A Tale of Two Pieces

What follows is an account of two calligraphic pieces that emerged out of my love of early-twentieth-century Russian poetry, and also of how the second of them came into being not because of any artistic impulse, but instead, because of a need to outwit the Russian customs authorities. 

The story begins in 1989, when I received an invitation to submit work for a joint U.S.-Soviet calligraphy show. In response, I created “Preserve My Words Forever,” a calligraphic tribute to Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and to his wife’s effort to protect his work from the destructive forces of the Stalinist state. I wrote extensively about the conception, execution, and creative context of this piece in an article published in the Summer 1992 issue of Calligraphy Review, and won’t attempt to cover the same ground here; the only fact that’s essential to this narrative is that the piece was rejected by the exhibit jury— ostensibly because it included elements other than calligraphy, but it’s my hunch that it was excluded because the political content was unacceptable.

Be that as it may, the practical consequence was that I was left with an art object of monumental scale, for which no prospective after-life was apparent. I knew that I wanted it to end up in a public venue somewhere in Russia, but as for how to realize this vision, I was clueless. Over the next few years I pursued two or three tentative leads, but none of them amounted to anything, and it wasn’t until late 1997 that a prospect offering real promise appeared on the horizon.

The institution expressing interest was a small but culturally important private museum in St. Petersburg, dedicated to the legacy of Mandelstam’s contemporary and friend, the poet Anna Akhmatova. Thanks to the urging of a couple of indefatigable advocates, the Akhmatova Museum offered me a month’s show in their current-exhibitions gallery, and an opening where I would be able to discuss my work with members of St. Petersburg’s intellectual and artistic circles, native and expatriate.

It was an extraordinary opportunity, and there was no doubt in my mind that I would accept, but it also awakened some parallel concerns. For one thing, I was struck by the anomaly of having a piece devoted to one prominent artist shown in a space dedicated to another. The Russians have a great tradition of creating small museums honoring prominent cultural, political, and scientific figures, usually established in these people’s former homes: why was there no Mandelstam museum, given that he is now considered to be as important as any Russian poet of the twentieth century? The answer is brutally, heartachingly simple: for most of his life he was homeless, and to innovate a different way of honoring him would raise questions that many would prefer to ignore. With each passing epoch, his position both in the officially-sanctioned account and in the popular imagination has become increasingly mythologized, and the absence of any museum dedicated to his memory, however lamentable, is certainly easily understood.

Obviously, the chance to exhibit my piece at the Akhmatova was better than no chance to exhibit it at all, but what would be its status after my show? The gallery director assured me that they would find a place for it in their permanent collection, but given the insecurities facing a small independent museum in today’s Russia, I could feel no certainty that such an agreement would be honored. Still, I wasn’t going to let this stop me, and we settled on an arrangement whereby the piece would be on permanent loan to the Akhmatova, or to a more appropriate venue should one materialize. I would retain legal ownership, but to all intents and purposes it would be out of my hands, and into the hands of fate where, in my opinion, it belonged.

There was, however, a major stipulation, related to the exigencies of the Russian tax and customs systems. While the Museum was eager to accept my gift, they informed me, they would need to conceal the fact of a donated acquisition, since if it were to come to the attention of the tax authorities, dire fiscal consequences would ensue.

The strategy we developed for dealing with this situation was worthy of a Gogol or Bulgakov. The goal was to create a paper trail indicating that one piece of art had been brought into the country, and that the same piece of art would be exiting the country after the show. My challenge would be to create a new piece, similar enough to the Mandelstam that it would bluff the authorities into believing that the two were one and the same. 

The idea was that I would hide the new work in the false bottom of the shipping container that I was commissioning for the Mandelstam, which, being framed in a hefty shadow-box, weighed in at a good 15 kilos. We decided to gamble that a new piece consisting of a couple of sheets of paper, with no frame, could be easily concealed in the shipping box, leaving the functionaries none the wiser. Then, upon my arrival in St. Petersburg, my agent (without whom none of this would have been possible) would lean on the customs officials to fill out a declaration in language general enough that it could be interpreted as covering either of the two.

To meet these requirements, I needed to create a new piece that could be described as an assemblage of poetry excerpts, rendered calligraphically, with an assortment of paper ephemera and other related material. This was the genesis of “Miles of Earth, Rivers of Heaven,” a calligraphic diptych featuring another extraordinary contemporary of Mandelstam’s, Marina Tsvetayeva.

Luckily the assignment was not unwelcome to me, even if the motivation was to enable a customs scam. I had loved Tsvetayeva’s work since my college years, and was happy to give it the level of intention and focus that a new piece would require. Much of Tsvetayeva’s output revolves around separation, forced emigration, distance, and loss—themes that would lend themselves well to a work being created to echo the Mandelstam (the two would be shown in close proximity at the opening, though of course they would go their separate ways thereafter). 

I took as my keynote text a stanza from Tsvetayeva’s cycle “Separation,” whose pivotal word, provoda, means either “farewells” or “telegraph wires,” depending on stress. It doesn’t lend itself to felicitous translation, but an approximate rendering might be:

Oh, through what seas and cities shall I seek you,
The unseen sought by the unseeing?
I entrust my farewells to the wires,
And, forehead pressed to telegraph pole, I weep.

This is the text that stretches across the bottom half of the right-hand panel, four lines in heavy yellow-ivory paint, written in a staccato script echoing the intensity of the poet’s grief. 

Another passage from the same cycle of poems straddles the break between the two sheets as it races across the uppermost tier, a sinuous pale-blue line that declares “between us, not the miles of earth, but the rivers of heaven, of separation”—the caesura of the original corresponding dramatically to the cleavage between the panels, likewise suggesting the absolute nature of the experience being described.

The found papers in the piece are incorporated in rough chronological order, intending to convey a left-to-right movement through time, in alignment with the left-to-right direction of the writing. Material near the left-hand edge is clearly of Russian origin, and dates from the start of the revolutionary era, while ephemera further to the right are from places of exile such as Khabarovsk, Shanghai, and Paris, included to suggest parallel expansions happening through space and time. This is not a depiction of Tsvetayeva’s literal path of exile, any more than the photograph is a literal representation of her face; but to anyone familiar with the history of Russian emigration, the names say it all.

There is, here, a motif of cancellation—intimacies, dreams, lives all cancelled by inexorable circumstance, just as stamps are cancelled in their passage through the mail. This is what inspired me to “cancel” the entire piece, after many of the ephemera were in place, by pushing an ink-soaked push-broom over the two panels, laid end-to-end on brown paper on the floor. It was a risky move, but I was pleased with how it came out, not least because of the unplanned hint of upward movement on the right, where I saw the suggestion of telegraph wires, as one sees them from the window of a moving train. 

This, then, was the piece I created in order to hoodwink the Russian authorities. Once unpacked at the Akhmatova Museum, the big box revealed not only the Mandelstam but also the Tsvetayeva, allowing the publicity for my opening to make mention of a variety of work instead of just a single piece. A pair of frames was found for the diptych, the show was hung, and on June 11, 1998, I had my one and only art opening in Russia. at the Akhmatova Museum in the courtyard behind the old Sheremetyev Palace on the Fontanka Canal in St. Petersburg. I was introduced by the gallery director, made my way through my much-rehearsed 20-minute speech without too much stumbling, and listened politely as the Cultural Attaché of the local U.S. Consulate made a few nebulous remarks about my contribution to Russian-American understanding. There was a buffet “à la fourchette” with abundant Georgian champagne, during which I was introduced to an extraordinary assortment of people—academics, critics, unaffiliated intellectuals, avant-garde artists, threadbare hangers-on, even a distant cousin of Mandelstam’s who drolly identified herself as “idr”—as odd-sounding in Russian as in English, but as she explained it to me, a sly poke at scholars classifying her in their list of sources as “i drugie” (“and others,” conventionally abbreviated as idr.): “they don’t want to thank me by name, because I’m a nobody, but they pump me for stories about the family, so they give me a token nod by putting “and others” at end of the their acknowledgment lists.” As one who’s felt like a bit of an idr myself upon occasion, I felt a warm resonance. It was an occasion to remember, and obviously, I do. 

Three weeks later, it was time for the second half of the encounter with the post-Soviet customs establishment to unfold. I signed the papers at the Museum, acquired a portfolio of suitable size to carry the Tsvetayeva diptych under my arm, and on the appointed day went to the airport with my agent, my customs declaration, and my fervent hope that no mishaps would ensue. 

Sure enough, the declaration clearly described the piece I was carrying, everything was in order, all was well. Then, just as I was about to be cleared, an agent observed that the assemblage included historic material that must legally remain in Russia—specifically, an envelope with prominent old postage stamps, near the upper-right corner of the left-hand panel. He tore off the offending document and made as if to throw it away, whereupon my agent coolly pointed out that it would not be illegal for her to possess such a thing, and demanded that he give it to her. Cowed, no doubt, by her air of authority, the apparatchik handed it over—her sang-froid gesture made further speech unnecessary—and I was given the final clearance I needed. My agent, meanwhile, told me under her breath that it would be easy enough for her to get it back into my hands, though it might take a few weeks. I tipped her generously, we said our goodbyes, and I headed off to the departures lounge, feeling rather as if I’d been told I could leave the country, but only after having agreed to leave two or three fingers behind.

It was certainly a relief to receive the missing antique envelope, along with a brief cover note from a woman in Texas, tucked into a standard U.S. Postal Service mailer, and I was happy to put it back where it belonged. The piece gives no indication of its bifurcated journey, but it’s amusing to know that one part of it went on its own unplanned side-trip before being restored to its rightful place among the other ephemera I’d used. It’s such a distinctively Russian twist, and it adds yet another dimension to an already quirky and multi-dimensional tale.