Capturing an Image

Last summer, while in Moscow, I went to the relatively new gulag museum--State History Museum of the Gulag, I think it is officially. I had never been there before, and it was only 40 rubles, or something ridiculously inexpensive for admission. That particular museum is such an interesting place, because of the art inside, but also because the building itself is literally situated on the horizon of the past 100 years of Russian history. Gulag art, protected by rusted barbed wire at the entrance is less than a stone's throw away from Burberry and Louboutin and all of the signs of "Novaya Rossia," so to speak.

So what does this have to do with our protagonist, Philip Latinowicz? The special exhibition (I don't know whether it is permanent or traveling) at the museum last summer was by a painter Симонов or Снимонов (I can't remember which). He had experienced the camp system as a prisoner in the late 1930s or early 40s, but his paintings were dated 1988 and 1989. As if the time discrepancy was not interesting enough, he had taken a brush to each of his pieces, dipped it in a cloudy gray paint, and smeared it all over shadows of emaciated prisoners, skeletons, and empty soup bowls.

For me, one of the dominant questions after reading Krleza is: how the hell is it possible to capture emotions, experiences, memories, nostalgia--whatever--in a painting, a picture, a conversation, or more frighteningly, in our own minds? I love this passage on page 61, "Thus Philip jogged drowsily along, his thoughts bubbling like carbonic acid in a glass of soda water; a process which is rather noisy and produces a lot of foam, but which is refreshing for the nerves: to think in pictures and intoxicate oneself with the endless variety of the changing images."

If memories--the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly are that fragile and volatile, maybe the answer to my question is that it's impossible. Maybe that is why I am still so perplexed by this gulag artist's paintings, as well.