“In Russia, in principle, not very good with memory” – Weekend

Two years ago, Moscow journalist Nikita Girin left for the village of Izhevskoye in the Ryazan region and began to create a house-museum of the self-taught photographer Ivan Filatov there. The museum as such has not yet appeared, but its own cultural life has already arisen around it, and in the process of work it became clear that even an unopened museum can become a community assembly point. Igor Gulin talked to Nikita Girin about the attraction of figures like Filatov and how a photography museum can change the self-awareness of villagers.

The village of Izhevsk is a rather unusual place. First of all, thanks to the traditions of self-government, which were formed almost from the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 19th century, the oral laws were recorded by the landowner Nikolai Demidov in a document, which was given the name “Izhevsk Constitution”. An official elected council appeared in the village. In 1832, the Izhevsk peasants ransomed the whole village from Demidov as free cultivators (they were well-known coopers throughout Russia and therefore earned good money). The village turned into a kind of peasant republic, at the same time – extremely advanced politically, economically wealthy and culturally developed. Ivan Filatov was in this sense a typical product of these places. A peasant from a family of blacksmiths, he went to the city, worked at a locomotive factory, then was a railway employee. During his travels, he met a certain aristocrat who fascinated him with art. At first, Filatov wanted to become an artist, but he chose photography and, returning to his native village, became incredibly successful in this profession. He filmed in Izhevsk for 40 years – until his death in 1937, he saw the revolution, the Civil War and peasant uprisings, the destruction of the traditional way of collectivization. Filatov died himself, and clearly on time: a couple of months later, a wave of terror reached Izhevsk, the victims of which were the closest acquaintances of the village photographer. He took pictures of everything: ceremonial portraits, weddings, processions, meetings, peasant labor, children’s games and just views of the village. His style changed with time, imbued with the influence of the avant-garde in the 1920s, and socialist realism in the 1930s. Filatov is a figure who does not fit into the “big” history of photography, remaining in the margins and, because of this, allowing him to feel the connection between photographic practice and social reality in a slightly new way. Approximately this is the task of the “Filatov House”. Now the museum exists more in social networks, as well as in the form of lectures-shows of scanned parts of the Filatov archive. But some intermediateness between the material and virtual form makes the project of Girin and his comrades an interesting way to work with memory.

How did you even take on this project and how did you become interested in Filatov?

I moved to Izhevsk two years ago to take care of my grandmother. I had two main interests at this time. The first is to the issue of self-government, to how people arrange their lives without the help of the state. In this sense, Izhevsky has a great history, and for me it is also the history of a family. Among my maternal ancestors there are participants in that same ransom of 1832. The second interest is in old architecture, restoration. Here they are formed. The fact is that there was a church in the cemetery – such a statue of freedom, which the peasants erected when they ransomed from the landowner. About ten years ago it was destroyed, and my comrades and I took up the conservation of the ruins. So I became interested in everything around, in particular – Filatov. It turned out that he was buried right in front of the church. Later I realized that they were part of the same story. The church is a material monument to liberation, and Filatov is the person who captured this freedom, the results of the economic and political flourishing that happened here in the 19th century. His photographs break all our stereotypes about the life of the peasantry: we see men in neat jackets, women in fur coats, incredible dresses, with rings on their fingers. This speaks to the wealth that self-employment can provide.

How did the idea for the museum come about?

The fact is that in the neighboring village of Orekhovo there is another museum – the museum of peasant life of Sergei Pogonin. It is completely collected from garbage dumps; summer residents buy houses and throw amazing objects into landfills: archaic stupas, ponevs, chests from Napoleonic times, and so on. In my view, this is the ideal museum. The collection there is larger than in most local history museums in Russia, but it is not registered in any way, people just tell each other and come. My friend and I also went to get acquainted, and Sergey showed us the photographs of Filatov, which turned out to be in his collection. Among them was a picture of the Filatov house with a sign “Photography”. And then I realized that I know where this house is and that now it is abandoned. The three of us almost said in unison: “We need to make a museum.” We bought the house, began to collect photographs of the locals. It turned out that quite a lot is stored in the storerooms of the Izhevsk Tsiolkovsky Museum (he was also from here).

Filatov is well remembered in Izhevsk?

In Russia, in principle, everything is not very good with memory, and Filatov is no exception. Of course, there are people who know about him from the stories of their elders; there are still a few who managed to be photographed with him in the 1930s, but there are very few of them. At the same time, the frames themselves are familiar to many: Filatov’s photographs illustrate all the texts about Izhevsk. I wouldn’t say that the museum we’re making captures an already existing memory. Rather, on the contrary: he must revive this memory, restore the connection of specific people with history. For example, a person knows that a particular house was built by his great-great-great-grandfather. Here, in the 19th century, very interesting architecture arose – such intricate peasant mansions with turrets, pediments; Now most of these houses are abandoned and falling apart. But here in the photograph of Filatov, both the whole house and the living great-grandfather are found. There is a personal connection. Sometimes different things are linked in one chain: photographs, memories, oral memory, gravestones in a cemetery, materials from criminal cases of the 1930s, which we also deal with. A big picture emerges. This is how photography turns out to be a door to history — not a big, impersonal one, but a very concrete, tactilely perceptible one. It is worth saying that Filatov’s photographs have an incredible quality. He shot on glass plates, and they were printed in a contact way: what size is the glass – this is the print (unlike shooting on film, where a small frame is enlarged with a photo enlarger, and the quality is inevitably lost). Therefore, photographs of the 19th century show people’s eyelashes, the wings of a fly that sits on someone’s coat …

How is the activity of the museum arranged, what is going on there?

Right now, the museum is more of a virtual one — we post photos of Filatov on social networks, link them to archival documents, talk about people and events that are captured in the pictures, or about small details that are visible only with a tenfold increase, but behind which entire historical periods are hidden ( like the title “Reply to Chamberlain” scrawled crookedly on the side of the boat by the wharf). In the photographer’s house itself, in parallel with emergency response work, we conduct guided tours-shows – for this you only need a projector, a white wall and curtains. With the same shows we go to Ryazan, Moscow (I managed to read lectures about Filatov in the Historical Library in Moscow, in the Ryazan Art Museum). The nearest plans include a summer school on attribution of photographs with older teenagers (we impudently call it cultural-anthropological) and play sessions with younger children about the heritage and architectural environment in Izhevsk.

Do you think it is possible to somehow revive the community with the help of your project, to restore the freedom-loving identity that the inhabitants of Izhevsk used to have?

We are trying. For example, there is such an idea. On the day when Nicholas I endorsed the agreement between the peasants and the landowner, the peasants of Izhevsk celebrated independence day every year, and they celebrated it in Soviet times, at least in the 1930s, because it normally fell on the Soviet historical concept. We want to bring back this holiday. Now there is a village day – this is a random, not tied to anything date, and we proposed to move it to the old independence day – June 23. Starting next year, it will be so, and there will be a large program directly related to the museum. Filatov filmed this holiday every year, and thanks to him we know what it looked like in general. We can simply repeat something from his pictures. And it could turn out to be an independence festival. But there is also everyday life. I would like the museum to become a tool for the local community to improve their affairs. You can imagine it like this: people come here, interested in the history of the peasant republic, they need to be offered some kind of infrastructure. For example, so that older people can pour tea from a samovar for museum guests, bake pies, so that empty houses can be rented out. It seems to me that these very simple things can help restore the political subjectivity of Izhevsky. After all, when basic needs are satisfied, there is time to think about values ​​​​and beliefs – there is a very direct connection between pies and freedom.

Aren’t you afraid that in this way the village will turn into a tourist simulacrum and the real memory will disappear from it?

In no case, firstly, because the history of Izhevsk and the history of Filatov are not far-fetched, as is often the case with small museums, and even the most formal presentation will be “taken out”. Secondly, in Izhevsk, for purely objective reasons, there will be no crowds of tourists – this is not a highway between regional centers, but an hour and a half from Ryazan along a dead end road. That is, we (I speak only for the Filatov House team, of course) are guided by a rather limited, but stable and motivated audience, for which the empire is evil, and the real bond is autonomy. In the end, about 3 thousand people live in Izhevsk, and it would be paternalism to think ahead for them how we will protect their memory from weathering when and if we attract many guests to the village. So far, the task is to put this memory in order in general, to help blow the dust off it, and it seems to be possible – today they posted another unattributed pre-revolutionary photograph of a peasant family, and just received this comment from a villager: “Now I’m walking along Izhevsky, peering into faces of passers-by and into the bricks of old buildings.

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