Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

If moving to England was the beginning of my jubilant exile, my removal to Moscow was its apotheosis. My high school glee club trip had been canceled thanks to the invasion of Afghanistan. The family trip to the Soviet Union we planned some years later was canceled at the last minute thanks to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So much of my favorite literature was Russian that like Chekhov’s renowned sisters, I had taken to asking, plaintively, when I would ever get to Moscow. In 1988, I was working for the British monthly Harpers & Queen as arts correspondent, and Sotheby’s was planning its first auction of contemporary Soviet art. After looking at the advance materials, I had concluded that terrible art was being hyped to wealthy collectors in a scheme of cynical exploitation. I proposed writing a tell-all article about the jet-set tomfoolery of the whole sorry affair.

Then I went to Moscow. My third day there, I had planned to interview a group of artists who had studios in a squat at Furmanny Lane, and my translator failed to show. I didn’t want to be rude, so I went to their studios by myself. They indicated that I could hang out for a bit. At first, there wasn’t much communication; I spoke no Russian and they spoke no English. A few hours later, someone came by who spoke French, which I speak poorly, so we made some headway; a few hours after that, someone came by who spoke English. But the gift, though I didn’t know it at the time, was those hours of being unable to communicate verbally. It gave me time to watch the artists interact. As they showed their work to one another, I saw that they were getting things from it that I wasn’t. Later, I learned that the artists had designed their work to appear banal to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the KGB, but had filled it with hidden meanings. The key to understanding those meanings lay in the personal relationships among the artists, none of whom expected to exhibit to a larger audience. The work was full of inside jokes. More important, it reflected a deep mysticism: these artists believed they were safeguarding integrity in the face of a regime that was out to undermine truth itself.

If my translator had come that morning, I would never have recognized any of that. The West was curious about these artists; I soon understood that they were just as curious about the West and lacked a point of reference, all interchange having been forbidden. I entered their orbit knowing a bit about the Western art world, and they wanted the guidance I could provide. Shockingly unmoored from familiarity, I didn’t know how to make sense of their world, but they were kind to me as a mutual coherence slowly emerged.

The following summer, I returned to Moscow for a month of research. I remember sitting at Heathrow Airport in a panic. I wanted to see my Russian friends; I had decided to write my first book about them; yet I felt a tinge of that dread of unfamiliarity that had overcome me in Morocco four years earlier. My sense of myself was still fragile and depended on the constant reassurance that only familiarity affords. Everything in Moscow was different: what I ate, where I slept, what we talked about.

I started out living in a dacha with a group of German artists, but ended up camping out somewhat apprehensively in the Furmanny Lane squat. I considered myself an observer but came to understand that my artist friends considered me a participant in whatever was happening—both because lives are changed by being recorded, and because the presence of an interloper is never neutral. More than a hundred artists were living in the building by then. Though there were toilets in various locations, only one bathroom, at the far side of the courtyard, was fully functional. Unlike the artists, I bathed every day. I borrowed a fuchsia terry-cloth bathrobe from the painter Larisa Rezun-Zvezdochetova. Since Larisa is not quite five feet tall, the robe hung rather weirdly on my lanky frame. A Russian documentary, released a few years later, about the art world in that late Soviet period includes overhead footage of my daily trek across the courtyard in Larisa’s bathrobe as a kind of punctuation to mark the passing days.