be; and the very air in this suddenly unrecognizable place, this oddly churchlike place with smoking incense and dancing candles, was trembling once more with the faith of old. The faith he himself had upheld for a few short, inspired, brilliant years, the best years of his life maybe—the faith he had lost when faced, at Christ’s age of thirty-three, in the Year of Our Lord 1962, with his own fork in the road, his own choice between crucifixion and… and…
He caught himself tottering on the brink of the private hell to which he had long ago canceled all admission, and hastily opened his eyes, only to discover that they had always been open. The disembodied voice that had awoken such happy, such painful echoes inside him had faded away, and applause was sweeping through the world. He too clapped, trying to read his watch as he did so, but the hands seemed broken, rotating loosely and changing direction now and again. All the same, he knew hours had passed, for his soul was spent. Just as the invisible singer was announcing that in conclusion he would present the promised performance piece and nonsensically asking everyone to “please put on the ties,” Sukhanov made his unsteady way out of the press of excited humanity, back into the deserted corridor.
Things were largely amiss here, he saw quickly. Candles, left without observation, were jumping mischievously from counter to counter; a few paintings had turned upside down, sending villages, forests, and lakes down the skies in rivulets of running watercolors; nearby, a flock of horses had burst out of their frame and trotted gracefully, hooves up, along the underside of a bookshelf. As he walked, he tripped over shadows that lay on the ground like unswept leaves. Worse yet, most objects had a shimmering, hazy glow about them, making him suspect that as soon as he turned his back on them, they ceased to be what they pretended and transformed into something else entirely—a shoe into an umbrella, an umbrella into an imp, an imp into a cloud—or maybe even slipped altogether into some different, fourth, dimension, melting forever in the labyrinths of existence. In a way, it seemed only appropriate that everything should be so strange and uncertain, but his head hurt more than ever, his heart tingled unpleasantly, and he felt an urgent need to immerse himself in a pool of quiet and sleep for a while —or watch the colors flitting like zigzagging dragonflies across the underside of his eyelids.
Haltingly he moved deeper and deeper, farther and farther, with each step collecting the large, humid roses that fell off the wallpaper onto his upturned palms, then offering them, in one luxurious, aromatic bouquet, to a short-haired adolescent girl in a yellow dress who at that moment chanced to walk toward him, her small boyish face as familiar as everyone else’s (for, of course, he had seen them all before), her lips half open in laughter. The girl gave him a wide-eyed look and, letting the flowers drop to the floor, ran off, shouting a name he had seemingly heard before: “Ksiusha! Ksiusha!”
He followed her with tired eyes, then, crushing the delicate rose blossoms under his feet, turned into an alley, passed through a doorway almost invisible under the graffiti, rose up an evil-smelling staircase to the third floor, and after checking again the address scrawled on a tram ticket, knocked on one of the peeling doors. A fierce fellow with a spade-shaped beard let him in. Murmuring hellos, Anatoly navigated the smoky, sparsely furnished space of the crowded room and sank into a moaning couch at the back, almost out of sight, feeling a bit awkward because he knew only a couple of people here by name and no one at all closely, and the acquaintance who had invited him was running late. For almost an hour he sat quietly, nursing a glass of vodka and listening, with growing interest soon turning into excitement, to an older man with a nervously agile face, whose place this was, softly explaining his theory of art’s demise.
“From its very birth at the dawn of humanity,” the man was saying in a mild voice bred of generations of intellectuals, “pictorial art has served two separate functions: ritualistic and decorative. In its primitive stages, art amounted to, on the one hand, drawing pictures of slain animals on cave walls to ensure some friendly spirit’s help in a hunt, and on the other, fashioning necklaces out of seashells to make savage women more bearable to look at. Gradually, as man matured, these two original functions—communicating with the spirit world and making the present world more pleasant to live in—crystallized into what I see as art’s two great raisons d‘etre, if you will: the search for the Divine and the search for Beauty. In the Dark Ages, when man was weighed down by superstitions, the Divine predominated at the expense of Beauty, but at the very peak of artistic development—and by that, of course, I mean the age of the Renaissance—the two searches grew more and more intertwined until they became one. And for one brief moment God was Beauty, nature was God, and the Divine and the Beautiful could be found equally in Titian’s voluptuous nudes and in Mantegna’s emaciated saints. This miraculous balance lasted hardly more than a century, yet it brought about a flowering of genius so extraordinary that it sustains us to this day. But inevitably, as the world moved on, life gained the upper hand over art, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their new mantras of enlightenment and reason, led to the beginning of the end. As art’s two purposes drifted apart once again, creation found itself boxed into increasingly narrow compartments: portrait, epic painting, genre painting, religious painting, landscape, still life…. Then, with the advent of our own monstrous age of machines and secularism, Beauty was killed by industrialization, God was declared persona non grata by so-called progressive thinkers, and thus, in a blink of time, both higher artistic purposes lost all meaning. What are we left with? A sad bunch of labels and occasional pathetic attempts to recover at least something of art’s previous glory, either by desperate proclaimers of art for art’s sake, who try to restore Beauty but invariably end up painting poodles and shepherdesses or the aesthetic equivalent thereof, or by eager revolutionaries who seek the Divine in a red banner of humanity, hoping to use art for the common good as if it were a loaf of bread or a pair of boots —needless to say, in vain, for a purpose does not become sacred merely by virtue of being noble.”
“So why continue to paint at all if art is dead?” the bearded man said, scowling.
“Christ was also dead once,” replied the other sternly. “It is precisely art’s resurrection that must become your mission as artists today.”
Loudly they cheered, and toasted each other’s health and palettes, and drank, and passed around the bottle, and drank again, and someone went off to find a jazz record a friend had just brought from Prague, and someone else was beginning to talk about a book of reproductions of some crazy Spanish artist he liked; but amid the general exuberance, no one had thought to ask the most important question—the only question really, as I saw it.
“How?” I said in an undertone, and when no one heard me, asked again, this time shouting over the noise, “How can we resurrect art? What are we supposed to
Immediately everyone fell silent and turned toward me, perhaps trying to recall exactly who I was and who had brought me here—and just then the front door opened, and my long-awaited acquaintance walked in. Seeing them all looking at me, he said happily, with that radiant gift of a smile he possessed, “Ah, good, you’ve all met Tolya already.” And instantly, amid the erupting shouts of “Finally!” and “Levka, come here!” and “Lev Borisovich, do us the honor of accepting this glass of disgusting home brew!” my momentous question was forgotten.
Or rather, not forgotten but postponed, for after that exulted, inebriated night, I too became a regular at Yastrebov’s place. And all through the spring of 1956 we met at least weekly, and sometimes more often, and
