Where the Muses Flee – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Ildar Galeev Gallery opened the largest exhibition of Olga Hildebrandt-Arbenina (1898-1980), known to us as the addressee of the poems of Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam and Mikhail Kuzmin and other poets of the Silver Age and the artist of elusive charm and sad fate who appears here.
Any text about Olga Hildebrandt-Arbenina begins with a ritual enumeration: Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Kuzmin. “Female voice on the phone…”, “Elga! Elga! – sounded over the fields…”, “Take joy from my palms…”, “I want to serve you on a par with others…”, “Because I couldn’t hold your hands…”, “Another’s love has bloomed …”, “How old are you, tell me, Psyche?” – these and other lines are enough to remain in history as a muse. And she, a young lady from an acting family, played this role perfectly, she did it – with a deep understanding of the historical and cultural significance of such roles, which is fully reflected in her diaries. Her parents served in the Imperial Theaters, but she, the enchantress-sylph-psyche, was not raised by the vulgar world of dressing rooms and backstage – her father, Nikolai Hildebrandt, who took the stage name Arbenin, a man of noble blood and intellectual and noble education, was, in addition to acting talents, an intellectual, theater critic, translator, mainly of German and Austrian drama, the children were given a good education. After the Lokhvitskaya-Skalon gymnasium and pedagogical courses, she, like her older sister, chooses a parental path and an acting school, but her theatrical romance with Alexandrinka was short-lived – the most striking episode in it was participation in Meyerhold’s Masquerade.
This is also a special gift – to be not only in the center of male attention of the main characters of the era, but also in the center of its main events, if we understand by “epoch”, “events” and “heroes” exclusively the history of culture. The “Crazy Ship” of the House of Arts, the legendary DISK, Kuzmin’s circle, Detgiz’s circle, the Oberiuts, the group “13” – and everywhere she is, the heroine of the unwritten “poem without a hero” about Leningrad in the 1920s – early 1930s. However, the literary “Don Juan” list of Hildebrandt-Arbenina would be more correct to start not with Gumilyov, but with Leonid Kannegiser, who did not have time to become a great poet, and end with Yuri Yurkun, whose entire archive, including many unpublished works, died, partly confiscated during arrest, partly missing into blockade. Kannegiser, the murderer of Uritsky, Gumilyov, who was captured in connection with the Tagantsev case, and Yurkun, who was involved in the case of the “terrorist writers’ organization”, were shot, Mandelstam disappeared in the camp – this play was not limited to the history of culture, she got the role of the muse of tragedy.
From her father, she inherited not only acting, but also a gift for writing, which was realized not in absolute and autonomous theatrical and literary dimensions, but in this tragic dramaturgy of life. In love, like all schoolgirls of her years, with Alexander Blok, she wrote poetry, sent them to Valery Bryusov, received an answer, unflattering, swore not to write poetry, she did not keep her oath, since she later went to classes in Gumilyov’s poetry studio in DISK. But her diaries, letters, memoirs are pure poetry in prose, musical rhythm, sad lyrics (some fragments will be published for the first time in the exhibition catalogue). In one of the best performances of the late Gogol Center, Kuzmin. Trout Breaks the Ice” by Vladislavs Nastavshevs, the memoirs and diaries of Hildebrandt-Arbenina from a book published in 2007 were used, which partly confirms the thesis about the immanent dramaturgy of this life. In the production of the director, who ironically relates both to the protagonist of the strange menage a trois Kuzmin-Yurkun-Arbenin, which lasted fifteen years, and to her literary opuses, she appeared as an ingenuous, naive, enthusiastic and eccentric fool who did not understand what kind of person she was ” her Yurochka. It is impossible to suspect Nastavshevs of love for her, but Mandelstam, in love, was also good: “So don’t try to be smarter, everything is a whim in you, everything is a minute”, “The most gentle mind is all placed outside.”
Photography, always insensitive to the charms of des dames du temps jadis, as usual, does not convey the charm of this “outside”, capturing a fragile, short-haired girl in the fashion of the twenties – no “echo of the Silver Age”, no decadence, in her, albeit theatrical, but strict morals to the family was considered bad form. The poetry focuses on the details that come down to the kiss: the cherry tender mouth, the salty tender lips, the petal lips. Is that in the portraits of Yurkun and in the “nice” of Tatiana Mavrina appears a hint of magic. And this magic seems congenial to her own watercolor lyrics, or painting, or graphics – in her case, the line between the one and the other is indefinable, just as between poetry and prose.
Probably, Hildebrandt-Arbenina began to draw systematically under the influence of Yurkun, an amateur artist like herself, whose graphic heritage she miraculously preserved (during the search that followed the arrest, she managed to save some manuscripts of Yurkun and Kuzmin, but, deposited with friends, they disappeared in the blockade). She was familiar with Vladimir Lebedev, Vladimir Kozlinsky and other Petrograd avant-garde artists before, but it was in Kuzmin’s house, where the illustrator of Curtained Pictures Vladimir Milashevsky disappeared and where, despite the difficult feelings of the owner and the famous causticity of Milashevsky, she was treated more seriously than anywhere else, the poetess was transformed into an artist. And Lebedev, and Milashevsky, and others – all unanimously advised her not to study, so as not to spoil her natural talent. Apparently, at the suggestion of Milashevsky, Yurkun and Hildebrandt-Arbenina were among the chosen ones: in 1929, both participated in the first Moscow exhibition of the 13 group.
“Nyushki” by Mavrina, written with Hildebrandt, testify to their tender friendship even more eloquently than the tenderness lavished on each other by both outstanding memoirists. The friendship that connected Mavrina and Hildebrandt, the strongest and the weakest – if you follow the rankings accepted in art history – from the artists of “13”, is interpreted as a mutual attraction of the master, ingeniously stylized as a primitive, and direct – immediacy in every sense of the word is characteristic of her, like no one to another, an example of this primitive. Perhaps a large series of garden and park scenes with thin-legged girls in fluffy skirts and beautiful ladies in crinolines and bustles and resembles childish, girlish drawing, since the author so often writes in her diary notes about how she imagined herself a princess and a fairy. But the entire corpus of Hildebrandt-Arbenin watercolors suggests that she, having not undergone any formal training, constantly studied throughout the 1920s and 1930s – both from classmates from among the “13”, and from the landscape painters of the Leningrad school, and from their French inspirations, from Albert Marquet to Raoul Dufy. The shadow of Marie Laurencin appears behind every pair of ladies walking in the park.
They remember that she loved to paint to music, and her fairy girls in fairy gardens, her sailboats ready to sail into the insomnia of the Mediterranean, her African and Venetian landscapes, written off from the paintings of Gumilyov and Mandelstam, seem like such a composer’s transposition into the register of dreams. This is a common feature of the European neo-romanticism of the 1930s – escapist fantasies, an attempt to hide in lacy clouds of the imaginary, when dense clouds of the real are gathering around. The artists of the “13” group fled to illustrate the European classics, however, everyone who wanted to survive then fled to those lands – not only to survive, but also to remain true to themselves. For example, Arthur Fonvizin, breaking away from book affairs, gets used to the era of Baudelaire and the role of the “artist of modern life” Constantin Gies. Hildebrandt-Arbenina wrote about growing up on Apollo and the World of Art, but her seemingly retrospective masquerades refer not to the Silver Age of St. the assassination of Kirov.
The performance had a bad and very long ending. She was not arrested, repressed, exposed in formalism, escaped the nightmare of blockade, on the eve of the war she left Leningrad for the Urals – either fate kept this psyche-sylph unadapted to Soviet life, or her slender figure slipped between the millstones of history, on which ” gentle mind” looked without any naivete: in the diaries of the late 1940s, there are records that the Germans were tried in Nuremberg for Auschwitz and Majdanek, and no one was convicted of Soviet crimes against their own people. But until the end of her days, she was doomed to a homeless and semi-miserable existence, to auxiliary work in Leningrad cultural institutions, the Theater Museum, Lenfilm, the Hermitage, and the Philharmonic. She dreamed of distant countries, but nowhere further than Estonia, her father’s homeland, she did not visit. I dreamed of my own corner and free time to draw for my own pleasure. She returned to drawing after a long break when Stalin died, and not only because her financial circumstances improved slightly in the mid-1950s. And yet, again taking up watercolors, her memories and fantasies still again and again turned to the interwar years, the years of the tragic heyday of non-Soviet Soviet culture, getting younger, as Kuzmin bequeathed to her, in poems about Psyche.
Psyche of Northern Palmyra. Galeev Gallery, until February 5
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