Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Savitsky bought his first Volkov paintings a decade after the artist died. This acquisition inspired Savitsky to travel around Uzbekistan looking for “art that the history of our times condemned to obscurity.”

  But art isn’t always condemned to obscurity because it’s subversive. Sometimes, it fades into obscurity because it’s not that great.

  I knew things wouldn’t last forever with Anton long before we start handing back copies of each other’s keys and making threats we don’t quite have the courage to follow through on.

  I’ve gotten good at explaining him to people. “Tell me about your boyfriend,” they say, and I reply, “Well, he’s from Belarus,” and they quickly mask the look of concern that flickers across their faces. “But he went to high school and college in the U.S.,” I continue, and then they relax, because this proves to them that he has another way to live in the U.S. legally and that he isn’t scheming to use me for a green card. They ask me what he does and I just cut to the juicy stuff, which is Elena and Vadik, because it’s better to just get that out of the way. I explain that Anton and Elena are getting divorced, and they give me a look, like they’ve heard that before. And I know what they mean, but I also know that Anton and Elena really will get divorced. The only thing I don’t know is that it will happen a few months after Anton and I break up.

  It’s a lot of explaining for something that never seems that complicated in the moment. The commute is annoying and their shower is broken. I keep a baby pair of slippers in my apartment for Vadik. But mostly, I’m happy.

  My guide’s name is Gulmara. She’s quiet and thoughtful, and she knows the history of the museum and its paintings with an obsessive attention I’ve never achieved outside of the biographical details of members of ’90s boy bands.

  Before we enter the collection, she makes me leave all of my belongings in a locker.

  “Can I bring this?” I ask, holding up my phone.

  She shakes her head.

  “This?” I hold out a notebook and pen.

  She considers, then decides it’s allowed.

  The museum’s director recently resigned in the midst of a murky controversy. The government alleged that she’d been forging paintings from the archives and selling the originals to wealthy collectors. Her supporters allege that the government fabricated this story in order to push her out, so that it could quietly implement this exact scheme.

  Gulmara does not tell me any of this, but she does, in one rare, unguarded moment, declare how much she admires the former director, her former boss, and she says this with such fierce intensity that I would want to believe her even if evidence pointed to the contrary.

  Paintings cover the walls from floor to ceiling. No inch of wall space is wasted. In some rooms, the art feels less on display and more just really jammed in there. There’s a sense of urgency, a need to exhibit as much of the collection as humanly possible.

  After his Volkov purchases, Savitsky spent the next 20 years traveling around Uzbekistan in search of paintings that had been hidden in attics or stashed in the back of closets for fear of getting their creators labeled counterrevolutionaries. Sometimes, the paintings’ “subversive” qualities were limited to abstract forms. Other works were more explicit in their critique of communism, the Soviet government, and the way of life in the USSR.

  Savitsky undoubtedly saved some work that would otherwise have been destroyed, but he might have just set out to collect paintings, not preserve a piece of a modernist movement. Unapproved work that couldn’t be shown in official galleries might have been easy to acquire. So could paintings that no one else wanted.

  When people say he hid the paintings in the desert, they usually don’t mention that the desert was also where he lived. Perhaps he brought the art to Nukus to keep it safe, or perhaps he brought them there because it was the most obvious choice.

  But now I’m starting to question how much his motives matter.

  Oleg’s parents once told me a story about reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famed Soviet writer who lived in exile and published works criticizing the Soviet regime. One of his most famous, The Gulag Archipelago, told the story of the brutal gulags where prisoners, intellectuals, and innocent civilians were sent to toil in work camps that claimed over one million lives.

  Oleg’s family, like most in the USSR, was aware of Stalinist repressions because of a personal connection. An uncle who had risen through the ranks in local government had been executed in a political purge. In the relative thaw that followed the Stalinist period, Soviet officials acknowledged that Stalin had gone too far, but few ordinary citizens knew the extent or specifics of the gulag system.

  The Gulag Archipelago detailed the horrors of the prison labor camps and quickly became a sensation when it was published abroad in 1973. The book was of course banned in the Soviet Union, but Oleg’s father had a friend with a father high up in the Communist Party, and she was able to get them a copy of the book. The only catch was, they could only keep it for one night.

  “We sat down with my parents at the kitchen table,” Oleg’s mother told me, “and we stayed up all night reading it.” They divided the book up into four parts and took turns reading each section. “We would read each piece as fast as we could and then pass it to the next person,” she remembered. “It was all so shocking.”

  Later I mentioned that I couldn’t imagine a book so important to Americans of my generation that we’d stay up all night reading it.

  “For us, it was not even a question,” she said. “We were happy to stay up all night and read, because we wanted to know.”

  Here is an expressive, chaotic canvas in which forms bleed into the shape beside them.

  “It’s a caravan,” Gulmara tells me.

  Here are landscapes, deconstructed; faces, chopped up and reassembled; portraits barely recognizable as such; here are vibrant bursts of color, scenes of daily life; here is a woman, here is a man, here is a mood, idea, intimation. Here is a collection of art that overwhelms the space it’s in; here are portraits, stacked five on top of one another, covering the walls, leaving barely any white space in between, hinting at the hundreds or thousands of more unseen in basement storage.

  Here is the collection’s pièce de résistance. It was painted by a man named Vladimir, or maybe Evgenney, Lysenko, an artist about whom little is known, except that he was arrested and probably died in a mental institution, possibly not because he suffered from mental illness, but because the authorities wanted to keep him from painting.

  The painting is titled The Bull. A secondary title is, apparently, Fascism Is Approaching. It’s hard to find much information on the painting. Some sources use the second title; others only the first. It’s unclear if the artist gave the work its politically charged name, or if that was added later. It’s unclear when it was made. Most of all, it’s unclear why, without the second title, it would be considered so slanderous to the Soviet Union.

  Especially given how openly the other paintings brazenly mock and disparage the powers that were.

  Here is a painting called Drink to the Dregs. Do I see the influence of German expressionism? Look at the caviar label pasted onto the canvas. This was a luxury brand favored by the political elite, who lived private lives of lavish comfort while publicly condemning decadence. Do I see the political critique?

  Here is another canvas, called Capital. A grotesque couple smile in front of a backdrop of floundering workers, the couple’s material comfort apparently built on the backs of others’ labor. Gulmara tells me that the work is only the top half of a larger painting. The bottom is missing.

  Gulmara says that many of the works were painted on top of existing pieces, because, at that time, it was cheaper to buy an old painting than a blank canvas. To get a sense of what was underneath, the museum staff X-rayed the pieces at a hospital in Nukus.

  Some of the paintings compel me to keep standing in front of them after Gulmara finishes her explanation. Others don’t, but sometime
s I pretend to be absorbed and enthralled, because I want Gulmara to feel like I love each painting as deeply as she seems to, that I, too, am reveling in the precise, meticulous details she shares with me.

  I’m trying to discern if these paintings were on the verge of being forgotten because they were forbidden, or because they weren’t particularly memorable. I feel guilty wondering about this, because being here has made me realize how terrifying and difficult and hopeless it must have felt to live through the Stalinist purges.

  Is there such as thing as objective aesthetic value for art made under duress? Does it get graded on a curve? Do the paintings left behind preserve the story of the risk and sacrifice required to make them, and hint at the works that weren’t painted? Would that story have been conveyed if I’d just wandered through the galleries, staring at the paintings unguided?

  Anton occasionally sends me stories after we split. I try not to respond to the e-mails, but I always devour the words. They invariably read like lightly fictionalized accounts of his relationships—some from his past that I recognize, others set in a post-Audrey world that I don’t. The women range in importance from Elena to one-time flings. There’s not even one tiny detail I recognize myself in.

  How am I so absent in his stories? Did I leave so little of an impression on someone who had such an outsized impact on me? Of course, there is a more logical explanation. Why would he send me a story about me? We can be unreliable narrators when we try to tell the stories of things that matter most to us.

  “I would never write about you,” he tells me another time. “I have too much respect for what we had.” I don’t believe him; I assume he’s trying to dissuade me from ever turning him into a character. But also, if you respect something, how can you not try to immortalize it?

  Here is one way to understand the story of Savitksy and the Nukus Museum: a failed artist built a collection of works by artists who similarly failed to gain recognition. Here is another way: a man had a vision to preserve endangered art in the middle of the desert.

  The result is the same. Savitksy put together the world’s second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde work. The only other is the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, a massive collection in a city known for its mind-numbingly massive collections. This makes Savitsky’s accomplishment impressive regardless of how or why it happened. How many private collectors assemble a catalog that rivals that of a state museum of the largest country on Earth? How many fewer did so without access to wealth, by simply persuading artists and their families to give him work that they didn’t want?

  This is where the collection is most vulnerable to criticism. Some argue that Savitsky’s collection dates from a period when the avant-garde was in decline, and that it lacks works from the movement’s most well-known artists. Art critics have said that the pieces in the Nukus Museum are, for the most part, unremarkable.

  But it must have been hard to become remarkable when you couldn’t study abstract techniques in schools or look at the movement’s masters in exhibitions.

  One of the last paintings Gulmara shows me is a bright, happy scene of a family at a picnic. A blanket spreads over the ground, and Gulmara points to the baby in the center of it. She smiles. “That’s me.”

  At first, I’m confused. She feels like a picnic?

  No, no. “My father was one of the artists in the museum,” she tells me.

  The pieces click together.

  “Do you tell everyone on the tour?” I ask her.

  Her smile becomes more mysterious. “Only some.”

  In the end, I’m left with a sense that the museum might mean more to someone who has stayed up all night passing pieces of a book around a table than it would to someone who hasn’t. That Anton’s mother’s work is good in a way that has nothing to do with composition or technical mastery, because it’s something of hers that he has. That hanging a painting on a wall doesn’t erase the pain of losing a parent or knowing a relative was shot for no reason or being told that your work isn’t good enough or having to paint in secret because the government dictates what you can and cannot make. That I don’t know if the majority of these artists set out to make dissident works. That paintings probably don’t change the world or erase the past or save us from being condemned to repeat it. That the $5 tour is always worth it. That sometimes it’s worth taking a taxi to the middle of the desert and coming away without any concrete answers but an interest in trying to understand.

  10

  Camping Beside the Door to Hell (Turkmenistan)

  My first glimpse of Turkmenistan is from the Turkmen embassy on the outskirts of Bishkek, where a silent man in a plaid shirt and reflective sunglasses escorts me through a walled-off compound that houses embassy staff and operations. In the middle of the courtyard sits an empty, uncovered swimming pool.

  My second glimpse of Turkmenistan is from the Turkmen embassy in Dushanbe, where I have to go because my visa application was rejected in Bishkek. A young official with expertly applied eyeliner at the embassy in Dushanbe asks me about my passport as soon as her boss leaves the room. “I’ve heard Americans can travel to many countries,” she says. “Where can you go?”

  The collapse of the Soviet Union brought greater freedoms to most of the nations that emerged from it. Turkmenistan is one of the exceptions. Today, it’s a closed, isolated country, with a government that controls all access to information and fosters a cult of personality.

  I want to visit Turkmenistan because I imagine seeing it with my own eyes will yield even some small understanding of what life is like under these political conditions. I also want to see a crater that’s on fire.

  In 1971, Soviet engineers were surveying for oil in the Karakum desert of Turkmenistan. It wasn’t easy work. Temperatures could fluctuate wildly, soaring above ninety degrees Fahrenheit at midday and then dropping below freezing at night. With the exception of a small nearby village, the surrounding area was empty, with nothing but sand stretching out in every direction.

  The desert had once been home to bands of nomadic Turkmen tribes renowned and feared for their ferocity in battle. Hardened by desert living and centuries of conflict with neighboring empires, the Turkmens were widely regarded as the wildest Central Asians, among the last to be subdued by the Russian Empire.

  Now, the tsar’s socialist successors believed they’d found oil in the desert they’d once conquered. A rig and base camp had been installed to investigate the sand that earlier surveys suggested was covering a massive oil field.

  The engineers soon realized that the site contained natural gas, not oil, and that they’d set up shop on top of a gas pocket. Not long after, the earth under the rig suddenly collapsed, the desert opening its mouth to swallow the equipment and work site. Miraculously, no one was hurt. But the newly formed crater was now leaking gas, and fumes were spreading across the surrounding terrain.

  Fearing that the leak could pollute a nearby settlement, the engineers decided to light a fire to burn it off, which sounds dangerous but I guess is standard practice on gas fields. They figured all the gas would burn off within a few days, a few weeks, at most.

  What they started wasn’t so much a fire as a conflagration. Flames shot up into the air, ten, twenty, maybe thirty feet above the crater. You couldn’t go anywhere near it. It burned for weeks, and then months.

  It’s still going today, more than forty years later.

  These days, it’s known as the Darvaza Crater, or, if you’re feeling dramatic, the Door to Hell. People come from all over the world to see it: from Japan, from America, from Japan, from Russia, from Japan, from Germany, from Japan. They say the best way to see the crater is to spend the night camping beside it. I want to go. But there’s no way, I tell myself, that I am camping.

  I, of course, end up camping beside the crater.

  There are two ways to get to Turkmenistan. You can book a tour with a state-licensed operator, which comes with a state-licensed guide-slash-chaperone, or you can appl
y for a five-day transit visa. I opt for the latter for many reasons, the most important being that I want to see the “real” Turkmenistan. I don’t want a guide following me around, spouting government rhetoric and making sure I don’t see anything I’m not supposed to. I want to have real conversations with real people unafraid to tell me what they really think.

  But not booking a guide means I’m on my own for getting to the fiery crater in the middle of the desert, and finding a ride is turning out to be harder than I expected.

  I spent the past week e-mailing dozens of Turkmen tourist agencies, but it’s the end of the tourism season, and everyone is either shuttered for the winter or exorbitantly expensive.

  A mile-wide strip of no-man’s-land runs along the Uzbek-Turkmen border, and a guy with a minivan is driving me and a few men to the Turkmen side. When he hears I don’t have a way to get to the crater, he brightens and tells me he knows someone. He pulls out his phone and starts texting while driving, which I normally condemn but can’t bring myself to speak up about, given that the only other living creatures around are cacti, and none of them are driving.

  The first thing I see in Turkmenistan is a border outpost whose façade is adorned with a giant portrait of the president. He flashes us a welcoming, benevolent smile.

  When you hear that a country hangs pictures of the president from the top of its buildings, you don’t quite get a sense of how sinister this will seem in real life. After all, celebrities wink at us from the top of Times Square, imploring us to buy watches and carbonated beverages. We resent this blatant commercialization, but let me tell you: it’s much creepier when it’s a politician. You feel like he’s watching you, keeping tabs on what you’re up to. More than anything, you realize that someone who can put his face on the side of a government building probably has few things he can’t do.

  In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, granting Turkmenistan independence. As in other post-Soviet states, a former high-ranking party official was elected president of the new country of Turkmenistan. His name was Saparmurat Niyazov, and he quickly realized he had few rivals.