everything is true if you say so
This Week in Reading
Other Russias by Victoria Lamasko
As most of you know, I studied Russian history in college. In many ways this felt like a kind of arbitrary choice. Russia seemed interesting, so I took a couple classes about it and then took a couple more classes and then wrote a 55 page thesis about communal apartments in the Soviet Union. It was a time in my life when I wanted to deep-dive into something, when commitment and direction seemed synonymous with each other. I needed to pick something, and there was Russian history, there to be picked.
Near the end of my degree, and in the years since I've graduated, I've managed to piece together what initially drew me to Russia. Like everyone else born in the early 90s, I sat through many VHS screenings of Anastasia. I had a tiny plastic Anastasia doll, in the yellow dress, permanently frozen as if she was running down a staircase. In elementary school I read a biography of the real Anastasia and wrote a book report. Like all elementary school reading assignments, this one came with an arbitrary art component. I made a mask of the last Russian princess, complete with a frilly doily collar and long curls made from gold ribbon (the real Anastasia was blonde). In my high school history class we spent all of senior year discussing single party states (I have many, many, criticisms of my high school, but the history curriculum is not one of them). For one of our big papers I chose to write about the Soviet show trials of Trotsky and his supporters. Another choice that at the time felt arbitrary.
But now I can see that my interest in Russian history was simply an offshoot from my lifelong fascination with truth and fiction. I read a lot of fiction and I read a lot of academic press. I've always loved how literature, seemingly conjured from thin air, can stir the most real of human emotions. History, while compelling and true and factual, rarely affects me in the same way. I am always looking for the middle ground between fiction and reality. Trying to find the sweet spot between the imagined future, some misremembered past, and actual fact; a narrative that feels truer than the truth does.
No place does this better than Russia. Russia is part myth, part reality. Narrative matters in Russia. Throughout its history, Russia has been telling itself very specific stories about what it is and what it will be. Whether that is the divine rule of the Romanovs or the radical equality of communism, Russia is a place where ideology often trumps reality. I don’t remember the details of this story, so don’t fact check me on this, but one of my professors told us about some fraudulent tsar who claimed to be the long lost son of the now dead Ivan the Terrible. The imposter hung a portrait of Ivan in his military barrack and would show it to people, and was like, “hey, I am totally the real tsar, look at this picture of my dad, why would I have this painting if it wasn’t my dad?” AND THEY BELIEVED HIM. AND HE BECAME THE TSAR OF RUSSIA. Russian history is bananas. In Russia, you can tell a lie until it becomes true.
Russia chooses a storyline, and then forces the country to see it through to the end, no matter the consequences. (This is also how I lead my own life, for better or worse.) The state sponsored story is frequently at odds with the day-to-day reality of Russian life, but that only seems to make them double down on it. But this narrative also seeps into public life, filtering the way ordinary Russians view themselves, their country, and the broader world. If you believe something to be true, and make all of your decisions around that set of facts, it hardly matters if it actually is. The actual history of Russia is made up of these conflicting stories. State propaganda and urban legend and oral histories that are all at war with one another, yet somehow coexist. It is better not to try to ferret out a singular truth.
That is what works so well about Other Russias. It's not quite a graphic novel—if anything, it is closer to photojournalism. Each page is a tiny micro-story. A portrait of a Russian truck driver, or a self employed prostitute, or an orthodox protestor, with a brief paragraph or two about their lives. Her illustrations are wonderful as stand alone drawings, but they also seem like the perfect choice for an oral history of Russia. Drawing is perhaps the most imprecise way of documenting reality, but maybe that makes it more honest. It is aware of its limitations at representation, and it reminds us that all forms of representation are flawed. This is a non-fiction book, full of tiny detailed vignettes of Russian lives, but it also a gesture, an impression, a singular perspective on a bigger whole. Drawing a portrait is also an intensely intimate act. There is so much tenderness embedded into every page of this book.
The book focuses on what Lamasko describes as forgotten people. Protestors, juvenile delinquents, Central Asian women enslaved in Moscow, rural schoolchildren. The book is wide in scope, but Victoria Lamasko grants each subject just a page or so. She doesn't claim to tell us the whole story, doesn't attempt to give us more than a sketch of someone else’s life. I studied Russian history for years, read dozens of books, wrote pages upon pages of historical analysis; but still, I don’t feel like I understand Russia at all. No history is exhaustive; we never can truly tell the whole story.
I studied Russian history for the same reason that I moved to Alaska, and to some extent, for the same reason I moved to Los Angeles. I chose these places because I have created myths for them, and I want to see how that myth will actually fit once I get there.
I have not been to Russia yet. It is still all idea, no reality. When I got to Alaska, all of my ideas of Alaska were immediately supplanted by the Alaska in front of me, stamped out by those big mountains that now wallpaper the inside of my brain. Right now everything that I've thought and felt about Russia floats in sort of a nebulous cloud. You can probably tell, reading this.
Studio-ing
“Three Secrets,” (2017) oil on canvas, wood, gold leaf
Been slowly chipping away at this series of fake paintings. Lately, I’ve been interested in how vulnerability can be used as a type of shield. Things are only meaningful within their proper contexts. I’ve been experimenting with stripping these contexts away, seeing what things are when they stand by themselves. If you are given the punch line, but you don’t know the joke, is it still funny? If you take a window out of the wall, is it still a window? Or is it a framed piece of scenery?
With these not-sculptures, I want to let you in on a secret without giving anything away. I made stretcher bars from frame stock and gold leafed them. Stretched and primed, they look like ordinary canvases, their golden skeleton obscured from view. I then proceeded to make an entire painting on top of it. Finally, I cut the painting away. The ornate framework is revealed, but you also never get to see the painting. It is half of a secret. I have given you nothing, by giving you everything.
Further Reading:
My favorite Russia-related book is Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya Von Bremzen. I know that this is a mash up of all of my specific, hyper-niche interests, but I am going to recommend it to everyone anyways.
Fiction wise I love love loved The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. One of those short story collections where everything puzzle pieces together, which is my absolute favorite type of book to read.