[progchat_action] Fwd: 'Vlady Lives' by Suzie Weissman
Steven L. Robinson
____________
Vlady: !Presente!
By Susan Weissman
Vlady Kibalchich, born in Petrograd in June 1920, died on July 21, 2005
at home (in his studio) in Cuernavaca, Mexico after a difficult battle
with cancer which began as a melanoma, but spread to his brain. He was
85.
It is customary to say that someone of that age had a full life but
in Vladys case it is an understatement. The 20th century was his life.
La Jornada headlined his death saying a subversive creator and critic
of power has died.
For Vlady, the Russo-Mexican artist (painter, muralist and
lithographer) art was resistance and his themes were revolution and
liberty. He was called a heretic and a rebel, but one who transformed
his rebellion into art. Though he painted with Renaissance formulas and
Venetian colors, everything about Vlady was revolutionary. His art, his
daily life, his writing: Social revolution, cultural revolution,
revolution of material, revolution of colors. His murals can be seen in
the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada in Mexico City, and in the
National Palace of the Revolution in Managua, Nicaragua. In 1994 he was
commissioned to produce four monumental paintings for the Ministry of
the Interior. True to form, Vlady used this commission to question
power through his art. The paintings soon suffered the fate of
revolutionaries in disfavor they were disappeared sequestered in
the old Lecumberri prison because the authorities decided they were a
tribute to the Zapatista rebellion. They will re-surface, we are told,
in an exhibition of his work next year.
Vlady belonged to the world but he was Mexico's national treasure. Last
year he donated some 4600 works to Mexicos National Institute of Fine
Arts, enough to fill a museum in itself. There will be an homage to
Vlady at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in April of 2006. And just this
month Vladys dream of an exhibition in Moscow was fulfilled though
he was too sick to be there to see it.
Vlady lived in Mexico for 64 years, but he dressed in a Russian peasant
blouse, had a long pony-tail and always wore a workers cloth cap.
While his father, the anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary novelist and
historian Victor Serge was arguably more Belgian-French than Russian,
Vlady was considered Russian, though his real nationality was that of
revolution.
Vladys life mirrored the political development of the Soviet Union:
born in the Civil War, child of the opposition, gulag and defeat. Vlady
said he understood nationalism and for that reason he detested it. His
teacher was the history he lived through and participated in, his
friends the generation of revolutionaries surrounding him -- erudite
autodidacts of the times. Vlady often said this generation is on the
way to extinction. He is one of the last links, and a Mexican newspaper
called him the last Bolshevik.
Trotsky once accused Serge of having the temperament of the poet or
artist. It was much more true of Vlady. Like his father, Vlady was
largely self-taught. Serge's teachers were the Russian
anarcho-populists in exile after the assassination of Tsar Alexander
II; his parents were part of the group, Narodnaya Volya, and his uncle
was executed for his role in the assassination itself. Vlady's teachers
were the exiled Left Oppositionist Bolsheviks, sent to internal
deportation in Orenburg, near the border between Russia and Asia. Vlady
did attend high school for a while, but was expelled for insisting that
free trade unions existed in France.
Vladys mother Liuba Russokova was Lenins stenographer. Lenin was a
frequent guest in the apartment at the famous Astoria Hotel in
Petrograd. Vlady liked to tell the story of the time Lenin visited, to
find the baby Vlady crawling naked. Lenin affectionately picked up baby
Vlady, only to find himself bathed in the warm jet of Vladys urine.
Depending on the audience, Vlady would adjust the story, saying
instead, I shat on Lenin.
The Astoria was just a few blocks from the Hermitage, or Winter Palace,
where Vlady spent many of his days while skipping school, which he
found boring. The Hermitage changed his life it was his refuge, and
he spent countless hours in the rooms featuring the artists of the
Renaissance.
Vlady said his house was filled with the fire of revolution, tales of
sacrifice, repression, death, and pogroms, told in many languages and
cultures. Vlady grew up in Leningrad, Berlin, Vienna, Orenburg,
Brussels, Paris and Marseilles. In 1921 Serge went on Comintern
assignment to Germany and participated in the German Revolution of
1923; then to Austria until 1925. Vladys first language was German,
but he was most at home in Russian, French and later Spanish.
Vladys first Trotskyist act came at the age of seven when he rescued a
portrait of Trotsky from under the heels of the GPU agents ransacking
the apartment. As they arrested his father, Vlady wept: not in fear but
anger.
He was a teenager when he accompanied his father into the gulag of
internal exile. Liuba, Vladys mother, was driven insane by the
Stalinist persecution and remained behind, hospitalized in Leningrad.
In Orenburg Vlady and his father nearly starved and froze to death.
They survived thanks to food packets and money from the sale of Serges
novels in France. Magdeleine Paz sent one with flour, sugar, rice and
olives, and Serge gave Vlady a single olive, which he divided among a
group of schoolmates none of them had ever seen one.
Art was Vladys escape from the tightening noose of Stalinism, the
detention of his father and his mothers growing insanity. Art was also
his resistance.
In April 1936 Serge and his family were expelled from the Soviet Union,
just a few short months before Stalin began the trials that ushered in
the great terror. They were saved, their comrades were not. Serge, his
wife Liuba, baby daughter Jeannine and Vlady went first to Belgium,
then to Paris, just as the thunderclouds of fascism were darkening
Europe.
In Paris, Vlady came into contact with the surrealist painters and
poets. Along with his father, Vlady joined the POUM (the anti-Stalinist
Spanish Marxist Workers Party who were largely massacred by the
Stalinists and fascists during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39).
As Paris was falling, Vlady and Serge were making their way to
Marseilles, teeming with refugees in search of a visa out of the
nightmare. Liuba retreated from sanity and lived out her life in a
mental institution in Aix-en-Provence. Jeannine was temporarily with
friends in the Dordogne. In Marseilles Serge hooked up with Varian Fry,
Mary-Jayne Gold, Andre Bretsn and others in a lovely villa Serge dubbed
chbteau espere-visa. The surrealists around Bretsn shifted their
presence from the cafis of Paris to the beauty of the chbteau. Vlady,
considered the passionate young Marxist of the crew, developed his
entrepreneurial talent, collecting dried fruits and nuts and making
them into croque-fruit, or fruit rolls to sell, so there would be food
to eat. While Serge wrote The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Andre Bretsn
was writing Fata Morgana, Vlady sketched relentlessly.
Serge and Vlady finally sailed for Mexico (the US refused a visa to the
Bolshevik Serge), first being detained in Martinique, Santo Domingo and
then Cuba. On the boat Vlady read Bukharin and Preobrazhenskys The
ABCs of Marxism which prompted Serge to angrily toss it into the sea,
telling Vlady now was the time to study a Spanish primer.
In Mexico Vlady was part of a political group of exiles, mostly from
the Spanish Civil War. He met his wife Isabel Diaz Fabela, who survives
him. His father, Victor Serge, died in 1947, the year Vlady and Isabel
married. In 1949 Vlady became a naturalized Mexican citizen. For the
next two decades, Vlady traveled and painted. He spent 1966 in Paris,
and 1968 in New York, thanks to a Guggenheim grant. Vlady is celebrated
as part of the school of nuevo muralismo mexicano along with Orozco,
Rivera and Siqueiros. Yet Vlady reacted against the nationalistic works
of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, and came to lead Mexicos rupture
movement.
In an interview in Mexico Vlady was asked what he thought of Rivera and
Siqueiros. In particular, Vlady was asked if his Sergean vision of the
Stalinist fantasma colored his view: Vlady swore that wasnt the case.
But Siqueiros lost the talent he had, Vlady insisted not because a
painter is bad because he is a Stalinist but because Vlady believed
he was a Stalinist because he was a bad painter.
In 1986 Vlady took me to an exhibition of his work at Bellas Artes. His
gigantic portrayal that he painted and repainted for years of the
Persian emperor Xerxes hung in the museum as a testament to the
absurdity of autocratic absolute power. All around the grotesque Xerxes
(a Cyclops in Vladys painting) were tiny soldiers, trying to follow
his command to whip the sea for swallowing his fleet.
Unfortunately the next day the workers at the museum went on strike,
making entry impossible without crossing a picket line. Vlady said to
me sardonically -- if only the workers understood the content and
message of the work they were now making it impossible to see. For
Vlady, it was incomprehensible that the workers struck when he
Mexicos uncompromising revolutionary artist -- finally got an
exhibition and he saw it as a comment on the condition of working class
consciousness in Mexico.
In 1989 Vlady and I traveled to Russia. It was his first time back in
57 years, and we were there to press for the rehabilitation of Trotsky
and Serge in the glory days of glasnost and perestroika. Having Vlady
as my Russian tour guide was like a stroll through the thirties. His
Russian was beautiful and we walked the familiar streets of his youth,
stopping at the art museums as well as the infamous Lubyanka. When he
saw the Kremlin he noted that it was yellow, the color of cowardice. In
the Manezh (art museum) across the street, Vlady imagined the
exhibition of his work, a life long dream finally realized this month,
the month of his death.
At a public meeting at the house of writers discussing the
rehabilitation of Trotsky (this was March 1989, at the time of the then
Soviet Union's first semi-free elections), several relatives of left
oppositionists came to Vlady to introduce themselves. It was both
moving and strange, this collection of the children of the revolution's
heroes, converted into enemies and undesirables.
In 1987 Vlady commented that he and his father lived in the tail of
Trotskys comet. He belonged to a unique generation who saw clearly,
fought tenaciously, but were defeated. Vlady was generous of spirit and
intellect, an artist and a revolutionary to his core; he refused
compromise yet socialized in wide circles of poets, politicians,
writers, artists and dignitaries. He had the kind of energy that makes
his death unbelievable: Vlady just seemed immortal.
Vlady is survived by his wife Isabel, his sister Jeannine, and five
nephews.
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