Soon after moving to Moscow in 1985, I mentioned to a friend at a cocktail party that I wanted to be introduced to the Soviet art scene. "You're in luck," she said, dragging me around a table laden with caviar and vodka, past three ambassadors and various other diplomats hunched over Soviet champagne and up to a slightly stooped man with graying hair, dressed in a gleaming blue suit and a red tie.
"Meet Ilya," I was told as I reached out my hand. "He's our one-man Soho." Ilya Glazynov, as it turned out, was known less for his paintings than his flamboyant lifestyle. It was built around a silver Mercedes, a coterie of girls, and all the other trappings of fame in today's Russia. When he did paint, he specialized in flattering oil portraits of Leonid Brezhnev, the former Communist Party boss, and his cronies. And he was, by far, the best known artist in Russia.
By the time I left the Soviet Union four years later, Brezhnev had been blacklisted, Glazynov dethroned, and the arts scene, like the rest of the country, was in the midst of a revolution.
Suddenly, painters who had never been heard of emerged with a force that seemed volcanic. Prices rose accordingly. In a matter of weeks Grisha Brushkin's Fundamental Lexicon shot up in value from a few hundred dollars to more than $400,000. In one dramatic stroke a whole new generation of Soviet artists had moved to center stage.
Over the course of my four years as a journalist in Moscow, I befriended a few members of that generation. Together we ushered in the new thaw, the era of perestroika. We shared vodka and black bread. We lamented the death of Andy Warhol and toasted the coming of glasnost. I watched fame touch and change my artist friends, one by one. I bought their paintings, too, a collection that had burgeoned to twenty-two pieces by the time I returned to Washington. This article is about those painters, the times we spent together, and the works of art they bequeathed me.
I do not remember how or when I first met Kostya Zvesdotchotov. But I remember where. It was in a big dilapidated building on a side street in central Moscow. The building had been taken over by a group of artists and turned into studios. I used to go there, mostly in search of somebody to talk to, on evenings and weekends. It was a grim place, so grim that I would burn out a whole book of matches stumbling through the cavernous, unlit hallways, looking for the right doorway.
I knew immediately when I found the right place. There was always tea-drinking, cigarette smoking, and people talking. And, invariably, there was a guy in the corner telling jokes. He was a short wiry Russian who had oversized ears and wore bow ties. He seemed to be forever making up riddles or long intricate stories on the spot, stories that never failed to send the whole room rolling across the floor in laughter.
That was Kostya. He was what Russians called a shootnik, a jokester. As a clown he was a natural. In life, he seemed to pick up just where Nicolai Gogol, the nineteenth-century Russian satirist, left off. He had a Gogolian imagination, a knack for old Slavic myths, and a gift for storytelling. When he combined the three, he was at his
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