The brief encounter with Mrs. Ferris felt like a momentary reprieve. As soon as I gave her my first and last name, the elderly Mrs. Ferris identified me as the author of articles about Konstantin Vaginov and Leonid Dobychin. True, I’d published one of them in the Slavic journal Russian Literature, which had been coming out in Amsterdam for years and was regarded as the premiere place to publish Slavic-studies articles. But this was so long ago that even I could no longer remember the details. Yes, in my former life I’d been a “Slavist” but only my rare participation in gatherings such as this one brought this back to me. And, true, after a while I’d realized I lacked the motivation for a serious academic career. But I was, at least, powerfully curious at first. The times fed this, it was such a different time from our life today, the Wall was still definitively dividing Europe and this only piqued my curiosity to peer at life beyond the Wall, behind the Iron Curtain. Among other things, this was also the BG age, when my efforts, and those of others, to re-discover forgotten literary works came with a righteous thrill at rescuing texts and their authors from the jaws of Stalinist oblivion. At the time I believed there to be vortices in the history of culture. One such vortex was the Russian avant-garde. It was an explosion of new art and new thinking, but before they’d had a chance to bring it to its fullness, Stalin’s iron lid clamped down on their efforts as did the Second World War, and then long years of neglect followed. Too many things happened over a short period of time: one of the greatest moments in which art flourished, yet one of the most savage scourges of artistic minds in world cultural history. Human flesh was pinioned by inconceivable hardships, right and left the reaper mowed his deadly swath.
So it transpired that my articles about Vaginov and Dobychin were among the first in the world of Russian studies to rediscover and re-evaluate these two forgotten writers of the Russian avant-garde. I knew that someone bitten by the rediscovery bug would be likely to remember such a detail.
“I, too, have always had a fondness for the avant-gardists,” said Mrs. Ferris, modestly.
Irina Ferris was a memorable name especially because it sounded so much like a well-designed pseudonym. Mrs. Ferris used a cane. She spied the question in my eyes and told me how an impatient young man had knocked her down the stairs a few years before in the London Underground. He’d been rushing up, she’d been on her way down, but she’d made the mistake of using the left side instead of the right, which so infuriated the young man that he punched her and she lost her balance, fell, and fractured her hip. The operation was, apparently, mishandled. Ever since she’d been suffering from stabs of pain when she walked. She told me she was a widow; her husband, David, had also been a Slavic scholar, a linguist, but he’d died a few years before and their sons, twins, had moved to Australia where David’s brother lived. She almost never saw them, especially after the bad fall. She lived in London. She’d come to the conference at Asen’s urging to spice up her otherwise solitary routine. She had no right, however, to complain about anything because she’d never made much of a career for herself, she’d spent most of her life as a professor’s wife, though, true, she did teach Russian language and literature now and then, but too little for her teaching to be deemed a career. She no longer had anybody left in Russia, as it was she’d only ever had her mother. She’d never known her father; he was gone before she was born, and her mother died soon after she left for England. No, she no longer had the desire, or the need for that matter, to go back “there” ever again.
There was an air of neglect about Mrs. Ferris, which clearly signaled that she no longer cared a whit about her outward appearance. She wasn’t exactly untidy, but behind her trailed the subtle odor of an unaired wardrobe. When I put together her age, what student life in Moscow had been like—something I’d experienced myself, though, admittedly, only for a few months, a dozen years or so after her time there but coinciding loosely—this helped me better understand her biography, the encounter with the soft-spoken, reserved Englishman, the marriage to a foreigner that gave her “a way out.” Those were days when foreigners were pursued, when young men and women, and even the middle-aged, were on the prowl, looking to trade in the non-convertible currency of their Russian life for a more convertible one. Foreigners were a sure ticket to a better life. And the foreigners often showed little or no reluctance at the prospect of leveraging their privileged status, either consciously or unconsciously, to garner profit, whether emotional, sexual, moral, or, sometimes, even financial. This was a time of lively commerce, all sorts of commodities were traded: dreams of freedom, ideas about better and worse worlds, self-confidence. Mrs. Ferris, on the other hand, was not “in pursuit.” She was one of the generation of Russians for whom setting aside a month’s salary to purchase a black-market copy of The Master and Margarita was a perfectly acceptable choice.
Mrs. Ferris and I went to a teashop not far from the conference hall for tea and English scones with raspberry jam and clotted cream. I can’t say Mrs. Ferris was riveting company, but then again nothing about her had promised riveting. I recall two notable details. First, she said her two sons reminded her of camels. This curious remark, coming as it was from a parent about her own children, was most unusual. It was also a literary reference. This is how Gapa Guzhva, in a story by Isaac Babel, spoke of her daughters: they, too, looked rather a lot like camels.
Second, Mrs. Ferris mentioned living in South London; she’d moved there after her husband’s death once she’d sold their home; life was less expensive there. Perhaps the neighborhood was a little less safe, but there was nothing untoward left that could happen to her.
“I’m far too old for anybody to come after me; I’ve lost all there is to lose,” she said, perhaps a little too grimly.
She spoke of her little garden that she so enjoyed and the foxes that often dropped by . . .
“Foxes in London?” I asked.
“Oh, yes! Didn’t you know?”
“I never knew foxes actually came knocking at the door . . .”
“Not in the center of town, of course . . . But in my neighborhood, yes . . .”
“And, what do you do with them?”
She didn’t say . . .
“Foxes are loners. They like deserted places . . .” she added, a little absently.
Then we said our warm goodbyes. It never occurred to me or to her to exchange email addresses. I didn’t even ask how this woman, who needed a cane to get about, would manage on her way back to London from Nottingham. Asen was the one who saw to that.
5.
Salieri
A young man attended an OBERIU performance at the Institute for the History of the Arts in Leningrad in 1928. Some thirty years later, this same man would be beset by flocks of Soviet and foreign Slavic scholars imploring him, in vain, to tell them, as one of the few surviving witnesses from the time of the Russian avant-garde, what really happened that evening. The man was Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev. Khardzhiev graduated from the Odessa Law Faculty at the young age of twenty-two. Bios about him tell us that he is the author of the story “Yanyichar” [“Janissary”], the biography Nedolgaia zhizn' Pavla Fedotova [The Brief Life of Pavel Fedotov] about a Russian painter from the first half of the nineteenth century, and sheaves of “experimental” and humorous verses. In the late 1920s he moved from Odessa to Leningrad (later he’d live in Moscow), where—drawn by the fascinating circle of artists—he rubbed shoulders with many of this innovative crowd, including art theoreticians (formalists Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky), writers, and artists. His most abiding friendship was, apparently, with Aleksei Kruchenykh, a zaumnik and author (with V. Khlebnikov) of the libretto for the futuristic opera Pobeda nad solntsem [Victory over the Sun]. Khardzhiev also made the acquaintance of Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and many others.
Nikolai Khardzhiev and Kazimir Malevich met at the OBERIU event. The encounter was a watershed moment. “It was the painters who shaped me, not the poet
s or the philosophers. As far as my feel for art is concerned, I owe the most to Malevich. I did socialize with Tatlin, but this I hid from Malevich. They didn’t tolerate each other, so I had to hide from each of them that I spent time with the other. Fortunately, one of them lived in Moscow while the other was in Leningrad,” he said.††† Khardzhiev’s words exude the confidence of a person who controls and steers the game; the artists are there for him, not he for the artists. Malevich himself died seven years after they met, but Khardzhiev would stay profoundly linked to the artist, in his own way of course, until his own death.
Nikolai Khardzhiev loved fraternizing with artists—he knew how they breathed, how to get under their skin, he was always eager to lend a helping hand. At some point it struck him that an explosively talented pack of painters and writers had no one to serve as their guiding light, their archivist, their devotee, their priest, adviser, and patron, and this at a time when, as Khardzhiev put it, one could hear “the crack of splitting skulls in the air,” when people were like “worms in a jar.” Khardzhiev transformed his amateur love of art into a mission, he became an archivist, collector, guardian of Russian avantgarde art. He was cunning and sly, he knew what tone to take with weeping widows and a painter’s heirs; he knew, for instance, to ask if he might make copies of certain documents and then forget to return the originals; he knew to offer to store somebody’s canvasses for them and then forget to give them back.‡‡‡ Nadezhda Mandelstam described him as a “son of a bitch,” a combination of “eunuch and marauder,” a body snatcher. His appetites, power, and expertise grew, writers gave him signed copies of their books, entrusted him with editing and proofing their work, delivered manuscripts, sketches, projects, and finished canvasses to him, either for safekeeping or as gifts, grateful that somebody in those dark days was willing to take care of them. In many later newspaper articles and books, descriptions of his activities were couched in flattering terms such as scholar, textologist, historian of new literature and art, and collector.
Was Nikolai Khardzhiev the Salieri of Russian avant-garde art? According to what we’re told by collector Mikhail Davidov in his book Razgovory sa sosedom [Conversations with a Neighbor], Khardzhiev “was a Mozart his whole life. Everything N. K. touched became a precious wellspring for the ‘music of life.’ Whether it was verse, image, word, or an ordinary, daily situation. N. K. as scholar—this was just one of his many talents. He ennobled scholarship with his resolve to be a scholar. With simple generosity he ‘indebted [all of us] with his very existence.’”
The man who “ennobled” scholarship and “indebted us with his very existence” did so for nearly a century. If Salieri lived twice as long as Mozart, Khardzhiev lived almost three times as long as most of his contemporaries. He was born in 1903 in Kakhovka (Ukraine) and died in 1996 in Amsterdam. Longevity was Khardzhiev’s advantage. And had he not been so long-lived, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to initiate and contribute to something (as victor or victim, or both) which many newspaper articles referred to as the “theft of the century,” the “perfect crime,” called by those with greater empathy “the tragedy of Nikolai Khardzhiev,” and by others yet, speaking from a post-cold-war perspective, “a tragic flight to freedom.”
Khardzhiev managed to amass an inestimable treasure trove of art. With the fall of the Wall, many objects were suddenly accorded value: T-shirts with Stalin’s slogans and face, cheap souvenir coffee cups with Malevich designs, memoirs, documents, letters, paintings, chests, military uniforms, communist medals, Malevich paintings . . . Many collectors crossed over to became “body snatchers,” there were those who hit the jackpot, others who didn’t. A few of the artists, such as Daniil Kharms, were tossed up to the surface in the collective gasp of freedom—quick to become a powerful geyser—that conferred on him a cult status that reached across the borders of Russian language and literature with speed and success. Even I, visiting the newly opened and renovated Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to see an exhibition of Malevich’s work from the Nikolai Khardzhiev collection, could not resist purchasing a souvenir at the Museum shop: an eyeglasses case with a Malevich design and a Suprematist lens cloth.
Whether Khardzhiev was a Mozart or a Salieri of Russian avant-garde art is a question of taste, but love for his contemporaries, the luminaries of the Russian avant-garde age, was certainly not his strong suit. Irina Vrubel’-Golubkina included an interview with Nikolai Khardzhiev in her book Razgovory v Zerkale [Conversations in the Mirror]. She interviewed him in early 1991 in Moscow, two years before Khardzhiev moved permanently to the Netherlands, and five years before he died.
Of his contemporary, celebrated architect and painter Vladimir Tatlin, Khardzhiev says that Tatlin had a “strange personality,” that he was a “maniac,” that he feared “somebody would steal his professional secrets.” Khardzhiev describes Tatlin as a “wily monster,” a “diabolical finagler,” a man who despised Malevich with a “fierce loathing.” Khardzhiev describes Aleksandr Tufanov, zaumnik, as an “ugly,” “lame,” and “hunchbacked old man,” who, admittedly, was not entirely “uninteresting.” His friend Nikolai Suetin, the Suprematist, was described by Khardzhiev as a “psychopath,” an “unberable man with a million personal problems.” Marc Chagall had a “God-help-us personality,” he was “spiteful,” a bad teacher who was incapable of teaching anybody anything but how to draw “flying Jews.” Aleksander Rodchenko, the respected photographer, was an “amazing dreck of a man,” a “ridiculous figure.” Pavel Filonov was “not a painter,” but a “lunatic and a mindless maniac.” Even Lissitzky was “no painter.” Khardzhiev socialized with Anna Akhmatova and though he referred to her as a “fine poet,” her poetry was not to his liking. Osip Mandelstam was “ingenious,” but not “great.” Vladimir Nabokov was “overrated,” and, as far as poetry was concerned, a “talentless graphomaniac.” He stole the ending for his novel Priglashenie na kazn’ [Invitation to a Beheading] from Andrei Platonov’s story “Epifanskie shlyuzy” [“The Epifan Locks”]. As far as Andrei Platonov was concerned, Khardzhiev “cannot bear to read his prose,” because of the over-abundance of “empty rhetoric” and “natural thinking,” though he describes Platonov as a “decent and wise man.” Nikolay Oleynikov, close to the OBERIUTs, was a poor poet, a “comedian.” Alexander Vvedensky was a “cardsharp,” a “gambler,” who wrote shoddy children’s verse for money. Evgeny Schwartz was a “fool,” the “lowest of the low,” in general the “Schwartzes craved possessions,” they “collected porcelain” and “all manner of rubbish.” This interview is rife with hints of anti-Semitism, overt misogyny, and a shocking lack of empathy toward the people Khardzhiev called his friends.
Khardzhiev was visited in 1977 by a Swedish scholar, author of a Mayakovsky biography. With Khardzhiev’s blessing he took four of Malevich’s paintings from Khardzhiev’s collection out of the Soviet Union through a diplomatic channel. Their agreement was that the money from the sale would be waiting for Khardzhiev when he emigrated. The Soviet authorities did not allow Khardzhiev to emigrate. Where did the four Maleviches go? The scholar sold one, supposedly, to the Center Pompidou in Paris, the second he donated to the Stockholm Museum of Contemporary Art, the third found its way to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, while all trace has been lost of the fourth. Or has it? Those who work on this sort of thing will know. Mysterious are the ways that artworks travel.
A new opportunity to leave the Soviet Union arose some fifteen years later, in the form of another Slavic scholar, this time from the Netherlands. He was an expert on Velimir Khlebnikov and invited Nikolai Khardzhiev to Amsterdam. This time Khardzhiev imposed conditions: he asked for permanent residence and the possibility of exporting his entire collection. In the process, he promised that after his death he’d leave the paintings to Amsterdam museums and his rich literary archive to the Slavic Department at Amsterdam University. In September 1993, Kristina Gmurzynska, proprietor of a high-end art gallery in Cologne, Mathias Rostorfer, the director of the gallery, and the
scholar all arrived in Moscow. Nikolai Khardzhiev signed a contract. The contract stipulated that Gmurzynska would take six paintings of which she’d sell two and place the other four in storage, and Khardzhiev would be given two and a half million dollars upon his arrival in Amsterdam. Khardzhiev and his wife Lidia Chaga arrived in Amsterdam in November 1993.
Three months later at Sheremetyevo, the Moscow airport, an Israeli citizen, Dmitry Jakobson, was detained and his large number of suspiciously bulky bags were inspected. In his luggage they found Velimir Khlebnikov’s manuscripts, Kazimir Malevich’s letters, Osip Mandelstam’s and Anna Akhmatova’s papers, and precious documents pertaining to Russian Futurism. Jakobson was released, the documents were confiscated. Among them was also the Galerie Gmurzynska contract. And meanwhile, as this international scandal was exploding, the remaining paintings and the archive—which Kristina Gmurzynska had already brought out—arrived in Amsterdam where they were stowed away in a safe. Khardzhiev and Chaga later claimed that many items were missing, and for this they blamed the scholar, who, they said, had access to the safe.
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