The Fleeting Spirit of Time: Stanislav Goncharov's Artistic Universe

"Everything changes, everything flows," said the wise Heraclitus. Inexorable time rushes on, sweeping away if not everything, then certainly much in its path. Sometimes not only external circumstances, visible facts, and living conditions change unrecognizably, but also the very fabric of existence, which cannot be reduced to its individual features. The elusive spirit of time, not equal to tangible facts, hopelessly dissipates. And then comes a completely different life, a different melody. A melody behind which we sometimes cannot hear the mysterious voices of the past. However, new currents and new trends are also forced to disappear over time, giving way to subsequent stages of history. All random voices and momentary idols are lost, as if drowning in the all-encompassing chorus of eternity and death.

Whether with inevitable melancholy or inexplicable nostalgia, looking back at the bygone era—the tragic (or perhaps tragicomic?) era of the 1960s-80s of the last century—one wants to ask what was the unique face of that time, or perhaps its multiple faces. The work of Stanislav Goncharov presents a special panorama of the epoch.

In Goncharov's works, despite their timeless scale, there is a certain elusive spirit of time, a special atmosphere of the 1960s-80s that cannot be reproduced now. It means that the past era was accompanied by certain values that were inherent only to that era but, simply put, have survived to this day. To draw a perhaps overly bold analogy, the flight of the ballerina Istomina, described by Pushkin in "Eugene Onegin," is a fact of the Russian stage of Pushkin's time, and by no means a fact of the contemporary stage. Nevertheless, thanks to Pushkin, we can appreciate the ballerina's plasticity and divine lightness today. Another equally bold example: Pechorin is positioned by Lermontov as a hero of his time, yet Pechorin did not artistically die with the 1830s-40s of the century before last but, on the contrary, gained literary immortality in diverse meaningful projections onto subsequent epochs. The 1960s-80s of the last century also had their own mystery, their own unique charm—and the artist carefully conveys this mystery of time to us. It is impossible to embrace it, but it is still possible to outline it in contours. Stanislav Goncharov, as a painter of time, as an artistic mirror of his era, is particularly interested in the phenomenon of private life, which is uniquely characteristic of that era alone. It corresponds not to monumental principles related to the severe style, but to a special poetics of minimalism—one of the recognizable constants in Stanislav Goncharov's work.

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The Poetics of Minimalism in Goncharov's Works

Goncharov's work in its religious-metaphysical halo is usually associated with the so-called "art of resistance"—and indeed, it was internally alien to a certain social regime. But social regimes belong to the malice of the day, not to eternity, to which Goncharov aspires—can one then call his art dissident? Such a definition would apparently be inaccurate and superficial. For example, literature directed exclusively against serfdom loses relevance after serfdom historically dies out and the peasant question becomes, in a certain sense, exhausted. This idea can quite well be applied to various social phenomena of the country's relatively recent past. After the social facts in Russia of the 1960s-70s became historical past, the art that fought against these facts irrevocably went into the past with them, losing its living relevance. And this is tragic in its own way. An artist whose activity, however noble, exists exclusively in the public arena, departs with his time as soon as the problems that colored his time are resolved—even if they are resolved by the heroic, selfless efforts of the same artist. He is like a sewage worker or a janitor who inevitably leaves the frame of social existence as soon as the space entrusted to him is cleared of dirt—he exists in a social sense only as long as dirt and abomination exist. When the dirt ends, the janitor is no longer needed. When crimes cease, even a brilliant investigator is left without work, left out in the cold. His virtuoso labor becomes completely unclaimed! The same tragic processes occur with art that fights and is indignant against topical phenomena, however repulsive, but cares little about the eternal. Fortunately, Stanislav Goncharov's work is not like that—it does not fit into the Procrustean bed of definitions like "art of resistance" or "dissident art." This is completely obvious!

Less obvious is that in Goncharov's works, despite their timeless scale, there is a certain elusive spirit of time, a special atmosphere of the 1960s-80s of the last century that cannot be reproduced now.

In that era, which is now officially called "stagnation," there officially existed harsh working days, officially existed the heroic romance of distant construction sites.

"I love the grandeur of our plans," Mayakovsky wrote enthusiastically (and possibly not without some hidden irony). And this grandeur, or in other words, the monumental principle of official culture in the visual art of the so-called "stagnation" era, gradually formed into the so-called severe style. It seemed to hover in the air of the time before the corresponding term emerged and the corresponding movement in painting took shape, since there was grandeur. It was openly opposed by the so-called "art of resistance," many of whose creators have now emigrated, and latently opposed by perhaps more complex and interesting art, which did not fight with officiality, did not seek to "overthrow the foundations," but existed parallel to officiality in its own cultural niche. It did not fight with loud officiality but somehow did not support it either. There is no need to prescribe a strict terminological label to such art, which both the "severe style" and the "art of resistance" have—let us leave the "third" artistic niche without a proper convenient term, limiting ourselves to the conditional definition of "internal emigration." It corresponds to the existential escape of the artist from the frightening immensities of monumental officialdom into the space of private life with its exciting metaphysics and freedom from the malice of the day...

In the "third niche," artists depicted private life, containing nothing externally contrary to officiality, but still latently denying its monumental principle, its grandeur through chamber aesthetics. The minimalism of Viktor Popkov's works, one of the contemporaries of the currently exhibited artist, is noteworthy. Unlike obvious "resisters," such as Tselkov or Bulatov, Popkov was officially recognized. But, working in line with depicting the Soviet family, Popkov in Aesopian language still denied the grandeur—he showed the cozy world of home, the world of family in contrast to the harsh and uncomfortable world of heroic weekdays at a factory or construction site. Let us allow ourselves a somewhat controversial thought—this allegorical path of escape from public hype was more interesting and fruitful than the path of direct caricaturing of official clichés, if only because the ugly stamps of the era have gone into the past, practically vanished into Lethe along with parodies of them (even if they were extremely witty and talented parodies). But home and family are eternal values, even if they acquired special artistic relevance in negative dependence on the grandeur of officiality. Here is Popkov's painting "Babka Anisya Was a Good Person." Gloomy autumn weather, rain. People stand in raincoats, coats, overalls—they have lined up near a small church. The lush autumn ochre testifies that the acquaintances and relatives of the old woman are both sad and joyful. A good person has left life, leaving behind a bright memory. The work feels more like a paradigm of family than a caricature of officiality: the artist depicts a fact rather external to, than hostile to, the officialdom of that time. Here is another painting by Popkov—it directly depicts a family in the evening. The father, with one leg crossed over the other, reads a newspaper, the mother and children are peacefully engaged in their household chores—before us, depicted not without some irony, not without folk craftiness, are the happy everyday life of a prosperous Soviet family, behind which, however, aesthetically unobtrusively can be guessed a different semantic plane—private life in its eternal foundations. Formally, a pictorial idyll unfolds before us, a continuation of the "bright weekdays of a new life," but in essence—a kind of family refuge that allows a person to hide from the "common cause" in a private corner, to go into comfortable isolation, to immerse oneself in the space of the home hearth.

Viktor Popkov was one of the artists who directly influenced Goncharov, and that's putting it mildly—Goncharov works in the same paradigm of depicting private life that is interesting and significant in its eternal metaphysics, as does Popkov. It is no coincidence that one of Goncharov's most lyrically piercing works is titled "Northern Song. The Muse of the Artist Viktor Popkov." The painting depicts a nude under an umbrella against a background of blue blizzard: it's either winter or late autumn in the painting. In the blue swirl rare autumn leaves—so piercingly yellow, yellowish-red—to which the warm colors of the palette, located near the muse (she is the nude under the umbrella), respond. In the distant but easily readable plane is a cozy little church—it testifies that Goncharov thinks of the willfully naked muse in the paradigm of religious foolishness, which is humble, and not in the paradigm of "art of resistance," which is still haughtily didactic despite its noble pathos. The painting contains a piercing sadness and its related lyrical nerve, rather than a poster-like outcry "for" or "against." The painting testifies to the artistic unanimity of Goncharov and Popkov, and even more—to a certain apprenticeship of Goncharov. What distinguishes him from his teacher is not so much a striking artistic individuality as a religious philosophy of art. The painting with the church, written in line with Popkov (his manner is recognizable), differs from Popkov's works not so much in external manner as in the piercingly religious pathos, not so vivid in Popkov. In the muse's readiness to expose herself to the autumn rain, in the elegantly broken contours of her movement into autumn, into Russia, into snow, into death, one feels religious sacrifice and pure pain—in Popkov, who is occupied with purely visual plastic questions, they are sometimes more veiled, less piercing. Popkov is more ironic and in this sense artistically more successful than Goncharov, who chose the role of an almost prophet of painting and took upon himself the holy foolishness of preaching...

Goncharov generally has a special artistic philosophy of pain and sacrifice. Here is his poem "Azyadnev":

"Toothache, vanity or lightning Will split a boulder in two— This zaum will be forgotten And the thoughtful world will be remembered."

In acute pain or strong impression, zaum—the sister of intellect—recedes into the background, and suddenly from somewhere in our subconscious or from nowhere emerges a world related to some higher idea or thoughtfulness—Popkov does not speak about this (at least, he does not speak in a dissected way).

And yet, yet Goncharov, albeit independently and originally, works in Popkov's recognizable style sometimes even where he does not mention his still no less talented contemporary in the titles of his works. Here is Goncharov's painting "At the Winter Window," echoing "Northern Song" in its color scheme. There is something common in the content of the two works as well. An ordinary woman—as simple as everyone, like a hundred thousand others in Russia—against the background of a winter window, in which fluffy snow-white trees are visible, somewhat mysterious, resembling large snowflakes, is engaged in a simple task: she is mending or embroidering. Female warmth, domestic coziness, as is generally characteristic of Goncharov's authorial thinking, are given against a northern background, shown in an atmosphere of almost eternal winter. And just as in "Northern Song," red lines—a kind of blood vessels of the canvas—advantageously contrast with blue, gray, and white, the colors of winter. In Goncharov's work, as we have seen, white color generally occupies a lot of space, complemented by gray and blue. The woman who is busy embroidering or something similar is transformed and elevated into a high celestial space. And it seems that a light halo will soon shine above her head...

In another of Goncharov's works, two people are depicted literally with halos—this visual fact, like the piercingly religious pathos of Goncharov's work, makes one think about the icon-painting features in his paintings. In the direct sense, they are, of course, not icons, because an icon, firstly, still relies on a canon, and secondly, serves directly sacred purposes, unlike a painting. And Goncharov is not an icon painter, but an artist. And yet, yet over his works one feels a certain halo of icon painting, strangely enough, generally characteristic of some phenomena of art from the era of the so-called "stagnation."

"The telephone is like an icon for me," sings Vysotsky, reproducing his attempts to call his beloved girl. What is this? Poetic convention? License? Blasphemy? Erotic love—and right there an icon, which for some incomprehensible reason suddenly becomes a standard object, an ordinary city telephone! No, it is hardly blasphemy, despite all the freedom sometimes observed in artists' treatment of the religious canon. The fact is that such freedom does not equal, but does not contradict, the essence of the canon. According to the canonical Judeo-Christian teaching, man is created in the image and likeness of God, although the higher principle in him is sometimes clouded by original sin. In this regard, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh said that we should perceive our neighbor, despite all his imperfections, as a hidden icon, darkened by extraneous layers, the scab of sin—however, to reject our neighbor on this basis is the same as chopping up an icon only because it is covered with alien paints! This would be a terrible blasphemy! One respected Orthodox priest, not at all rebelliously and not heretically (as it may seem at first glance!), even explained that the funeral service is a small canonization. A person who has acquired the grace of Baptism and has not wasted it (and possibly even multiplied it) during life, carries within him, albeit a small, particle of holiness...

Proceeding from canonical logic, it remains to be recognized that there is a diverse layer of secular art, which in the proper sense is not icon painting at all, but contains some features of icon painting. For example, Wassily Kandinsky, who worked long before Goncharov, proclaimed that a painting is a hidden icon. Goncharov adheres to a similar internal logic (logic alien to earthly wisdom). And he himself in his self-portrait is bearded, solemnly concentrated, thoughtful and internally enlightened, directed not into himself, but ready to listen to the voice of eternity, to look at the higher truth, he himself is punctually likened to an icon painter. And this is internally logical: if his poems secretly gravitate towards psalms, religious hymns, then his paintings distantly resemble icons and are about icons.

Many of Goncharov's portrait constructions are internally icon-like and at the same time full of artistic tact—their artistic logic indicates that they still do not pretend to a sacred role. Goncharov depicts ordinary people, his acquaintances, which is emphasized in his works by characteristic features and even everyday traits of the portrayed people—and at the same time they are internally spiritualized. Goncharov is interested not so much in the face as in the personality of those portrayed. As a kind of epigraph to Goncharov's portraits (and parallel text to the words of people spiritually enlightened), one wants to quote Tsvetaeva's lines:

"And a double who has found his double, Through the light face will emerge the countenance."

And in Goncharov's portraits, countenances timidly emerge through faces, but preserve their pictorial mystery... It is no coincidence that even the faces in Goncharov's portraits are sometimes flimsily drawn. Here is "Portrait of a Girl on an Emerald Background." Her excitingly fragile expressive outline with an elegant, slightly protruding mass of hair is outlined by a shimmering emerald space. Before us stands an expressive silhouette, inside which the specific features of the face of the portrayed are delicately and aesthetically unobtrusively viewed. They are like floated by the golden and internally mobile silhouette of the girl, vividly testifying to her not just as a plastic phenomenon, but as a vitally bright phenomenon. The artist is interested in the metaphysics of the relationship between a person and the surrounding space, and not anatomy or plasticity as such.

Here is another female portrait. It is titled "Delight. A Pictorial Masterpiece." A female face is given against a thick black background in warm orange-golden colors—at the right temple of the girl they condense into a sanguine red color. Being externally not quite plausible, it testifies to the work of thought of the portrayed, but work not intellectually cold, but full of emotional warmth and feminine energy.

Here is the portrait composition "Visiting the Art Critic Kostaki." Before us are people sitting decorously at a table—the pictorial (or partly graphic?) images of dining utensils, images ascetically restrained and at the same time symbolic, distantly remind of icon-painting technique. At the table are figures immersed in noble statics and some thoughtfulness, opposite to festive exuberance. The restrained range of colors in the artist's work is also no coincidence—it abounds not in bright and screaming, but in slightly muted colors.

Associated with the icon-painting principle in Goncharov's works is not only the daring halo—an extreme, but singular case of the artist's departure almost beyond the boundaries of art to the Divine Light—but also the artist's tendency towards local colors with their complex symbolism and the tendency to reject mixed colors in their external plausibility. The artist is obviously akin to that realism in the highest sense, of which Dostoevsky spoke—not realism of form, but realism of essence, which sometimes is not even plausible. "They always say that reality is boring, monotonous; to entertain themselves, they resort to art, to fantasy, read novels. For me, on the contrary: what can be more fantastic and unexpected than reality? What can sometimes be even more incredible than reality?" Dostoevsky notes in "A Writer's Diary" for 1876 (March, chapter two).

The local colors in Goncharov's works are appropriately contrasted with the externally similar and by no means reprehensible, but in essence completely different phenomenon of painting, namely the poetics of primitivism. At the core of consciously primitive art, be it the work of the French artist Henri Rousseau or the Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani, lies naive and touching simplicity, sometimes coupled with the same simple and clear corporeality. In Goncharov's works, with their poster-like clarity, seemingly externally reminiscent of the poetics of primitivism, metaphysics opposes corporeality as such, even if revealed in symbolic (not self-sufficient, not self-contained!) forms of corporeality, and behind the provocative simplicity of local color one can guess the multidimensional (and in this sense complex!) symbolic content. Apparently, primitivism can be contrasted with minimalism. Are, for example, the road sign "brick" or a traffic light signal primitive just because they are simple and minimal? They are hardly consistently primitive, firstly, because behind them lies the multiple and in this sense complex content of city life, and secondly, because they have minimal but allegorical meaning—not direct, but indirect indication of the signified. For example, the green color itself has no direct relation to car driving, and red—to stopping movement. Meanwhile, for example, the green forest depicted in Rousseau's paintings is relatively equal to itself and does not require, albeit elementary, semantic deciphering.

Goncharov possesses that symbolic minimalism, the content of which is sometimes greater than the form. In all likelihood, at the origins of Goncharov's work, only externally converging with the art of primitivism, stands Suprematism—and, perhaps, not least of all Malevich's "Black Square." Let us not arrogantly assert that the artist simply cheated, "slapped together" his famous "...square" for the sake of what is now called PR.

"He understood the density of oil," these words of Mandelstam about Vrubel are applicable in part to Malevich: he revealed the depth and saturation of the black color, and did not simply put a meaningless spot on the canvas. If one tries to dissect the mystery of painting with an art critic's scalpel, one can see that Malevich has diverse shades of black—his "...square" is not optically primitive. But if we still deny Malevich a rich range of black shades, his work contains the philosophy of black color and the philosophy of the square, which is more complex than primitive. Black color is tragic and at the same time elegant, and the square is infinite because it has the mystery of symmetry... Symmetry is a companion of harmony, and what harmony is—is an infinite and tangled question with its apparent simplicity...

All this, probably not without the mediation of Malevich's Suprematism (and partly not without the mediation of Kandinsky's abstract art and Rodchenko's mysterious collages), Goncharov creatively and organically assimilated. It is no coincidence that his work includes many "window" series, speaking of a peculiar quadrature in Goncharov's work—an artistic philosophy of the square. It does not always formally manifest itself exclusively in the image of strict squares, but carries the thought of the mystery of the square... The fact is that Malevich's thick black color (he also has a "White Square," by the way) is elemental and in this sense naturally natural (relatively speaking). It is contrastingly corresponded to by the geometric and in this sense artificial form of the square. Absolute squares are practically not found in nature... By the sign of some geometric artificiality, the square is related to rectangles, be they rectangles of windows or white sheets, so beloved by the artist. Here is the "window" series "Winter Light"—in the specified triptych, the frames (made by the artist) are part of the works, but behind these frames new rectangles emerge, be it the mysterious rectangle of a white sheet on an easel (a window into poetic reality) or the bizarre view from a window depicted by the artist and as if continuing (more precisely, deepening) the frame of the painting.

And here is another "window" series. Let us note the paintings "Window with Bird-Clothespins" and "Window with Swallow-Clothespins." Both paintings carry the artistic philosophy of the square (or rectangle), related to Malevich's Suprematism. Goncharov artistically rephrases Malevich in a direction both more concrete (squares of windows instead of a square), and, strangely enough, simultaneously more abstract and metaphysical. The fact is that windows, behind which laundry is drying, remind of the romance of communal apartments—a fact of a concrete epoch, and at the same time windows are also some breakthroughs into the infinite world, into space, something opens behind them... And this something is directly related to poetic reality. It is no coincidence that Pasternak loved to sing the whiteness of window frames or the mysterious window frame. The blue color, characteristic of Goncharov and in his time celebrated by Pasternak (beyond the window, the sky is blue), also aligns with the cosmic element of Pasternak's verses.

"Into this blue solution The earthly expanse is immersed," wrote Pasternak.

We see the blue solution in Goncharov's painting "At the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. At Night." The solution of the canvas again makes us recall Suprematism. Goncharov creatively adopts from Malevich not only the individual square (or the principle of the square), but also the principle of the attitude towards color. At first approximation, it reveals itself in the density of oil, which was previously denoted by Mandelstam's words. The saturation of this density with shades and variations of color reveals itself in the nocturnal Zagorsk on Goncharov's canvas. Being silhouetted against the background of the piercingly azure sky, the city, sanctified by the presence of St. Sergius, reveals lilac, crimson, burgundy, bronze, deep purple, chestnut, even ochre variations of color, and is not entirely black. The dark colors in Goncharov's work are not dull, but diverse and saturated. Perhaps the dark color schemes in Goncharov's works are even more diverse than in Malevich's "...square"—but the question is not in this quite statistical ratio. Goncharov somewhat imitates Malevich and at the same time continues him not in quantity, but in the solution of black (or dark color, be it sepia, umber, or ultramarine). The dark color in Goncharov's work expresses not so much mystical horror as domestic coziness, partly related in semantics to alcove semi-darkness, but without any risqué connotations. Here is a work depicting an evening city, "Microdistrict at Dusk"—again with glowing windows against the backdrop of dark, sometimes completely black walls. Goncharov adopts this blackness from Malevich along with civilizing and in this sense disposing towards apartment coziness forms. But if Malevich's square in its abstract given state in its potential meaning can be mystically frightening and can be considered almost a "hole" to hell if desired, then Goncharov in his works rephrases Malevich's blackness in the direction of warm domesticity.

Let us also recall the semantics of the mirror in Goncharov's verses and point to his inclination towards symmetrical (in this sense mysterious and symbolic) constructions in painting. The two who are depicted with halos are mutually symmetrical, as are other paired images by Goncharov—in some of his works, symmetrical equal geometric forms are found—squares or rectangles. They correspond to such seemingly mutually exclusive poles of Goncharov's creativity as chamber closedness and universal metaphysics. This contrasting dyad reveals itself in the special play of straight and smooth or curved lines. Here is the work "Waiting," in which from behind a certain vertical plane peeks a slightly sad (corners of the lips are lowered downwards), meaningfully agitated face of a woman. The rectangle of a wall or door, from behind which the face seems to stick out, is furrowed by picturesque flourishes expressing the elemental principle of being in contrast to the organized plane (however, the contrasts complement each other). Here is another portrait piece—"Art Critic Vl. Desyatnikov": before us is a living, moving person, sitting on a stool. He is thoughtful and smoking a cigarette. The winding tobacco smoke, parallel to the art critic's living pulsating thought (and repeating the sparkling folds of his sweater, as well as the highlighted lines of hair), is demarcated by the adjacent even geometric plane of the wall—the art critic himself is given against a dark, practically black background. Before us again is the contrast of geometric and non-geometric lines and forms...

The play of elements and measure in Goncharov's works is connected with his Suprematism (still not exhausting the artist). Suprematism manifests itself in the element of color, which in Goncharov's work (as, incidentally, in Malevich's) is not equal to the colors of phenomena and objects—sometimes it seems to engulf and absorb objects and phenomena. Here is the work "Artist from Leningrad": a woman is given in red against a red background, signifying her inner brightness, she seems to drown in a luxurious red color—in radiance, as if transferred from inside the artist to the surrounding world. It is no coincidence that the background color and the color of the artist's dress coincide!

Two works parallel to the "Artist" in color solution are "Invitation to a Feast" and "Summer," written in red. The mood, emotional tonality, and meaning of the works are determined, perhaps, not so much by the figures and plot details, as by the predominant color of the works, a color that seems larger than the objects and phenomena colored by it. In the "Invitation," the contours of the intended feast and even people seem to float out of the red, in "Summer" a large red plane (almost a "Red Square") depicts a joyful and hot time of year: against the red background a small (in the scale of the painting), plastically expressive human figure emerges, pondering about summer.

The semiotic circumstance that color in Goncharov's works seems to acquire an independent life in relation to people, plants, and things colored by colors, declares itself not only in some occasional non-coincidences of color spots and object contours, but also in a special solution of nature. An animate or inanimate object in Goncharov's paintings sometimes appears not just as a colored something, but as a form on which the same color passes from the maximum to the minimum phase of intensity—for example, pale blue gradually and systematically transitions into deep blue and almost black, and so on. The main thing is not statistics, but the principle. Goncharov sometimes works not with shades, but with vibrations and modulations of color. This is the principle of Suprematism. It combines in Goncharov's paintings with the everyday recognizability of the depicted phenomena. In potential, a combination of realism and conventionality emerges (something far from both abstraction and photography). In such a conditional, but vitally convincing key, the work "Muse Behind the Fence" is resolved: the fence is quite ordinary, but so colored and so tonally resolved that it becomes clear—behind it can hide a muse. Let us note two other works by the artist, written in a conditional (but not abstract) key. This is the painting "Listening to Bach," where a kind of musical universe of almost abstract forms with a recognizable human face immersed in music is given, and the painting "Song of Death," where fantastic (though quite anthropomorphic) creatures are depicted. Their almost poster-like colors (mainly yellow) and at the same time very lifelike volumes (with light and shadow, not just homogeneous planes) remind one of the painting technique of the French artist Fernand Léger. Goncharov is also brought closer to Léger by the combination of chromatic and achromatic colors, expressing different levels of reality. Thus, the "Song" expresses poetic fearlessness towards the unknowable abyss, towards death, fearlessness, punctually reminiscent of the Chairman's hymn in Pushkin's "Feast During the Plague"—it is no coincidence that "song" and "hymn" are synonymous words. The relationship between song and abyss is given by Goncharov in the contrast of a gaping gloomy plane and diverse volumes inherent in three-dimensional space inhabited by people...

On the one hand, the universe of color. On the other—the human world and the coziness of home. In similar semantic parameters, Goncharov perceives Russia: on the one hand, as already noted, pure beauty—a miniature and in this sense chamber aesthetic essence, also related to Popkov's muse, piercingly depicted by Goncharov. On the other—the expanse of Russian blizzard and the frightening immensity of the Russian universe with its eternal and tragic homelessness. In these two contrasting semiotic parameters, Stanislav Goncharov depicts Russia in his canvases and in his verses.

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Russia in Goncharov's Work

The artist, whose work (not falsely and not wrongly) is imbued with patriotic sentiments, lived a significant part of his life in Zagorsk. And this circumstance does not allow the author of the article to refrain from completely extraneous and even inappropriate remarks. The name of the city comes from the surname of a revolutionary, it was someone named Zagorsky, who actually gave the name to the city. However, the word "Zagorsk" sounds like the name of an ancient Russian city, similar, for example, to Izborsk or Borovsk. These names exude antiquity and some touching decrepitude... And when Zagorsk in recent times became Sergiev Posad, returning to its original name, from the lips still slips not this correct name, but the purely and piercingly sounding, but in meaning completely incorrect word "Zagorsk." Is it because Zagorsk is still pronounced more clearly than the correct name, that the religious connotations, openly sounding in the new name of the city, lose a particle of the inner silence and humility that was in the old—incorrect—name. The Posad declares itself as a large and officially recognized religious center, and Zagorsk is perceived as a quiet abode, which seems to hide in the exciting distance and darkness of the Moscow region.

With the word "Zagorsk" in its opposition to the more understandable (logically motivated) Posad is connected that "internal emigration" of which was spoken earlier. Some went to the detachments of "art of resistance" and subsequently demonstratively left the hateful country of slaves, others cheerfully praised and eulogized officiality, and the third, as already mentioned, went into "internal emigration"—if desired, this term can name that art which dedicated itself to depicting private life—the work of Popkov and to a considerable extent Zverev. Goncharov followed the aforementioned path... His "internal emigration" or even "internal seclusion" corresponded to the special, incomparable charm of the Russian suburb and, of course, the name "Zagorsk," not "Sergiev Posad." And Goncharov lived in Zagorsk for a long time... Is this a simple coincidence or the strange and constant care of fate about the inner correspondence of a person to his place of residence?

Living in Zagorsk, Goncharov organically entered the life phase of foolish escapism, related to, if not directly synonymous with, "internal emigration." Here are Goncharov's verses on a civic theme, which implicitly agree with his place of residence. The poem is called "Night of a Sorrowful Day."

"By God's will, in the hour of High Truth The Soviet people stepped on a rake... Why did they look in that mirror, what was bad?.. And now in their country they have become outcasts. What is this lesson about? After all, God's message is good. God save us from this darkness without end."

Isn't it true that the artist's long residence in Zagorsk, outside the capital, represents a visible form of such outcast status, the exile of the artist in his own country? Goncharov does not renounce that phenomenon which he called the Soviet people, but shares their sorrowful fate.

One does not want to arrogantly abuse literary terminology where it concerns the living pain of a person and a country, but one does not want to resort to tearful sentiments either. Let us look at the facts of the past impartially and, as Pushkin writes, without fear. The motif of outcast status transparently implies "internal emigration"—a special poetry of intellectual kitchens, the romance of communal apartments. They were preserved in some places not only in the 70s, but partially survived even to the 80s. To huddle in a communal apartment or to isolate oneself in a cozy kitchen from the harsh reality of domestic weekdays—this is the form of outcast status or escapism, sometimes taking massive forms. And Goncharov narrates about these objective processes with pain and sober courage.

But here's what's strange! The poem was written in 1994, when the situation in the country had changed significantly. That very notorious grandeur, in negative dependence on which the intellectual kitchens or sparsely populated villages of the intellectual suburb positioned themselves, disappeared! And such a population as the Soviet people also disappeared, but Goncharov continues to grieve about their fate. What is this? In part, one has to speak about the tragedy of the generation of the sixties-seventies, who did not step over the barrier of their time—in part, the poem must be recognized as prophetic. After all, what is happening now (good or bad—it is not for us to judge) is the result of that very escape of the mysterious population from itself, which Goncharov foolishly and perspicaciously depicted. The mysterious darkness without end, into which both cozy intellectual kitchens and communal apartments collapsed, and where even the suburb began to fall, gradually being absorbed by the ever-growing Moscow. Darkness without end... And at the same time, hope for salvation from darkness, some positive lesson or rebus, the meaning of which remains to be deciphered.

"Internal emigration" as Goncharov's foolishly paradoxical and in this sense not kvass-like, not saccharine form of patriotism, determines his connection with village poetry and village prose. Goncharov latently follows the idea that in the Russian suburb or hinterland some kind of unclouded light of truth has been preserved. It is no coincidence that one of Goncharov's poetic books is called "Izba Light." One of Goncharov's poems is called "Poet A.T. Tvardovsky and the Surviving Russian Stove."

"Grieving about the paternal ancient izba fate, stood the poet—all silence and memory in a burnt-out, but survived space, inclining everything to the ground at that time..."

Goncharov perceives Tvardovsky, endowed with peasant origin, but still having accepted urban culture, as a village poet like Yesenin. (It must be said that Yesenin, a poet of the golden log izba, is an almost sacred figure for Goncharov, not only the editor of "New World" Tvardovsky). In Tvardovsky's work Goncharov sees some archaic roots—that very izba light and warmth of the ancient stove, which Goncharov is sorry and afraid to lose in the noise of the city.

Due to his ineradicable love for the mysterious izba light, Goncharov unexpectedly converges with village writers—Rasputin, Belov, Astafyev, but does not repeat some of their marginal extremes. What are these extremes? ...In principle, the prose of the village writers is one of the extremely talented and fruitful branches of the "internal emigration" mentioned earlier. Let us risk asserting even more. The idea that eternal truth is hidden and does not die in the Russian hinterland, an idea that nourished the prose of village writers throughout the tragic era of the 60s-70s, hides behind it an extraordinarily high national archetype of the city of Kitezh—a mysterious village that in the time of the triumph of falsehood completely went under water and continued its quiet life there, as the domestic hinterland continues it now. It is no coincidence that Rasputin's famous story "Farewell to Matyora," which describes a fatal flood, a total disaster that befell a Russian village, contains obvious or hidden echoes of the ancient Russian legend of the city of Kitezh. However, in its opposition to urban culture, in its sharp opposition to the capital—the invariable center of the country's life—village prose sometimes falls (or can easily fall) into a kind of aggressive provincialism and a kind of pettiness. One of the characters in Sokurov's film "The Sun" anxiously speaks about Asian isolation, attributing this property to the Japanese emperor, the hero of the film. However, in the forms of Eastern exoticism, the Russian film director Sokurov nevertheless narrates about our ordinary domestic realities. So, the sad vector of village prose is this Asian isolation. ...A.T. Tvardovsky, who knew the Russian village well, in his time criticized the talented writer and a kind of epic of the village F.A. Abramov for some abuse of local words, which do not allow to give an image of the village on universal and generally significant scales, but lead to Asian isolation. A.T. Tvardovsky writes to F.A. Abramov about his major work "Two Winters and Three Summers." "The thing is riddled with language weeds. The least evil is local words and expressions, but even here measure is needed: 'zadoski'—okay, but 'to underplow' the floor—an impossible thing," the poet elegantly ironizes, considering modern slang in fiction a greater evil than the presence of dialectisms, and yet advising F.A. Abramov not to lock himself in local specifics—to see the world widely and fully (otherwise it will turn out according to the proverb "Every kulík praises his own swamp").

Stanislav Goncharov is a writer who stands close to the village writers, but does not share their sometimes internally aggressive position, leading from universal questions to narrowly ethnographic and local questions. Here is an indicative poetic dialogue between Goncharov and one of the prominent village writers—the aforementioned Rasputin (the poem "Two Conversations"). As the author explains without false modesty in his self-commentary, the Poet is Goncharov, and the Prose Writer is Rasputin.

"Prose Writer: As through bewitchment and trance you will see what is more ancient than ancestral homelands. Poet: You will see, you will think. What is the lesson about, to a cloud driven by the wind in the sky?.."

The two voices seem not to argue, but to complement each other. However, through Valentin Rasputin's guttural murmuring, we guess his village longing for immutable patriarchal foundations—so deep and ancient that they are even more ancient than ancestral homelands. Stanislav Goncharov's foolish insight consists, on the contrary, in the fact that love for the homeland is not chained to the patriarchal soil, to the earth, but can freely hover everywhere, like a cloud. In Goncharov's verses one hears a transparent reminiscence from Lermontov:

"Cloudlets of the sky, eternal wanderers..."

These eternal wanderers of Poetry are universal, while the Prose Writer standing firmly on peasant legs, with his deepest insights, is still a little one-sided. And inclined to marginal extremes of pochvennichestvo (soil-bound ideology).

Stanislav Goncharov, on the contrary, elevates his beloved izba light to a world scale, as evidenced not so much by his programmatic statements (external facts), as by his universal metaphysics, distantly related to Brodsky, another poet-exile.

"You've forgotten the village, lost in the swamps of a forested province, where scarecrows in vegetable gardens they never keep—not those crops there, and the road also all corduroy roads and bumps. Granny Nastya, probably, died, and Pesterev is hardly alive, and if alive, then sits drunk in the basement or is fixing something from the back of our bed, they say, a gate, if not a door. And in winter there they chop wood and sit on turnips, and a star blinks from the smoke in the frosty sky,"

Brodsky writes penetratingly and soulfully about the places of his exile. It seems (and probably, not just "it seems"), with Brodsky everything is out of place, not like with others! If Goncharov praises the well-built Russian stove, which can evoke praise from any of the village writers, Brodsky almost curses the Russian village: and the harvests there are meager, and the roads are bad, and the frosts are severe, and the population is drinking, not hardworking. In such places even wolves die, let alone old granny Nastya, one can easily conclude from Brodsky's verses, this small dystopia. Goncharov, on the contrary, is inclined rather to village utopia—to the poetic absolutization of the light of izbas.

However, behind the external difference between Goncharov and Brodsky, their underlying similarity can be traced. Behind the lamentation about the tragic fate of the Russian village in Brodsky, one can guess not the arrogance of criticism, but living pain and piercing bitterness. The visceral romanticism and poetry of the village backwoods, which unexpectedly unites such different poets, resonates with it. Brodsky does not write, "how outrageous it is that in the Russian village there are no such and such conveniences of civilization," but rather admires its patriarchal decrepitude and poetic abandonment. In Brodsky's verses, what is significant is not the formally statistical indications of the village crisis, but the author's attitude to the indicated crisis—it is lovingly compassionate and in this sense related, not polar to Goncharov's izba light! Brodsky freely uses the colloquial expression "probably," related to Granny Nastya—from the verses, it is clear that he remembers and loves (and does not curse) the inhabitants of the village.

"What can I say about life? That it turned out to be long. Only with grief do I feel solidarity. But until my mouth is filled with clay, From it will be heard only gratitude,"

Brodsky writes in another poem. And this warm gratitude brings Brodsky closer to Goncharov, who suffered in Zagorsk both from the darkness of exile and from the wildness of the aborigines' customs, but preserved love for the izba light.

But let us return to Brodsky's village, lost in the swamps. Can we assert that Brodsky becomes a village writer in a poetic miniature? Not quite. As already partially noted, for village writers the wilderness is a self-value, but for Brodsky (as for Goncharov) it is a window to the universe. The romance of the boundless distance is not localized by Brodsky in one or another geographical village, but is universally significant. And if village writers are sometimes involuntarily inclined to provincial pathos, then Goncharov, like Brodsky, perceives the Russian village on a world scale. It is no coincidence that in one of Goncharov's works, relating to the series "Village Windows," in one of the windows we see a conventional landscape, having some oriental features, as if not reducible to the middle zone of Russia. The painting is constructed so that its frame, made by Goncharov, vividly reminds of the frame of a village window, but from there opens a view into poetic reality. Russia of the village writers, figuratively speaking, looks with its windows at itself, while Russia of Brodsky and Goncharov looks with the windows of its izbas into the world space.

Goncharov's "internal emigration" is characterized by that life philosophy of emigration, which was adhered to by Brodsky, who lived abroad for many years. He did not shed a sentimental tear for Russia, but maintained a latent patriotism (which is evident, for example, from his "village" verses). How did he manage this? The cosmic unity of the globe, on which both Russia and America, and other countries are located, created by God, was for Brodsky more primary and more important than the geographical borders of states, organized by people—and Brodsky did not absolutize these borders, considering that even in emigration he was involved in Russia simply as an inhabitant of the globe. Hence his verses about the village (allowing universal interpretation) and his verses about a foreign land (or about an imaginary land?), in which is guessed the romance of the boundless distance, related to the Russian national mentality, and even a kind of poetry of exile.

"We will live with you on the shore, fenced off by a high dam. from the continent in a small circle surrounded by a homemade lamp,"

Brodsky writes, addressing his beloved. The coziness of a home lamp (a desk lamp?) is related to that world of internal emigration and simply the world of home, the world of family, which Goncharov and Popkov painted. Expressing somewhat paradoxically and exaggerated, in Brodsky's verses about a "small circle" with a lamp there is that metaphysical Russia, which is homeless, expelled from everywhere and geographically not localized.

The fact that Goncharov as a village poet in some ways coincides with Brodsky (we will talk about their differences a little below) is a revealing and amazing fact! The fact is that Goncharov's like-minded people, such as Valentin Rasputin and other writers of his cohort, in the spirit of their work are hostile to Brodsky as a poet who, in their view, has changed national foundations. Moreover, what is negative for village writers is not just the biographical fact of Brodsky's emigration, but the pan-European (and not purely national) coloring and scope of his work. The village writers' aggressive position towards Brodsky was voiced by Solzhenitsyn, who can be called their literary forerunner as the author of the famous story about a Russian peasant woman "A Village Without a Righteous Person" (the print version of the title is "Matryona's Yard"). So Solzhenitsyn asserted that Brodsky did not know the Russian village sufficiently, was not sufficiently introduced to the simple homespun truth available to the domestic peasant—a simple muzhik-plowman. Solzhenitsyn writes with bitterness and indignation (but not without some condescending humor, addressed to the fragile intellectual—a "hothouse plant"—from a person who has known life in its epic severity): "The life-giving effect of the earth, everything growing, horses and village labor. Once I too, a stunned city student hitting a horse convoy, experienced similar—and already drew it in as joy. I think: if Brodsky had lived in exile longer—that component in his development could have significantly continued. But he was soon pardoned, he returned to his native city, village perceptions did not in any way remain in him." The writer Solzhenitsyn goes to the extreme—almost already regretting that Brodsky's term of exile was reduced. "And so it turned out that, having grown up in a peculiar Leningrad intellectual circle, Brodsky hardly touched the extensive Russian soil," his unflattering critic remarks in passing. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian backwoods, the hinterland could have awakened the heart in the poet, over which in Brodsky actually predominates rational irony, haughty intellect. "Brodsky's feelings, in any case expressed outwardly, are almost always—within the narrow limits of ineradicable detachment, coldness, dry statement, harsh analysis," Solzhenitsyn condescendingly laments, as if instructing Brodsky, advising him how he should have written. "Because of the core, all-pervasive coldness, Brodsky's verses do not touch the heart," the inexorable Solzhenitsyn concludes with all categoricalness. In addition, with Brodsky, as Solzhenitsyn believes, the accumulation of abstruse rhymes and complex syntactic constructions often obscures the meaning: "...for these spacious rhymes and for the construction of sophisticated stanzas (further complicated by the unwinding of the consequences of rhyming) Brodsky has to pay a big price. These same rhymes lead him to an immeasurable (eluding coherent meaning) weaving of lines and stanzas—and the rhymes, which one at first attentively follows, already cease to play their binding role, cease even to be noticed, they no longer work..." In other words, Brodsky's poetry is criticized as too intellectual, cold, and abstruse. Let us not posthumously judge the domestic classic, the literary father of the so-called village prose and Nobel laureate, but only recognize his sharp polarity to another Nobel laureate—Brodsky.

Goncharov manages to combine the features of a village writer (love for izba light) and those features that unexpectedly bring him closer to Brodsky (for example, intellectualism). The wave of village writers arose on the literary-genetic soil of narodnichestvo—a phenomenon romantically exciting, but in its immeasurable fetishization of the village rejected from the European context—however, Goncharov is actively involved in it, while being a more consistent poet of the village than Brodsky. Therefore, in folk motifs (for example, in the motifs of the izba and the stove) in Goncharov there is a component of play and conventionality: the author is not equivalent to the depicted phenomena of the village, although he is full of love for them. Goncharov's artistic foolishness is combined with an inner intellectualism, not always characteristic of village writers, who are sometimes existentially surrounded (and creatively stimulated) by elementary wildness! Goncharov's foolishness sometimes consists in such deliberate simplification, behind which is guessed European education. The artist's elevated mockery corresponds to the poetics of the avant-garde—Goncharov is not alien to it (although it is not immanent to him), while Brodsky is primly academic.

Goncharov's interest in the visceral Russian language is combined with futuristic zaum, not characteristic of Brodsky as a poet of a different tradition—a student of the Acmeist Akhmatova and a distant continuer of Baratynsky's poetic cosmology. Goncharov's involvement in futurism—a poetic direction that came from Italy, a country in Europe, but capable of poetically adapting on Russian soil, speaks of the personal scale of the poet-artist.

Stanislav Goncharov follows, in particular, the tradition of Khlebnikov's zaum, which has clear futuristic—and in this sense still European—roots.

"Two-speech of villages—forests... Capital-speech of cities—emptinesses..."

Goncharov writes in the poem "At Shelomyan You Are." Before us is a transparent play with the word: "emptinesses" (pustoby) next to forests look like an occasionalism—this word is formed like the word "thickets" (chashchoby). But if thickets—forests—in the poet's life feeling are deep and meaningful, then the stone jungles of cities are externally saturated with all kinds of products of civilization and internally empty. And yet Goncharov has no categoricism: the word "two-speech" formed by the type of the word "two-facedness" or "doublethink" testifies also to a certain treachery of fairy-tale forests, where one can get lost. So dangerous in Goncharov's view are not only the stone jungles of cities, but also wild dense dark forests.

In general, what is significant is not formal evaluations, but the dual artistic essence hidden behind them. Being inclined to the insistent sacralization of izba light, the artist-poet is by no means alien to playing with words, as if guarding him from boring seriousness in depicting village patriarchy.

It remains to conclude that the izba light in the artist's view is associated with a mysterious window to the universe. That is why his patriotism is not marginal, but, on the contrary, cosmically large-scale and freely open to the world space. Like a fairy tale, Goncharov's poetry does not moralize, but conveys its truth to the reader in playful and entertaining forms. Before the reader unfolds a poetically sacred game, full of intelligence, freedom, and creative selflessness.

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