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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.115 >>
Letter Q (December 1989) – Russkoee Polee • The Russian Field
Letter Q, dated 13 December 1989, is Kozlov’s second letter from that year, and it includes his New Year Greetings. Like in his previous letter from March 1989 (Letter P), he starts with an excuse explaining his prolonged silence.
The year 1989 had indeed brought substantial changes to Kozlov’s personal life. In late summer 1989, September or earlier, roughly twenty years after he had left Leningrad for the suburb of Peterhof, he moved back to downtown Leningrad to open a spacious studio – Russkoe Pole – The Russian Field. This was the main news he announced in his letter, written on both sides of a page ripped from a spiral notebook. On a separate sheet of paper, he joined a drawing with his belated birthday greetings:
 Kozlov had actually been expecting a personal encounter with his friend before the end of the year, since Catherine Mannick hadn’t given up plans to finally return to the Soviet Union in 1989. They had last seen each other in 1986; occasionally, they talked over the phone. In April 1989 (Letter 46), her response to Letter P, Mannick announced her visit for June – a visit she was looking forward to enthusiastically:
At that time, Mannick was deeply involved in her graduate studies of Russian history and was hoping to work on her own research once the Soviet archives opened – “something connected with the 1920s” (Letter 46). Kozlov’s “hot news” list from Letter P also contributed to her curiosity. When the travel agency cancelled her trip for lack of hotel accommodation, she postponed it to the end of November (Letter 47, July 1989). She again confirmed her trip with her birthday greetings from August/ September (Letter 48) and wrote how culture from the Soviet Union was making its way to the States.
Letter 48 is the last of Mannick’s letters in Kozlov’s archive (now at Davis Center Special Collection), and it is likely that it was actually the last one Mannick wrote him. Mannick’s November trip, however, was again under a bad star and had to be postponed another time. Kozlov received the news from her friend Lucyna.
Kozlov therefore decided to give his friend a detailed description of his new studio. Four black and white pictures from Catherine Mannick’s archive (now at Davis Center Special Collection), taken on the premises of his new studio, illustrate his text. Although Kozlov doesn’t mention any pictures in his letter, it is very likely that he sent them with Letter Q, since they are presumably from the same negative film and one is dated December 1989. He explains:
In 1989, still in Peterhof, Kozlov met Rinad Akhmethine, a young man with a sense for entrepreneurship who used the new possibilities offered by perestroika to do business at the local food market. Upon their encounter, Akhmetine decided to venture into the art business and offered Kozlov his support in setting up a proper studio in Leningrad, since, as Kozlov wrote “My business is going quite well. Paintings are bought by foreign collectors and museums.” (p. 1) He added – in English “I have the personal manedger [manager] now, who work in my business.” Kozlov also mentions exhibitions in Finland, an upcoming exhibition in New York and the prospect of showing his works at the Russian Museum. In fact, the lack of studio space wasn’t the only problem the artist confronted as his works were becoming international. A main problem was to keep track of the sales and collect the money, which wasn’t an obvious thing to do see Letter N Part 1. So far, Kozlov hadn’t travelled himself and therefore relied on intermediaries who weren’t always willing to share the profit. Although he was hoping to travel in the near future (“There are rumours that from January next year the law on free departure from the USSR without limitation of the period of stay abroad will come into force. And this means that I can go wherever I want at any time.” p.2) he definitely needed someone with a better understanding of doing business. He first thought of his friend Andrey, a laywer (see Letter P, p.5: “I'm going to take Andrey as a lawyer and attorney in my affairs”), but it was clear that he needed more than just legal assistance. In this way, Kozlov became the first Leningrad artist with a personal manager, a situation that led to mutual benefits, but also to major conflicts of an art versus business nature until Akhmethine and Kozlov terminated their collaboration in early 1991. After that, Akhmethine remained tied to the Petersburg art scene while Kozlov gradually moved to Berlin. The main achievement of their collaboration, however, was the opening of Kozlov’s studio, which finally allowed the artist to unfold his projects on a new level and establish international contacts with journalists, curators, and art collectors. He decided to give it a name – Russkoe Pole “The Russian Field”. He kept the name when he opened a new studio in Berlin in 1994, and since it was the second of its kind, he sometimes called “The Russian Field no. 2” more >>. Kozlov had previously named his Peterhof workplace – Galaxy Gallery (see Letter I and Letter L). In terms of physical space, this was pure euphemism, although it was a hint to the mental dimension of Kozlov’s art. The name Russkoe Pole, the Russian Field, on the other hand, was inspired by a popular Russian song from a Mosfilm production from 1968, Новые приключения неуловимых / The New Adventures of the Elusive Avengers. The lyrics, written by Inna Goff, express the deep romantic bond Russian urbanites continue to feel for the openness and vastness of the Russian field.
Field, Russian field, / Whether the moon is shining / Or whether it is snowing /Happiness and pain / Are connected to you, / No, I won't forget you / Forever to my heart. Russian Wikipedia quotes Inna Goff with a comment on her lyrics,
Inna Goff’s lyrics obviously hit the nerve – in the words of poet Rasul Gamzatov:
Like many town dwellers, Kozlov was no stranger to the Russian countryside. His mother was from Sintsovo, a small village the Kostroma region, and some of his relatives still lived close by. He visited the place as a child and later, occasionally, as a young adult (see Letter C). In a way, the name “The Russian Field” was a sign of his shared feelings with everyone else, though it would be wrong to assume that once back in town, looking towards Fontanka River, Trinity Cathedral and the Sovetskaya hotel, he was getting sentimental about the past. In fact, in 1990, he added an additional “E” to each of the two words: Русскоее Полее / Russkoee Polee, and displayed them on the door to his bedroom.
Kozlov first experimented with separating or doubling letters systematically in the mid-eighties, thus creating visual and sound games, as in the large graffiti painting Я-Я / Ya-Ya from 1985 (see Letter I). At that time, both Kozlov and his artist friend Oleg Kotelnikov used a hyphenated upper and lower case E-E as a visual element in their art, but only Kozlov kept it and integrated it systematically into his work. Starting in the new millennium, he gradually substituted his old signature, E. Kozlov for E-E, and since 2005, has made it his only signature.
Russian Я and E are an iotified vowels, pronounced ya and ye, respectively, or ia and ie, in modern transcription. When repeated as Я-Я or E-E, they create rhythmical sound patterns, ya-ya and ye-ye, much like the joyous and affirmative English “yea-yea” or “yeah-yeah” more >>. Therefore, Russkoee Polee must be properly pronounced Russkoe-ye Pole-ye, and, accordingly, should be translated as “The Russia-yan Fie-yield, which is almost impossible to render. However, the connection to modern pop music – yeah-yeah music – is obvious, and the swift rhythm combats any excessive emotionalism coming from the song. But there is also another feature: At that time, Kozlov noticed a personal relation to terms and proper names consisting of thirteen letters, like his own: Евгений Козлов / Evgenij Kozlov. In 1991, he complied a long list of such words, including Новый Петергоф / Novyi Petergof, where he had lived before moving back to Leningrad, and, not surprisingly, Советский Союз» Sovetskyi Soyus, Soviet Union. The number of letters in Russkoee Polee is also thirteen, and, incidentally, the flat number of his studio was 31. Returning once more to Kozlov’s signature: In 2014, Evgenij Kozlov shifted it to the front of his name – (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov; the idea was that his birth name should ultimately disappear. Interestingly, it now reads “Ye-Ye Yevgeni Kozlov”, repeating the “Ye” sound three times, as in “yeah-yeah-yeah”. The triple affirmation (= three times “yes”) is, as we know, a magic spell. Fontanka 145
The Russian Field was located on the third floor of a large five-floor tenement house on the corner of Fontanka River Embankment 145 and Makarenko lane, 14, near the Egyptian Bridge. Built in 1910 in a sober yet elegant art deco style, its horizontally structured brick façade displays some spare cubist elements, a few six-pointed windows, and a dominating top floor supplied with pilasters. To the right, at number 145 B, was a somewhat lower building from the late nineteenth century. Both buildings had been vacated due to impending renovation, but were still connected to water, electricity, and heating. Artists managed to move into the block of houses on a semi-legal basis, and at the beginning of the 1990s, Fontanka 145 became a short-lived, but rather significant hot spot for Leningrad’s artistic life, with numerous studios and, most importantly, with Tanzpol, Russia’s first private techno club more>>.
Naturally, artists and musicians paid each other visits all the time, and personal friends came over quite often. Kozlov mentions Andrey (Fitenko) as one of the most frequent visitors, his closest friend and a friend of Catherine Mannick’s, too; in 1989, he painted Andrey’s portrait.
The room where he would receive his guests was equipped with low, comfortable seats and a small “CCCP” table he had brought from Peterhof, along with numerous paintings.
He could now finally display them next to each other and eventually exchanged them for new ones. In this way, The Russian Field became a private gallery from which he drew inspiration. Yuris Lesnik’s video from 1989, which Kozlov and I re-edited in 2011 as E-E ART. FONTANKA 145, shows the situation shortly after Kozlov moved in in 1989, completed with scenes from his birthday in 1990 and from Tanzpol more>>. The focus of Kozlov’s activity, however, was on what he called “my painting”:
Kozlov therefore tried to limit the time for visits, and when I first visited “The Russian Field” in May 1990, there was a sign next to the doorbell – “Do not disturb before midnight”. Several paintings from 1990 were inspired directly by Kozlov’s new domicile and contain the name of the studio The Russian Field in their respective titles. The sphinges on the Egyptian Bridge next to Fontanka 145 led to a pair of sphinxes – “Sphinxes of the Russian Field” .
The stucco reliefs in the building’s entrance hall, created after Berthold Thorvaldsen’s pair of marble reliefs “Day“ and „Night” (1815), can be found in “Angels of the Russian Field”, where a female figure in the style of iconic film stars from the 1950s protects Thorvaldson's angels.
Pictures
E-E Kozlov’s black and white photography roughly corresponds to the decade of the 1980s. Having moved to the Russian Field in 1989, he continued taking pictures of social events and meetings, but now predominately at his own place. Another portion of the films documents his paintings, sometimes in successive stages. Like before, he processed and printed the 35 mm films at his Peterhof photo laboratory. In his archive, about thirty black and white films, some preserved with only a fraction of the frames, cover the period of The Russian Field. A few colour slides and prints complete his archive. The pictures document, in the first place, the period until the summer of 1990. (NB This page also presents three colour prints that were most probably sent with the following letter, Letter R from March 1990.)
The spacious studio allowed Kozlov to paint large-format canvases, which he started doing right away with “Love for Woman” (see picture 6A above) and “Love for Man” (see picture 5A above), transferring the motifs created on bus-stop signs to two by three metre formats see Letter R.
What is more, he could now also work on several compositions simultaneously. In this case, he temporarily covered an unfinished composition with a large cloth to go ahead with a different painting before returning to the original composition with a fresh look.
Two of the black and white prints from Letter Q illustrate his method. One picture shows a canvas with an irregular border in a 180 x 217 cm format, displaying the preparatory drawing for a multifigure painting of which only a few details had been accomplished so far. The print is signed on the reverse Одна из последних работ над которой сейчас работю. 1989-1990. / One of the last works I'm working on now. 1989-1990. The other picture shows the artist standing before this very painting, now fully covered with jute sacking through which some of the painted ornaments are shining. Above it, five portraits from 1989 form a top row. This picture is signed Декабрь 1989 © Русское Поле © Е. Козлов / December 1989 © Russkoe Polee © E. Kozlov. Interestingly, Kozlov started to use the copyright sign during this period, and somewhat later he also introduced the trademark sign ® in connection with Russkoee Polee – Russkoee Polee®.[5]
In 1990, this painting could be seen, still unfinished, in Aspekte, a cultural programme on German television, which featured The Russian Field as part of a special programme on glasnost culture External link to YouTube >>. Kozlov took the painting to Berlin, where he completed it in 1993, and called it Чудесные Возможности любви Гермафродита Пространства /Those Wonderful Contingencies of the Love of the Hermaphrodite of Space.
The other two black and white pictures from Letter Q show the artist with some of his regular guests. Kozlov wrote their names on the reverse with numbers indicating their spot in the picture.
One is a studio view – Kozlov writes studiyaya, reduplicating the ya sound – with Kozlov, Marilyn Monroe aka Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Norma Jean ( Mamyshev’s dog), Georgy Guryanov, and Dima Pavlov. On the wall behind the group are photographic reproductions of Kozlov’s earlier works that had already left Leningrad for exhibitions abroad. The other picture shows Dima Pavlov, Georgy Guryanov, Timur Novikov, and Andrey Fitenko (“Smolnyi”) in the so-called “Lenin’s Room”, again written with a reduplicated E and YA = Леенинскаяя комната “Le-yeninskayaya komnata”. This was the bathroom Kozlov converted into a Lenin memorabilia room with posters, stickers, and a large bust. Supported by his artist friends, the collection was growing steadily. A fifth, coloured picture, shows the artist in the same place, and it might have been sent with Letter R from 1990.
Most guests had been friends with Kozlov since the early 1980s. Andrey Fitenko and composer and pianist Dima (Dmitryi) Pavlov were Kozlov’s personal friends; they can be seen in a number of pictures from the “Points of Contact” collection. Georgy Guryanov and Timur Novikov were active in the same circle of artists as Kozlov – The New Artists. Kozlov had repeatedly painted their portraits, among them his outstanding “Portrait of Timur Novikov with Arms Consisting of Bones” more >>, and had sent Mannick several of his painted photographs and collages of them (see Letter J, Letter K, and Letter L). Guryanov was a big fan of Kozlov’s art, especially of those portraits Kozlov painted of him, which Guryanov, an exceptionally handsome young man with an impeccable feeling for style, sometimes kept to himself.
In the 1980s, Guryanov started a career as a drummer of the celebrated band KINO (see E-E Kozlov's cover for the KINO album Nachalnik Kamchatki from 1984 >> and Letter G), but gradually shifted to painting and is today best known for his paintings of muscular men. Guryanov shared the Boys’ Club studio, just below The Russian Field, with video director and cameraman Yuris Lesnik, best known for his “Pirate Television” videos more >>, and Ivan Movsesian, who organised the legendary “Exhibition on Palace Bridge“ in 1990 more>>. Later, Guryanov moved to his own studio next to Tanzpol.
Young Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe represented the next generation of Russian artists and became one of Russia’s shooting stars in the 1990s. Like Guryanov, he admired Kozlov and his art, dedicating his “Politbureau” series from 1990 to “My Dear Evgenij Kozlov” more>>. The drawings on posters are now in the collection of Tate Gallery. Kozlov, for his part, promoted Mamyshev’s talent as a performer and painter, inviting him to a number of photo shoots at The Russian Field, where Mamyshev, posing next to Kozlov’s paintings, impersonated his favourite hero Marilyn Monroe more>>. Mamyshev contributed to the “Lenin’s Room” memorabilia with some collages and was among the first to participate in Kozlov’s outstanding collection of Russian art “2x3m”, begun in 1990. Later, Mamyshev, always short of money, took his two paintings back from the collection without Kozlov’s knowledge and sold them – a rather intriguing story more>>. Among these six people, four have passed away: Timur Novikov (1958-2002), Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (1969-2013) Georgy Guryanov (1961-2013), and Andrey Fitenko (1958-2023). Oddly enough, those who are still among us, Dima Pavlov and Evgenij Kozlov, came to Berlin in the early 1990s; whether this had any impact on their life expectancy remains a matter of speculation. Hannelore Fobo, 20 December 2023
[1] Boris Grebenchikov, founder of Leningrad’s legendary band “Aquarium” in 1972, was one of the first Soviet “underground” musicians to travel to the United States. See Introduction: Perestroika Emissaries
[2]“ Raketa” watches were a famous Soviet brand manufactured in Kozlov’s hometown Petrodvorets / Peterhof, Petrodvorets Watch Factory.” [3] Этот ничем не заслонённый вид на край света, из-за которого утром всплывает солнце и за которым оно прячется к ночи… Золотое шумящее поле налитых колосьев было последним мирным видением моего отрочества… [4] «Это лучшая песня о Родине. Я бы предложил её сделать Государственным гимном России. Но вот беда, в ней нет демагогической высокопарности, столь милой официальным структурам. Ibid. [5] Had Kozlov officially registered the name Russkoee Polee as a trademark, he might have been able to get royalties from a Russian marketing and opinion poll company founded some years ago under the label “Russian Field”.
see also (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive) Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection Harvard University>> |
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Published 25 December 2023 Last updated 17 November 2024 |
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