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<p class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__text--tableCell">Russian Sign Language Tours of&nbsp;Spring Exhibitions</p>
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<p class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__footer">Garage Museum of&nbsp;Contemporary Art organizes regularly scheduled events for visitors with disabilities. <a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link ex-modal__content__inline" href="/en/visit/disabled_visitors?kind=blind">Learn more</a>.</p>

<p class="ex-modal__content__text">Individual Tours,&nbsp;Tours for Students and Schoolchildren, and a&nbsp;Day at Garage.You just need to choose the tour that's best for you.</p>
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<i>"We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams." The Other East and Esoteric Knowledge in Russian Art 1905–1969</i>

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<p>The three works by Alexandra Sukhareva in the exhibition &ldquo;We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams&rdquo; were made at various times and in various circumstances and have been brought together in the trilogy Christa, Argiris, Eudora. This triad of names has no known topographic or mythological connections. It references Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd (Persian for &ldquo;the land of nowhere&rdquo;), a landscape of the imagination in the discourse of Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and researcher into Islamic Gnosticism. In the paper &ldquo;Mundus Imaginalis,&rdquo; Corbin describes a world located between the perceptible and the sensible, a &ldquo;fully objective and real world with equivalents for everything existing in the sensible world without being perceptible by the senses.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Sukhareva&rsquo;s works define and guarantee this Corbinesque reality of cognitive experience. They are not artifacts, nor are they traces of acquired experience or free interpretations of &ldquo;visions.&rdquo; They are keys. The first work the visitor sees in the exhibition is a universal communicator, a specially developed mechanism designed to be used by two people simultaneously. Each visitor is asked to place their arms in the special sleeves, which are attached to a lever. Underneath the lever is a circular panel holding a sheet of paper. Participants are deprived of their usual optical regulator and, placing their trust in the motor image&mdash;a distinctive echo of an idea within the body&mdash; create &ldquo;seismograms&rdquo; of their mutual knowledge.</p>
<p>Inside the communicator the parts are painted in various colors, which are not random. Here, color is a proto-element, the origin of painting and, more broadly, of artistic practice as a whole. The different colors enter into specific power relationships with each other (while remaining hidden from the people working with the communicator). Nor is it accidental that the process of work with the communicator is collective. For Sukhareva it is important to create a new type of communication, which opens out beyond the boundaries of social interaction. As she puts it, &ldquo;to fantasize is to smash the conventions of the present&rsquo;s imaginative stagnation.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This different communicative basis can be seen in another work by Sukhareva, which takes the form of a space for a collective &ldquo;hypnotic séance.&rdquo; As with the communicator, participants cannot see what is happening around them: they are blindfolded. A theme, moderated by the voice of the artist, passes from person to person. In a vaguely trance-like state, participants have the sensation of a different kind of connection.</p>
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<p>Another work exists in a flickering regime. It involves &ldquo;sleep séances&rdquo; within the exhibition. According to some theories, the location and circumstances of sleep can influence dream production, with the image-bearing structure of dreaming affected by that which surrounds the sleeper. In this context, the exhibition &ldquo;We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams&rdquo; becomes a sleep laboratory, a venue for experiments in which participants experience mediated communication that takes place outside the zone of our usual daytime reality.</p>
<p>Christa, Argiris, Eudora is a whole that is experienced intuitively. The basis of this wholeness can be considered the possibility of creating a new type of relationship. It is the relationship of an alternative connection between people, which occurs, as per Corbin, in &ldquo;a place beyond the boundaries of place; where it is impossible to answer the question &lsquo;Where?&rsquo; with a hand gesture.&rdquo;</p>
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Alexandra Sukhareva Christa, Argiris, Eudora

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<p>Sociologists noted some time ago that the deepest social and economic crises in human history tend to be accompanied by the blossoming of culture and science. Human consciousness appears to assume that the changes in daily life are irreversible and redirects its energy toward unconstrained imagining and free exploration of various cultural and spiritual phenomena. This rule can easily be applied to the crises of modern history and specifically to the fin de siècle, when the premonition of a major disaster (the First World War followed by the Russian Revolution) pushed artists, writers, and intellectuals to intensify their spiritual explorations. In Russia, the turn of the twentieth century saw a huge wave of interest in alternative ways of thinking and interpreting the world: the romantic model of the rebel rising up against the old world, with its outdated religion, culture, and politics, became an ideal for many of the young people who gathered in countless groups, clubs, and orders. Moscow and St. Petersburg had their own active Masonic lodges, Rosicrucian and Solomon&rsquo;s Temple Orders as well as groups such as the anarcho-mystics. Young people like the film director Sergei Eisenstein, who was briefly a member of the Rosicrucian Society, would sometimes be part of several groups simultaneously. A special place on the map of the spiritual pursuits of the Russian intelligentsia was occupied by anthroposophy, a philosophical system established by the thinker and researcher and expert in the legacy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy became widely popular among Russian intellectuals due to the work of Steiner&rsquo;s devoted followers, including Andrei Bely, his first wife Anna (Asya) Turgeneva, and the first wife of Maximilian Voloshin, Margarita Sabashnikova. Bely continued his anthroposophist work in Soviet Russia, while Turgeneva spent the rest of her life in Dornach and was the chief artist of two anthroposophist temples, the First Goetheanum and the Second. Almost all of the artists featured in the exhibition had some connection to anthroposophical societies. Anthroposophy should not be confused with the still popular theosophy, the syncretic religious and mystical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky (the Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875), which remained active and became increasingly popular (including among artists) throughout the Soviet period.</p>
<p>Involvement in alternative theories, teachings, rituals, and practices became almost commonplace in the Russian culture of the turn of the century: spiritualists, anthroposophists, theosophists, Freemasons and Templars, anarcho-mystics, healers, shamans, herbalists, and Tarot readers exerted great influence on the country&rsquo;s cultural agenda (and mass culture was no exception, a good example being the double-page spread from the magazine Uranus featuring ads for all kinds of mystical services). However, these pages in the history of Russian art and culture have been forgotten, obscured by the achievements and successes of the radical Russian avant-garde, which was endorsed (briefly) by the new Soviet government and celebrated by Western art criticism.</p>
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The Heyday of Esoteric Movements in Pre-Revolutionary Russia

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<p>Surrounded by the hills of the Swiss Jura, in Dornach, south of Basel, the Second Goetheanum and the buildings around it form an architectural ensemble based on a dynamic conception of form and space. Designed by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, it is the seat of the School of Spiritual Science and the Anthroposophical Society. This building of reinforced concrete, completed after Steiner&rsquo;s death as his last legacy, was constructed on the foundations of an earlier building, the First Goetheanum, which burnt down as a result of arson on New Year&rsquo;s Eve 1922.</p>
<p>The foundation stone of the First Goetheanum was laid in September 1913. Construction began in 1914 and continued throughout the First World War, with volunteers coming from many nations. Designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the Goetheanum was to become a platform for cultural renewal based on a broader understanding of humanity and the universe. Rudolf Steiner&rsquo;s philosophical teaching&mdash;anthroposophy&mdash;extended into many disciplines, including pedagogy, medicine, economics, arts, eurythmy, curative education, architecture, and biodynamic agriculture, to all of which Steiner himself made significant contributions. As a result, institutions emerged across the world that researched, taught, practiced, and promoted the new approach to arts and sciences that Steiner advocated.</p>
<p>The building of the First Goetheanum was conceived like a living sculpture. The interiors and exteriors were mainly carved by hand, the domes covered with murals, natural light flowing into the building through stained glass windows that projected their colors into its space. The main material used in the construction was wood. The building featured an unusual structure of two intersecting domes of different sizes, yet this duality formed an integrated unity. The big dome covered the main hall, or auditorium, and the smaller one the stage, where dramatic, eurythmic, and musical performances took place as well as lectures and meetings.</p>
<p>Steiner&rsquo;s ideas inspired many artists (Vasily Kandinsky was among those who attended his lectures) and in 1913 some of them headed to Dornach to take part in the construction of the Goetheanum. Hope was present on the construction site. There was a sense of responsibility and intensive engagement, a feeling that something new and culturally important was in the making. Russian volunteers included Andrei Bely, who arrived in Dornach in March 1914 and stayed for two years (he carved wooden columns and architraves), Margarita Sabashnikova, who also carved wood and painted the domes, and Anna (Asya) Turgeneva, who participated in various tasks but whose biggest contribution was the etchings and engravings for the glass windows. Oswald Dubach, born in Moscow, worked on pedestals and architraves. Dubach later became one of the Goetheanum&rsquo;s main artists and founded its Fine Arts School together with Carl Kemper.</p>
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<p>Arriving in Dornach from every corner of Europe, many of the artists had no previous experience of the artistic skills required and der Bau (the construction site) became a place of learning and discovery. New techniques were developed, such as glass engraving with wheel-driven carborundum stones, which was used for the first time for the windows of the Goetheanum. Steiner saw the project as a first step toward the development of a new aesthetic in arts and architecture, an attempt to integrate deep spiritual knowledge into a visible aesthetic language, which would have the potential for further development. In the Goetheanum he did not aim to impart abstract ideas: there were no symbols to be interpreted or explained. That which he wished to communicate was achieved through an immediate aesthetic experience of form, color, sound, and space. Astonishment was intended to be the first impression for anyone who entered the building, encouraging them to awaken inner forces and seek a deeper understanding of existence. The richness and complexity of spiritual reality cannot be truly expressed in a theoretical way, because rational and abstract thinking have their own boundaries. In the Goetheanum&rsquo;s architecture Steiner aimed to make visible the continuous transformation of form, revealing changes and permanence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe&rsquo;s idea of metamorphosis <sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> was applied to the arts. The name given to the building was a homage to the great German poet and thinker.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Silvana Gabrielli</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Goethe was a great admirer of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In a letter to his friend Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, he called himself (if slightly ironically) a pantheist. Nature played a very significant role in his creative work and philosophy, prompting some authors to associate him with the natural philosophy movement. In Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)&mdash;his biggest contribution to natural science&mdash;Goethe introduced to the understanding of nature the idea of constant development, evolution, and interaction of forms and compared the metamorphosis of plants to the constant changing of the world we live in. &ldquo;The root,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;is in fact no different from the stalk no different from the leaf, and the leaf no different from the flower: variations of the same idea.&rdquo;</p>
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Rudolf Steiner and the First Goetheanum

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<p>Margarita Sabashnikova was a gifted artist, writer, translator, and teacher, and the first wife of the poet Maximilian Voloshin. In Russia she studied painting under Ilya Repin and Konstantin Korovin and icon-painting in the workshop of Matvei Tyulin. A frequent traveler, she also took drawing classes in Paris.</p>
<p>Delving into the world of pure color, Sabashnikova was constantly searching for a higher spiritual reality behind the everyday and was interested in the spiritual mission of painting and art in general. In 1905, this search led her to Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, which gave new meaning and direction to her life. Sabashnikova took part in the construction of the First Goetheanum, a unique structure built in Dornach for anthroposophical work and productions of mystery plays. She was among the artists who painted the small dome of the Goetheanum and also took part in the development of eurythmy, a new art of movement originated by Steiner. Through anthroposophy Sabashnikova came to a new understanding of Christianity based on a conscious and lived experience of Christ.</p>
<p>On September 20, 1913, Sabashnikova took part celebrations for the founding of the Russian Anthroposophical Society (1913&ndash;1922) in Moscow. Inspired by the idea of a spiritual renewal in Russia, in 1917 she returned to her homeland. At Anatoly Lunacharsky&rsquo;s suggestion, she began teaching. During her years in Russia, she produced portraits of important public figures and ran eurythmy classes and courses in anthroposophy. By 1922, having faced numerous difficulties, she realized that anthroposophical work in Russia was becoming impossible and emigrated to Germany, settling in Stuttgart. There she taught painting and gave talks about Russia, her experience of working with Steiner, and the First Goetheanum. She painted portraits and works based on myths, folk tales, and legends, but her main focus was on religious subjects. She offered original interpretations of popular Christian stories. Following Steiner&rsquo;s belief that &ldquo;today, one should search for Christ in all areas of life, including in painting,<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> Sabashnikova painted to explore &ldquo;the very essence of color.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In 1954, she published the autobiographical novel The Green Snake: The Story of a Life. The epigraph, taken from Goethe&rsquo;s The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, reads, &ldquo;...the Temple is built.&rdquo; Her friends recalled Sabashnikova as &ldquo;a thoroughly Russian person&rdquo; throughout her life. Her legacy includes around 300 paintings. Some have been acquired by museums in Russia, but most are in private collections in other countries. Her best-known paintings include portraits of Ekaterina Balmont, artist Mikhail Chuyko, and poet Vyacheslav Ivanov. In Self-Portrait (1905), she painted the silhouette of the Second Goetheanum, which was built many years later. She is also known for the altar paintings she produced for Christian community halls in several European countries.</p>
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<p>At the end of her life, Sabashnikova wrote, &ldquo;Christ wants to reveal himself to contemporary humans, such is his nature. Light shines in darkness and thus transforms it. Colors emerge as His epiphany, His language. Speaking this language, comprehending this discourse in the kingdom of life, we bring to painting a sense of reality, a feeling that Christ lives in the paint. That is already Christian painting, and no other content is needed.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup></p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Olga Pronina, Svetlana Sholokhova&nbsp;</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Bodo von Plato, editor, Anthroposophie im 20.Jahrhundert. Ein Kulturimpuls in biografischen Portr&auml;ts (Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2003), 941.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Margarita Woloschin, Leben und Werk (Stuttgart: Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1982), 54.</p>
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<p>Margarita Sabashnikova<br />Self-Portrait, 1905</p>
<p>&ldquo;In Zurich&hellip; I began to paint a self-portrait. My face was reflected in the second glass of a three-sided mirror so that, as a result of the double mirroring, the two sides should not be exchanged. I painted myself with flowing hair so that it formed a sculptural, rosegold mass on both sides of the face. Each of these surfaces, composed mosaic-like in colour and form, were reminiscent of a pearl oyster. The face I painted in bluish, cold-rose and warm-rose tones. Behind the head, the surfaces were set forth in the same manner, forming an architecture&hellip;What amazes me today is the fact that the architecture in the background and the treatment of its surfaces reminds one, in every respect, of the sculptural forms of the Goetheanum that was built twenty years later.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Margarita Sabashnikova, &ldquo;The Green Snake: Life Memories&rdquo; (translated by Peter Stebbing)</p>
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Margarita Voloshina–Sabashnikova

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<p>Andrei Bely (meaning &ldquo;white&rdquo;) was one of the key figures of the Silver Age of Russian poetry, a novelist, critic, symbolist thinker, and anthroposophist who was a follower of Rudolf Steiner from the early 1910s. He was the greatest writer among Russian mystics and the greatest mystic among Russian writers of the twentieth century. Bely was the son of leading mathematician Nikolai Bugaev and studied natural sciences at the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University. Despite his positivist upbringing, as a young man he was drawn to mysticism (&ldquo;A spiritual voice clearly spells out to me that which reason cannot explain&rdquo;) and the subliminal (&ldquo;An intense mystical and aesthetic life is arising in me; we [...] are going deeper in our studies of the Gospels; we are observing the agency of grace in our era; our mystical experience of this time is the recognition of apocalyptic feelings in relation to the color.&rdquo;)<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>In 1912, Bely and his partner Anna (Asya) Turgeneva met Rudolf Steiner. Bely was fascinated by Steiner and his views and decided to make anthroposophy part of his life. In 1913 and 1914, he followed Steiner across Europe, attended his lectures, and explored esoteric practices under his guidance. Admitted to Steiner&rsquo;s Esoteric School, he studied meditation and astral projection. &ldquo;Between sleep and awakening I experienced strange states, as if I were flying freely across spaces and looking around, <sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup>he later recalled. Bely documented those experiences in a series of drawings, which he described as copies of what he &ldquo;saw spiritually,&rdquo; or his &ldquo;spiritual findings.&rdquo;</p>
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<p>From 1914 to 1916, Andrei Bely lived in Dornach and took part in the construction of the First Goetheanum, for which he carved architraves from various woods with a chisel. Around the same time, anthroposophical ideas and imagery entered his literary work (e.g. the novel Kotik Letaev and the philosophical essay Life Crisis).</p>
<p>In fall 1916, Bely returned to Russia where he worked to spread Steiner&rsquo;s ideas through lectures, articles, and essays, in which he offered anthroposophical explanations of the First World War and the Russian Revolution and suggested possible solutions for the crisis in Russia and across the world. All of his work in the 1920s and 1930s was strongly informed by anthroposophical ideas and images, which resonated with his own mystical experiences.</p>
<p>From 1921 to 1923, Bely lived in Germany where came into conflict with Western anthroposophists, but continued to be faithful to Steiner&rsquo;s teachings.</p>
<p>He returned to Moscow in 1923 and remained the spiritual leader and ideologist of the Russian anthroposophists even after the society was banned. In 1931, most people in his anthroposophist circle were arrested. He was not, although there was a prosecution file detailing his mystical views and anti-Soviet activities. He most likely did not live long enough to be arrested.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Monika Spivak</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Andrei Bely, &ldquo;Material k biografii,&rdquo; Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 105 (Moscow: Nauka, 2016), 57, 65.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Ibid., 256.</p>
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Andrei Bely

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<p>Anna (Asya) Turgeneva was an artist and anthroposophist, the first wife of Andrei Bely, and a great-niece of novelist Ivan Turgenev. She lived in Moscow with her aunt, Maria Olenina d&rsquo;Alheim, a singer and the founder of the House of Song, with which Andrei Bely was actively involved. Bely and Turgeneva became close in 1909, when Asya, an engraver, offered to make his portrait.</p>
<p>In 1910, Turgeneva and Bely went on a long honeymoon (although they were not married). &ldquo;She would carve on a sparkling copper board a fine image that brought to mind the engravings of Rembrandt; and in her life, too, all decisions were clear and precise, as if engraved. After I met her, my outer life was chiselled to perfection; my literary style took on its definitive shape [...], she rearranged it with her bold stroke,&rsquo; Bely recalled.<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup></p>
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<p>In 1912, Bely and Turgeneva met Rudolf Steiner, in 1913 they became his esoteric students, and in 1914 settled in Dornach. They married at Bern town hall. Without a marriage certificate it was difficult to rent a flat in a Swiss village as a couple. Their relationship was already strained by 1915, and Turgeneva left Bely in 1922, when they met in Berlin.</p>
<p>In Dornach, where she remained until the end of her life, Turgeneva fully developed her creative potential. The leader of a wood carving team at first, she later moved on to the glass studio and worked on the stained glass windows for the First and the Second Goetheanum. She attended eurythmy classes, took part in a production of Faust and toured Europe with a group of eurythmists from Dornach. Turgeneva was held in high esteem in anthroposophical circles. She worked in book design and illustrated writings by Goethe and Steiner, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, and other books published by anthroposophists. She wrote memoirs on Andrei Bely, Rudolf Steiner, and the construction of the First Goetheanum. Toward the end of her life she became very ill: sawdust and glass dust had badly affected her lungs.</p>
<p>In the history of Russian culture Asya Turgeneva has been immortalized as the object of Andrei Bely&rsquo;s most passionate and tragic love (their separation was very painful for the writer). To Asya he dedicated both his light-hearted Travel Notes (about their journey through Italy and Africa) and the heart- wrenching poems from After Separation. She also served as a prototype for several female characters in Bely&rsquo;s novels: Katya in The Silver Dove, Nelly in Notes of an Eccentric, and Lizasha in the Moscow trilogy. Marina Tsvetaeva painted an enchanting portrait of Asya in A Captive Spirit: &ldquo;Good posture, head naturally raised and framed in Lamartine-style curls, an eternal cigarette between fine fingers [...]. I have never seen hands more beautiful. Her curls, neck, and arms&mdash;everything belonged in an English engraving, and she was an engraver herself [...], but the main thing is that Asya Turgeneva was Turgenev&rsquo;s Asya<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> [...]. It was impossible not to fall in love.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup></p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Andrei Bely, &ldquo;Zapiski chudaka&rdquo; in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Respublika, 1997), 293.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Translator&rsquo;s note: &ldquo;Asya&rdquo; is a famous short story by Turgeneva&rsquo;s great-uncle, the novelist Ivan Turgenev.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Marina Tsvetaeva, &ldquo;Plennyi dukh&rdquo; in Smert&rsquo; Andreya Belogo (1880&ndash;1934) (Moscow: NLO, 2013), 563.</p>
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Anna (Asya) Turgeneva

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<p>Spiritualism is a religious and philosophical movement based on the belief in life after death and the possibility of communicating with the spirits of the dead via specially gifted mediums. Although the theory and practice of communicating with the dead date back to ancient times, spiritualism in its modern sense is believed to have emerged on March 31, 1848, the day on which sisters Kate and Margaret Fox reported having contact with a spirit. This instance gave rise to an entire movement that saw communication with spirits not as a means to an end but as its main goal.</p>
<p>According to spiritualists, contact with the world of the dead was possible under two conditions: the presence of a medium and the spirit&rsquo;s willingness to communicate. As the number of people who wanted to talk to the dead greatly exceeded the number of mediums, the format of spiritualist séances<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> appeared, in which mediums helped individuals communicate with spirits by means of table-turning, automatic writing, drawing or trance speaking. There were other methods of communicating with spirits, which required the presence of the medium but not their direct involvement.</p>
<p>Spiritualist experiments varied in terms of details, but they were structurally similar. A medium (one or several) and everybody who wished to be involved gathered in an enclosed space with dimmed lights or in complete darkness. If the medium succeeded in contacting the spirit, participants witnessed manifestations ranging from sound and light effects to vibration or movement of furniture and materializations.<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> The medium could also use a Ouija board to communicate messages from the spirit.</p>
<p>Spiritualism quickly became popular across the United States, and later spread to Europe and Russia. In the Russian Empire of the mid-1850s it did not extend beyond fashionable salons, but within two decades a new resurgence sparked a lively debate and created a mass movement, which has continued in various forms to the present day.<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup> The main champions of spiritualism in Russia were the writer and state councillor Alexander Aksakov, St. Petersburg University zoologist Nikolai Wagner, and chemist Alexander Butlerov.</p>
<p>Aksakov, Butlerov, and Wagner founded a group that organized séances and studied psychic phenomena in St. Petersburg. Articles about the group&rsquo;s research into spiritualism and their active support of the movement were sensational not only as a result of the subject matter but also because the protagonists were acclaimed scientists.</p>
<p>In January 1881, Wagner was present at Russia&rsquo;s first stereo photography session organized to document psychic phenomena invisible to the naked eye. The stereo method (taking simultaneous photographs from different angles) was used as a safeguard against inaccuracies common in early photography. As a scientist, Wagner saw spiritualist photography primarily as a means of proving the possibility of capturing otherwise invisible psychic phenomena and various stages of phantom materialization.<sup><a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">4</a></sup></p>
<p>The first spiritualist attempts to document the materialization of spirits (and thus prove the existence of the afterlife and the possibility of interacting with the dead) were made almost immediately after photographic technology started becoming widely available.</p>
<p>Phantoms could be captured in a variety of ways. In one technique, a long exposure was used and at the last moment a person playing a ghost appeared. As their time in front of the camera was very brief, the photograph featured a clear yet semi-transparent ghostly figure, which was exactly what was required.</p>
<p>Alongside spiritualist photography, another technique for proving the existence of the afterlife involved making wax moulds of ectoplasmic figures (ectoplasm is a substance apparently produced by mediums). Such moulds often led to lengthy and heated debates in society.</p>
<p>Doctor Gustave Geley, who conducted experiments together with the famous Polish medium Franek Kluski, described the technique in the following way: &ldquo;The s&eacute;ance took place in dim light. The medium&rsquo;s right hand was held by Professor Richet and his left hand by Count Potocki. A trough containing wax, kept at melting-point by warm water, was placed two feet in front of Kluski, and for the purpose of the test the wax was impregnated (unknown to the medium) with the chemical cholesterin, to prevent the possibility of substitution. [...] The operation involved two or three immersions. The hand was plunged into the trough, withdrawn, and, covered with warm paraffin, touched the hands of the controllers of the experiment, and then was plunged again into the wax. After the operation the glove of paraffin, still warm but solidified, was placed against the hand of one of the controllers.</p>
<p>In this way, nine moulds were taken: seven of hands, one of a foot, and one of a chin and lips. The wax of which they were composed on being tested gave a positive result for cholesterin.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">5</a></sup></p>
<p>The moulds in Geley&rsquo;s photographs feature folds of skin, nails, and the veins that are different to those of the medium. Experienced sculptors and moulders of the time declared that they knew of no method of producing similar wax moulds. To exclude falsification, Geley organized trials with hands of living humans and rubber gloves. Chemicals such as cholesterin were added to the melted wax at the last moment before the experiment.</p>
<p>Geley concluded that &ldquo;the experiment of the mould, coupled with that of the so-called spirit photograph, gives objective proof of the operation of an intelligent force outside of any visible organism, and offers a fair basis for scientific investigation.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">6</a></sup></p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Natalya Veprikova</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Elnara Akhmedova, &ldquo;Spiriticheskii seans v literature Velikobritanii vtoroi poloviny XIX &ndash; nachala XX veka,&rdquo; Filologiya, zhurnalistika, 17, 3, 2017..</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Ibid.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;Alexander Panchenko, &ldquo;Spiritizm i russkaya literatura,&rdquo; Trudy Otdeleniya istoriko-filologicheskikh nauk RAN, 2005.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">4.</a>&nbsp;Vladislav Razdyakonov, &ldquo;&lsquo;Velikoe delo&rsquo; uchenykh spiritov: istoriya russkogo obshchestva eksperimental&rsquo;noi psikhologii i spiriticheskii kruzhok N.P. Vagnera,&rdquo; Vestnik RGGU, 2013.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">5.</a>&nbsp;Arthur Conan Doyle, Istoriya spiritizma (St. Petersburg, 1997), 364.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">6.</a>&nbsp;Arthur Conan Doyle, Istoriya spiritizma (St. Petersburg, 1997), 364.</p>
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Spiritualist Photography

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<p>In the early twentieth century, numerous occult groups and initiation organizations functioned in Russia, including spiritualists, Templars, Rosicrucians, illuminati, and Martinist initiation societies.</p>
<p>Martinism had been revived in France by Augustin Chaboseau and Gérard Encausse (Papus), who were initiated by different people. In 1884, Papus drafted a constitution for the new Martinist Order. In the 1890s, the order&rsquo;s highest executive organ was created&mdash;the Supreme Council&mdash;with Papus as its President and Grand Master. Papus&rsquo; Martinist Order quickly spread throughout the world. Martinism of that time combined elements of various western initiation traditions: the order&rsquo;s aim was to return man to the divine source through spiritual enlightenment, which could be attained through the study of the laws of ethereal realms and communication with their spirits. By 1916, the order had 160 lodges in different countries, including Russia. In 1897, Papus initiated Daria Musina-Pushkina, an actress in Russia&rsquo;s Imperial Theaters and the prototype for one of the sisters in Chekhov&rsquo;s famous play. In January 1899, Musina-Pushkina became the order&rsquo;s Grand Legate in Russia and was tasked with organizing a meeting between the order and Russia&rsquo;s Imperial couple. Her successor in this role was Valerian Muravyov Amursky, the military attaché of the Russian embassy in Paris. Around the turn of the century, Papus made several visits to Russia, which, along with his contacts with Emperor Nicholas II, helped the rapid spread of Martinist ideas in the country.</p>
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<p>The formal leader of Martinism in Russia, Muravyov-Amursky was known for his right-wing politics and his fear of the &ldquo;international Judeo-Masonic conspiracy,&rdquo; and advised the emperor to create a special organ to monitor the activities of secret societies. In 1906, he published an advertisement seeking new members of the Martinist Order in several Russian newspapers (State Councillor Pyotr Kaznacheev joined the following year). Musina-Pushkina soon drifted away from the order to focus on her theatrical career, while Muravyov-Amursky broke with Papus and Martinists in 1907, denouncing them as &ldquo;dark forces.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was not until 1910 that Count Czesław Czyński was appointed as the new Grand Legate in Russia. He was a hypnotist and chiromancer, who made several attempts to legalize the order in the country. Czyński and his allies published a large number of popular propaganda brochures about &ldquo;occult sciences.&rdquo; It was during this period that Grigory (G.O.) Myobes became a follower. He opened the first Martinist lodge in St. Petersburg, named after Apollonius of Tyana.</p>
<p>Myobes, who was of Swedish descent, worked as a professor of mathematics and French in two imperial schools in St. Petersburg and wrote on esoteric subjects under the pen name G.O.M. In 1911 and 1912, he read a lecture cycle titled The Encyclopedia of Occultism in St. Petersburg, to great acclaim. The lectures were later published as a book, which is still read today. They were built around a symbolic interpretation of the Major Arcana in Tarot. The Encyclopedia of Occultism became one of the most influential books for followers of the order.</p>
<p>Martinist initiates tried to develop a more mindful approach to life. They worked on themselves, practiced self-analysis, and explored various aspects of human nature with the help of astrology, chiromancy, and other occult sciences.</p>
<p>Critical of the simplification of rituals under Czyński, Myobes travelled to Paris, where Papus assured him that the Apollonius of Tyana Lodge was completely autonomous. In August 1912, encouraged by his new connections and bypassing Czyński, Myobes declared himself the Sovereign Grand Master Legate and Unknown Superior in Russia. The Apollonius of Tyana Lodge became the Supreme Council of Russia (a Grand Lodge).<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> Czyński responded by suspending Myobes from order in St. Petersburg and appointing Kaznacheev the &ldquo;administrator&rdquo; of Martinists in Russia. Finally, in late 1912, Myobes officially informed Papus of his decision to create an autonomous Martinist order within the Russian jurisdiction. In response, the Supreme Council of the Order in Paris stripped St. Petersburg initiates of their Martinist titles and transferred the administration of the order to Kaznacheev.<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> From then on, all of Myobes&rsquo; new initiatives were completely autonomous of the international Martinist Order and continued as independent occult societies. In 1913, some of the former Martinists of St. Petersburg joined the Autonomous Martinist Order of the Russian Rite, which was strongly influenced by Templar and Rosicrucian traditions.</p>
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<p>In 1919, Myobes appointed Boris Kirichenko (Astromov) (1883&ndash;after 1941) as the Secretary General of his order. Astromov had fought in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904&ndash;1905. Infected with tuberculosis on the front line and with a head injury, in 1905 he had traveled to Italy to recuperate. There he began studying law at the University of Turin, became a Freemason, and in 1909 was conferred the Second Degree at the Ausonia (Concordia) Lodge. As he had not attained the degree of Master, Astromov, according to Freemasonry tradition, did not have the right to establish a new lodge.</p>
<p>After the revolution, from November 1917 to 1921, Astromov was the deputy head of security and commandant of the Public Bank and studied occultism under Myobes as part of a group named Prometheus. In 1920 or 1921, he was expelled from the order for dishonorable conduct and broke away from Myobes. As well as differences on moral issues, Myobes and Astromov had ideological disagreements: Astromov was particularly interested in Masonic symbolism, which Myobes chose to simplify, believing it to be excessive, overcomplicated, and unsuited to Soviet Russia. In 1921, Astromov established an independent lodge he named Three Northern Stars, and later three more: The Blazing Lion, The Dolphin, and The Golden Colossus. In August 1922, these lodges, none of which boasted large numbers of initiates, joined to form The Grand Lodge of Astrea, announcing the establishment of autonomous Russian Freemasonry. None of Astromov&rsquo;s lodges were active for long, nor did they leave much documentary evidence, but the few sources that have been preserved testify to Astromov&rsquo;s great enthusiasm for reviving Masonic traditions in Russia. Among them are carpet designs for different Masonic Degrees, a specially equipped room with Masonic symbols, manuscripts, and numerous drawings.</p>
<p>Astromov had little success in his attempts to adapt to the new Soviet life.<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup> In 1925, he visited the office of the Joint State Political (OGPU) in Moscow to offer his services as a police informer in exchange for permission to leave the country. Although he never received permission, Astromov drew the attention of the OGPU to quite a few members of various occult societies, including the lodges he had established himself. On January 30, 1926, Astromov was arrested together with 21 members of his lodge.<sup><a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">4</a></sup></p>
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<p>Another wave of arrests followed. On the night of April 16/17, 1926, the OGPU searched the flats of the most active members of occult societies. On May 20, 1926, charges were brought against Myobes, his wife, and other occultists. They would be sent to the remote prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea and later exiled.</p>
<p>This was the end of the occult societies established by Myobes and Astromov, which had no connection to the internationally recognized Martinist and Masonic Orders. Organizations that before the Revolution had been inspired by the nationalist, monarchist black-hundredists, and after the Revolution by provocateurs who sought support from the OGPU, ceased to exist.</p>
<p>The internationally recognized Martinist organizations had continued to function in parallel with the autonomous ones. Kaznacheev became the order&rsquo;s Legate for Central Russia and was responsible for the Order&rsquo;s affairs not only in Moscow but across a significant part of the Russian Empire. In 1913, Czyński promoted him to Sovereign Legate, which was confirmed by Papus. The development of the Martinist and, later, Masonic organizations run by Kaznacheev and his associates proved no less eventful than that of Myobes and Astromov&rsquo;s enterprises, but their initiation tradition has remained uninterrupted to the present day.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Roman Gorodnitsky, Andrei Serkov</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Russian State Library, Manuscript Section, Ф. 116б K. 1, Ед. хр. 21.&mdash;Л. 33-35; K.2, Ед. хр. 4; Ед. хр. 46.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Russian State Library, Manuscript Section, Ф. 116, К. 1, Ед. хр. 9.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;From 1921 to 1923 he worked in the justice department (as a defence lawyer and consultant). In the early 1920s he completed a course at film school and took part in the shooting of The Miracle Maker (1922), Infinite Sorrow (1922), and Red Partisans (1924) under the pseudonym Watson. From 1923, he lived on social benefits as a disabled person.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">4.</a>&nbsp;By resolution of the Special Council of the Joint State Political Directorate issued on June 18, 1926, Astromov was sentenced to five years in a labor camp, and in December 1926 he was sent to Siberia. After his release, he settled in Gudauta, in the Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where he managed the laboratory of the local tobacco factory. On June 10, 1940, he was again arrested by the People&rsquo;s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD).</p>
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Martinists and Freemasons in 1920s Petrograd/Leningrad

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<p>Alexander Kohts was a Russian evolutionary biologist, professor, museologist, and the founding director of the State Darwin Museum in Moscow. His wife, the animal psychologist and primatologist Nadezhda Ladygina-Kohts, and the pioneering Russian wildlife painter Vasily Vatagin are usually considered to be the museum&rsquo;s co-founders.</p>
<p>Vatagin, who was also interested in Indian culture, has left a diverse creative legacy of sculpture, drawings, paintings, and illustrations. He collaborated with the Darwin Museum for 45 years, from 1908 to 1953. In 1918, Kohts commissioned him to make a series of sculptures of thinkers who had made important contributions to evolutionary theory. The first work in the series was a bust of Charles Darwin and the last was a huge bust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The series also included a bust of Rudolf Steiner that is now lost but can be seen in two photographs. One features Alexander and Nadezhda Kohts and the other the Kohts couple with Vatagin and Margarita Sabashnikova, Steiner&rsquo;s student, who took part in the construction of the First Goetheanum.</p>
<p>In the 1920s, Kohts commissioned Vatagin to produce the triptych Evolution of Worldviews: Ancient Myths, Dogmatic Theology, and Science. The Darwin Museum also holds Vatagin&rsquo;s original studies for these works, and whereas that for Dogmatic Theology is almost identical to the painting (the only addition to the latter was a panther), the sketch for Ancient Myths includes an important element that is missing in the final work. All of the fantastical creatures&mdash;the triton, the sphinx, the satyr, and the centaur&mdash;are in place, but instead of a goddess standing by a tripod, as in the painting, there is a naked man standing on the back of a centaur with a skull in his hand. Above him is an angel making a gesture of blessing.</p>
<p>It is interesting to compare this image to Sabashnikova&rsquo;s description in her memoirs of the &ldquo;Slavic initiate&rdquo; she painted in the Goetheanum. &ldquo;The second figure entrusted to me in the circle of figures representing various cultures was a Slavic man. [...] Splitting away from him was his dark shadow. A blue angel was giving the man a blessing with one hand and pointing to a strange figure approaching from the sky with the other: a red winged horse with eight legs and a human face.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> The anthroposophists depicted the &ldquo;Slavic initiate&rdquo; as a man standing between an angel and a centaur. Rudolf Steiner believed that the mission of the Slavic (and in particular Russian) people was to bring together in their culture the spiritual mysticism of the East and Western materialism, a merger that would lay the foundation for true human brotherhood.<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> This is exactly what Vatagin depicted in his study for Dogmatic Theology. Kohts rejected the initial composition for reasons that are unknown to us, but he carefully preserved the original sketch in his museum.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Antonina Nefedova</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Margarita Voloshina, Zelenaya Zmeya. Istoriya odnoi zhizni (Moscow: Enigma, 2015), 321.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Ibid., 272.</p>
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Alexander Kohts and Vasily Vatagin

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<p>Ariadna Arendt was born into a family of doctors, and as a child was a regular visitor to Boran-Eli, the estate and studio of Mikhail Lattry. This haven of creativity was also frequented by Maximilian Voloshin, the Tsvetaeva sisters, Aristarkh Lentulov, Konstantin Bogaevsky, and Nikolay Khrustachev, among others.</p>
<p>&ldquo;In the morning everybody worked in their own corner or outdoors,&rdquo; Ariadna recalled. &ldquo;Artists painted and poets wrote. There was also a pottery studio, where anyone could come and work with clay. Later, their pieces were fired and glazed. [...] To me it was all magic, just like the paintings that emerged from a blank canvas.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> As a child, Arendt took classes from Elizaveta Govorova, a member of the World of Art group, who was a student of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a mystic and theosophist who greatly influenced Arendt&rsquo;s worldview and style. Her teenage works, especially drawings, already revealed an interest in symbolism and mysticism.</p>
<p>Later, writing about one of her other teachers Nikolay Samokish, Arendt recalled, &ldquo;N.S. said of Maximilian Voloshin that he knew no better art historian. He had a lot of respect for Arkhip Kuindzhi and his students, especially for Nicholas Roerich and, strangely, our student sketches reminded him of the new directions pointed out by Roerich.&rdquo; Her close connection with Voloshin&mdash;a family friend and her mentor in art (he was also a mentor in poetry for the young Marina Tsvetaeva)&mdash;brought Arendt to Koktebel, a place that would play a crucial role in her life.</p>
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<p>Deeply influenced by the theosophical beliefs she picked up from Voloshin, Arendt learnt to seek and find harmony even in life&rsquo;s darkest moments. As a young girl, she had what she called a revelation. &ldquo;I remember when I was 16 and was studying at Simferopol Art College. I finished a life drawing and went into the small room where we stored our works. As I was about to pull aside the curtain something happened to me, which I cannot describe in words. Any attempt to do so would be very pale in comparison to the actual experience. All of a sudden, time ceased to exist. How long I stood there I do not know, but I experienced immense, ineffable happiness. I was so happy that I could not breathe. It seemed to me at that moment that I knew everything; that I could answer any question; that God existed; that evil was an illusion; that there was no death and that the world was boundless [...]. I could see golden rays that pierced me from above and, and seemed to grow narrower toward the bottom. My essence was shaken. Everything ended as abruptly as it had started, but I left that small room a different person. This was cosmic and inexpressible happiness!&rdquo;</p>
<p>In 1932, after graduating from VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN, where her teachers included Lev Bruni, Nina Niss-Goldman, Vera Mukhina, Joseph Chaikov, Sergei Bulakovsky, Ivan Efimov, and Vladimir Favorsky, Arendt settled in Moscow. She lived in the artists&rsquo; village at Verkhnyaya Maslovka, known as the Russian Montmartre, where she worked alongside her friends Sarra Lebedeva, Vasily Vatagin, Ivan Efimov, her first partner Meer Ayzenshtadt, and her husband Anatoly Grigoriev.</p>
<p>In a tragic incident in 1936, Arendt was run over by a tram and lost both legs, however she remained active both in her daily life and creative work.</p>
<p>In the 1940s, Arendt and Grigoriev were both members of a theosophical circle run by Arendt&rsquo;s relative, Olga Butkevich. In 1948, Grigoriev was arrested as a member of &ldquo;the anti-Soviet theosophical underground&rdquo; and sent to a prison camp, but Arendt miraculously avoided arrest. In the mid-1950s, she started building a house in Koktebel, where her friends and like-minded artists came to stay in the years that followed. Amaravella artists Viktor Chernovolenko and Boris Smirnov-Rusetsky were frequent guests.</p>
<p>Toward the end of her artistic career, Arendt began making innovative compositions of stones and fossils she found in Koktebel, which had parallels with Amaravella&rsquo;s work. &ldquo;I got into [collecting stones] much later. Maximilian Voloshin was no longer around and I couldn&rsquo;t run up and down the mountains, and that was when I discovered the microcosm of rocks.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Maria Arendt, Natalia Arendt</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;All quotes are from: Ariadna Arendt, &ldquo;V strane golubykh kholmov,&rdquo; in Natalya Menchinskaya, Krymskie &ldquo;argonavty&rdquo; XX veka (Moscow: Kriterion, 2003).</p>
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Ariadna Arendt

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<p>Anthroposophy and George Gurdjieff&rsquo;s mystical teachings gave birth, among many other things, to two movement arts: eurythmy and sacred movements. It comes as no surprise that dance&mdash;a primary and ancient way of expressing inner experiences through movement&mdash;became the language of choice for mystical and ritualistic practices, a means of activating the imagination, and a reliable channel through which to connect to the transcendental and the otherworldly. It also made perfect sense that the early twentieth-century syncretic theories &ldquo;of spirit,&rdquo; such as Steiner&rsquo;s anthroposophy and Gurdjieff&rsquo;s doctrine, worked to develop a new approach to dance and revive some of its archaic ritualistic and healing functions.</p>
<p>The first documented instances of Steiner&rsquo;s interest in developing an art of movement date back to 1908. As he was preparing a series of talks on the Gospel of John, Steiner asked one of his students, the artist and author Margarita Sabashnikova (her work from the Rudolf Steiner Archive is featured in the exhibition), whether she believed that excerpts from the Gospel could be interpreted in dance. Sabashnikova answered: &ldquo;one can dance anything one feels.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Eurythmy is the anthroposophical art of movement, which combines dance with poetic texts or music. Steiner developed the theory and practice of eurythmy in conjunction with Marie von Sivers. Under von Sivers, eurythmy received further development as a performance art, a pedagogical practice integral to Waldorf education, and later&mdash;a contribution from Ita Wegman&mdash;as a form of therapy.</p>
<p>Eurythmy uses the movement of the human body to express relationships and patterns contained in language and music. Along with gestures, its means of expression include color and spatial arrangements. Eurythmic movements express particular sounds (phonemes). This enables the performer to dance a text in poetry or prose. Similarly, drawing on tonality, style, and intonation, a eurythmist can interpret a musical work. Unlike classical ballet, eurythmy is not composed of abstract and taught poses arranged to fit the music but is a &ldquo;living visible language.&rdquo; The basic unit of this language is &ldquo;form:&rdquo; through form, a poetic or musical work emerges in space. Form is created based on the experience of interpreting music and text and observing their inner dynamics.</p>
<p>Sacred movements were the building blocks from which sacred dances were composed, an essential practice taught by George Gurdjieff as part of his Fourth Way. According to the mystic, a system of movement like the one he taught helped those who practiced it to develop a will and brought them closer to liberation and disengagement from their own materiality, making them true masters of their physical bodies. The system developed by Gurdjieff consisted of a sequence of movements that ranged from special gymnastic exercises to complex dance schemes and structures.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">K I</p>
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<p>As part of the exhibition, the Russian group VASYARUN will present the performance It Just Seems That Way, which was specially created for the project based on George Gurdjieff&rsquo;s sacred movements The Swiss performer Martje Brandsma will present three eurythmic performances in the Museum&rsquo;s East Gallery during the exhibition. Dates and times will be published separately.</p>
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Secrets in Movement: Eurythy and Sacred Movements

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<p>The mysteries surrounding the figure of the famous mystic and spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff (1866?, 1872?, 1874?, 1877?, Alexandropol, Russian Empire&mdash;1949, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) begin with his date of birth. Biographers&rsquo; opinions diverge and that is hardly surprising, since the &ldquo;teacher,&rdquo; as his followers called him, conjured numerous mystifications and fantasies about his life and created this riddle himself. We do know that he was born into a Greek-Armenian family in Alexandropol (Gyumri). His father was an ashik folk singer and musician, who was quite well known in the area, and Gurdjieff was familiar with the myths and legends of the East from an early age.</p>
<p>The small border town of Alexandropol did not satisfy the young man&rsquo;s ambition and thirst for knowledge, and he set out on a journey to discover the world and find himself. According to his autobiographical work Meetings with Remarkable Men, as well as wandering through the Caucasus, Persia, and the Himalayas, Gurdjieff spent eleven years travelling across Central Asia, which at the time was known as Russian Turkestan. Although his biographers can neither confirm nor deny his account, its truthfulness is of secondary importance when it concerns the spiritual journey of</p>
<p>a person as extraordinary as Gurdjieff. Whether the journey happened or not, his study of Central Asia&rsquo;s religions&mdash;from Eastern Christianity to Buddhism and Sufism&mdash;inspired Gurdjieff to create his own teaching&mdash; the &ldquo;Fourth Way,&rdquo; which put forward a particular system for personal development. Gurdjieff believed that people lived in a state of &ldquo;hypnotic sleep&rdquo; and needed to work on their minds, bodies, spirits, and emotions in order to &ldquo;wake up.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In the 1910s, the mystic travelled around the Russian Empire and in 1915 met P. D. Ouspensky, who became his follower. Ouspensky was the author of The Fourth Dimension and the husband of the artist Vera Pshesetskaya (Runa), whose work is featured in this exhibition. In Tiflis (Tbilisi), Gurdjieff met the artist Alexandre de Salzmann, whose wife Jeanne later became one of his most loyal students and continued to teach the sacred dances, or movements, which she developed together with the &ldquo;teacher,&rdquo; in France until 1990. When the Civil War broke out in Russia, Gurdjieff and his students moved to Istanbul, where he tried to establish the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. They later moved to Europe and then to the United States.</p>
<p>As his teaching was focused on the &ldquo;awakening&rdquo; of people, Gurdjieff attached great importance to art and action, which led to the creation of his sacred dances. Composed of particular movements, they were essentially texts or sequences of phrases. Every gesture referred to a truth or a revelation discovered by Gurdjieff on his journey. As a synthetic work, the system of sacred dances also required special music to bring together the meanings conveyed through movements into a coherent text. Gurdjieff wrote the music for the movements in collaboration with his student, the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann.</p>
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<p>Few people know that the Soviet sculptor Sergei Merkulov&mdash;the recipient of two Stalin Prizes and the author of iconic portraits of Lenin (including his death mask)&mdash;was Gurdjieff&rsquo;s cousin. They kept up a correspondence, which has not been preserved. Indirect evidence of their connection is Merkulov&rsquo;s sculpture Thought (1911&ndash;1913), which traveled around various areas of Moscow before ending its journey on the artist&rsquo;s grave at Novodevichy Cemetery. The &ldquo;thinker&rdquo; has Gurdjieff&rsquo;s features, while his clothes allow us to identify him as an eastern priest. To this day followers of the Fourth Way gather by this monument to pay their respects to the great mystic.</p>
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George Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way

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<p>Whereas the politically engaged artists of the radical avant-garde began working on &ldquo;a new art for a new world&rdquo; immediately after the Russian Revolution, for those creative people involved in anything considered mystical, religious or esoteric the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the threat of imminent arrest and possible execution. In 1922, the Anti- Religion Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was founded. Most esoteric groups and philosophical and religious associations were now defined as sects and considered anti-Soviet organizations. As Ilya Udovenko writes in his article for this booklet, in 1929, &ldquo;the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People&rsquo;s Commissars issued the decree &lsquo;On Religious Associations,&rsquo; which remained in force (with certain alterations) until October 1, 1990. Article 17 of the decree banned any non- liturgical activities by religious organizations. These included all education and economic activities, as well as running groups or societies. Members of such groups were usually accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and imprisoned.&rdquo; By the mid-1920s, the anarcho-mystical community had fallen victim to violent persecution, many anthroposophists were arrested as class enemies, the constant fear of the &ldquo;arrival of the crow&rdquo; (as the black cars of the repressive state were referred to) pushed the members of the Anthroposophical Society to destroy any evidence of their involvement in Steiner&rsquo;s teaching (one display in the exhibition covers the founder of the State Darwin Museum and devout anthroposophist Alexander Kohts). &ldquo;Secret knowledge&rdquo; came to mean more than esoteric teachings accessible to a few initiates. Now it really had to be kept secret for the safety of those who possessed it. This &ldquo;double secrecy&rdquo; would later present a major obstacle to those searching for information and artifacts that might shed light on the intense spiritual life of the first half of the twentieth century. However, one of the exhibition&rsquo;s most curious narratives unfolds around the mechanics of the transfer of &ldquo;secret knowledge:&rdquo; the crystal that Alexander Kohts kept on his desk; the indirect evidence of Andrei Bely&rsquo;s friends having been converted to anthroposophy by the poet (Steiner said that Bely &ldquo;would bring many followers&rdquo;); a cabinet with spiritual texts copied by hand into standard Soviet notebooks and preserved by the family of the Soviet sculptor and theosophist Ariadna Arendt. Arendt&rsquo;s husband, sculptor Anatoly Grigoriev was arrested and exiled in 1948 as the result of a fabricated case against the &ldquo;anti-Soviet theosophist underground.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Working in the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the research team was able to reconstruct the tragic trajectories of several artists (including Rimma Nikolaeva), writers, and intellectuals involved in mystical societies. The exhibition includes copies of criminal records of a number of people tried by troikas (commissions of three people that handed down sentences without a public trial, created as an instrument of political repression). One of the most striking of these documents is the record of Boris Zubakin, who at the age of 18 created a Masonic lodge he titled Light of Stars. Later it merged with another lodge called Astrea. Zubakin was an important figure on the Russian intellectual and philosophical scene. He amassed an outstanding library of religious and philosophical literature. Anastasia, the sister of the famous poet Marina Tsvetaeva, briefly worked as Zubakin&rsquo;s secretary. He was arrested in 1922 and again in 1929 as an ex-officer, &ldquo;a member and organizer of mystical groups, a Kabbalist, and a practitioner of black magic.&rdquo; In 1937, he was among those accused in the group case against &ldquo;the members of the counter-revolutionary fascist organization the Rosicrucian Order.&rdquo; On January 26, 1938, Zubakin was sentenced to death and on February 3 he was shot at the Butovo Polygon.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">K I</p>
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Chronicles of Exile: Esoteric Movements during the First Decades of Soviet Power

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<p>The confrontational ideological campaigns launched repeatedly by the Soviet propaganda machine throughout the 1920s and 1930s served to create an image of an internal enemy and build social tension. This mechanism was used to justify the state&rsquo;s repressive policies, which had been in operation since 1918 and peaked in 1937/1938. The image of the &ldquo;enemy of the people&rdquo; was not fixed but evolved alongside the repressive apparatus. The only thing which did not change was opposition to Soviet power (whether real or imagined). This opposition could be political (Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, and later Trotskyists), physical (White Army), class-based (the aristocracy, the clergy, kulaks) or otherwise. According to Soviet propaganda, as well as social groups that were in open conflict with the regime, the country&rsquo;s industry and agriculture were infested with saboteurs, wreckers, and terrorists. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw two major show trials against counter-revolutionary saboteurs in coal mining (the Shakhty Trial in Donbass, 1928) and wreckers in industry and transport (the Industrial Party Trial, 1930). Science and culture were not far behind. In the late 1920s, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) fabricated a criminal case against the members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (the Academy Trial, 1929&ndash;1931), which led to the arrest of the well-known historians Yevgeny Tarle, Sergey Platonov, and Nikolay Likhachev. Alongside political and economic factors, the peak in political repression was based on changes to the law made in the 1920s. The introduction of the infamous Article 58 (Political Crime and Counter-Revolutionary Activities) to the Penal Code in 1926 and its lack of clarity gave the secret police carte blanche to arrest virtually anyone. The article opened with a definition of counter-revolutionary action as &ldquo;any action aimed at overthrowing, undermining or weakening the power of the workers&rsquo; and peasants&rsquo; soviets or the government founded in accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.&rdquo; This was followed by a curious clause, according to which &ldquo;any action not directly aimed at the above-mentioned goals but implying a conscious attack on the key political and economic achievements of the proletarian revolution&rdquo; was also considered counter- revolutionary. Then came a list of political crimes with corresponding punishments. Crimes ranged from armed uprising (punishable by execution) to the spreading of rumors (six or more months in prison). According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, 4,060,306 people were arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes between 1921 and 1953, and 799,455 were sentenced to death. An integral part of Soviet politics since September 1918 (when the Council of People&rsquo;s Commissars issued the decree &ldquo;On Red Terror&rdquo;), repression was seen by society as an organic element of the political life of the state.</p>
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<p>In the 1920s and 1930s, the state&rsquo;s repressive apparatus targeted various social organizations, groups, creative and spiritual associations, and religious institutions. In fall 1922, the Anti-Religion Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was created to guarantee the separation of church and state. It defined government policy in religious affairs until 1929. However, according to historian Igor Kurlyandsky, the real aim of the Commission was &ldquo;not to implement the principle of the separation of church and state, as its official name hypocritically stated, but to weaken all religious organizations with a view to destroying religion as such in future and expelling the remains of religious thinking from the minds of the people.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> Most esoteric groups and philosophical and religious associations fell into the category of sects and were considered anti-Soviet organizations. On April 8, 1929, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People&rsquo;s Commissars issued the decree &ldquo;On Religious Associations,&rdquo; which remained in force (with certain alterations) until October 1, 1990. Article 17 of the decree banned any non-liturgical activities by religious organizations. These included all education and economic activities, as well as running groups or societies. Members of such groups were usually accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and imprisoned. Among those persecuted were many representatives of Russian Cosmism (Amaravella group, Alexander Chizhevsky, Alexander Yaroslavsky, and others). One of the biggest &ldquo;sect&rdquo; trials took place in 1928&ndash;1929 and involved members of Voskresenie (Resurrection), a philosophical and religious group run by Alexander Meyer.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Ilya Udovenko</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Igor Kurlyandsky, Stalin, vlast&rsquo;, religiya (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011), 190&ndash;191.</p>
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On the Persecution of the Old Spirituality

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<p>For Lydia Armand (née Tumpovskaya, 1887, St. Petersburg, Russian Empire&mdash; 1931, Rostov Oblast (?), Soviet Union), the Russian Revolution was the start of the &ldquo;era of Great Spirituality&rdquo; in teaching. Amidst the turmoil and destruction of the Civil War, Armand, who was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and a former member of the National Constituent Assembly, decided to create a new kind of school: a countryside commune that would &ldquo;help young people [...] grow into humans for whom life would be both a temple and a workshop, and in this temple they would be as much a part of God as they would be priests and workers.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>In April 1920, Armand, together with a group of companions that included Sofia Guerrier, Varvara Ievleva, Alexander Kasatkin, and Ekaterina Chekhova, finally received state accreditation of the secondary stage of the Pushkino Experimental School-Colony, located 36 km from Moscow. Armand believed that children of the &ldquo;secondary stage&rdquo; (school years 5 to 10) were capable of making conscious decisions about their education, and conscious choice was an important element of the selection of children for her school. Another element was the spiritual development of the child.</p>
<p>The core of Armand&rsquo;s approach to education was anthroposophical. Students were to be completely immersed in their studies, not merely receiving knowledge but living it. Like their teachers, they were to discover the world through direct introspective experience, meditation, and complex reflexive techniques.</p>
<p>One of the main goals of anthroposophy was to reunite art, science, and religious thinking. While working on the program for her future school, Armand wrote in her diary that &ldquo;the idea of cosmic unity is best understood through Brahmanism; that of the evolution of forms through Buddhism; and respect for the purity of nature and the ideal of expressing this purity in human life through morality, rhythm, and harmony with the world through Zoroastrianism.&rdquo; <sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup></p>
<p>In addition to the main curriculum, optional study groups were organized based on students&rsquo; interests. Subjects included drawing, French, English, Italian, Esperanto, drama, and gymnastics.</p>
<p>The day started with readings of spiritual, philosophical or fictional texts, ranging from the Gospels to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Peter Kropotkin, Paul Gauguin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Leo Tolstoy. Then teachers and students sang a kind of spiritual hymn, and proceeded to work in the fields or in the garden. In the afternoon, classes in the sciences and humanities followed, plus work in study groups and reading. Occasionally, before the end of the day, Armand would talk to the students about the lives of the great men of faith, thinkers, and revolutionaries.</p>
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<p>Before her experimental school even opened, Armand was accused of elitism and biased selection of &ldquo;the best&rdquo; children, whereas &ldquo;school-colonies existed for the worst.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup> The community of teachers and students at Armand&rsquo;s school was closed to the outside world and almost esoteric, which, of course, went against the very essence of the Soviet system of &ldquo;people&rsquo;s education.&rdquo; However, confronted with mass juvenile delinquency in the 1920s, the state welcomed any initiative in educating and supporting orphans and neglected children.</p>
<p>In autumn 1924, following numerous checks and reviews, the school was closed. On November 12 of the same year Armand was arrested for being a member of &ldquo;a counter-revolutionary organisation&mdash;the Theosophical Society.&rdquo; She was detained by order of the Special Council of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) issued on December 12. Less than two weeks later, she was charged with &ldquo;anti-Soviet activity and the spreading of false rumors.&rdquo; Following the resolution of the Panel of the OGPU Special Council on February 27, 1925, she was exiled to the town of Berezov in the Urals for three years.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Sergei Levochsky</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Elena Armand, Blazhenny chistye serdtsem (Moscow: Arsis Books, 2012), 179.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Lydia Armand, Dnevniki, vol. 1, GULAG History Museum.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;See Elena Armand, op. cit.</p>
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The School of Lydia Armand

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<p>Rimma Nikolaeva was an artist, sculptor, illustrator of Persian myths and poetry, and a member of a mystical organization active in Tashkent and Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s.</p>
<p>The only source of information about her life discovered to date is the criminal case in the Federal Security Service (FSB) archive in St. Petersburg,<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> however it sheds no light on the first thirty years of her life. We do not know where and with whom she grew up, nor where she studied. The only thing we do know is that before the early 1930s she lived in Batum (currently Batumi, Georgia).</p>
<p>The earliest known episode in Nikolaeva&rsquo;s life, as recounted in the criminal case, involves her visits to Tashkent. She went to see her friend Elisaveta Dmitrieva (married name Vasilieva, also known by the pseudonym Cherubina de Gabriak), who was exiled to Tashkent in 1927 for her involvement in anthroposophy (&ldquo;for her belief in the immortality of human spirit&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup>).</p>
<p>In Tashkent, through their shared interest in anthroposophy, Nikolaeva met translator and East Asia scholar Julian Shutsky. From 1935 to 1936 she lived with Shutsky and his family at their apartment in Leningrad. She worked at the Oriental Studies Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a sculptor and illustrator specializing in Persian myths and poetry, took commissions from the Leningrad Porcelain Factory, and participated in several group exhibitions.</p>
<p>In May 1937, after Nikolaeva chose not to deny her interest in anthroposophy during a number of interrogations, her apartment was searched and the discovery of religious and philosophical books led to her arrest. She was charged with anti-Soviet propaganda and counter-revolutionary activities, a common formula that the Soviet regime used against people involved in mysticism and spiritual practices (including Julian Shutsky, Iranologist Fyodor Rostopchin, artist Andrei Sparionapte, and poet and archeologist Boris Zubakin). On October 5, 1937, the NKVD troika<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup> for Leningrad Oblast sentenced Rimma Nikolaeva to death. She was shot four days later, on October 9. The only artefacts that constitute her legacy today are two small, porcelain sculptural groups (Rostam (1936) and Rostam (1937)) in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum. The exhibition features one of these sculptures, painted by Alexei Vorobievsky in 1937, which was most likely produced for the Paris World&rsquo;s Fair of the same year.</p>
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<p>Rostam is the protagonist of The Shahnameh, an epic poem by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. Nikolaeva sculpted him next to his stallion, Rakhsh. Ferdowsi described the color of Rakhsh&rsquo;s coat as &ldquo;rose petals scattered on a saffron ground,&rdquo; and Vorobievsky followed this description when painting the sculpture.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Daria Bobrenko</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;FSB Archive for St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast, case no. П-70808.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;From the introduction to Cherubina de Gabriak&rsquo;s collection of poems Under the Pear Tree (Tashkent, 1927).</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;Translator&rsquo;s note: In the Soviet Union, troikas of the People&rsquo;s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) were commissions of three people created across the country as an instrument of political repression during the Great Purge. They issued sentences without a public trial and were active from 1937 to 1938.</p>
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Rimma Nikolaeva

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<p>For several decades, the &ldquo;East&rdquo; as it exists in the Western imagination has been a matter of heated debate. The biggest contribution to this discourse to date (and it is likely to remain so) is Edward Said&rsquo;s Orientalism, in which the author, drawing on a huge pool of literary and documentary sources, distilled the Western vision of the East as an exotic, mystical, and radically &ldquo;different&rdquo; place. Meaning it differs from that reality considered the central one, without any alternative: the space of Western culture and tradition.</p>
<p>This relationship was created not simply by direct political subjugation but also by sometimes elaborate forms of cultural colonization and even self-colonization. The East attracted seekers of new spiritual and cultural directions from the European part of the Russian Empire, and particularly after the Russian conquest of Central Asia. One of the pioneers was the painter Vasily Vereshchagin, who travelled to Samarkand in 1868, the year the city was captured by Konstantin von Kaufmann, who would be the first Governor-General of Russian Turkestan. Several artistic expeditions followed Vereshchagin&rsquo;s, including the 1921 journey that inspired Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin to produce his celebrated series of drawings Samarkandia.</p>
<p>One important reason behind this wave of searching for a new self, a different spirituality, and alternative foundations in the &ldquo;mysterious East&rdquo; (where &ldquo;East&rdquo; could mean anything) was the crisis of the Christian worldview, which was already looming in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, this crisis had spread beyond philosophical books and intellectual debates and blossomed in a variety of mystical, including eastern, teachings and practices, ranging from yoga to the Egyptian Tarot and the search for Shambala.</p>
<p>In the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of the artists featured in this exhibition associated themselves with the East, be it in a more general orientalist sense or as represented by Central Asia, the local East of Russian and Soviet culture. In his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, George Gurdjieff recounts the story of his eleven-year journey across Central Asia, although whether it actually took place is still a matter of debate. In the Andrei Bely Museum in Moscow, visitors can find objects that the poet brought back from Turkestan: an embroidered cap and bedcovers with a traditional ornament. The poet and anthroposophist Elisaveta Dmitrieva (married name Vasilieva), best known by the pseudonym Cherubina de Gabriak, lived and worked in Tashkent. Dmitrieva was close to poet Maximilian Voloshin, one of the key figures in the mystical circles of the Silver Age, whose house in Koktebel was frequented by all seekers of &ldquo;higher knowledge.&rdquo; Another resident of Tashkent, Cherubina&rsquo;s friend, the artist, sculptor, and illustrator of Persian myths and poetry Rimma Nikolaeva was also an anthroposophist and a member of a mystical society that was active in Leningrad and Tashkent in the 1920s and 1930s. Nikolaeva was in a relationship with the oriental studies specialist and translator Julian Shutsky, who she met in Tashkent thanks to a shared interest in anthroposophy.</p>
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<p>The search for artistic inspiration (along with &ldquo;exotic&rdquo; imagery and textures) in &ldquo;the East&rdquo; received a new impetus in the early years of the Soviet Union. A number of artists from various parts of Russia headed to Samarkand encouraged by the Soviet government&rsquo;s unexpected decision to restore the city&rsquo;s medieval monuments. This circle, which included Daniil Stepanov, Aleksandr Nikolayev (Usto Mumin), and Alexei Isupov, is often referred to as &ldquo;the Pre-Raphaelites of Samarkand,&rdquo; a phrase coined by art historian Boris Chukhovich to reflect members&rsquo; reverence for Italian culture, language, and fine art. The group worked using a form of painting that combined the achievements of the Italian Renaissance with Persian miniature painting techniques, the Russian icon-painting tradition, and local cultural motifs such as bacha bazi (boys made to dance in female costumes to show off their androgynous beauty). However, Samarkand did not remain free from ideological pressure in art for long, and their unique project was short-lived. Isupov and Stepanov both left the Soviet Union under different pretexts and moved to Italy, where Stepanov showed his &ldquo;Pre-Raphaelite&rdquo; works at the Venice Biennale in 1926. For Nikolayev, life took a tragic turn. He was arrested on a number of charges and spent several years in prison. The legacy left by the circle was scattered across the world and a large part of it is now lost.</p>
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Exodus to the Soviet East: In Search of New Foundations

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<p>Aleksandr Nikolayev was born into a noble family. In his memoirs he described his father as an ardent art enthusiast and his mother as a gifted pianist. As a youth, Nikolayev took lessons in classical drawing. Around the same time, he became aware that he liked &ldquo;strong and tanned&rdquo; men.<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> Inspired by leftist ideas, he enrolled on Kazimir Malevich&rsquo;s course at the Open Art Studios in 1919, but several months later was drafted into the military and sent to the Civil War frontline. After the war, he headed to Turkestan to &ldquo;revolutionize art [...] as a Bolshevik artist.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> On his way to Turkestan Nikolayev spent half a year in Orenburg, where he &ldquo;got carried away and married,&rdquo; but the marriage fell apart and he travelled to Tashkent in 1920 and then, several months later, to Samarkand.</p>
<p>In 1939, describing his arrival in Central Asia, Nikolayev wrote, &ldquo;I knew [...] the famous story of the French artist Paul Gauguin, who spent seven years on the island of Tahiti living with the local tribes and taking part in their rites and customs. [...] I thought I would repeat his experiment.&rdquo; Nikolayev lived differently to others within the community of Russian artists in Samarkand. He settled in a Muslim neighborhood (or mahalla), quickly learnt the basics of the Uzbek language, converted to Islam, and took the name Usto Mumin (Faithful Master), which he also used as his artist&rsquo;s pseudonym.</p>
<p>Rather than &ldquo;revolutionizing&rdquo; local art,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Bolshevik artist&rdquo; began to adapt to the local culture. He produced his first artworks around eighteen months after starting his new life in Samarkand. Mumin was a member of the informal circle of artists that gathered around Daniil Stepanov (1921&ndash; 1924) based on a shared interest in Italy and specifically the Quattrocento. In Mumin&rsquo;s work the collective project of the group found its ultimate visual and thematic expression. He brought together elements of the Italian Quattrocento with those of Persian miniatures and Russian icons, supplementing this combination with androgynous motifs. The images were inspired by bacha bazi, the culture of dancing boys, whose theatrical performances were an important part of Samarkand rituals. The cycle featured a subliminal narrative: all of the paintings revolved around a love story between two young men from the Muslim community.</p>
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<p>In 1925, Usto Mumin moved to Tashkent. After his second marriage both his professional and private life seemed to be going well, but his erratic movements across the country (in 1929 he suddenly moved to Leningrad and a year later, just as unexpectedly, he returned to Uzbekistan) revealed hidden conflicts. The themes of his works were becoming more conventional and the traces of homoeroticism less noticeable, but this did not save him from persecution. In 1938, he was accused of &ldquo;counter-revolutionary activities&rdquo; and sent to a labour camp in Mariinsk. After his return to Tashkent in 1942, he took up art again and worked as a stage designer, however his 1920s works remained the highlight of his career.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;From the manuscript diary of Olga Bessarabova (Marina Tsvetaeva House-Museum, inv. no. КП-4677/55). The quote was located by Professor Eleonora Shafranskaya of the Department of Russian Literature at Moscow State Pedagogical University. She is the author of the book Nikolayev &ndash; Usto Mumin: His Fate in History and Culture (A Reconstruction of the Artist&rsquo;s Biography).</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Shorthand report of the meeting of the steering committee of the Uzbekistan Union of Artists, August 27, 1937. Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Ф. 2320, О. 1, Д 39.&mdash;Л. 455.</p>
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Usto Mumin

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<p>Alexei Isupov was the son of an iconostasis maker. He worked in icon- painting studios during his adolescence (1903&ndash;1908) and later received an academic training at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1908&ndash;1912), where he developed an interest in impressionism. His career is usually separated into four periods: the first Moscow period (to 1913), the Turkestani period (1915&ndash;1921), the second Moscow period (1921&ndash;1926), and the Italian period (1926). This separation does not strictly follow the evolution of his work, but is based on the artist&rsquo;s biography. During World War One, Isupov was conscripted into the military and spent seven years in Central Asia. Later, he worked in Moscow and then, in the mid-1920s, he traveled to Italy to recuperate from tuberculosis, remaining there until the end of his life. Stylistically, he fluctuated between academicism and impressionism, the only dramatic swing in his career being the Samarkand series of tempera paintings that he produced in 1921. This series was so different from anything he had made before, or would produce after, that it can best be considered a separate period in the artist&rsquo;s creative biography.</p>
<p>With the tempera series Isupov departed from his studies of the representation of light, a key problem in both academicism and impressionist painting. Instead, he created forms through the use of gradient in monochrome and sharply delineated spots of color. He renounced his signature succulent brushwork, moving away not only from his personal style but from everything that European painting had achieved since the invention of perspective. Stylistically, the tempera series was a turn toward the icon- painting tradition and early Renaissance painting, in which objects created no shadows and light was seen as a property of the object itself. This sudden change in style cannot be explained by anything other than a visual influence. It might have resulted from Isupov&rsquo;s collaborations with Daniil Stepanov and later with Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, both members of an informal circle that could be described as &ldquo;the Pre-Raphaelites of Samarkand.&rdquo; Isupov&rsquo;s tempera series featured works in various genres, including ethnographic portraits with details pointing to a particular way of life or a craft (Teahouse Owner, Commandant, Jeweller), genre art (Family, After the Bath), ritual scenes (depicting, in particular, rites of passage, such as The Bride), and icon- type portraits that elevated &ldquo;Samarkand&rdquo; characters to the level of Biblical or other religious figures. Isupov produced several images of half-naked women (Mother with Children), which were unique for &ldquo;the Pre-Raphaelites of Samarkand&rdquo;, but also, like the other members of the circle, portrayed a number of androgynous young men (Musician with a Dutar, Young Man with a Book), whose thin long fingers bring to mind early Tuscan painting and dramatically bent necks are a variation on the erotic motif found in work by other artists of Stepanov&rsquo;s circle.</p>
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Alexei Isupov (Alessio Issupoff)

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<p>The role that Daniil Stepanov played in forming &ldquo;the Pre-Raphaelites of Samarkand&rdquo; was as important as it was paradoxical and difficult to pinpoint. In comparison to the gigantic figure of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, the impressive oeuvre of Alexei Isupov, and even the relatively modest body of work left by Usto Mumin, Stepanov&rsquo;s legacy seems minute. However, he was not simply the owner of the garden where the &ldquo;Pre- Raphaelites&rdquo; had their meetings but, more importantly, he was the link that connected the first incarnation of the circle (when Petrov-Vodkin arrived in Samarkand and Isupov was preparing to leave) and the later one (when Usto Mumin joined the group). Very little is known about the artist&rsquo;s life. Stepanov was born to an aristocratic father, who was a painter and a Slavophile with monarchist views. According to family sources, he was educated at the Sorbonne, took classes from French medalists (in the late 1890s), and later studied fine art in Rome, where he specialized in restoring Renaissance paintings (1900&ndash;1902/1903). On his return to Russia, he worked as a restorer in the Kremlin. In 1911, he became the chief medalist at St. Petersburg&rsquo;s Print Yard. According to his family, in the years that followed the Revolution, Stepanov was twice arrested and detained at the Petrograd headquarters of the secret police. He was later released with the help of the People&rsquo;s Commissar for Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky. Stepanov designed one of the first Soviet medals and taught in an art school in Penza. Having moved east and away from the capital, from 1920 to 1924 he headed Samkomstaris, a commission created to oversee the restoration and preservation of medieval buildings in Samarkand. It was under Stepanov&rsquo;s direction that Alexei Isupov, Aleksandr Nikolayev (Usto Mumin), Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Alexander Samokhvalov, Viktor Ufimtsev, and Nikolai Mamontov worked for the commission. In the evenings, the artists gathered in the garden of Stepanov&rsquo;s dacha, where they formed a circle with a distinctly &ldquo;Pre- Raphaelite&rdquo; aesthetic program.</p>
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<p>Along with his extensive practical experience and knowledge of the techniques used by the Italian Old Masters, Stepanov introduced to the circle his own approach to painting, which involved the use of photography to capture details for the future work and determine its composition. Photographs that served as the basis for at least two of his works (Prayer, 1925 and Suzani Seller, 1921&ndash;1925) have been preserved and allow us to see how carefully Stepanov documented his surroundings, despite the minimalist composition, poetic nature, and Italian-influenced style of his paintings. We know from a memoir that it was also Stepanov who taught the tempera technique to Usto Mumin. But Stepanov was also receptive to the work of his friends, and several of his paintings show the influence of the imagery and &ldquo;spherical perspective&rdquo; that Petrov-Vodkin developed in the 1910s and 1920s.</p>
<p>In 1925, Stepanov went on a working trip to Paris and never returned to the Soviet Union. After emigrating he no longer made use of &ldquo;Pre- Raphaelite&rdquo; motifs, despite the fact that his Samarkand works were exhibited at the 15th Venice Biennale in 1926.</p>
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Daniil Stepanov

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<p>The East as an imaginary space of creative and spiritual inspiration and as a real place for life and work (the Soviet East was Central Asia) was changed over time. From the late 1920s it became, for many of the artists featured in this exhibition, a territory with special status: it was a place of exile; a destination to which people chose to move in order to escape the strict artistic control of the capital cities; and, for some, an imaginary territory emanating spiritual energy that offered psychological and emotional support in an increasingly totalitarian society. Artistic people involved in the pursuit of secret knowledge were now turning toward a &ldquo;quiet creative life.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The upheavals of that time were reflected in the journey of Sergey Kalmykov, an extraordinary artist who remains under-appreciated today. Born in 1891 in Samarkand, Kalmykov studied in Moscow and St. Petersburg, including under Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and created bold, avant-garde works. In the 1930s, rumors began to circulate that he was of interest to the secret police and in 1935 he moved to Alma-Ata. This move was followed by a curious episode, on the nature of which his biographers disagree. In Alma-Ata it seemed that Kalmykov had lost his mind: he became something of a local madman, wandering the streets in clownish outfits and shouting strange words and phrases. Some believe that the artist simulated madness in order to continue painting abstract works with unearthly architecture and alien-looking fantastical creatures, none of which matched the Socialist Realist canon. Others argue that his madness was real and a form of protective escapism.</p>
<p>Later, Alma-Ata became home to another Soviet artist, Isaac Itkind. The son of a rabbi, Itkind also had a religious education, but chose to devote himself to art and specifically wooden sculpture. He worked in Moscow and Leningrad and was successful, but in 1937, after he took part in the Pushkin Anniversary Exhibition at the Hermitage, Itkind was arrested. Brutally beaten and tortured in prison, until 1944 he was believed to be dead. In fact, since 1938 he had lived in Kazakhstan, in a dugout on the outskirts of Alma- Ata. The locals thought he was crazy. Opinions diverge on the spiritual aspect of his work. In his article for this booklet, Alexey Ulko writes that, &ldquo;Although Itkind never considered himself an esoteric artist, there is ample evidence that he may have been unconsciously enlightened and worked with the imaginary on the ethereal level, without the need to rationalize his approach.&rdquo; Other researchers believe that Itkind may have deliberately kept the esoteric aspect of his work secret, knowing that it would not be accepted by Soviet art historians.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>Amaravella, a group of artists who practiced an intuitive approach to creativity and described themselves as &ldquo;cosmists,&rdquo; used the space of the spiritual and the unearthly as a receptacle for inspiration. Strongly influenced by Nicholas Roerich, they rooted their work, both in terms of form and narrative, in a wide variety of Eastern and Western mythologies. The story of Amaravella was a tragic one. Some of the group fell victim to the political repressions of the 1930s and 1940s (Vera Pshesetskaya and Sergei Shigolev), some were imprisoned (Aleksandr Sardan) or abandoned their creative projects (Viktor Chernovolenko), and (Pyotr Fateev and Boris Smirnov- Rusetsky) continued to work &ldquo;quietly.&rdquo;</p>
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Chtoniles of Exile II: The Beginning of the “Quiet” Period

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<p>Sergey Kalmykov was born in Samarkand. In 1894, his family moved to Orenburg, and in 1909 Kalmykov arrived in Moscow, where he entered the school of artist and theater designer Konstantin Yuon and later attended classes at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In 1910, he moved to St. Petersburg and trained at the studio of Ilya Repin&rsquo;s student Elizaveta Zaitseva under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov- Vodkin. In 1935, invited by the Musical Theater of Alma-Ata (now Abay Kazakh State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater), Kalmykov moved to Kazakhstan.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Would you like to know who Sergey Kalmykov is?&rdquo; he wrote in his diary, &ldquo;Very well. An artist, a philosopher, the author of many long books, diaries, biographies, unsent letters, dedications, jokes, and poems. A painter, a drawer, an engraver, and a sculptor. A designer, a calligrapher, a lecturer, an art historian, an Egyptologist. He who sings the praises of Orenburg, an inventor, an eccentric, an admirer of fine things, a dreamer, who makes fantastic art. A great expert in the making of reliefs, an architect, and an archeologist. A bibliophile, a novelist, a satirist, and so on. I come from Asia, Europe, and from the cosmos, too.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Kalmykov&rsquo;s artistic career spanned just under 60 years (1908&mdash;1967), and was defined by three of his major areas of interest: theater and everything related to drama; studies from life&mdash;landscapes, portraits, and still lifes; and fantasy art, which included illustrations for his own literary works (such as The Boom Factory and Moon Jazz) and the series Majestic Portraits.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>To a certain extent Kalmykov&rsquo;s fantasy art was likely a product of conscious escapism. Born at the end of the nineteenth century and formed as an artist amidst the vibrant scene that developed before the revolution, he was caught off guard by the ideological machine that crushed familiar ways of living and thinking.</p>
<p>His work was permeated by a kind of dualism that showed in every art form he chose. On one side were the theatre designs for specific performances, on the other the reconstruction in his paintings of the worlds of Ancient Egypt and Babylon.</p>
<p>The protagonists of his fantasy cycle include the Gallant Spender, the Great Costume Maker (both with Kalmykov&rsquo;s own features), and the Costume Maker&rsquo;s Daughter. From 1944 to 1946, Kalmykov produced an interesting series of paintings with terrifying characters such as a human-bull, an anthropomorphic creature with a pear-shaped face, an elder with donkey&rsquo;s ears, and a blue humanoid with huge eyes and a thin neck and limbs.</p>
<p>Kalmykov left diaries and albums sewn together from whatever he had to hand (sometimes wallpaper or wrapping paper). His rich artistic legacy was stored in bunches and rolls. He wrote fantasty librettos with intriguing names like Moon Jazz, Sully Hotel, Unusual Paragraphs, Cabinet of Engravings, Magnificent Stories, and The Boom Factory. In his albums, images are mixed with literary texts.</p>
<p>Kalmykov rightfully considered himself a philosopher and a poet, an inventor. &ldquo;No, I am not insane,&rdquo; he wrote in one of his many diaries. &ldquo;I see different worlds. The secrets of nature are revealed to me. I can hear the grass growing. I live among the dazed stars of the universe...&rdquo; Kalmykov produced paintings and writings that challenged the norms of his time, theorized about &ldquo;removing the notions of time, so that lines could extend to eternity,&rdquo; and experimented with technology that resonated with his belief that &ldquo;reality should be interpreted as a myth.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Today Kalmykov&rsquo;s extraordinary figure still captivates the public and specialists, as it did during his lifetime: with his dignified manners and the outfits he made from theater props, the artist always stood out from the crowd. &ldquo;Imagine millions of eyes looking at you from the depths of the Universe,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;And what do they see? Some kind of boring, monochrome, grey mass crawling across the Earth. And suddenly&mdash;like a gunshot&mdash;there&rsquo;s a spot of color! That&rsquo;s me walking out into the street.&rdquo; The artist&rsquo;s deliberately odd looks (hand-painted clothes with little bells and elaborate trims) may have been a gesture of protest against the shackles of society and the state, the enforced rules of what was permitted and prohibited.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Erkezhan Omarova</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;All quotes are from Kalmykov&rsquo;s diaries in the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan, ф. р-1758.</p>
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Sergey Kalmykov

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<p>Isaac Itkind was a remarkable sculptor, who worked mainly with wood. A Hassidic rabbi&rsquo;s son, he received religious education and also became a rabbi, but soon abandoned religious service and spent a number of years in search of his calling. In 1897, he came across a book about the sculptor Mark Antokolsky, which inspired him to learn sculpture. In 1910, he joined a drawing school in Vilno and from 1912 to 1913 studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Itkind&rsquo;s sculptures caught the attention of the writer Maxim Gorky, who organized a well-received solo exhibition of his works in 1918.</p>
<p>Itkind&rsquo;s early works mostly explored the history of the Jewish people and human suffering, and only a few have survived. After the revolution, he worked as a teacher in a Jewish work camp and school near Moscow alongside Marc Chagall, and in 1927 he moved to Leningrad, where he created a number of works on historical topics. By this time, he had become famous across the Soviet Union. However, in 1937, after an exhibition at the Hermitage to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin&rsquo;s death, he was arrested as a Japanese spy. Despite torture in detention that left his ribs broken, his teeth smashed, and his eardrums perforated, Itkind did not plead guilty, which saved his life. He was exiled to Siberia and later to Kazakhstan, where he settled in a dugout on the outskirts of Alma-Ata. The art world believed he had died in a prison camp in 1938.</p>
<p>In 1944, the artist Nikolai Mukhin identified the strange elderly man who dragged old tree stumps into his den as the famous Soviet sculptor, but could do little to help him, as Itkind was still considered an enemy of the people. He lived in the dugout for a further twelve years until the Alma-Ata State Theater hired him as a stage designer in 1956. Itkind continued to carve wooden sculptures in his spare time and soon became famous again. A few years before his death, the government of Kazakhstan gave him an apartment. In 1967, two years before Itkind&rsquo;s death at the age of 98, a documentary film was made about him.</p>
<p>Contemporaries recalled Itkind as a uniquely talented artist and an extremely energetic person, who was also incredibly absent-minded and rather eccentric. The impression he made sometimes obscured his vivid spiritual life, which was reflected in his art. Although Itkind never considered himself an esoteric artist, there is ample evidence that he may have been unconsciously enlightened and worked with the imaginary on the ethereal level, without the need to rationalize his approach. His choice of wood as a material that embodied light was in tune with anthroposophical ideas and practices, as was his focus on the human head. Itkind&rsquo;s heads captured inner experiences and were not meant to represent real prototypes.</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Alexey Ulko</p>
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Isaac Itkind

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<p>Amaravella was a group of artists with an intuitive approach to creativity, who also described themselves as &ldquo;cosmists.&rdquo; They found inspiration in the space of the spiritual, the unearthly and the mystical. The group came together spontaneously. In 1922, Boris Smirnov-Rusetsky, a young artist influenced by Vasily Kandinsky, Nicholas Roerich, and Mikalojus Čiurlionis, met Pyotr Fateev, who was knowledgeable about theosophy and whose life and artistic practice were influenced by the teachings of P.D. Ouspensky, as formulated in his book The Fourth Dimension. Later, Rusetsky met artist and musician Aleksandr Sardan: their encounter took place at the Museum of Artistic Culture, by Malevich&rsquo;s Black Square, which sparked their conversation. In 1924, Vera Pshesetskaya joined the group. She was an artist, poet, and actress who used the pseudonym Runa and was interested in Egyptian culture and mysticism and the secrets of the Egyptian Tarot. This may have been partly as a result of her brief marriage to P.D. Ouspensky, a mystic and occultist who was influential in Moscow circles and collaborated with George Gurdjieff. In 1926, the group were joined by Sergei Shigolev and later, for one of the group&rsquo;s few international exhibitions (International Exhibition of Modern Art, New York, 1927), by Viktor Chernovolenko.</p>
<p>The prospect of an international exhibition, organized with Roerich&rsquo;s assistance, encouraged the group to think of a name and a manifesto. Aleksandr Sardan (or possibly Roerich) suggested the name Amaravella, which in Sanskrit &ldquo;stands for &lsquo;space,&rsquo; &lsquo;ocean,&rsquo; or &lsquo;radiation,&rsquo; &lsquo;expansion&rsquo;, and is associated with creative energy.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> The artists were looking for common ground&nbsp; that would define their projects. &ldquo;We proclaimed (and later tried to formulate our beliefs in a manifesto [...]) what we called living creativity, or the bringing of knowledge to life. You can find these ideas in Andrei Bely, in Tagore, and in theosophical works.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> Together with their name, the group formulated &ldquo;the key creative points&rdquo; of Amaravella:</p>
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<li>The work of art should speak for itself to the person who is able to hear what it says.</li>
<li>This cannot be taught.</li>
<li>How strong and convincing the work is depends on how deeply the artist penetrates the original source of the creative impulse and the inner meaning of that source.</li>
<li>Our creativity, which is largely intuitive, is directed at the exploration of various aspects of the cosmos, be it through human appearance, landscapes or visualizations of abstract images that belong to the inner world.</li>
<li>As we work toward this goal, the technical aspect of art is of secondary importance and has no independent value.</li>
<li>Therefore, our works should not be approached rationally or analytically but emotionally and empathically. Then the thought behind them will be attainable.<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup></li>
</ol>
<p>The group came to a tragic end. Runa was arrested in 1930 and her artistic legacy has been almost entirely lost. Sardan, who was imprisoned in the same year, more or less abandoned art after his release, but worked on popular science films, such as Crystals: The Color of the Earth. After the outbreak of war, Chernovolenko stopped making art (he resumed only after his retirement) and began working in a military factory. Shigolev became an animator but was arrested during political purges in 1942. The time and place of his death are unknown. Smirnov-Rusetsky was also arrested in 1941 and spent 14 years in the camps. Fateev spent the rest of his life in seclusion, deliberately avoiding showing his work in public.</p>
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<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Boris Smirnov-Rusetsky, Idushchii (Moscow: Vellum Gallery, 2008), 68&ndash;69.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Ibid., 53.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;Ibid., 69.</p>
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Amaravella

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<p>Julian Shutsky was a major figure in Soviet oriental studies and an anthroposophist. His father was a forestry scientist and his mother, who taught French and music, inspired in him a love of languages and music at an early age. In 1913, the family moved to Petrograd. There, Shutsky studied at the Duke of Oldenburg School until 1915, then spent a year at the Petrograd Polytechnic and entered Petrograd University, where he studied Chinese language and culture until his graduation in 1922.</p>
<p>In 1920, while still a student, Shutsky began working at the Museum of Asia of the Academy of Sciences and on graduation became a researcher in the Department of Chinese Philology of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Eastern and Western Languages and Literature. In 1924, he qualified to teach Chinese studies and went on to read courses at a number of Leningrad universities. From 1936 to 1937 he collaborated with the State Hermitage Museum.</p>
<p>Shutsky mastered several East Asian languages and wrote a number of books, but his most important work was the translation of the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching (Book of Changes) and a study of its origins and history. Published only in 1960, this text remains a unique source for readers wishing to understand the I Ching, which, as Shutsky admitted, &ldquo;still poses almost insurmountable difficulties, so unusual and alien to us are the images used to convey its ideas.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup> According to East Asia scholar Artem Kobzev, &ldquo;Shutsky was a highly gifted individual with extraordinary talents both in sciences and arts.&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">2</a></sup> His interest in the East arose in parallel to his spiritual awakening, which was brought on by music, and in particular by Scriabin&rsquo;s works, which he described as &ldquo;a major interest of [his] youth&rdquo;<sup><a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">3</a></sup> and believed to be an integral part of his inner life. &ldquo;[Scriabin&rsquo;s] search for the ideal world that existed above our reality was the first philosophical idea that would stay with me forever,&rdquo; he wrote in 1935.</p>
<p>In 1922, while still at university, Shutsky developed an interest in anthroposophy, in which he found a universal explanation for the visible organization of the world, its invisible structure, and his personal development. To anthroposophy he devoted his work, his philosophical research, and his artistic practice. Around the same time he met poet&nbsp; Elizaveta Dmitrieva (also known by the pseudonym Cherubina de Gabriak), who became his platonic lover and partner in anthroposophical work, to which they committed themselves with a sense of looming disaster. Dmitrieva was arrested for her involvement in anthroposophy and exiled to Tashkent, where she died in 1928, leaving Under the Pear Tree, her collection of poems written in the style of Shutsky&rsquo;s translations of Chinese poetry.</p>
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<p>In the 1930s Shutsky occupied himself with research and teaching but maintained connections to former members of anthroposophical circles: the sculptor Rimma Nikolaeva, Iranologist Fyodor Rostopchin, meteorologist Alexey Sinyagin, and other esotericists, who the Soviet state accused of being part of anti-Soviet, terrorist, &ldquo;anarcho-mysticist organizations.&rdquo; In August 1937, Shutsky was arrested on similar charges and forced to confess. He was executed on February 18, 1938.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;Artem Kobzev, &ldquo;Vstupitel&rsquo;noe slovo,&rdquo; in Shutsky, Julian, Kitayskaya klassicheskaya &lsquo;Kniga peremen&rsquo; (Moscow, 1990).</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">2.</a>&nbsp;Julian Shutsky, op. cit.</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">3.</a>&nbsp;Ibid.</p>
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Julian Shutsky

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<p>This plan is the product of Andrei Bely&rsquo;s meticulous analysis of his life. The cloud of lines, arrows, and writings might seem chaotic at first sight, but Bely has left a key to the idea and logic behind his lifeline:</p>
<p>&ldquo;Its relief (the highs and lows) is based on an attentive and honest analysis of how I felt during the given period of time (high or low life energy); below I indicated the people who were especially close at this time (friends, opponents, collaborators); above, I tried to pinpoint the cultural influences; and at the very bottom, the periods of work on different books are shown.&ldquo;</p>
<p>The &ldquo;relief&ldquo; is represented by the dark blue graph in the center. The timeline does not begin with the year Bely was born (1880) but with 1882, since the writer believed he started having &ldquo;early moments of self-awareness&rdquo; from the age of two.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The highs and the lows&rdquo; correspond to periods of inspiration and enthusiasm and of desperation and depression. The graph peaks in 1901 and 1913. The first peak marks the beginning of Bely&rsquo;s literary career: the rise of the second generation of Russian symbolists and what he called &ldquo;the dawn years.&rdquo; The second marks the start of his anthroposophical and esoteric training under Rudolf Steiner.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The main graph is accompanied by two diagrams that are smaller in size and narrower in scope: two details of the lifeline. In a note regarding the diagram, Bely explained that they represented &ldquo;detailed (month-by-month) reliefs of the two peak periods in [his] life (the dawn years and the years of learning), with an attempt to comprehend the reliefs.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This explanation referred to Detail 1 (&ldquo;The Dawn Years&rdquo;) and Detail 2 (&ldquo;The Culmination of Life&ldquo;), whereas Detail 3 (&ldquo;Invisible Forces&rdquo;) was organized differently. Featuring a smaller copy of the lifeline graph with all the &ldquo;highs&rdquo; and &ldquo;lows,&rdquo; it presented a special mystical perspective on the journey of life:</p>
<p>&ldquo;This diagram shows the lifeline at an angle that presents it as a battle between the light and dark forces that have recruited certain people as the messengers of light or darkness for me.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Monika Spivak</p>
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Andrei Bely. The Line of My Life. Plan and Explanatory Notes, 1918

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<p><sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1"></a></sup></p>
<p>In May 1937, the Office for Leningrad and Leningrad Oblast of the People&rsquo;s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) issued a search warrant for Apartment 2 at 9/5 Ulitsa Dekabristov, which was home to Julian Shutsky, his family, and Rimma Nikolaeva. The record of the search listed the materials the NKVD investigators confiscated, including Nikolaeva and Shutsky&rsquo;s mystical manuscripts, shorthand notes, and books on theosophy, religion, and philosophy that Shutsky had hidden in a pump organ. Confiscated items included a Russian translation of British theosophist Mabel Collins&rsquo; book <em>Light on the Path</em> (1914), Nikolai Belotsvetov&rsquo;s <em>Religion of the Creative Will: Four Lectures on the Culture of the Future given at the Russian Anthroposophical Society in 1915</em> (1915), and a self-published edition of Rudolf Steiner&rsquo;s 1912 lecture series <em>On Initiation, Eternity, and the Moment: On Spiritual Light and the Darkness of Life.</em><sup><a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Nikolaeva was arrested and charged with being a member of &ldquo;the anarcho-mystical terrorist organization Order of the Templars.&rdquo; She was sentenced to death and executed on September 9, 1937. In August of the same year, Shutsky was arrested and charged with espionage. He was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp without the right to correspondence (a euphemism for the death sentence) and executed in 1938.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Daria Bobrenko</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small"><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">1.</a>&nbsp;This information is from criminal case number П-70808 against Rimma Nikolaeva, which is in the FSB Archive for St. Peterburg and Leningrad Oblast.</p>
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The record of the search at home of Rimma Nikolaeva and Julian Shutsky

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<p>An image of this painting can be found in the catalogue of the 1926 Venice Biennale. According to Daniil Stepanov&rsquo;s family, the <em>bacha</em> was painted after the artist&rsquo;s son, Pavel. The title does not fully correspond to the content, as the painting features not one but two young men. The posture of the half-naked youth in the foreground communicates sensual bliss, while the look of the seated boy betrays his fascination with his companion. It appears that this work illustrates the same story as that in Usto Mumin&rsquo;s cycle of the 1920s, with its similarity to the garden and bathing pool scenes from Mumin&rsquo;s <em>Pomegranate Zeal</em>. Its composition, which features three &ldquo;horizons,&rdquo; brings to mind the &ldquo;spherical perspective&rdquo; developed by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin in the late 1910s. This detail shows that the influences and connections between the artists of Stepanov&rsquo;s circle were not limited to their choice of subjects.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
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Daniil Stepanov. Bacha, 1923

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<p>Depictions of Muslim prayers are among the most popular motifs of orientalist painting, and Daniil Stepanov&rsquo;s <em>Prayer</em>, which he showed at the Venice Biennale in 1926, seems to belong to that tradition. The scene has been executed with great attention to ethnographic detail: the intricately carved <em>duval</em> (mud-brick wall) in the background and the <em>hauz</em> (artificial pond surrounded by trees) replicate those in the photographs taken Stepanov took of his house in Samarkand. However, on closer inspection another semantic layer is revealed. Both stylistically and in terms of narrative, Stepanov&rsquo;s <em>Prayer</em> is close to Usto Mumin&rsquo;s 1920s cycle devoted to the love of two <em>bacha</em> boys. Structurally, it reproduces scene 8 from Mumin&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>Pomegranate Zeal</em>, in which two boys are sat on either side of an elder. In Mumin&rsquo;s painting, the scene can be interpreted as a call for the legitimation of the two lovers&rsquo; union. Prayer features similar characters. The elder&rsquo;s face brings to mind other works by Usto Mumin, while the boy in the red shirt with a characteristic bend in his neck looks like Mumin&rsquo;s androgynous youths with their eyes fixed on the viewer.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
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Daniil Stepanov. Prayer, Samarkand, 1925

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<p>Similar to an icon in its composition, this tempera painting contains a key to the entire cycle of works Mumin created in Samarkand, in which he reproduced separate scenes or episodes from <em>The Story of the Boy with Pomegranate Lips</em> (otherwise known as <em>Pomegranate Zeal</em>). The work&rsquo;s central field is surrounded by border scenes that tell a story:</p>
<p>Scene 1. Town square. This is where the two boys meet. One is carrying a pomegranate platter on his head; the other one, dressed in a dark blue <em>chapan</em>, a satin shirt, and an amber headscarf, has stopped by the side of the road. The pomegranate vendor offers a fruit to the boy with the amber headscarf, watched by a disapproving old man.</p>
<p>Scene 2. Countryside garden. Six boys are sitting on rugs spread out on green grass. One is playing a tambourine while the others clap in rhythm and watch the dancer.</p>
<p>Scene 3. Quiet meadow in a countryside garden. Two boys are sitting on a rug: the one wearing the gold headscarf is playing the tambourine, the one with the amber headscarf is listening, mesmerized.</p>
<p>Scene 4. Garden by the bathing pavilion. Behind the pavilion is a green hill with a dome rising above it. A rug is spread on the grass, on which a boy is sleeping. It looks like he is dreaming.</p>
<p>Scene 5. The boy&rsquo;s dream. Someone is bathing in the pool. He has left his gold headscarf by the water, which is steaming hot. The boy in the amber headscarf is hiding in the roof and watching the bather.</p>
<p>Scene 6. An empty countryside garden. Two boys are sitting on a rug spread on the grass. The following scene suggests that this must be the moment of a confession of love. Each boy has a birdcage: one is holding his, the other has placed his on the ground in front of him. The cage in the boy&rsquo;s hands is empty and his friend is teaching him how to feed the bird with his mouth. The boy with the empty cage seems embarrassed.</p>
<p>Scene 7. Same place, same characters. Both birdcages are on the ground. The lovers embrace.</p>
<p>Scene 8. Stairs in front of a mosque. An elderly mullah is in the center, before him an open book. On either side of him are the boys with the amber and gold headscarves. One has turned his head away, too shy to look at the mullah, the other one is looking forward and listening to the elder. The following scene suggests that what we see here has to do with the religious and social legitimation of their relationship.</p>
<p>Scene 9. Festive <em>dastarkhan</em> in the courtyard of a private house. The two boys sit in the center, symbolically united by a niche behind them. Six of their friends, who have taken part in the rite, are sitting in a circle. Outside are three old men and a woman in a burqa. Their gestures show disapproval, surprise, and concern.</p>
<p>Scene 10. A green cemetery. A double grave with a lantern is in the center and a green hill can be seen in the background. &ldquo;The stairway of sinners&rdquo; and the blue domes of Shah-i-Zinda are visible on the hill.</p>
<p>The &ldquo;zeal&rdquo; in the title of the painting most likely refers to the second border scene featuring a collective ritual with music and dancing. In Russian, the word &ldquo;zeal&rdquo; can refer to a collective ritual performed in order to achieve religious ecstasy. In early twentieth-century Russia, zeal was widely associated with rituals involving self-flagellation. In the context of Central Asia, it would usually have stood for Sufi devotional practices, however what we see in Usto Mumin&rsquo;s tempera painting is clearly not Sufi zeal&mdash;a <em>dhikr</em>&mdash;but a bacha dance.</p>
<p>As well as the icon-painting tradition, Mumin&rsquo;s imagery brings to mind the androgynous young male lovers often featured in Persian painting from the Safavid to the Qajar dynasties, as well as Persian poetry from the time of Rumi, Saadi, and Hafez, which was rich with homoerotic motifs. However, the last three border scenes push the boundaries of traditional narratives in painting and literature. The first (the scene by the mosque) can be interpreted as a call for the legitimation of the relationship between the two protagonists, the second as a wedding feast, and the third (the double grave) as a symbol of a life lived together in a happy marriage. Finally, the central element of &ldquo;zeal&rdquo; is the portrait of a boy in a white robe, whose gold headscarf allows us to identify him as one of the protagonists of the story and interpret the sequence of border scenes as the boy&rsquo;s dream of his life, love, and death. He holds a cut pomegranate. Perhaps it is the same one that we can see in the town square meeting scene. The artist lures the viewer into an elaborate game that blurs the lines between the real and the imaginary, defying simple interpretation.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
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Usto Mumin. The Story of the Boy with Pomegranate Lips, 1920s

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<p><em>Friendship, Love, Eternity</em> (<em>Old Bukhara</em>) is a key work within Uzbekistan&rsquo;s fine art of the twentieth century. On moving to Uzbekistan, Aleksandr Nikolayev found himself fascinated by the East: he adopted a Muslim name (Usto Mumin) and became interested in Islamic mysticism in the form of Sufism.</p>
<p>The painting presents an allegory of the soul&rsquo;s quest for divine love (in Sufism, the goal of human existence is the love of God). The young man on the right is holding a rose, a symbol of that love. Its thorny stem represents the obstacles on the path to divine love and the flower the bliss of attaining it. On the left of the two young men is a jug, which is probably another metaphor for knowledge of God: every human has a jug to fill with the love and understanding of God. Above the jug, two old men with white beards are descending the stairs: they may be the same youths toward the end of their lives. Their faces are serene, like the faces of saints who have unraveled the mysteries of existence. The <em>mazārs</em> (mausoleums of Muslim saints) in the background symbolize eternity. The stork flying above them is associated with love and devotion.</p>
<p>According to Usto Mumin, this painting tells the story of two inseparable friends. One of them went on a journey to distant lands and disappeared. The other youth waited for the return of his friend but in vain, and eventually went to look for him. Despite many&nbsp; obstacles, he found his friend and they were reunited. <em>Friendship, Love, Eternity</em> was Mumin&rsquo;s gift to his close friend, the composer Alexei Kozlovsky. He later designed the set for a production of one of Kozlovsky&rsquo;s main works, the opera <em>Ulugbek</em>. The story behind the painting was preserved by the composer&rsquo;s widow Galina Gerus-Kozlovskaya and written down by East Asia scholar and music historian Alexander Dzhumaev.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Tigran Mkrtychev&nbsp;</p>
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Usto Mumin. Friendship, Love, Eternity (Old Bukhara), 1928

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<p>This unusual tempera painting stands out from Isupov&rsquo;s &ldquo;Pre-Raphaelite cycle.&rdquo; Thematically, it fits between the two subseries of his 1921 works: the family portraits (<em>Kyrgyz Family, Father with Children</em>) and the rites of passage (<em>Kyrgyz Bride, Just Married</em>). The dramatic, mournful figure of the woman tells us that this is not merely a family portrait but a genre painting. The figure of the aggrieved youth in the background also testifies to that. The scene&rsquo;s dynamic is created by the conflict between the melancholic, detached expression of the youth in the center and the dramatic gestures of his mother and younger brother. We might be witnessing a family drama. The boy in the foreground could represent Jesus, with Mary and Jacob, or the protagonist of an unfinished story by Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy (who was executed in 1938 during Stalin&rsquo;s purges). In Qodiriy&rsquo;s story, a family makes the young protagonist renounce his true love for fear of public shame. Isupov left no notes that could shed any light on the drama in the painting, and apart from the work&rsquo;s mood we have no reason to read into it a theme that is clearly present in Usto Mumin&rsquo;s &ldquo;love cycle&rdquo; of the 1920s. However, the mood that invites a comparison between the two artists is very obvious. The rounded faces of the two brothers and their eyes and lips are clearly androgynous: the only element that distinguishes them from their mother is her hair. The rose behind the boy&rsquo;s ear connects him to the protagonists of Mumin&rsquo;s &ldquo;love cycle.&rdquo; Intonationally, the work is also close to Daniil Stepanov&rsquo;s Samarkand paintings and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin&rsquo;s works of the 1910s. It combines the tension of a love drama with the meditative focused expressions of its characters, their gaze at the viewer with an intense internal dialogue.</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
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Alexei Isupov (Alessio Issupoff). Older Brother (Three Faces, Uzbeks), 1921

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<p>Stylistically, Isupov&rsquo;s tempera series was a turn toward the icon-painting tradition and early Renaissance painting, in which objects created no shadows and light was seen as a property of the object itself. Several paintings of the period can be grouped into a subseries of ethnographic portraits, whose protagonists include a teahouse waiter, a barber, a <em>dutar</em> player, and a vendor. Despite featuring many everyday details, these portraits elevated Samarkand characters to the level of biblical or other religious figures. The pointed arches in which the figures are inscribed relate the portraits to the Renaissance transition genre of portrait-icons.</p>
<p><em>Porcelain Seller</em> is a work representative of the series. The deifying eye of the artist has transformed a shop vendor showing his goods to the customer into a saint whose finger draws our attention to some hidden meaning. The plate in his hands is no longer an everyday object, but a sacred symbol with images of clouds and stars circled into a mandala. The apparent sacredness of the painting is enhanced by its background. The two domes with a portal and the hilly landscape on either side of the protagonist bring to mind the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Samarkand. However, the white mausoleum in the center, contrasting in color with the seller&rsquo;s face, is clearly an invented building. This and the exotic vegetation show that the artists of Stepanov&rsquo;s circle were not immune to the orientalist fantasies of the West and had a Gauguinian perspective on local characters, which filled the &ldquo;primitive lives&rdquo; of the Other with &ldquo;mystical meanings.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
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Alexei Isupov (Alessio Issupoff). Porcelain Seller, 1921

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<p>The turn toward the techniques and minimalism of the Quattrocento brought with it a particular choice of subjects and imagery that fitted the style of early European painting of the transition period, which had seen the first elements of genre painting introduced to art that had previously been religious. As a twentieth-century artist, Isupov moved in the opposite direction, giving secular, everyday scenes religious overtones. His tempera painting <em>Mother and Children</em>, which features two women, a baby, and a slightly older child, brings to mind the four-figure compositions of the Renaissance that typically featured the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ, John the Baptist, and St. Anne. This intertextuality means that the characters, depicted with ethnographical attention to detail, look extratemporal and epic. An everyday scene from Samarkand gains a biblical aspect, in the same way as Ruvim Mazel&rsquo;s works of the early 1920s, in which Turkmen people seemed to illustrate the prophetic books of the Old Testament.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Boris Chukhovich</p>
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Alexei Isupov (Alessio Issupoff). Mother and Children, 1921

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<p>&ldquo;We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams.&rdquo; The Other East and Esoteric Knowledge in Russian Art, 1905&ndash;1969 is the result of a major research project undertaken by the team at Garage together with Samarkand-based art critic Alexey Ulko and Moscow-based artist Alexandra Sukhareva. The quote in the title is from a poem by the writer Andrei Bely (1880&ndash;1934), who was a central figure in the Russian esoteric movement.</p>
<p>The exhibition tells the story of those people living in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, whose creative and spiritual enquiries were closely connected to a &ldquo;pretersensual&rdquo; understanding of the world, secret societies, and mystical practices, all of which often coincided with an exodus to the Soviet East. Here there are many characters, not a single protagonist. However, if we were to create a map of their connections, it would be clear that all of the people concerned directly or indirectly knew of each other&rsquo;s work or influenced each other &ldquo;by reflection.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The chronological research begins at the turn of the twentieth century, in the Russian Empire, at a time when mystical circles and spiritual societies were thriving: from the anthroposophists and spiritualists to the knightly orders. After the revolution, the activities of esoteric communities began to be wound up. There were a number of prosecutions for &ldquo;anti-Soviet agitation,&rdquo; which affected a significant proportion of the intellectual elite and led to the loss of evidence of a wide range of personal cultural and spiritual practices. At that point, the Soviet East (in particular Samarkand) became a way out for many of the people featured in the exhibition, even if sometimes purely an imaginary one. It was a territory that was briefly free from ideological pressure. The exhibition narrative develops around the symbolic cycle of flourishing and exile: from the diversity of esoteric practices in the pre-revolutionary period to the exile and executions of the 1930s and 1940s; from the spiritual rebirth in the Soviet East of the 1920s to the arrests and persecution that followed.</p>
<p>The art exhibited in &ldquo;We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams&rdquo; exists at the periphery. It lies outside the achievements of modernism and, in particular, the radical Soviet avant-garde. Its conscious secretiveness and invisibility, even for specialists, are a result of the fact that it not an aesthetic experiment but an artifact bearing witness to a spiritual awakening. The logic of documents played a defining role in this exhibition. In the course of two years of work in public and private archives, it was possible to re-establish a number of previously lost artistic biographies using criminal cases and search protocols, including the biography of Rimma Nikolaeva, an artist who was a member of the Russian Anthroposophical Society.</p>
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<p>The works by the Moscow artist Alexandra Sukhareva do not interfere with the narrative of the exhibition, nor do they enter into a dialogue with other objects on display. Sukhareva&rsquo;s three works, created at different times and in varying circumstances, have been combined into the trilogy Christa, Argiris, Eudora. This triad of names has no known topographic or mythological connections. It references landscapes of the imagination that humans perceive as direct experience. These works foreground the esoteric experience, allowing it to exist within the Museum and guaranteeing the viewer an individual acquaintance with the &ldquo;secret&rdquo; history of Russian twentieth-century art.</p>
<p>The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, drawings, objects, photographs, films, rare books, archive documents, music, and even performances related to various historical periods, artistic traditions, cultural contexts, and geographies. Many works are exhibited for the first time.</p>
<p>The texts in this booklet provide more information about the life and work of the people featured in the exhibition and are a key to the &ldquo;life cycle&rdquo; of the show, which flickers between the abundance of spiritual experiments and the direct threat posed by the Soviet system, which consistently destroyed those who thought differently. A forgotten and/or deliberately concealed history of Russian artistic life is revealed to the viewer, the basis of which is secret knowledge of the world and experience of &ldquo;pretersensual cognition.&rdquo;</p>
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<p class="text__muted" style="text-align: right;">Katya Inozemtseva, Andrey Misiano</p>
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The record of the search at home of Rimma Nikolaeva and Julian Shutsky

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