St Petersburg

The Leningrad neorealists were early Russian beatniks and led an ascetic life (their rooms held only books and records) with a tendency to psychedelic experimentation. Arefyev and Shagin slept in cemetery crypts and lived on the deposits of bottles and cans that they collected. They did not even try to reach an audience and exhibited publicly for the first time at the December 1974 exhibit of Leningrad’s unofficial art at the culture club of the Kirov Plant.

The authorities reluctantly agreed to this exhibit under pressure from the growing international publicity around Russian nonconformist artists and in the hope of compromising the underground once and for all. Announcing that they would not allow paintings that were “anti-Soviet, pornographic, or religious,” the overseers ended up permitting the exhibition of close to two hundred works by fifty-two painters, but only for four days.

Given the total absence of advertising, no one expected that, under the vigilant eyes of police units, long lines would form before dawn, lines of people eager to learn about nonconformist art in Leningrad. They were hustled into the building in groups and given only fifteen minutes to see the entire exhibit. And yet they had time to see the canvas of Igor Sinyavin, where they were invited to sign their name with a marker; the conceptual presentation—an iron nail in a board—by Yevgeny Rukhin, who died in a suspicious fire a few years later; and the canvas by Vadim Rokhlin, in the middle of which was a mirror framed by four aggressive male figures. (Another nonfigurative painter of the period, Yevgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, refused to exhibit his works out of sheer contrariness.)111

Those four days in December were important in Leningrad’s modern cultural history because they were the first time that the Leningrad underground surfaced, even briefly, and attracted a sympathetic audience. The authorities were furious. One prominent cultural bureaucrat attacked Arefyev and Shagin at the exhibit, shouting, “We don’t need artists like this!”

The stamina and self-dramatizing behavior of the Leningrad bohemia looked back to the futurists and Bakhtin’s “carnival” and forward to the early 1980s appearance of a group called Mitki. The name was the nickname of one of its founders, the artist Dmitri Shagin (son of the neorealist Vladimir Shagin and therefore a second-generation bohemian). Mitki embodied a stylized, local variant of Western hippie culture with a strong Russian accent. The younger Shagin was joined by the artists Vladimir Shinkarev and Alexander Florensky and his wife, Olga, who revived the craft of “lubok,” folk pictures with clever captions.

The main artistic achievement of the group was its ritualized lifestyle, described by its “ideologist” Shinkarev in a witty manual called Mitki, which was widely circulated in samizdat. According to Shinkarev, Mitki dressed like outcasts: striped sailor shirts (the Soviet bohemian uniform inherited from the Leningrad neorealists), old quilted jackets, Russian felt boots, and mangy fur hats with earflaps. Mitki drank from morning till night, but only the cheapest vodka and rotgut wine, and snacked on pasteurized cheese. When the members drank with outsiders, they used three main strategies for dividing up the alcohol: “share equally” meant each got the same amount; “share like brothers” meant Mitki got the bigger portion; and “share like Christians” meant Mitki got it all.

But even when drunk, Mitki remained friendly and gentle because aggressiveness was organically alien to them, as was the desire to have a career. Mitki communicated primarily through quotations from popular television shows. Still, Shinkarev’s manual quoted Henry David Thoreau and contained references to Brueghel the Elder and to Mozart, whom the author actually considered predecessors of Mitki, adding that “Mozart was Russian.”

Mitki found a like-minded person in the poet and artist Oleg Grigoryev, who composed short, grim poems in the style of the early Leningrad dadaist Oberiuts:

“Well, and how is it on the branch?”

Asked the bird in the cage.

“The branch is like the cage.

But the bars are farther apart.”

Grigoryev’s absurdist and irreverent humor was unacceptable for official publications, and so his poems were circulated primarily in samizdat. But some things were published (just like the Oberiuts in the 1920s and early 1930s) in children’s books, attracting attention thereby and recalling the heyday of children’s literature. Living in slum rooms, which he decorated with masks of his own making, Grigoryev led the typically desperate life of a Leningrad bohemian. Constant confrontations with the authorities, arrests, time in the camps, and heavy bouts of drinking eventually led to the poet’s early death in 1992.