Moscow – Leningrad: Something Different

The Seventies are arranged in a rather unusual way in Soviet culture. The Thaw was over, the euphoria had evaporated, and it became clear to certain people that print runs in the millions and vast auditoriums no longer loomed on the horizon, while large exhibitions would be of whatever format was deemed suitable. But instead of a pause, part of the culture left the official venues for private flats and came to life there.

This was not the underground in any political sense, and there was nothing anti-Soviet in essence about the conceptualists' exhibitions, the samizdat magazines or the home-made jeans. It was simply a parallel life, without officialdom and arranged according to somewhat different rules.

In August the Peredelkino House of Creativity and New Holland, in Dovlatov's "Day D", are holding a festival on precisely this subject: 22-23 August in Moscow, 29-30 August in Saint Petersburg.

From the programme I have picked out a few events.

For the first time, a project by "Collective Actions" will be realised. The Garage Museum and the curator Sasha Obukhova are carrying out the work "Slogan-2026, Hard to Make Out", following the technical brief of Andrey Monastyrsky, from his "Trips Out of Town" cycle, which he never carried out in the Seventies. The slogan will be installed on the central avenue in Peredelkino. An action conceived fifty years ago will at last be brought to life.

The prize-winning writer Vodolazkin will talk about "A School for Fools", a book that, in his words, was never supposed to exist at all. Mikhail Sverdlov will speak about how a trip on a suburban train changed Russian prose. The bronzed Saprykin and Prokhorova will discuss "Summer in Baden". Akhmetyev and Sheiker will address the question of whether unofficial poetry had its own hierarchy, and what people in that world argued about if not worldly goods. Skidan and Tsibulya will talk about Leningrad poetry. Yelena Gracheva will speak about samizdat.

Vladimir Martynov will tell the story of the academic underground. Oleg Kovriga will explain how music circulated before cassette recorders. About the Rock Club, the hunt for records and work at Melodiya you will be able to hear from Vsevolod Gakkel and Alexander Senin. And of course there will be concerts by Volkov, Kondakov and Martynov.

Do not leave out the emergence of Soviet privacy and the great struggle for the garage, jeans and a masterclass on sewing them, Nevsky Prospect through the eyes of black marketeers, religious life in atheist Moscow, the refuseniks, uncensored Leningrad on unpublished amateur cine film, and the circle around Dovlatov.

A pleasant addition to the Soviet trappings, and to the queues for people who for some reason are not at work, will be the book scrum in Peredelkino from "Dom pisatelya" and in New Holland from "Akademiya".

Study the Moscow and Petersburg programmes and make your plans.