What Am I Doing Here? (19 page)

The three paintings signalled to Costakis the existence of a world he had never suspected. Whenever free from his duties at the Canadian Embassy he hunted for ‘lost' pictures ‘thrown around all the corners of Moscow and Leningrad'. The hunt led to old people who imagined time had passed them by. Some were broken by events and delighted to have even a token of recognition. He rescued canvases that were rolled up or covered with dust. He met Tatlin before he died, ‘the great fool', who designed the
Monument to the Third International,
and lived alone with some hens and a balalaika. He befriended Stepanova, the widow of the comprehensive genius Alexander Rodchenko. He tracked down the friends of the great Malevich. He bought works by the émigrés Kandinsky and Chagall; by Lissitzky, the master typographer, and Gustav Klutsis, the Constructivist designer; by Liubov Popova, the ‘strongest painter of her generation' (‘When she was fighting for art, she was a man; but in bed she was a woman'); and by Ivan Kliun, whose cosmic abstractions anticipate Rothko. With persistence he traced obscure artists who had signed the early manifestos, finding in them qualities their contemporaries had overlooked. And as he accumulated, he pieced together the story of their ideologies, alliances, fantastic projects, squabbles and love affairs; for revolutionary freedom was synonymous with free love.

Costakis was never rich, but he paid every rouble he could afford, sometimes offering two or three times the price asked. (I was told this independently.) The next acquisition was always a real struggle. Some years ago he saved up the money for a car, and his wife was ecstatic about the prospect of picnics in the country. A few days later a Chagall arrived and the car returned mysteriously to the garage for repairs. He asked her, ‘Which do you prefer, the Chagall or the car?' to which she replied, ‘I like the Chagall but . . . ' The Chagall stayed on the wall and the car stayed in the garage.

Costakis's family stayed in Russia through the Revolution and Civil War. His father came from the Ionian island of Zacynthos and had tobacco interests in Southern Russia. His mother, now in her advanced nineties, lives in a dacha outside Moscow and recently discovered amid general surprise that she could speak fluent English after fifty years of not speaking it. Her son is a complex, very likable man of sixty-one, with solid black eyebrows, quizzical eyes and a diffident but disarming smile, belied in photographs. ‘Photographers make me look like a crook.' He is resourceful, yet innocent to the point of unworldliness at the same time. In a good mood he is almost uncontrollably buoyant; when agitated he plays the guitar and sings Russian folksongs in a dark melancholy voice.

He and his irrepressibly cheerful Russian wife live in an apartment at the top of a new white tile and concrete block on the Prospekt Vernadskogo in a far-flung extension of the city. From its windows you overlook an anonymous landscape of tall buildings, spaced far apart and exposed to the wind that whistles in from the forest. In February the snow lay thick. Only the odd tree and black fur-hatted figures, threading along thin muddy paths, punctuated the white space between the buildings.

On his own territory Costakis becomes one of the great personalities of Moscow. He has placarded the walls with pictures, and pinned unframed canvases to doors. Vibrant colours and elemental forms of paintings dance around the walls; the exuberance of the artists themselves seems to linger in the apartment. Too often a visit to a famous art collection entails a display of sterile exhibitionism on the part of the owner; but Costakis infects all comers with his enthusiasm. Some art historians have been less generous with him. With the calculated meanness of scholars they have picked his brains and failed to acknowledge their source.

The rooms vary between the neatness of a museum and the amiable chaos of family life. There are samovars and painted Russian peasant boxes, a collection of icons, Congo fetishes, Chinese tea-kettles and Eskimo carvings from the Siberian Arctic. Occasionally Costakis's son comes home on leave from the Soviet Army. His daughters arrive at all hours with husbands and boyfriends expecting to be fed. It is also home for two large affectionate dogs, a Borzoi and a Kerry Blue Terrier. And as Russia's unofficial Museum of Modern Art it attracts the expert and curious from all countries. The visitors' book begins with an autographed line by Stravinsky and continues with a string of familiar names. The deferential comments of museum directors from East and West underline the collection's uniqueness. A famous Soviet actor writes: ‘One of the best and most alive museums in the world. I am not drunk.'

The existence of the Costakis collection introduces an unfamiliar aspect of life in the Soviet Union. In Western imagination the Marxist State is the declared enemy of private property; and some might suppose that a valuable private art collection merely reveals the inconsistency of Marxism. This is not so. Nothing in the Soviet legal code prevents a man owning pictures any more than it prevents him owning a pair of boots. Nor can one suggest, by way of explanation, that Costakis uses his Greek citizenship to enjoy special rights and immunities. He does not.

There are plenty of private collections in the Soviet Union today and prices are rising. An entry in Costakis's visitors' book which reads, ‘An example to all of us Russian collectors of avant-garde art', tells us he has competition. But two awkward facts remain; that abstract art was banned by 1932; that it has failed to resurface on the walls of museums. The Ministry of Culture, however, is showing signs of a more indulgent attitude. Rumours are in the air of a Soviet Museum of Modern Art. Costakis, who is tender-hearted towards the country of his adoption and will not have her slandered, sees in this a vindication of his life's work. He cannot afford to give them outright, but one day he would like to see his pictures in that museum.

 

The reasons for the ban are far from clear. Western opinions on the subject have long entertained a consoling fiction, that Party bureaucrats failed to understand Leftist art, therefore hated it and branded it as subversive. Its disappearance is used as an excuse for pious assertions on the need for artistic freedom and for exposing ‘official' Soviet art to ridicule. These have not been helpful. I do not mean to suggest that Leftist artists were not horribly wronged in the late Thirties. But the idea that their art was banned through ignorance is a trite explanation which belittles its significance.

In the opinion of its makers, the Bolshevik Revolution had set man free. The proletariat had won – was, in theory, dictator, and had the right to decide what was, or was not, proletarian art. Marx had hoped that once the worker had free time he would ‘among other things, paint'. But for all his genius, he was not visually inclined and did not suggest
what
the worker should paint. Nor did his theory allow for the visual awareness of the Russians, nor for the Russian painter's status as prophet and teacher. No government can afford to ignore him; and this is a fact not appreciated in the West, where a revolutionary art is defused by the patronage of the rich. One of Lenin's secretaries records how people were led before Repin's painting
The Barge-haulers on the Volga
in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and converted to revolution by its message against injustice. Now all good Bolsheviks believed that art belonged to the people. But by October 1917 there are two contradictory opinions on the form the new art should take.

In one camp were the Futurists. (I use the word Futurist in the widest sense.) As the old order tottered, they had conducted a war of nerves against middle-class morality and taste. They saw themselves as a wrecking-party which would unhinge the future from the past. Their painters saw in French Cubism a preliminary shattering of images beloved by the bourgeois. The philosopher Berdyaev said Picasso was the last of the Stone Age Men. Their poets had an ‘insurmountable hatred for the language existing before them'. They drained poetry of its meaning and insisted on the primacy of pure sound. ‘Words are but ghosts hiding the alphabet's strings.' They published their manifestos – ‘Go to the Devil' – ‘The Thunder Boiling Cup' – ‘A Slap to Public Taste' – on the cheapest paper, ‘the colour of a fainted louse'. Mayakovsky and David Burliuk, the self-appointed storm-troopers of Futurism, paraded around St Petersburg in alogical fancy dress; crowds wondered if they were clowns or savages or fakirs or Americans. Mayakovsky once advised his audience to ‘carry their fat carcasses home'.

But the Futurists usually came from ‘good' families, and their posturing was of the essence of middle-class revolt. The Bolsheviks were tougher, more serious and their view of art different. The populist composer Mussorgsky had once said that artists must ‘not get to know the people, but
be admitted to their brotherhood'
. If serious, the artist must merge in with the masses and do nothing to affront the taste of the common man. That taste was bound to be traditional. And the pragmatic Lenin saw the need for an art which would broadcast the Revolution in simple, traditional images.

Lenin was the son of a provincial director of schools, and historians have often noticed the firm, pedagogic manner with which he handled his colleagues. Edmund Wilson even called him ‘The Great Headmaster'. Certainly his concept of
partiinost,
or sacrificial party spirit, reminds one of loyalty demanded for the schoolteam. His tastes were old-fashioned and austere. He knew that Marx's moral and historical interpretation of history was right. He knew his own interpretation of Marx was right. And he also knew that if he waited for capitalism to collapse he would wait indefinitely.

On this crucial point there are two distinct trends in Marx's thought. One encourages the worker to rise and batter his oppressors. The other says capitalism will evaporate in the quickness of time and in accordance with the laws of history. Marx's open legacy crystallised into the quarrel between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Lenin, as Bolshevik leader, appointed himself the active agent of history, who would accelerate its inevitable process by force. The Mensheviks dreaded force, preferring a gradual change to Socialism, through educating the workers.

Among the Bolsheviks themselves there was a similar split. A challenge to Lenin's authority came from an ambitious Marxist called Alexander Malinovsky, who had changed his name to Bogdanov, which means ‘Son of God' (God in this case being the ‘People'). He founded a rather nebulous institution called
Proletcult
which, he said, was ‘a laboratory for proletarian culture', and had set up a colony in exile on Capri which Lenin had visited and loathed. Bogdanov countered Lenin's demand for unity by calling for ‘Three Ways to Socialism - Political, Economic and Cultural'; in particular he insisted on the independence of cultural matters from the government. The Futurists preferred the independence of Bogdanov's
Proletcult
to Lenin's centralisation. From the start they were in the wrong camp.

Years of committee meetings in exile (those. of the Second International were held in Tottenham Court Road) had convinced Lenin that liberal intellectuals were weak-kneed and ineffectual. Unity, unity at all costs obsessed him, and he saw ‘no special basis for different directions in art'. Anything that reminded him of idealist philosophy he distrusted, and he would chide his colleagues for ‘coquetting with religion'. Maxim Gorky might exclaim, ‘Almighty, Immortal People, Thou art my God!' but Lenin never. If he was a dreamer, he was, in H.G. Wells's verdict, ‘a dreamer in technology'. His saying ‘Communism is Electrification plus Soviets' expresses his faith in the machine as saviour and agent of Socialism.

Marx had warned against the delusions of abstract thought, and Lenin probably thought the same of abstract art. At first he thought it harmless, but tolerance gave way to irritation. He disliked the street monuments which left spectators gasping for sense. And when some artists ‘cancelled out' the trees of the capitalist period in the Alexandrovsky Gardens outside the Kremlin by painting them in bright colours that wouldn't come off, Lenin and Krupskaya were very cross. In a dry memorandum of October 1920 Lenin wrote: ‘No creation of a new proletarian culture, but the development of the best models of existing culture . . . ' Marxism does not despise the achievements of the past.

Certainly the new masters of Russia preserved its treasures. Once the Winter Palace was stormed, the inventory of its contents began and looters were shot. Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin's first Commissioner for Education, had once made his listeners cry as he evoked the wonders of old in the Naples Museum. In November 1917 he made himself cry at news of the destruction of the Kremlin and St Basil's, and resigned from the Revolutionary Committee. ‘I cannot stand it. I cannot stand the monstrous destruction of beauty and tradition.' He reinstated himself two days later when he heard the news was false.

In contrast, a mood of iconoclastic fervour swept the Leftists. They couldn't have cared less what happened to the Kremlin. Marinetti had once called it ‘an absurd thing'; for all they were concerned it could burn. Malevich hoped all towns and villages would be destroyed every fifty years and said he'd feel more sorry about a screw breaking off than the destruction of St Basil's. The avant-garde hadn't counted on the Bolshevik uprising, but they were the only group of artists in Russia to welcome it. Calling themselves Leftists, they clamoured for complete monopoly in the arts.

They behaved with customary lack of caution but superhuman energy. Mayakovsky's slogan ‘The streets our brushes, the squares our palettes' flushed artists out into the open. They decorated the Agit-Prop trains which toured the country, staged mass spectacles, placarded old palaces with monumental posters, bundled Tsarist monuments into parcels of throbbing red cloth, played a symphony on factory sirens, evolved a new typography to broadcast the new message and said they were breaking down the divisions between art and engineering, or between painting and music: the latter is not difficult in a country where colours have equivalents in sound; reindeer bells tinkle red and for one poet the noise of the 1905 Revolution was mauve.