30.11.1916. St. Petersburg.
It's hard to tell in a letter how it happened. In general, so. It's been a long time since I got the feeling that we're somewhere in the suburbs, on a quiet street that barely gets the noise of a desperate fight between artists of all directions. It has often occurred to me that the main thing is there, but in our studio, which is modelled on "free Parisian studios", everything happens "according to the model", and not enough of its own, that is, independently. So, now I'm convinced that I wasn't painting, but painting "about", so, not only hasn't worked so far, but hasn't even approached the work.
I am writing to you with a dark head, after three days of arguments, crazy, started in the house of a collector, with whom I met Dmitry Gorin. He called me to see this collection for a long time (the owner was a sort of manufacturer imitating Stanislavsky and really something like him). I dissuaded myself, maybe instinctively. But I agreed - and my God, what hit me, what a strange, ugly, shifted, dazzling world! The meeting is strictly modern, consisting mainly of diamond Walletts. The dispute began immediately, because from the first minute I attacked the calculated naivety, to imitate the signs in the paintings of Larionov and Goncharova. Before Tatlin, Dmitry and I just did not fight, especially when he began to prove that "corner and center counter-reliefs" enriched the painting, because "we must look for a way out on the other side of the canvas. He immediately compared Tatlin to the Byzantine iconography on the grounds that they were also developing a painted surface, "without worrying about the subject, which was repeated for centuries and had no significance for them. I did not understand anything from all this abracadabra, but when we returned to Goncharova, I really saw an "icon-painting" angle of view, although I found nothing in common between Tatlin and her.
It wasn't Dmitry and his Byzantine scholarship that helped me, but one memory, a child's memory, even before I was a boarder. I am in the church, where the air is painted with light bulbs, the evening dawn penetrating through the semi-closed windows. Everything is painted - flowing incense smoke, shimmering utensils, strange, female, golden clothes of the priest. The "Royal Gate" is surrounded by paintings, and the other gates, on the right and left, are arranged among the paintings. Paintings and icons are everywhere you look. They are for nothing, they cannot be different. And we need to have a lot of them, because together they all make up a new, huge, whole wall painting. Dark shining faces, silver rims, leaving faces and hands open.
I remembered this feeling of children's amazement in front of Goncharova's paintings. I remembered her at the Moscow debate on "Jack of Diamonds" herself - serious, slender, strict - and her words about what is important in art, not only "what" and "how", but also "why". Not "about", but "in the name of".
15.12.1916. St. Petersburg.
The snow is flaking and you are not there. Don't think I'm blaming you for my unsuccessful love. If you had come, you could have stayed in Shura's room, she left, and Kuzya is leaving the other day. I received a telegram in my dream today about your arrival.
17.12.1916. Petrograd.
How many long nights I spent dreaming of our meeting, and in return two words, which, as a knife, rinsed me in the heart. "God punished me with love," I repeat Hamsun's words. For what? I don't know...
Why should I lie to myself and to you, that I can bear this "cold boiling water", is the sun that shines and does not warm up? Do you "love and not fall out of love"? They love a playful kitten so much.
Don't write to me anymore, this will be the best proof of your good attitude towards me. Everything is fine, nothing has changed. Do you smile when you read this letter? Your truth is, there is something funny about it.
Please return my letters, which you certainly do not need.
Е. Turaeva.
Karnovskyi
Konstantin Pavlovich grew up in a bourgeois family on Bolshaya Prolomnaya Street, in a two-storey dirty house inhabited mainly by the Jewish poor. In the far left corner of the yard was a well, and in the middle - the famous bathroom, about which reporters repeatedly placed indignant notes in the newspaper "City of Kazan".
On a half-mountain under the Kremlin there was a jolt, and almost all the inhabitants of the house traded on this jolt old dress, shoes, moscatelle (cleaning products), than they would have to - in shops, in chests, under white umbrellas, in a rage. At night, they hid the goods in chests, locking them up and wrapping them in chains.
Konstantin Pavlovich's father held a "half-shelf" with old iron and samovar pipes, horns, axes, shovels, horseshoe shoes, barrel hoops, and tools seemed to the boy to be a special commodity without which he could not do without.
To be continued...