detective story about icon speculation in the USSR in the 1970s

The publishing house Individuum has published a novel by the artist, poet, publicist and figure of the Orthodox underground Alexei Smirnov von Rauch, “The Board of Dionysius” – an adventurous detective story about speculation in icons in the USSR in the 1970s that has been waiting for publication for half a century.

Text: Igor Gulin

Alexei Smirnov von Rauch, who died in 2009, is an underappreciated figure of Soviet and post-Soviet counterculture. His obscurity is easily explained: Smirnov’s professional status is difficult to determine. He was an active participant in the “third avant-garde” of the 1960s, was friends with Anatoly Zverev and Vladimir Yakovlev, was fully recognized in the West, but then somehow did not fit into the underground canon. Partly because a fair part of his legacy was lost in a fire in his workshop, partly because as an artist Smirnov was less an innovator than a restorer. His style is a synthesis of modernist aesthetics: Petrov-Vodkin, de Chirico, Filonov, Picasso, iconography mixed with surreal eroticism. Now she doesn’t look too impressive. Smirnov, it seems, was not entirely satisfied with his own art; in the 1970s, he almost gave up painting and took up applied activities – painting temples. In addition, he wrote poems, stories, plays, was friends with Mamleev and Golovin, was part of the backbone of the Yuzhin circle, but he also quickly moved away from this company. It seems that the transgressive riot of the “Southernians” simply became boring to him. His literary texts of that time remained in the archives, if they survived at all. Smirnov’s only published book is “Complete and Final Disgrace,” a posthumously published collection of journalistic essays and memoirs, mostly written in the 1990s and 2000s. This book is amazing. Only by reading it can one at least partially appreciate the scale of Smirnov von Rauch’s personality.

He was a hereditary aristocrat and all his life he boasted of belonging to the upper class, despising the proletarian hegemons (oddly enough, the aristocratic surname here is the Smirnovs, von Rauch is a pseudonym meaning “from the smoke”). He was a parishioner of the catacomb church and communicated with the pillars of religious and mystical dissidence (in particular, Smirnov was close to the author of “The Rose of the World,” Daniil Andreev, about whom he wrote several essays). He knew well not only underground artists, but also the entire Soviet cultural nomenklatura (his father, the artist Gleb Smirnov, like many surviving aristocrats, became a socialist realist classic). As a professional restorer, he was immersed in the shadow economy swirling around Soviet church life, the world of forgers and blackmailers. All these circles, of course, were penetrated by KGB agents, and Smirnov was also well versed in them. A heterogeneous and rather nasty social brew swarms and writhes on the pages of his memoirs.

Smirnov’s letter itself also wriggles. The sublime chronicle of spiritual exploits suddenly turns into savoring sexual and gastrointestinal lewdness, and a deep political analysis of Russian history turns into pure conspiracy delirium. Smirnov hated the Bolsheviks, but in general he also despised the whites. He considered himself a Russian nationalist, being a passionate Judophile. Among other things, he insisted that genuine Russians needed to leave “Erethia” and found their own Israel somewhere – a small country with a strong army and theocratic principle of power. He hated all the pillars of Russian culture, however, even recognized outcasts like old acquaintances Mamleev and Limonov seemed to him opportunists, and simply fools. The marginality of von Rauch himself was akin to his dear medieval foolishness. It is based on the feeling that the world is a garbage dump; you can comprehend and influence it only by making your thinking and practice just as garbage and unsystematic. Every gesture—everyday and cultural—should cause shock. (His daily behavior was just as frightening, stupidly paradoxical, deliberately holy fool.) The novel “The Board of Dionysius,” written in 1976, is just such a gesture.

Formally, this is a very well-tailored detective story. At the center of the story is the fate of the precious icon of the Savior, painted by the great icon painter Dionysius for a certain monastery somewhere in Central Russia. In 1917, the last archimandrite, a former hussar, a freemason, a conspirator who participated in the preparation of the February Revolution, and then staged an anti-Bolshevik putsch together with his monks, hid the icon and other treasures in a cache. In the 1970s, the icon suddenly resurfaces and her odyssey through the new Soviet world begins. Sinister former White Guards, cynical and greedy priests, exquisitely vicious speculators, drunken forger artists, criminal thugs, restless and money-hungry pitiful intellectuals play their roles in the adventures of the Savior. The canonical role of the amateur detective for the genre is played by a charming art critic who defended her dissertation on Dionysius.

The most unusual thing about this novel: Smirnov was seriously planning to publish it (under the pseudonym Alexey Annenkov). He inserts into the text passages about the duty of the Soviet man, the class struggle and the vigilance of the authorities, and reverently remembers cultural figures like Lunacharsky or Grabar, whom he hated with all his heart. In general, if you have even the slightest idea of ​​the author’s character, it is clear that this is pure hooliganism. In the 1960s, when many free-thinking peers of Smirnov tried to establish contacts with official culture, he considered this a fundamentally vicious undertaking. At the end of the 1970s, when underground people already existed almost completely separately, the publication of such a “Soviet anti-Soviet novel” would have been an act of cheerful terror directed against friends and foes.

The “Board of Dionysius” has two direct predecessors. These are Mamleev’s “Connecting Rods” and the famous “What do you want?” Vsevolod Kochetov. All three novels belong to the same line of “late Soviet Dostoevschina”; all of them present the modern USSR to the authors as a territory populated by all kinds of monsters, reptiles, devouring each other and dreaming of larger food. At the same time, the lampoon of the Stalinist Kochetov, oddly enough, is closer to the text of von Rauch than to the metaphysical horror of Mamleev. For him, the trade in icons also plays an important role in the plot, around which various anti-Soviet elements scurry around – fascist “formers”, obscurantist underground workers, blackmailers from the golden youth. Smirnov probably read Kochetov’s novel (he generally read everything in the world) and decided to write the same thing – only with knowledge of the material.

The problem is that he set himself a problem that is not entirely solvable. He was clearly not interested in writing a novel for samizdat readers, but in order to be published, the book still could not be an outright parody – and it seems that Smirnov’s idea was to undermine Soviet reading material from the inside. The result was neither this nor that; and the incompletely edited novel remained in the author’s desk for many decades. However, as often happens with books that are not quite finished, there remains a reserve of enchanting horror in “The Board of Dionysius” that has not evaporated over these almost fifty years.

Alexey Smirnov von Rauch. Board of Dionysius. M.: Individuum, 2024

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