2025 / group exhibition-investigation / installation, drawing, metal, envelopes / V. V. Nabokov Museum, St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg. Curators of Nabokov Lab. at the Nabokov Museum — Stas Kazimov and Ksenia Makarenko.
What makes this project precious to me is its subject and its setting. My diploma film at VGIK was on Vladimir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence. I was defending The Defence. And so the address of the house in which the writer was born — and which he left for good in 1919 — was, for me, the starting point.
As with many of my site-specific projects, the idea here was to take my cues from the place itself, from its walls, and from the handful of authentic objects that had belonged to the writer. The Green Drawing Room, described in the novel Speak, Memory. The pencils with which he wrote everything down on his small paper index cards.
A series of copper panels — like pages torn from a book — rises heavily out of the parquet floorboards. The house has been abandoned; the tragic history of our country in the twentieth century has left its trace in the half-ruined former grandeur of the interiors, and forever in the books. For all the elegance and refinement of form so characteristic of Nabokov's own language, everything bound up with the abandoned house, with a departure that was not chosen but forced, is hard to read.
Copper is not an arbitrary choice. And the second part of the installation is a pencil, made from a multitude of old envelopes which — like the tiny scales of a butterfly's wings — form a living surface, on which a pencil has been drawn in simple graphite. It seems to peel away from the wall, and it too is exaggerated in size. The pencil's scale outgrows the mere image of an object and becomes a symbol of an enormous, long-running correspondence, just as the envelopes themselves do. A life lived in letters. And a history set down in plain pencil.
