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**HOT ISSUE**
AB №33 – Transcription of Multiplicity
Transcription of Multitudes
AB issue 33 – Transcription of Multitudes – see it here
* Tower (Blues Mondo). Tatyana Apraksina
“from the objectlessness of the inaudible”
* “Because They’re People.” Ella Molochkovetskaya, Olga Romanova
“Since it’s theater within theater, everyone is everyone there”
* Transcribers Anonymous. Tom Cobbe
“suites, sonatas and sets of variations. Oh dear. There go the holidays.”
* You Know Where They Are. John P. Rogers
“time will stop at nothing”
“something like a clock embryo in a shot glass”
* Chromatoplastics. On Color, Form and the Fundamentals of Fine Art. Olga Zemlyanikina
“A spot of color as a tool for conveying the type, character and direction of movement”
* Heeding the Calling. At the Black & Brown Comics Festival (Blues Report). James Manteith
“artists display comics with a blend of mysticism, prophecy and science fiction dubbed ‘Afrofuturism’“
* Eight Cemeteries. Sempa Dordzhe
“His head was in the southwest and his feet were in the northeast, and from them, eight great cemeteries arose in all the worlds”
* Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Blackbirds. Vladimir Verov
“True poetry is not subject to decay”
* Spanish Rock. The Beginning. Olga Romanova
“too rocker for punks and too punk for rockers”
* The Art of Whispering. A New Poetry Collection by Gjekë Marinaj.
“the poet lives in both hemispheres, constantly cultivating literary relationships”
* The Mind Finds Russia…. Translated into Japanese, Persian, Rebrew, Arabic, French, Romanian and Turkish by Anton Kiselyov
* An Old Novel’s Insights and Predictions. Ekaterina Ovcharova “the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany was marked by the appearance of two fundamentally different concepts of the eternal image — Goethe, who crowned the tradition with his two-part play, and Bonaventure, who opened the way to its deconstruction.”
“The hero has no soul to sell, and there’s no one to sell it to.”
* Car Stories. Bill Yake
“then I could see dancing shadows on the asphalt beneath the engine”
* Mail
Worldly Aspect
AB issue 32 – see it here
* The Place of Measure (Blues Mondo). T. Apraksina
* Great and Mighty. What the Old Seer Prophesied. N. Yarygin
* The Artist and the Rich Man (translated by A. Kiselyov)
* Osip Mandelstam and Martiros Saryan. Some Parallels of Artistic Thought. S. Saryan
* Would You Like to Meet Me? G. Caproni (translated by Y. Sventsitskaya)
* And I Sing of Love for You. S. Quasimodo (translated by Y. Sventsitskaya)
* The Musical Experience of the Listener. E. Cho
* The “Vijuaru Kei” of Japanese Rock. E. Molochkovetskaya
* For Soviet Rock. S. Vasiliev
* Step by Step Through the Season with “Blues” (Blues Reports): Keepers of the Postal Fleece. Meetings with Fast-Witted Fan. Punk Defense, Punk Ballet. Boogie-Woogie Biosphere and Ethnogenesis: Lev Gumilyov. Finding a Face Before Sound. J. Manteith
* The Idea of a University. J.H. Newman (excerpts in translation)
* The Essence of the Mind. Lama Gendun Rinpoche (translated by V. Ragimov)
* Stages of Formation in the Verbist Order (interview)
* The Positive Tensor of Curvature. V. Lyubeznov
* Ibn Ezra and His Chess Poem (translated by A. Kiselyov)
POLEMICS SESSION:
* Defending Dostoevsky. N. Orlova
Mail
Nonoctave attunement
AB 31, our first issue since 1998 to be produced and published entirely in St. Petersburg, is imbued with the spirit of reconnecting with one’s beloved milieu.
The issue nonoctavely combines:
* the philosophy of pantheism in art (Sofia Saryan on her renowned grandfather’s worldview), of Tibetan monasticism (a new entry from Vagid Ragimov’s translation of “The Essence of the Ocean of True Meaning”) and of the human being as a project (highlights from the January 2021 seminar held by A. Lvov in our editorial office)
* the surprising songs of Vsevelod Gakkel and his disciple BG — through the eyes and ears of their admirers James Manteith and Andrei Advaitov
* the Decembrists at war, in a panoramic study by Olga Shilova
* inspired ways of measuring time, by Anna Kogan
* an apt, timeless critique of a failed musical, according to Alexander Donskich von Romanov
* the domestic wisdom of Tina Tiffany
* the poetry of Romania (translations by Anton Kiselev, in his first appearance here), Italy (Yulia Sventsitskaya, long known to our readers) and St. Petersburg (a wonderful cycle by Olga Alekseeva, who tragically passed away at the end of last year)
* the non-similarity of realities (according to the editor-in-chief).
All of this is now available in our Russian-language issue! Some can be available in English! If you know Russian, please feel free to help with translations. If you don’t know Russian, you can still help prepare translations — just get in touch to learn more. Meanwhile, please consider learning Russian — the language opens new worlds.
AB in SPb
The Apraksin Blues editorial board is pleased to announce the long-awaited publication of AB №30, “On the Way.” Authors and other interested persons who have seen it before only on the screen can contact the editorial office to obtain copies of the issue.
At the presentation of Apraksin Blues №29
November 9-11, 2019, St. Petersburg, Russia. Editor in chief Tatyana Apraksina and AB supporters in the Apraksin Lane editorial office.
AB Invites!
All-All-All!
Authors, readers, admirers, past and future! And just good smart people!
To everyone who knows us, who know each other, whom we know, whom we can get to know!
Epochs are replaced by epochs, the end of the era of separation becomes the beginning of the era of union.
It’s time to connect — on a new floor, in a new meaning.
Apraksin Blues is looking forward to meeting you!
The doors of the editorial office will be open to all inclined to attend our general meeting
and the St. Petersburg presentation of the new issue, “The Career of Freedom.”
The event will take place three consecutive evenings: 9 (Saturday), 10 (Sunday), 11 (Monday) November starting at 6 pm. .
Editorial address :
St. Petersburg, Apraksin Lane, 3, apt. 3
phone: 310-9640
I will also be happy to meet separately with everyone who so desires, in the second half of any day of the whole next week.
Tatyana Apraksina
Photos from conference on Mike
On April 18, 2017, on Mike Naumenko’s birthday, a conference on him was held in the historic editorial offices of Apraksin Blues on Apraksin Lane in St. Petersburg. The evening’s program included literary readings and sharing of memories. We thank the conference organizer Alexander Donskich von Romanov, office coordinator Elena Starovoitova, and those invited, among them Aleksei Rybin, Rodion, Igor and Lyuda Petrovsky, Natasha Krusanova, Pavel Krusanov, Willie Usov, Vsevolod Gakkel, Pavel Krayev, Igor Gudkov, A. Naslevod, Andrei Tropillo.
Read about Mike on Apraksin Lane here.
“If I were known as a violin bow”
Gregory Korchmar and Tatyana Apraksina, St. Petersburg, 2010
Composer Gregory Korchmar wrote his cantata If I were known as a violin bow in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting the composition in August 2012 and finishing in February 2013. The eight-movement composition, scored for soprano, violin and cello, sets texts from ten poems by a fellow St. Petersburg native, artist and writer Tatyana Apraksina. The texts selected by Korchmar reflect meditations on the metaphysics of music and musical performance. Korchmar’s and Apraksina’s resonance with St. Petersburg’s musical traditions informs the cantata, as do related spiritual and cultural affinities.
Gregory Korchmar, a composer, pianist, harpsichordist and professor who studied under the Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), has long been a visible exponent of St. Petersburg’s musical culture. He teaches composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and since 2006 has chaired the St. Petersburg Composers Union, having previously assisted the prominent composer Andrei Petrov (1930-2006), his predecessor in that post. For many years, Korchmar has served as the primary organizer for the annual Petersburg Musical Spring festival of contemporary classical music. He is the author of four symphonies and a series of operas, ballets, cantatas, oratorios and other choral and solo vocal works. He is an Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (1996), a laureate of the St. Petersburg government’s prize for work dedicated to the city’s three-hundredth anniversary (2003), and the recipient of a Pushkin Medal for contributions to the development, preservation and proliferation of national cultural traditions.
Tatyana Apraksina’s visual and philosophical investigation of the specifics and spirit of classical music performance was significantly furthered by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which began to facilitate this direction in her work starting in 1984, while Shostakovich associate Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) still conducted the ensemble. Major musical and scholarly centers in Russia and abroad have hosted her exhibits and lectures on creativity, artistry and cultural history, themes also explored in her ongoing essay and poetry publications. Collaboration with original members of Shostakovich’s preferred Borodin Quartet, including cellist Valentin Berlinsky (1925-2008), has had a major influence on her thought, as has the noted St. Petersburg violinist and Soloists of Leningrad founder Mikhail Gantvarg, a central muse for her art and writing. Her two jubilee-year memorial portraits of Shostakovich belong to the collection of the St. Petersburg Composers Union, as does her 1996 portrait of the composer’s favorite pupil, Boris Tishschenko (1939-2010), an important ally for her work.
The “voices” and “hands” of these mutual “friends” interweave in the texts and music of Korchmar’s cantata, as does Western and Eastern musical rite’s “frankincense of canon.” Korchmar’s opening movement sets Apraksina’s restatement of a Pythagorean-type creed of musical cosmology. His chronologically last setting, placed at the cantata’s center, gives a pentatonically inflected evocation of the legendary meeting between the sages Confucius and Lao Tse, as imagined in a 1999 poem dedicated by Apraksina to the sinologist Evgeny Torchinov (1956-2003), her professor at the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies. The closing movement, “To the Violinist’s Hand,” musically follows the trajectory of “whirlwind ascent” of sound from virtuosically played instruments, with the musical anagrams of Bach and Shostakovich fused in the culminating sonic “communion” envisioned in Apraksina’s 2001 source poem. Interstitial slow and waltz movements seem to extend other lines suggested by late-period Shostakovich, in varied moods of pastoral lyricism (“I discovered my violin…,” “A mountain cello…”), existential starkness (“The measurement for my love’s weight…”) and rhapsody in the “transmutation” of creative immersion in the sublime materials of musical craft (“My friends are notes…,” “Fetish”).
The cantata’s texts, written in anticipation of and during the early stages of a productive sojourn in coastal California, alternately seek to articulate the essence of Apraksina’s known experience of “music culled from altars” of “distinguished stage boards” from a vantage point of “gathering distance” an “ocean” and “continental stage” away from St. Petersburg, while also finding the wild setting’s “wave bows,” “vapor fingers” and “cello range” unlocking further layers of this essence for reporting back to the Old World, to “deliver information to the bureau.” In St. Petersburg, Korchmar responds with music steeped in that place, in the larger heritage of classical music and culture, and in headily transcendent “notes and numbers” sensed as measuring “heaven’s interval” and signifying the “vibration” that reconciles places, times, modes of thought and being for both composer and poet.
James Manteith, also the translator of Apraksina’s poem sequence California Psalms (bilingual edition 2013, Radiolarian) and other works by the author, has prepared an English-language singable rendering of the soprano part for Korchmar’s If I were known as a violin bow cantata, broadening the opportunities for the performance and comprehension of the work beyond Russia.
To inquire about this work’s recording and performance status and availability in its Russian or English versions, please contact apraksinblues@gmail.com.
Tibetan lessons
The historic Apraksin Blues magazine editorial offices in St. Petersburg are hosting regular Tibetan language classes.
(Photos by Elena Starovoitova.)
EXHIBIT
VISITORS FROM THE PAST
After many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen historic paintings and drawings by Tatyana Apraksina were recently returned as a gift to their author.
All these works were created in Leningrad in the 1970s and 80s. The earliest dates from 1974.
These visitors from the past were first on view at T. Apraksina’s studio on each of three days:
Thursday, October 29, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Friday, October 30, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Sunday, November 1, 2015 – beginning at 5 p.m.
Due the number of additional people wishing to view the exhibit, the show was extended through the end of November.
Below are photos from the exhibit, followed by an article about it.
Reproductions of works from the artist’s early period and part of her cycle “Gaze from Within” can also be seen at Tatyana Apraksina’s Studio.
AUTUMN MARATHON: VISITORS FROM THE PAST
— James Manteith —
An unknown man’s voice sounds in the receiver.
“Is this Apraksin Court?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming to the exhibit. How do I get there?”
Directions follow. And no one on either side of this conversation seems surprised until somewhat later, even though everyone knows Apraksin Court is in St. Petersburg, while the display under discussion is in Oakland, California, by San Francisco Bay.
That evening, the morning’s caller climbs a flight of outdoor stairs to the second floor, enters Tatyana Apraksina’s studio, has a look and says, “It’s Apraksin Court!” He well remembers the sight of these buildings: in the ’70s, he worked among them, loading crates of heads for hammers. Such things stay in the memory! And in those same ’70s, in the same city sector, the artist who unexpectedly for herself would be known as Apraksina had different tools in her hands, logging the experience that grounded her earliest exhibits.
Tatyana Apraksina. Side Entrance to Apraksin Court. 1984-1985
Most of Apraksina’s early art has long since dispersed among collections and friends. Yet now, decades later, some works from that time have suddenly found her in the United States. Returned to the author after many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen drawings and paintings, by now a part of history, determine the focus of this exhibit, entitled “Visitors from the Past.” The majority of these works haven’t seen their author in at least twenty years. Sometimes much longer. Images half-effaced in memory reassume their original clarity, dimensions in physical space. “Nothing’s ever really gone,” says a viewer, recalling personal witness of such transitions. “Everything returns.”
“Visitors from the Past” is scheduled for three days: October 29-30 and November 1, 2015. Showings then extend through the whole of November. An autumn marathon. Complex symmetry can be sensed with the Petersburg trip undertaken by the artist the previous spring, when for the first time in sixteen years Apraksina set foot in her own court and own original studio, a site which also hosted a meeting with the past, with paintings miraculously intact after their author’s long absence. There, on that side of the earth, other keys to truth surfaced. And here, more keys appear, no less needed.
Recently Apraksina compared art with gates: it doesn’t replace reality but may help gain entrance there. Moreover, she added, no gate is final or absolute. This justifies crafting ever new gates, as well as restoring the old. Among these early works, the theme of gates sometimes occurs literally, as more than metaphor, in the shapes of city archways, vivid symbols where the commonplace merges seamlessly with fate.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Prepared for the exhibit, sheets and canvases from the Leningrad of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s form a semicircle facing the studio loft’s entrance. Among the works created off Apraksin Lane in Leningrad are some from the artist’s Gaze from Within cycle of courtyard landscapes. The full cycle was first shown at the city’s Library of the Academy of Sciences in 1984. One scene shows a side street leading into Apraksin Court. Others complement the panorama with interstitial courtyards from adjacent neighborhoods. All the courtyards are approached from a personal perspective, with no attempt to exit a human scale for the sake of effect. “Painfully familiar,” says one viewer — who grew up in these mazes of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg — then repeats, “painfully familiar. Even after I left, I kept seeing these courtyards in my dreams. Like labyrinths of the subconscious. ” In these monochrome pastels, the solitary figures who make rare appearances seem at one with the courtyards, while the courtyards themselves, even when deserted, seem at one with human life.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Shortly after its opening, says the artist, the Academy of Sciences exhibit was hastily removed under pressure from state security. Yet in that brief interval, this first large-scale showing managed to cause a stir, to become an event. “Why was the exhibit taken down?” many now ask, Americans and not only. “What was there to dislike, what was offensive?” That era is separated from the present not only by a change of government but also by altered aesthetics. The specific defiance implied in visual language fades into the past. Yet such memories are easily refreshed. “Come on!” scoffs Apraksina, paraphrasing a fellow of serious rank who debriefed her back then. “‘Couldn’t you find something more appealing in our beautiful city than garbage bins and a blind old lady?'”
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
“Exactly!” another viewer lends a vintage stock remark. “And our beautiful country has no such thing as old age.” At any rate, apparently neither human aging nor architectural decrepitude ought to have been shown like this — unfiltered: free of the lens of political ideology, even of the ideology of naive sentimentality. Here reality is shown open to discourse, inclusive of the full range of human reactions, from fear to love, even love addressed to shambles, free of artificially imposed subtexts.
Incidentally, says Apraksina, she herself has no information as to the woman’s blindness, a trait simply assumed by many — including luminaries of nonconformism, with their specific criteria of contemporary relevance — mainly because the figure carries a cane.
When interpreting art, there’s something questionable about overemphasizing the times of its creation. These works’ content transcends topical issues of stagnation-era Leningrad. Nonetheless, it’s natural to respond personally to traces of historical moments. “I was exactly like that,” professes one viewer, pointing to an unabashedly declarative image of a nude cellist against the backdrop of a withdrawing street crowd comprising solely men, defined by impenetrable backs and anonymous hats. “Always a black sheep. I know just how he feels. Since then the dark guys have disappeared, and the naked and strange ones remain. It’s a great painting, right out of Magritte.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Cellist. 1983-1984
“New dark ones took their place all the same,” his companion, recently returned from Moscow, corrects him.
The viewer accepts the fairness of this rejoinder. Still, he says, he no longer feels alone: black sheep, he ventures, manage to find one another.
Tatyana Apraksina. Self-Portrait. 1974
Meanwhile, other works — drawings dating from a still-earlier time (they even include exact dates of creation: 1974, 1975, 1977…) — delineate people with little or no reference to surroundings. Such works might be said to portray the inner life within the courtyards’ domiciles. Not without attention to such inner, hidden life does the artist’s creative course turn to the courtyards’ emptiness and wornness to buttress further stages of progress. The exhibit gives an inkling of origins. Despite a certain randomness in the set of works that found their way into this particular collection, this sampling offers, for instance, a self-portrait from 1974, a pivotal year for its author. Beside this drawn portrait is an old photograph, taken that same year by Boris Mikhalevkin: the artist sits by a piano, in front of a wall completely covered by provocatively sharp, freshly completed sheets. “Isn’t it just pure ’70s?” adds Apraksina. “So expressionist. Posturing, longing for self-declaration.”
Tatyana Apraksina, 1974, Apraksin Lane. Photograph by Boris Mikhalevkin
Maybe. But the current spontaneous time warp serves as an occasion to ponder the values of that time’s rebels and where their rebellion led — in this case, say, contrasted with others.
A professional therapist attending the exhibit sees everything in her own way, interpreting the works’ subjects in terms of inherent sexual energy. “But you’re an artist, you sublimate!” This could be stated with other tropes, but some kind of sublimation certainly has a place here. Another viewer, surprised by the variety of themes, media, styles, posits that the author may have several personalities. But the author asserts the opposite: one personality simply need not subordinate life’s diversity to a single mold.
All the works reveal a feminine origin, with formal symbols of this, says the therapist, though various cases find varied sublimations, sometimes transitioning into masculinity. Yet it occurs to the artist that, for instance, in traditional Chinese yin-yang symbology, the same symbols — curve and corner, vertical and horizontal — carry diametrically opposite connotations. One way or another, namely a totality of opinions is adequate to the fullness of art itself.
Much discussion surrounds a large-scale pastel of 1975, “Premonition,” depicting a mutual embrace between a child — a “golden boy” — and a “green man” (as one viewer calls him) who clearly has many years behind him. The nature and meaning of this pairing is enigmatic: the “green man” hardly wins every viewer’s sympathy and trust. Perceptions diverge. “I think the feelings here are familiar to any mother,” one woman say. “She wants to hold her child all her life!” Or, in another version: “‘It’s my baby! Don’t touch!’ That’s written all over that face.” The author proposes a new hypothesis, more general but no less substantive: “When I look at this scene now, I think it depicts how age or tradition encounters novelty. The old both protects and supports, while simultaneously assimilating, dominating the new, which needs the old but also feels a bit afraid of it.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Premonition. 1975
An American visitor to the exhibit has a memorable response, after familiarizing herself with the early works from the German collection, then with the studio’s wide range of fresh paintings: “Not one dead face.”
In turn, one of the artist’s compatriots, enthusing over the exhibit, asserts that he particularly likes frightening works of art, that he sees plenty of them here, but isn’t afraid. This art is frighteningly alive.
One might note a frightening aliveness and expressiveness lingering even in faces depicted in stylized manners bequeathed by bygone fashions. Behind such faces are individuals, personalities, whether real or imagined, as in the pastel with the strange English name “The Bells,” comprising stained-glass-like overlays of faces and chimes. “I know all these people,” someone says, then begins to narrate each of their tales in turn. The title is placed directly on the picture — a decision later quite rare for the author. “Why is the name in English?” she tries to answer. “Everyone was drenched in English-language rock lyrics. Some floated up out of that source, gave a hint…”
Alternatively, the name may allude to John Donne’s “For whom the bell tolls,” also figuring as the title of the novel by Hemingway, a writer much in circulation then. Here the visual image, like the poem bearing Donne’s line, invokes the interconnectedness of fragile human lives. No life in this world is insignificant, each life is inseparable from the other.
Tatyana Apraksina. The Bells. 1976
A peculiar feature of the collection-based exhibit is to mark the strongest, deepest side of the artist’s Leningrad span of creative development — her working out of the theme of musical performance — by no more than one piece, far from the most striking example. This is a modest portrait sketch of a violinist, drawn in charcoal during a rehearsal. A subdued presence. Yet this violinist is Mikhail Gantvarg; namely he was to be the muse, the heart of the artist’s whole musical line.
Tatyana Apraksina. Mikhail Gantvarg. 1985
Seeing the portrait, a former Leningrader suddenly recalls her onetime attendance of Philharmonic concerts and her admiration for the orchestra’s then-concertmaster, whose name she hadn’t known until now. So these impressions, too, come full circle, are restored, concerning not only that life but life itself.
The composition of the audience at this exhibit warrants separate attention. Viewers make their way here from many different places: some from walking distance, others from nearby and even not-so-nearby towns and settlements. Half of the audience are Russian émigrés, while the rest are Americans of varying backgrounds. As for the Americans, besides having an eye-opening encounter with a hitherto completely unknown phenomenon at the intersection of Russian history and culture, they apprehend something more universal, common to all. The presence of violins, for example, in later pieces. From violin imagery it’s no stretch to talk of vibrations of the universe — indifferent to political, social or ethnic distinctions.
One American, however, expresses surprise over suddenly realizing her favorite artists have always been Russian. Another is thrilled by a feeling of seemingly popping up at a meeting of Russian intelligentsia. But the quality these people denote with the word “Russian” foremost likely relates to tastes native in themselves.
Those more used to viewing European art see more, while those for whom this is novel find it sufficient to contact the surface content or study spots of color… In this single studio has suddenly appeared “more art than the eye can take in at one time,” “more than in many museums,” in one American’s words.
And in this abundant studio, everyone feels uncommonly good and relaxed. People are pleased to spend time among the paintings, conversing, enjoying the spontaneous performance of Chopin and Schumann at the piano, an instrument more than appropriate here. In parallel occur unusual acquaintances, unexpected points of contact, the discovery of hidden meanings and connections. Some might be coming here for the first and only time in their lives, while some start visiting the show all but daily.
“You’ve created something unique here in this place,” one of the last viewers says on the way out. “It’s a great achievement. We’ll come again.”
Why is everything that’s been described happening here? “Artists’ creativity often shows up in the spaces they find to do their work,” an expert viewer says. It’s hard to escape a feeling of more than accidental convergence. Including the presence, with the works that traveled from Germany to this studio by boat and yacht slips, of a painting of a boy in a sailing uniform.
Tatyana Apraksina. Sailor. 1988
Apraksina plans to keep some of these recovered works. Others may continue their path onward, freeing their author for new creativity. In any case, part of attaining such freedom lies in willingness to face the self, including selves from the past.
Also abiding at the exhibit is an oil portrait of the woman in whose collection all these “visitors” spent many years, of whom it was said she lived in a museum. She found inspiration in these works; through her, these works inspired others. And at the exhibit’s close, having faced a new audience, she too seems to exude an aura of satisfaction. When the sacrifice of the past is accepted by the present, life wins. Even the past is capable of change, which brings more change to view a new horizon.
Tatyana Apraksina. Neonila. 1985
Transcription of Multitudes
AB issue 33 – Transcription of Multitudes – see it here
* Tower (Blues Mondo). Tatyana Apraksina
“from the objectlessness of the inaudible”
* “Because They’re People.” Ella Molochkovetskaya, Olga Romanova
“Since it’s theater within theater, everyone is everyone there”
* Transcribers Anonymous. Tom Cobbe
“suites, sonatas and sets of variations. Oh dear. There go the holidays.”
* You Know Where They Are. John P. Rogers
“time will stop at nothing”
“something like a clock embryo in a shot glass”
* Chromatoplastics. On Color, Form and the Fundamentals of Fine Art. Olga Zemlyanikina
“A spot of color as a tool for conveying the type, character and direction of movement”
* Heeding the Calling. At the Black & Brown Comics Festival (Blues Report). James Manteith
“artists display comics with a blend of mysticism, prophecy and science fiction dubbed ‘Afrofuturism’“
* Eight Cemeteries. Sempa Dordzhe
“His head was in the southwest and his feet were in the northeast, and from them, eight great cemeteries arose in all the worlds”
* Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Blackbirds. Vladimir Verov
“True poetry is not subject to decay”
* Spanish Rock. The Beginning. Olga Romanova
“too rocker for punks and too punk for rockers”
* The Art of Whispering. A New Poetry Collection by Gjekë Marinaj.
“the poet lives in both hemispheres, constantly cultivating literary relationships”
* The Mind Finds Russia…. Translated into Japanese, Persian, Rebrew, Arabic, French, Romanian and Turkish by Anton Kiselyov
* An Old Novel’s Insights and Predictions. Ekaterina Ovcharova “the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany was marked by the appearance of two fundamentally different concepts of the eternal image — Goethe, who crowned the tradition with his two-part play, and Bonaventure, who opened the way to its deconstruction.”
“The hero has no soul to sell, and there’s no one to sell it to.”
* Car Stories. Bill Yake
“then I could see dancing shadows on the asphalt beneath the engine”
* Mail
Worldly Aspect
AB issue 32 – see it here
* The Place of Measure (Blues Mondo). T. Apraksina
* Great and Mighty. What the Old Seer Prophesied. N. Yarygin
* The Artist and the Rich Man (translated by A. Kiselyov)
* Osip Mandelstam and Martiros Saryan. Some Parallels of Artistic Thought. S. Saryan
* Would You Like to Meet Me? G. Caproni (translated by Y. Sventsitskaya)
* And I Sing of Love for You. S. Quasimodo (translated by Y. Sventsitskaya)
* The Musical Experience of the Listener. E. Cho
* The “Vijuaru Kei” of Japanese Rock. E. Molochkovetskaya
* For Soviet Rock. S. Vasiliev
* Step by Step Through the Season with “Blues” (Blues Reports): Keepers of the Postal Fleece. Meetings with Fast-Witted Fan. Punk Defense, Punk Ballet. Boogie-Woogie Biosphere and Ethnogenesis: Lev Gumilyov. Finding a Face Before Sound. J. Manteith
* The Idea of a University. J.H. Newman (excerpts in translation)
* The Essence of the Mind. Lama Gendun Rinpoche (translated by V. Ragimov)
* Stages of Formation in the Verbist Order (interview)
* The Positive Tensor of Curvature. V. Lyubeznov
* Ibn Ezra and His Chess Poem (translated by A. Kiselyov)
POLEMICS SESSION:
* Defending Dostoevsky. N. Orlova
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Nonoctave attunement
AB 31, our first issue since 1998 to be produced and published entirely in St. Petersburg, is imbued with the spirit of reconnecting with one’s beloved milieu.
The issue nonoctavely combines:
* the philosophy of pantheism in art (Sofia Saryan on her renowned grandfather’s worldview), of Tibetan monasticism (a new entry from Vagid Ragimov’s translation of “The Essence of the Ocean of True Meaning”) and of the human being as a project (highlights from the January 2021 seminar held by A. Lvov in our editorial office)
* the surprising songs of Vsevelod Gakkel and his disciple BG — through the eyes and ears of their admirers James Manteith and Andrei Advaitov
* the Decembrists at war, in a panoramic study by Olga Shilova
* inspired ways of measuring time, by Anna Kogan
* an apt, timeless critique of a failed musical, according to Alexander Donskich von Romanov
* the domestic wisdom of Tina Tiffany
* the poetry of Romania (translations by Anton Kiselev, in his first appearance here), Italy (Yulia Sventsitskaya, long known to our readers) and St. Petersburg (a wonderful cycle by Olga Alekseeva, who tragically passed away at the end of last year)
* the non-similarity of realities (according to the editor-in-chief).
All of this is now available in our Russian-language issue! Some can be available in English! If you know Russian, please feel free to help with translations. If you don’t know Russian, you can still help prepare translations — just get in touch to learn more. Meanwhile, please consider learning Russian — the language opens new worlds.
AB in SPb
The Apraksin Blues editorial board is pleased to announce the long-awaited publication of AB №30, “On the Way.” Authors and other interested persons who have seen it before only on the screen can contact the editorial office to obtain copies of the issue.
At the presentation of Apraksin Blues №29
November 9-11, 2019, St. Petersburg, Russia. Editor in chief Tatyana Apraksina and AB supporters in the Apraksin Lane editorial office.
AB Invites!
All-All-All!
Authors, readers, admirers, past and future! And just good smart people!
To everyone who knows us, who know each other, whom we know, whom we can get to know!
Epochs are replaced by epochs, the end of the era of separation becomes the beginning of the era of union.
It’s time to connect — on a new floor, in a new meaning.
Apraksin Blues is looking forward to meeting you!
The doors of the editorial office will be open to all inclined to attend our general meeting
and the St. Petersburg presentation of the new issue, “The Career of Freedom.”
The event will take place three consecutive evenings: 9 (Saturday), 10 (Sunday), 11 (Monday) November starting at 6 pm. .
Editorial address :
St. Petersburg, Apraksin Lane, 3, apt. 3
phone: 310-9640
I will also be happy to meet separately with everyone who so desires, in the second half of any day of the whole next week.
Tatyana Apraksina
Photos from conference on Mike
On April 18, 2017, on Mike Naumenko’s birthday, a conference on him was held in the historic editorial offices of Apraksin Blues on Apraksin Lane in St. Petersburg. The evening’s program included literary readings and sharing of memories. We thank the conference organizer Alexander Donskich von Romanov, office coordinator Elena Starovoitova, and those invited, among them Aleksei Rybin, Rodion, Igor and Lyuda Petrovsky, Natasha Krusanova, Pavel Krusanov, Willie Usov, Vsevolod Gakkel, Pavel Krayev, Igor Gudkov, A. Naslevod, Andrei Tropillo.
Read about Mike on Apraksin Lane here.
“If I were known as a violin bow”
Gregory Korchmar and Tatyana Apraksina, St. Petersburg, 2010
Composer Gregory Korchmar wrote his cantata If I were known as a violin bow in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting the composition in August 2012 and finishing in February 2013. The eight-movement composition, scored for soprano, violin and cello, sets texts from ten poems by a fellow St. Petersburg native, artist and writer Tatyana Apraksina. The texts selected by Korchmar reflect meditations on the metaphysics of music and musical performance. Korchmar’s and Apraksina’s resonance with St. Petersburg’s musical traditions informs the cantata, as do related spiritual and cultural affinities.
Gregory Korchmar, a composer, pianist, harpsichordist and professor who studied under the Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), has long been a visible exponent of St. Petersburg’s musical culture. He teaches composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and since 2006 has chaired the St. Petersburg Composers Union, having previously assisted the prominent composer Andrei Petrov (1930-2006), his predecessor in that post. For many years, Korchmar has served as the primary organizer for the annual Petersburg Musical Spring festival of contemporary classical music. He is the author of four symphonies and a series of operas, ballets, cantatas, oratorios and other choral and solo vocal works. He is an Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (1996), a laureate of the St. Petersburg government’s prize for work dedicated to the city’s three-hundredth anniversary (2003), and the recipient of a Pushkin Medal for contributions to the development, preservation and proliferation of national cultural traditions.
Tatyana Apraksina’s visual and philosophical investigation of the specifics and spirit of classical music performance was significantly furthered by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which began to facilitate this direction in her work starting in 1984, while Shostakovich associate Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) still conducted the ensemble. Major musical and scholarly centers in Russia and abroad have hosted her exhibits and lectures on creativity, artistry and cultural history, themes also explored in her ongoing essay and poetry publications. Collaboration with original members of Shostakovich’s preferred Borodin Quartet, including cellist Valentin Berlinsky (1925-2008), has had a major influence on her thought, as has the noted St. Petersburg violinist and Soloists of Leningrad founder Mikhail Gantvarg, a central muse for her art and writing. Her two jubilee-year memorial portraits of Shostakovich belong to the collection of the St. Petersburg Composers Union, as does her 1996 portrait of the composer’s favorite pupil, Boris Tishschenko (1939-2010), an important ally for her work.
The “voices” and “hands” of these mutual “friends” interweave in the texts and music of Korchmar’s cantata, as does Western and Eastern musical rite’s “frankincense of canon.” Korchmar’s opening movement sets Apraksina’s restatement of a Pythagorean-type creed of musical cosmology. His chronologically last setting, placed at the cantata’s center, gives a pentatonically inflected evocation of the legendary meeting between the sages Confucius and Lao Tse, as imagined in a 1999 poem dedicated by Apraksina to the sinologist Evgeny Torchinov (1956-2003), her professor at the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies. The closing movement, “To the Violinist’s Hand,” musically follows the trajectory of “whirlwind ascent” of sound from virtuosically played instruments, with the musical anagrams of Bach and Shostakovich fused in the culminating sonic “communion” envisioned in Apraksina’s 2001 source poem. Interstitial slow and waltz movements seem to extend other lines suggested by late-period Shostakovich, in varied moods of pastoral lyricism (“I discovered my violin…,” “A mountain cello…”), existential starkness (“The measurement for my love’s weight…”) and rhapsody in the “transmutation” of creative immersion in the sublime materials of musical craft (“My friends are notes…,” “Fetish”).
The cantata’s texts, written in anticipation of and during the early stages of a productive sojourn in coastal California, alternately seek to articulate the essence of Apraksina’s known experience of “music culled from altars” of “distinguished stage boards” from a vantage point of “gathering distance” an “ocean” and “continental stage” away from St. Petersburg, while also finding the wild setting’s “wave bows,” “vapor fingers” and “cello range” unlocking further layers of this essence for reporting back to the Old World, to “deliver information to the bureau.” In St. Petersburg, Korchmar responds with music steeped in that place, in the larger heritage of classical music and culture, and in headily transcendent “notes and numbers” sensed as measuring “heaven’s interval” and signifying the “vibration” that reconciles places, times, modes of thought and being for both composer and poet.
James Manteith, also the translator of Apraksina’s poem sequence California Psalms (bilingual edition 2013, Radiolarian) and other works by the author, has prepared an English-language singable rendering of the soprano part for Korchmar’s If I were known as a violin bow cantata, broadening the opportunities for the performance and comprehension of the work beyond Russia.
To inquire about this work’s recording and performance status and availability in its Russian or English versions, please contact apraksinblues@gmail.com.
Tibetan lessons
The historic Apraksin Blues magazine editorial offices in St. Petersburg are hosting regular Tibetan language classes.
(Photos by Elena Starovoitova.)
EXHIBIT
VISITORS FROM THE PAST
After many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen historic paintings and drawings by Tatyana Apraksina were recently returned as a gift to their author.
All these works were created in Leningrad in the 1970s and 80s. The earliest dates from 1974.
These visitors from the past were first on view at T. Apraksina’s studio on each of three days:
Thursday, October 29, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Friday, October 30, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Sunday, November 1, 2015 – beginning at 5 p.m.
Due the number of additional people wishing to view the exhibit, the show was extended through the end of November.
Below are photos from the exhibit, followed by an article about it.
Reproductions of works from the artist’s early period and part of her cycle “Gaze from Within” can also be seen at Tatyana Apraksina’s Studio.
AUTUMN MARATHON: VISITORS FROM THE PAST
— James Manteith —
An unknown man’s voice sounds in the receiver.
“Is this Apraksin Court?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming to the exhibit. How do I get there?”
Directions follow. And no one on either side of this conversation seems surprised until somewhat later, even though everyone knows Apraksin Court is in St. Petersburg, while the display under discussion is in Oakland, California, by San Francisco Bay.
That evening, the morning’s caller climbs a flight of outdoor stairs to the second floor, enters Tatyana Apraksina’s studio, has a look and says, “It’s Apraksin Court!” He well remembers the sight of these buildings: in the ’70s, he worked among them, loading crates of heads for hammers. Such things stay in the memory! And in those same ’70s, in the same city sector, the artist who unexpectedly for herself would be known as Apraksina had different tools in her hands, logging the experience that grounded her earliest exhibits.
Tatyana Apraksina. Side Entrance to Apraksin Court. 1984-1985
Most of Apraksina’s early art has long since dispersed among collections and friends. Yet now, decades later, some works from that time have suddenly found her in the United States. Returned to the author after many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen drawings and paintings, by now a part of history, determine the focus of this exhibit, entitled “Visitors from the Past.” The majority of these works haven’t seen their author in at least twenty years. Sometimes much longer. Images half-effaced in memory reassume their original clarity, dimensions in physical space. “Nothing’s ever really gone,” says a viewer, recalling personal witness of such transitions. “Everything returns.”
“Visitors from the Past” is scheduled for three days: October 29-30 and November 1, 2015. Showings then extend through the whole of November. An autumn marathon. Complex symmetry can be sensed with the Petersburg trip undertaken by the artist the previous spring, when for the first time in sixteen years Apraksina set foot in her own court and own original studio, a site which also hosted a meeting with the past, with paintings miraculously intact after their author’s long absence. There, on that side of the earth, other keys to truth surfaced. And here, more keys appear, no less needed.
Recently Apraksina compared art with gates: it doesn’t replace reality but may help gain entrance there. Moreover, she added, no gate is final or absolute. This justifies crafting ever new gates, as well as restoring the old. Among these early works, the theme of gates sometimes occurs literally, as more than metaphor, in the shapes of city archways, vivid symbols where the commonplace merges seamlessly with fate.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Prepared for the exhibit, sheets and canvases from the Leningrad of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s form a semicircle facing the studio loft’s entrance. Among the works created off Apraksin Lane in Leningrad are some from the artist’s Gaze from Within cycle of courtyard landscapes. The full cycle was first shown at the city’s Library of the Academy of Sciences in 1984. One scene shows a side street leading into Apraksin Court. Others complement the panorama with interstitial courtyards from adjacent neighborhoods. All the courtyards are approached from a personal perspective, with no attempt to exit a human scale for the sake of effect. “Painfully familiar,” says one viewer — who grew up in these mazes of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg — then repeats, “painfully familiar. Even after I left, I kept seeing these courtyards in my dreams. Like labyrinths of the subconscious. ” In these monochrome pastels, the solitary figures who make rare appearances seem at one with the courtyards, while the courtyards themselves, even when deserted, seem at one with human life.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Shortly after its opening, says the artist, the Academy of Sciences exhibit was hastily removed under pressure from state security. Yet in that brief interval, this first large-scale showing managed to cause a stir, to become an event. “Why was the exhibit taken down?” many now ask, Americans and not only. “What was there to dislike, what was offensive?” That era is separated from the present not only by a change of government but also by altered aesthetics. The specific defiance implied in visual language fades into the past. Yet such memories are easily refreshed. “Come on!” scoffs Apraksina, paraphrasing a fellow of serious rank who debriefed her back then. “‘Couldn’t you find something more appealing in our beautiful city than garbage bins and a blind old lady?'”
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
“Exactly!” another viewer lends a vintage stock remark. “And our beautiful country has no such thing as old age.” At any rate, apparently neither human aging nor architectural decrepitude ought to have been shown like this — unfiltered: free of the lens of political ideology, even of the ideology of naive sentimentality. Here reality is shown open to discourse, inclusive of the full range of human reactions, from fear to love, even love addressed to shambles, free of artificially imposed subtexts.
Incidentally, says Apraksina, she herself has no information as to the woman’s blindness, a trait simply assumed by many — including luminaries of nonconformism, with their specific criteria of contemporary relevance — mainly because the figure carries a cane.
When interpreting art, there’s something questionable about overemphasizing the times of its creation. These works’ content transcends topical issues of stagnation-era Leningrad. Nonetheless, it’s natural to respond personally to traces of historical moments. “I was exactly like that,” professes one viewer, pointing to an unabashedly declarative image of a nude cellist against the backdrop of a withdrawing street crowd comprising solely men, defined by impenetrable backs and anonymous hats. “Always a black sheep. I know just how he feels. Since then the dark guys have disappeared, and the naked and strange ones remain. It’s a great painting, right out of Magritte.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Cellist. 1983-1984
“New dark ones took their place all the same,” his companion, recently returned from Moscow, corrects him.
The viewer accepts the fairness of this rejoinder. Still, he says, he no longer feels alone: black sheep, he ventures, manage to find one another.
Tatyana Apraksina. Self-Portrait. 1974
Meanwhile, other works — drawings dating from a still-earlier time (they even include exact dates of creation: 1974, 1975, 1977…) — delineate people with little or no reference to surroundings. Such works might be said to portray the inner life within the courtyards’ domiciles. Not without attention to such inner, hidden life does the artist’s creative course turn to the courtyards’ emptiness and wornness to buttress further stages of progress. The exhibit gives an inkling of origins. Despite a certain randomness in the set of works that found their way into this particular collection, this sampling offers, for instance, a self-portrait from 1974, a pivotal year for its author. Beside this drawn portrait is an old photograph, taken that same year by Boris Mikhalevkin: the artist sits by a piano, in front of a wall completely covered by provocatively sharp, freshly completed sheets. “Isn’t it just pure ’70s?” adds Apraksina. “So expressionist. Posturing, longing for self-declaration.”
Tatyana Apraksina, 1974, Apraksin Lane. Photograph by Boris Mikhalevkin
Maybe. But the current spontaneous time warp serves as an occasion to ponder the values of that time’s rebels and where their rebellion led — in this case, say, contrasted with others.
A professional therapist attending the exhibit sees everything in her own way, interpreting the works’ subjects in terms of inherent sexual energy. “But you’re an artist, you sublimate!” This could be stated with other tropes, but some kind of sublimation certainly has a place here. Another viewer, surprised by the variety of themes, media, styles, posits that the author may have several personalities. But the author asserts the opposite: one personality simply need not subordinate life’s diversity to a single mold.
All the works reveal a feminine origin, with formal symbols of this, says the therapist, though various cases find varied sublimations, sometimes transitioning into masculinity. Yet it occurs to the artist that, for instance, in traditional Chinese yin-yang symbology, the same symbols — curve and corner, vertical and horizontal — carry diametrically opposite connotations. One way or another, namely a totality of opinions is adequate to the fullness of art itself.
Much discussion surrounds a large-scale pastel of 1975, “Premonition,” depicting a mutual embrace between a child — a “golden boy” — and a “green man” (as one viewer calls him) who clearly has many years behind him. The nature and meaning of this pairing is enigmatic: the “green man” hardly wins every viewer’s sympathy and trust. Perceptions diverge. “I think the feelings here are familiar to any mother,” one woman say. “She wants to hold her child all her life!” Or, in another version: “‘It’s my baby! Don’t touch!’ That’s written all over that face.” The author proposes a new hypothesis, more general but no less substantive: “When I look at this scene now, I think it depicts how age or tradition encounters novelty. The old both protects and supports, while simultaneously assimilating, dominating the new, which needs the old but also feels a bit afraid of it.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Premonition. 1975
An American visitor to the exhibit has a memorable response, after familiarizing herself with the early works from the German collection, then with the studio’s wide range of fresh paintings: “Not one dead face.”
In turn, one of the artist’s compatriots, enthusing over the exhibit, asserts that he particularly likes frightening works of art, that he sees plenty of them here, but isn’t afraid. This art is frighteningly alive.
One might note a frightening aliveness and expressiveness lingering even in faces depicted in stylized manners bequeathed by bygone fashions. Behind such faces are individuals, personalities, whether real or imagined, as in the pastel with the strange English name “The Bells,” comprising stained-glass-like overlays of faces and chimes. “I know all these people,” someone says, then begins to narrate each of their tales in turn. The title is placed directly on the picture — a decision later quite rare for the author. “Why is the name in English?” she tries to answer. “Everyone was drenched in English-language rock lyrics. Some floated up out of that source, gave a hint…”
Alternatively, the name may allude to John Donne’s “For whom the bell tolls,” also figuring as the title of the novel by Hemingway, a writer much in circulation then. Here the visual image, like the poem bearing Donne’s line, invokes the interconnectedness of fragile human lives. No life in this world is insignificant, each life is inseparable from the other.
Tatyana Apraksina. The Bells. 1976
A peculiar feature of the collection-based exhibit is to mark the strongest, deepest side of the artist’s Leningrad span of creative development — her working out of the theme of musical performance — by no more than one piece, far from the most striking example. This is a modest portrait sketch of a violinist, drawn in charcoal during a rehearsal. A subdued presence. Yet this violinist is Mikhail Gantvarg; namely he was to be the muse, the heart of the artist’s whole musical line.
Tatyana Apraksina. Mikhail Gantvarg. 1985
Seeing the portrait, a former Leningrader suddenly recalls her onetime attendance of Philharmonic concerts and her admiration for the orchestra’s then-concertmaster, whose name she hadn’t known until now. So these impressions, too, come full circle, are restored, concerning not only that life but life itself.
The composition of the audience at this exhibit warrants separate attention. Viewers make their way here from many different places: some from walking distance, others from nearby and even not-so-nearby towns and settlements. Half of the audience are Russian émigrés, while the rest are Americans of varying backgrounds. As for the Americans, besides having an eye-opening encounter with a hitherto completely unknown phenomenon at the intersection of Russian history and culture, they apprehend something more universal, common to all. The presence of violins, for example, in later pieces. From violin imagery it’s no stretch to talk of vibrations of the universe — indifferent to political, social or ethnic distinctions.
One American, however, expresses surprise over suddenly realizing her favorite artists have always been Russian. Another is thrilled by a feeling of seemingly popping up at a meeting of Russian intelligentsia. But the quality these people denote with the word “Russian” foremost likely relates to tastes native in themselves.
Those more used to viewing European art see more, while those for whom this is novel find it sufficient to contact the surface content or study spots of color… In this single studio has suddenly appeared “more art than the eye can take in at one time,” “more than in many museums,” in one American’s words.
And in this abundant studio, everyone feels uncommonly good and relaxed. People are pleased to spend time among the paintings, conversing, enjoying the spontaneous performance of Chopin and Schumann at the piano, an instrument more than appropriate here. In parallel occur unusual acquaintances, unexpected points of contact, the discovery of hidden meanings and connections. Some might be coming here for the first and only time in their lives, while some start visiting the show all but daily.
“You’ve created something unique here in this place,” one of the last viewers says on the way out. “It’s a great achievement. We’ll come again.”
Why is everything that’s been described happening here? “Artists’ creativity often shows up in the spaces they find to do their work,” an expert viewer says. It’s hard to escape a feeling of more than accidental convergence. Including the presence, with the works that traveled from Germany to this studio by boat and yacht slips, of a painting of a boy in a sailing uniform.
Tatyana Apraksina. Sailor. 1988
Apraksina plans to keep some of these recovered works. Others may continue their path onward, freeing their author for new creativity. In any case, part of attaining such freedom lies in willingness to face the self, including selves from the past.
Also abiding at the exhibit is an oil portrait of the woman in whose collection all these “visitors” spent many years, of whom it was said she lived in a museum. She found inspiration in these works; through her, these works inspired others. And at the exhibit’s close, having faced a new audience, she too seems to exude an aura of satisfaction. When the sacrifice of the past is accepted by the present, life wins. Even the past is capable of change, which brings more change to view a new horizon.
Tatyana Apraksina. Neonila. 1985
**HOT ISSUE**
AB №33 – Transcription of Multitudes
* Tower (Blues Mondo). Tatyana Apraksina
“from the objectlessness of the inaudible”
* “Because They’re People.” Ella Molochkovetskaya, Olga Romanova
“Since it’s theater within theater, everyone is everyone there”
* Transcribers Anonymous. Tom Cobbe
“suites, sonatas and sets of variations. Oh dear. There go the holidays.”
* You Know Where They Are. John P. Rogers
“time will stop at nothing”
“something like a clock embryo in a shot glass”
* Chromatoplastics. On Color, Form and the Fundamentals of Fine Art. Olga Zemlyanikina
“A spot of color as a tool for conveying the type, character and direction of movement”
* Heeding the Calling. At the Black & Brown Comics Festival (Blues Report). James Manteith
“artists display comics with a blend of mysticism, prophecy and science fiction dubbed ‘Afrofuturism’“
* Eight Cemeteries. Sempa Dordzhe
“His head was in the southwest and his feet were in the northeast, and from them, eight great cemeteries arose in all the worlds”
* Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Blackbirds. Vladimir Verov
“True poetry is not subject to decay”
* Spanish Rock. The Beginning. Olga Romanova
“too rocker for punks and too punk for rockers”
* The Art of Whispering. A New Poetry Collection by Gjekë Marinaj.
“the poet lives in both hemispheres, constantly cultivating literary relationships”
* The Mind Finds Russia…. Translated into Japanese, Persian, Rebrew, Arabic, French, Romanian and Turkish by Anton Kiselyov
* An Old Novel’s Insights and Predictions. Ekaterina Ovcharova “the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany was marked by the appearance of two fundamentally different concepts of the eternal image — Goethe, who crowned the tradition with his two-part play, and Bonaventure, who opened the way to its deconstruction.”
“The hero has no soul to sell, and there’s no one to sell it to.”
* Car Stories. Bill Yake
“then I could see dancing shadows on the asphalt beneath the engine”
* Mail
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The Age of Blues
AB issue 33 - Transcription of Multitudes - see it here
* Tower (Blues Mondo). Tatyana Apraksina
“from the objectlessness of ...
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AB issue 32 - see it here
* The Place of Measure (Blues Mondo). T. Apraksina
* Great and Mighty. What ...
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AB 31, our first issue since 1998 to be produced and published entirely in St. Petersburg, is imbued with the ...
+
The Apraksin Blues editorial board is pleased to announce the long-awaited publication of AB №30, "On the Way." Authors and ...
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All-All-All!
Authors, readers, admirers, past and future! And just good smart people!
To everyone who knows us, who know each other, ...
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***
Its BILLBOARD
for gourmets
Dec. 14, 18: Two SPb concerts by James Manteith
December 14 | Saturday | 20:00: “Songs of Mountains and Cities” | Art-center “MITKI”
Marat Street, 36/38, apt. 120, code 4318B
1 – Host Mitya Shagin and James before the Mitki concert
2 – Audience at the Mitki concert
3 – During the Mitki concert
4 – During the Mitki concert
5 – After the Mitki concert
6 – James on Marat Street after the Mitki concert
7 – Tatyana Apraksina on Marat Street after the Mitki concert
Concert review by Frau Koroleva (Telegram: @fraukorolevaa):
We visited the Mitki on Saturday and met a poet, musician and translator from friendly America, James Manteith. (https://m.vk.com/wall-79098291_8913)
Near James’s house in California grow grapes, and sitting under grape leaves, he sings about what he skillfully fishes out of space.
The occasion for literary and musical reflection can be a meeting with a friend, a loved one’s new dress, neglected Chinese books or, say, Borodinsky bread (https://jamesmanteith.bandcamp.com/track/baker-an-order-for-borodinsky)! To be honest, I don’t eat Borodinsky bread very much, but Americans eat even less. Yet James liked this bread so much in Russia that now he orders it from Brooklyn and even dedicated a song to it. And the song turns out to be not just about bread and a touching attachment to strange Russian habits. If in the States the bread is puffy and “lightweight,” then Borodinsky embodies a stronghold, a robust, unbreakable core. The song even contains these lyrics:
Tell the miller,
Mill the kernels whole,
Heavy pillars
Will uplift our souls.
I especially liked the part about heavy pillars uplifting our souls.
December 18 | Wednesday | 19:00: “Under Grape Leaves” | Art-space mArs
Field of Mars 3
Tickets: https://litsa-event.timepad.ru/event/3159246/
#Mars_квартирник #Заповедник_андеграунда
From the mArs Art Space concert announcement:
James Manteith is a musician, writer and expert on Russian culture. He studied Russian at Middlebury College and St. Petersburg State University. For over 25 years, James has collaborated with the interdisciplinary magazine Apraksin Blues and its editor, the artist and writer Tatyana Apraksina, which has allowed him to delve deeper into the Leningrad underground.
James translates songs by Russian authors such as Mike Naumenko into English. He is also a translator of Tatyana Apraksina’s poetry and prose, composes music based on her poems, and dedicates songs to her and her work. A week ago, mArs hosted Apraksina’s exhibition “Preamble” (https://t.me/artspacemars/4670) and her performance of the poetry cycle “California Psalms” (https://t.me/artspacemars/4739), which Manteith has also translated into English.
In his songs, James combines the influence of such legends as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the Beatles with the spirit of informal Leningrad. His work is a melodic, poetic immersion in images and moods associated with life in nature and with an understanding of urban realities.
We invite you to a creative evening filled with music, poetry and deep reflections on human connections.
Video from the concert: Encore performance of James’s translation of Mike Naumenko’s “Call Me Early in the Morning”
Songs and lyrics by James Manteith: https://jamesmanteith.bandcamp.com/
“California Psalms” concert Dec. 5, 2024
“California Psalms” | a poetry house concert with writer and artist Tatyana Apraksina at mArs Art Space
Recording from the reading: https://vkvideo.ru/video-79098291_456239601
On the sidelines of Tatyana Apraksina’s art exhibit “Preamble” (https://t.me/artspacemars/4641) as part of the joint project “Underground Reserve” with the Etalon group, mArs Art Space will host an evening of poetry, representing the most complete presentation of the artist’s cycle California Psalms in Russia to date.
Apraksina’s Psalms were published in the magazine Neva in 2005 and 2007, then as a separate book in the United States in 2013. Spoken-word performances of the cycle in the USA, Germany, Israel and Russia have contributed to its reputation.
In 2023, Apraksina received the Babel Prize for Literature, including for this work. Recently, a new edition of California Psalms was published in the U.S., dedicated to the cycle’s 25th anniversary and including its updated translation.
The evening’s guests will have an opportunity to get acquainted with the book and purchase copies.
December 5 | Thu | 7 p.m.
Field of Mars (Marsovo Polye) 3
Tickets (https://litsa-event.timepad.ru/event/3140568/)
Exhibit Dec. 2-7, 2024
mArs Art Space announces:
“Preamble,” an exhibit of art by Tatyana Apraksina, opens on Monday, December 2, at 6:00 pm in the mArs Art Space gallery in St. Petersburg.
The artist’s first hometown exhibit after twenty-five-year pause will present works from the 80s and 90s — art with roots in a bygone era and which forms a preamble to a new search, a foundation for further discoveries.
The exhibit brings together works from various cycles by the artist. For instance, there are views of architecture’s casual side, the back lanes of St. Petersburg, from a series of drawings of courtyard scenes called “Gaze from Within.” Many spots depicted in the cycle no longer look the same or have even disappeared.
Another direction presented in the exhibit relates to the world of classical music, whose imagery offered Apraksina an ideal metaphor for spiritual development and realization. The paintings highlight the profound meaning of the human spirit seeking higher awareness.
Co-organized with the Etalon group as part of the joint project “Underground Reserve,” which focuses on the legacy of underground cultural movements in Leningrad-St. Peterburg, the exhibit will last one week.
December 2 to 7
Daily 12 p.m.-7 p.m.
Free admission
Field of Mars 3
Tatyana Apraksina began her career as an artist and connoisseur of culture in 1974, opening her home for participants in Leningrad’s underground cultural movements to communicate freely in an environment of mutual inspiration and support.
Classical music
In it, Apraksina found an ideal metaphor for spiritual development and realization. Her theme is always implicitly the evolutionary development of consciousness. “Model of the Mass,” “Time of Fruits,” “Weather Forecasts” and “The Quill of Aquinas” — paintings that seem to lead beyond the existing material context into the realm of abstract imagery — show the human spirit seeking higher awareness.
Tatyana Apraksina
- started as an artist and connoisseur of culture in 1974, was part of the Leningrad underground;
- in 1984 decided to live as an independent artist, devoting her attention for many years to the topic of classical music;
- has exhibited in Leningrad-Petersburg, Moscow and abroad;
- since the early 90s has written a range of works of literature and philosophy;
- since 1995 has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Apraksin Blues;
- since 1999 has developed bases for creative activity in America;
- in 2023 received the Babel Prize for Literature.
mArs Art Space reports:
The mArs gallery was filled yesterday with warmth and light from the paintings of Tatyana Apraksina at the opening of an exhibit of her works from the 80-90s, “Preamble,” part of “Underground Reserve,” a project jointly supported by the Etalon group.
Tatyana began her creative path in Leningrad during the heyday of underground rock culture. Her immediate circle included musicians from the groups Aquarium and Zoopark. The girl from Apraksin Lane served as a muse and co-author for the future rock idols of the 80s.
For just one week in St. Petersburg, you can see where it all began, how the preamble was written for Tatyana Apraksina’s artistic and creative development. First of all, there are paintings from her early series of monochrome city landscapes — abandoned buildings and courtyards, the view from the window of her studio at the Philharmonic.
Another significant part of the exhibit represents the creative period when the artist’s attention shifted from alternative aesthetics to classical music. The images of musicians, instruments, and notes combine an abstract style and a background of cosmic landscapes. The brushstrokes and dynamics of the figures resemble the movement of sound waves you can “hear” their oscillation when immersed in the painting.
For Tatyana, this is an important and long-awaited exhibit, when she can finally show her works in her hometown without censorship and oppression. Find time to visit and see this vibrant piece of the heritage of the Leningrad underground.
“Preamble”
December 2-7 | daily 12 p.m.-7 p.m.
Field of Mars 3 | free admission
On Thursday, December 5, we invite you to get to know Tatyana as a poet and listen to her poetry cycle “California Psalms.”
SEMINAR, December 5, 2023
“Apraksin Blues” invites everyone to a seminar
5 December (Tuesday)
ANDREI PATKUL,
author of the book The Idea of Philosophy as a Science of Being in the Fundamental Ontology of Martin Heidegger. SPb: Nauka, 2020
TEMPORALITY AS THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE IN THE ONTOLOGY OF M. HEIDEGGER
The seminar begins at 7 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm
The editorial office address is the same:
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 3
The editorial office phone is the same:
310-96-40
Also: +7-981-015-37-21
Seminar November 25, 2023
“Apraksin Blues” invites everyone to a seminar
CYCLE “HOW THE TEACHINGS SEE THINGS”
25 November (Saturday)
VAGID RAGIMOV
THE PATH OF SELF-AWARENESS IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM
The System of Mahamudra
The seminar begins at 7 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm
The editorial office address is the same:
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 3
The editorial office phone is the same:
310-96-40
Also: +7-981-015-37-21
SEMINAR
November 18 2023 (Saturday)
MARINA PAVLOVNA CHERNYSHEVA
THE NATURE OF TIME
Biological time
The author will try to answer the questions: What is TIME? Just a parameter characterizing the sequence and duration of events? Or something else — for instance, a type of energy that affects all living things, like light and mechanical energy, etc.? Is there evidence of this?
The seminar begins at 7 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm
The editorial office address is the same:
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 3
The editorial office phone is the same:
310-96-40
Also: +7-981-015-37-21
Vsevolod Gakkel and His Songs
Vsevolod Gakkel and His Songs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vsevolod_Gakkel
November 17, 2022 (Thursday)
8:00 pm,
Doors open at 7:30 pm
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 4
Phone:
310 9640,
+7 981 015 3721
Gate code #1469
All are invited!
Donations to musicians are welcome.
MUSICAL ZEN
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Musical Zen
Contemporary music with a Japanese accent
Vladimir SHULYAKOVSKY (violin)
Nikita CHASOVNIKOV (shakuhachi)
Doors open at 7:30 pm
Concert starts at 8:00 8:00 pm
Apraksin pereulok, d. 3, kv. 4 (gate code #1469)
Phone numbers: 310-9640
(NEW!!) +7-981-015-3721
Donations for the musicians are welcome
Advance announcement of the Association of Historical Psychology’s next conference
The conference will take place in St. Petersburg and remotely in mid-May, 2022.
The working language of the conference is Russian.
The theme of the conference is “The Petrine Era” (and everything that might bear some relation to it).
Articles (six pages with 1.5 line spacing) should be submitted around mid-March (the anthologies collecting these articles come out before the conferences).
More information will follow.
Questions may be sent to the AB editorial address.
Dmitry Kakhovsky – PAINTINGS, GRAPHICS, WOODEN SCULPTURE
Dear friends, come to the exhibit!
MUSEUM OF THE ST. PETERSBURG AVANT-GARDE (HOUSE OF M. V. MATYUSHIN)
Professor Popov St. 10.
Dmitry Kakhovsky –
PAINTINGS, GRAPHICS, WOODEN SCULPTURE.
JUNE 11 – JULY 13, 2021.
Opening: June 11 (Friday) at 5 p.m.
Those wishing to visit the vernissage, please sign up in advance by e-mail:
jouliali@gmail.com
Responses to the exhibit:
Kakhovsky is a very interesting artist (well, who would doubt it? “Its Billboard” would never offer anything less than essential) with life stages formed under the influence of now-classic Picasso, Miro, Malevich (his work looks very organic in the House of Matyushin). He’s a good artist, which is rare these days (or do I just not encounter them very often?). I’d never been in the house itself before, so it’s all the more interesting. An aesthetic feast.
О.
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