Filonov had started with expressionistic canvases and then came to the “principle of doneness,” which became the guiding light of his method. He taught, “Draw every atom stubbornly and accurately.” He painted large works with small brushes, often starting in a corner and gradually spreading across the canvas, because he was convinced that the painting “must grow and develop just as organically, atom by atom, as growth occurs in nature.” The result of such work was that even his small canvases and watercolors were so thickly “inhabited” by intertwining forms, figures, and faces that in reproduction they seem to be monumental frescoes. Filonov’s works are at once abstract and figurative, because the artist synthesized the myriad component details into complex symbolic images, which he often called “formulas,” for instance,
Filonov’s art is nationalist and original because its roots go back to primitive Russian folk art and Orthodox icons. A student of Filonov’s recalled that he “rejected the existence of the soul and the spirit and, of course, of God.” But Filonov’s works are spiritual in the highest degree, as happened with certain other Russian artists whose private lives were not marked by devoutness, for instance Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. That is why even though Filonov’s themes are often tragic, his paintings do not have a depressing effect. The current in Filonov’s art is sympathy for the underdog. Many of his paintings are populated by workers and other humble citizens. Filonov poeticized their life, and the working-class neighborhoods of Petrograd were transformed in his works into a carnival of multicolored forms, figures, and faces.
Filonov worked like a man possessed, without commissions, often half-starving. He wrote in his diary, “sometimes I stretch a pound of bread for two days.” On August 30,1935, he wrote, “I made the last pancake with my last pinch of flour this morning, preparing to follow the example of many, many times—to live, not knowing for how long, without eating.”92 And he refused to sell his paintings, because he wanted to hang all of them in his imagined grand museum of analytical art. But the Soviet state was getting more hostile toward Filonov and other modernists.
In 1932 Filonov wrote about a conversation with Malevich. “He started complaining about his lot and told me that he spent three months in prison and was interrogated. The investigator asked him, ‘What’s the Cezannism you’re talking about? What’s this cubism you are propounding?’”93 The secret police were questioning Filonov’s students about the artistic and political views of their teacher. Then his two stepsons were arrested. Filonov was effectively excluded from the artistic and social life of Leningrad. In 1941, in the first winter of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, he died of starvation, forgotten by all but his most faithful pupils.
After the war Filonov’s name was no longer mentioned, as if he had never existed. His works, over three hundred of them, were preserved by his sister, the singer Yevdokia Glebova. With an introduction, one could come to her apartment to view the paintings. In the early sixties I was among the lucky few. I went there with two friends. In a heavily curtained room in a Leningrad communal flat a gravely imperious woman first read us excerpts from Filonov’s theoretical works and then showed us several dozen paintings. The effect was as if a new world had opened before us, because Filonov had created his own universe, in which animals, people, buildings, and plants existed as a sparkling colorful mass, simultaneously solid and weightless, soaring upward. We lived under a profound impression of those amazing works for a long time. Unfortunately Filonov’s paintings were not available to large audiences until 1988, when an exhibition of his works was organized in Leningrad and the Soviet press happily announced “the discovery of yet another artist almost unknown until now.”
Despite his tragic end, one could say Filonov had been lucky in Stalinist Russia. He himself had not been arrested, had not been beaten during interrogations by the GPU or the NKVD (acronyms for the secret police), had not rotted away in a Siberian prison camp. The fate of many other Leningrad avant-gardists was much worse than the poor artist’s.
“Stunned by a blow from the back, I fell, started to rise, but there was another blow—in the face. I lost consciousness. I awoke, sputtering in the water someone was pouring over me. I was lifted up and I thought they were tearing off my clothes. I passed out again. No sooner had I come to than some strangers dragged me down the stone corridors of the prison, beating me and mocking my defenselessness.”94 This was a description of one of his interrogations by the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, an Oberiu member arrested in 1938.
