A Ransomed Dissident: A Life in Art under the Soviets

Abstract

The persecuted Soviet author and, eventually, Parisian émigré Andrey Sinyavsky (who used the pen name Abram Tertz) once pronounced that his quarrel with the Soviet state concerned aesthetics rather than politics. His longtime friend Igor Golomstock (1929–2017) concurred with Sinyavsky's position, as he announces at several moments in this account of a remarkable life that extends from early experiences as the child of non-prisoner civilians working in the Kolyma Gulag, to the social upheavals of Moscow during the Thaw of the 1960s, to a life in Great Britain from 1972 on. A specialist in Western European and, eventually, totalitarian art, Golomstock founded his resistance to the Soviet regime on rejection of its ugliness and falsity, rather than on any ideological commitment.His stance of principled nonpartisan resistance enabled Golomstock to circulate among many and varied circles of Soviet social life in the decades of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev, succeeded by the return to social discipline and conservatism under Brezhnev. Golomstock's friendships and contacts are a who's who of the nonconformist Soviet intelligentsia, including Sinyavsky and his wife (the art historian Maria Rozanova), the idiosyncratic “methodologist” Georgy Shchedrovitsky, the philosopher Alexander Piatigorsky, the guitar poet Alexander Galich, and the artist Boris Sveshnikov, known for his Gulag drawings. Golomstock's life experiences are a chronicle of highpoints in the social history of the Moscow intelligentsia: he held a position in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, hub of unofficial Soviet cultural activity; worked as a guide at the art pavilions of the 1956 Moscow International Youth Festival, where Soviets could for the first time see twentieth-century Western art; and later obtained a post in the Scientific Institute for Technical Aesthetics, a “Noah's Ark” for nonconformist thought as the Thaw turned frosty. Finally, Golomstock enjoyed a front-row seat, as unwilling witness for the prosecution, at the trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for “anti-Soviet agitation”—which is to say, the smuggling of phantasmagorical fiction to the West for publication. This episode was a crucial stimulus for the rise and organization of Soviet dissident groups, which Golomstock frequented but never “joined.” He himself was prosecuted for refusal to testify, leading to official ostracization, loss of work, and eventual emigration.In the West, Golomstock's path took him, once again, through key sites of activity: work as a writer and broadcaster for Radio Liberty and the BBC Russian Service, along with critical and editorial activity around the influential émigré journals Sintaksis (edited by Sinyavsky) and Kontinent. Here the reluctance of Sinyavsky, and Golomstock along with him, to march under ideological banners led to clashes with the self-appointed leaders of Soviet émigré society and anti-Soviet activism—most importantly, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Golomstock's account of life in emigration, which takes up the last quarter of the book, presents a mirror image of his stories of conflict with Soviet dogmatism, but now it was his former dissident allies who played the role of ideological purists.In sum, Golomstock's life is an encyclopedic account of the ironies of Soviet and Cold War culture and politics. He ends with a note (“The Benefits of Pessimism”) on his lack of faith in political programs (especially in Russia), but thanks to his sharp wit; ear for anecdote; and evocative tales of art, books, and tables of food, drink, and conversation, Golomstock delivers a dose of optimistic joie de vivre.