A Ransomed Dissident: A Life in Art Under the Soviets

Description

In 1939, a ten-year-old Igor Golomstock accompanied his mother, a medical doctor, to the vast network of labour camps in the Russian Far East. While she tended patients, he was minded by assorted 'trusty' prisoners – hardened criminals – and returned to Moscow an almost feral adolescent, fluent in obscene prison jargon but intellectually ignorant. Despite this dubious start he became a leading art historian and co-author (with his close friend Andrey Sinyavsky) of the first, deeply controversial, monograph on Picasso published in the Soviet Union. His writings on his 43 years in the Soviet Union offer a rare insight into life as a quietly subversive art historian and the post-Stalin dissident community. In vivid prose Golomstock shows the difficulties of publishing, curating and talking about Western art in Soviet Russia and, with self-deprecating humour, the absurd tragicomedy of life for the Moscow intelligentsia during Khruschev's thaw and Brezhnev's stagnation. He also offers a unique personal perspective on the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, widely considered the end of Khruschev's liberalism and the spark that ignited the Soviet dissident movement. In 1972 he was given 'permission' to leave the Soviet Union, but only after paying a 'ransom' of more than 25 years' salary, nominally intended to reimburse the state for his education. A remarkable collection of artists, scholars and intellectuals in Russia and the West, including Roland Penrose, came together to help him pay this astronomical sum. His memoirs of life once in the UK offer an insider's view of the BBC Russian Service and a penetrating analysis of the notorious feud between Sinyavsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nominated for the Russian Booker Prize on its publication in Russian in 2014, The Ransomed Dissident opens a window onto the life of a remarkable man: a dissident of uncompromising moral integrity and with an outstanding gift for friendship. Cover Author Biography Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents List of Illustrations Translator’s Note Acknowledgements Turning Point Part I Russia 1. My Father’s Arrest 2. Kolyma 3. Moscow 4. Finances and Romances 5. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Comrade Novikov Abram Efros and André G ide The Museum of New Western Art 6. The International Festival and Artists 7. The Sinyavskys, Khlebny Lane, the Far North 8. Dancing Around Picasso 9. The Museum Again 10. VNIITE 11. Great Expectations 12. The Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial 13. Dissidents 14. Pen Portraits of My Friends 15. Questions of Faith 16. AWaiting Game 17. Departure: An Obstacle Race Part II. Emigration Translator’s Note to Part II 18. The Journal Kontinent 19. The Anthony Blunt Affair 20. Radio Liberty, Galich 21. At the BBC 22. The Second Trial of Andrey Sinyavsky 23. Politics versus Aesthetics 24. Sinyavsky’s Last Years 25. Perestroika 26. Family Matters Instead of a Conclusion The Benefits of Pessimism Afterword Notes Dramatis Personae Appendix I Appendix II Select Bibliography Index Plates