Itself
Itself: Guidelines
Russian-language print versions of Apraksin Blues are available upon request.
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**HOT ISSUE**
AB №31 – Nonoctave Scale
Nonoctave attunement
AB 31, our first issue since 1998 to be produced and published entirely in St. Petersburg, is imbued with the spirit of reconnecting with one’s beloved milieu.
The issue nonoctavely combines:
* the philosophy of pantheism in art (Sofia Saryan on her renowned grandfather’s worldview), of Tibetan monasticism (a new entry from Vagid Ragimov’s translation of “The Essence of the Ocean of True Meaning”) and of the human being as a project (highlights from the January 2021 seminar held by A. Lvov in our editorial office)
* the surprising songs of Vsevelod Gakkel and his disciple BG — through the eyes and ears of their admirers James Manteith and Andrei Advaitov
* the Decembrists at war, in a panoramic study by Olga Shilova
* inspired ways of measuring time, by Anna Kogan
* an apt, timeless critique of a failed musical, according to Alexander Donskich von Romanov
* the domestic wisdom of Tina Tiffany
* the poetry of Romania (translations by Anton Kiselev, in his first appearance here), Italy (Yulia Sventsitskaya, long known to our readers) and St. Petersburg (a wonderful cycle by Olga Alekseeva, who tragically passed away at the end of last year)
* the non-similarity of realities (according to the editor-in-chief).
All of this is now available in our Russian-language issue! Some can be available in English! If you know Russian, please feel free to help with translations. If you don’t know Russian, you can still help prepare translations — just get in touch to learn more. Meanwhile, please consider learning Russian — the language opens new worlds.
AB in SPb
The Apraksin Blues editorial board is pleased to announce the long-awaited publication of AB №30, “On the Way.” Authors and other interested persons who have seen it before only on the screen can contact the editorial office to obtain copies of the issue.
At the presentation of Apraksin Blues №29
November 9-11, 2019, St. Petersburg, Russia. Editor in chief Tatyana Apraksina and AB supporters in the Apraksin Lane editorial office.
AB Invites!
All-All-All!
Authors, readers, admirers, past and future! And just good smart people!
To everyone who knows us, who know each other, whom we know, whom we can get to know!
Epochs are replaced by epochs, the end of the era of separation becomes the beginning of the era of union.
It’s time to connect — on a new floor, in a new meaning.
Apraksin Blues is looking forward to meeting you!
The doors of the editorial office will be open to all inclined to attend our general meeting
and the St. Petersburg presentation of the new issue, “The Career of Freedom.”
The event will take place three consecutive evenings: 9 (Saturday), 10 (Sunday), 11 (Monday) November starting at 6 pm. .
Editorial address :
St. Petersburg, Apraksin Lane, 3, apt. 3
phone: 310-9640
I will also be happy to meet separately with everyone who so desires, in the second half of any day of the whole next week.
Tatyana Apraksina
Photos from conference on Mike
On April 18, 2017, on Mike Naumenko’s birthday, a conference on him was held in the historic editorial offices of Apraksin Blues on Apraksin Lane in St. Petersburg. The evening’s program included literary readings and sharing of memories. We thank the conference organizer Alexander Donskich von Romanov, office coordinator Elena Starovoitova, and those invited, among them Aleksei Rybin, Rodion, Igor and Lyuda Petrovsky, Natasha Krusanova, Pavel Krusanov, Willie Usov, Vsevolod Gakkel, Pavel Krayev, Igor Gudkov, A. Naslevod, Andrei Tropillo.
Read about Mike on Apraksin Lane here.
“If I were known as a violin bow”
Gregory Korchmar and Tatyana Apraksina, St. Petersburg, 2010
Composer Gregory Korchmar wrote his cantata If I were known as a violin bow in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting the composition in August 2012 and finishing in February 2013. The eight-movement composition, scored for soprano, violin and cello, sets texts from ten poems by a fellow St. Petersburg native, artist and writer Tatyana Apraksina. The texts selected by Korchmar reflect meditations on the metaphysics of music and musical performance. Korchmar’s and Apraksina’s resonance with St. Petersburg’s musical traditions informs the cantata, as do related spiritual and cultural affinities.
Gregory Korchmar, a composer, pianist, harpsichordist and professor who studied under the Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), has long been a visible exponent of St. Petersburg’s musical culture. He teaches composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and since 2006 has chaired the St. Petersburg Composers Union, having previously assisted the prominent composer Andrei Petrov (1930-2006), his predecessor in that post. For many years, Korchmar has served as the primary organizer for the annual Petersburg Musical Spring festival of contemporary classical music. He is the author of four symphonies and a series of operas, ballets, cantatas, oratorios and other choral and solo vocal works. He is an Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (1996), a laureate of the St. Petersburg government’s prize for work dedicated to the city’s three-hundredth anniversary (2003), and the recipient of a Pushkin Medal for contributions to the development, preservation and proliferation of national cultural traditions.
Tatyana Apraksina’s visual and philosophical investigation of the specifics and spirit of classical music performance was significantly furthered by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which began to facilitate this direction in her work starting in 1984, while Shostakovich associate Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) still conducted the ensemble. Major musical and scholarly centers in Russia and abroad have hosted her exhibits and lectures on creativity, artistry and cultural history, themes also explored in her ongoing essay and poetry publications. Collaboration with original members of Shostakovich’s preferred Borodin Quartet, including cellist Valentin Berlinsky (1925-2008), has had a major influence on her thought, as has the noted St. Petersburg violinist and Soloists of Leningrad founder Mikhail Gantvarg, a central muse for her art and writing. Her two jubilee-year memorial portraits of Shostakovich belong to the collection of the St. Petersburg Composers Union, as does her 1996 portrait of the composer’s favorite pupil, Boris Tishschenko (1939-2010), an important ally for her work.
The “voices” and “hands” of these mutual “friends” interweave in the texts and music of Korchmar’s cantata, as does Western and Eastern musical rite’s “frankincense of canon.” Korchmar’s opening movement sets Apraksina’s restatement of a Pythagorean-type creed of musical cosmology. His chronologically last setting, placed at the cantata’s center, gives a pentatonically inflected evocation of the legendary meeting between the sages Confucius and Lao Tse, as imagined in a 1999 poem dedicated by Apraksina to the sinologist Evgeny Torchinov (1956-2003), her professor at the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies. The closing movement, “To the Violinist’s Hand,” musically follows the trajectory of “whirlwind ascent” of sound from virtuosically played instruments, with the musical anagrams of Bach and Shostakovich fused in the culminating sonic “communion” envisioned in Apraksina’s 2001 source poem. Interstitial slow and waltz movements seem to extend other lines suggested by late-period Shostakovich, in varied moods of pastoral lyricism (“I discovered my violin…,” “A mountain cello…”), existential starkness (“The measurement for my love’s weight…”) and rhapsody in the “transmutation” of creative immersion in the sublime materials of musical craft (“My friends are notes…,” “Fetish”).
The cantata’s texts, written in anticipation of and during the early stages of a productive sojourn in coastal California, alternately seek to articulate the essence of Apraksina’s known experience of “music culled from altars” of “distinguished stage boards” from a vantage point of “gathering distance” an “ocean” and “continental stage” away from St. Petersburg, while also finding the wild setting’s “wave bows,” “vapor fingers” and “cello range” unlocking further layers of this essence for reporting back to the Old World, to “deliver information to the bureau.” In St. Petersburg, Korchmar responds with music steeped in that place, in the larger heritage of classical music and culture, and in headily transcendent “notes and numbers” sensed as measuring “heaven’s interval” and signifying the “vibration” that reconciles places, times, modes of thought and being for both composer and poet.
James Manteith, also the translator of Apraksina’s poem sequence California Psalms (bilingual edition 2013, Radiolarian) and other works by the author, has prepared an English-language singable rendering of the soprano part for Korchmar’s If I were known as a violin bow cantata, broadening the opportunities for the performance and comprehension of the work beyond Russia.
To inquire about this work’s recording and performance status and availability in its Russian or English versions, please contact apraksinblues@gmail.com.
Tibetan lessons
The historic Apraksin Blues magazine editorial offices in St. Petersburg are hosting regular Tibetan language classes.
(Photos by Elena Starovoitova.)
EXHIBIT
VISITORS FROM THE PAST
After many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen historic paintings and drawings by Tatyana Apraksina were recently returned as a gift to their author.
All these works were created in Leningrad in the 1970s and 80s. The earliest dates from 1974.
These visitors from the past were first on view at T. Apraksina’s studio on each of three days:
Thursday, October 29, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Friday, October 30, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Sunday, November 1, 2015 – beginning at 5 p.m.
Due the number of additional people wishing to view the exhibit, the show was extended through the end of November.
Below are photos from the exhibit, followed by an article about it.
Reproductions of works from the artist’s early period and part of her cycle “Gaze from Within” can also be seen at Tatyana Apraksina’s Studio.
AUTUMN MARATHON: VISITORS FROM THE PAST
— James Manteith —
An unknown man’s voice sounds in the receiver.
“Is this Apraksin Court?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming to the exhibit. How do I get there?”
Directions follow. And no one on either side of this conversation seems surprised until somewhat later, even though everyone knows Apraksin Court is in St. Petersburg, while the display under discussion is in Oakland, California, by San Francisco Bay.
That evening, the morning’s caller climbs a flight of outdoor stairs to the second floor, enters Tatyana Apraksina’s studio, has a look and says, “It’s Apraksin Court!” He well remembers the sight of these buildings: in the ’70s, he worked among them, loading crates of heads for hammers. Such things stay in the memory! And in those same ’70s, in the same city sector, the artist who unexpectedly for herself would be known as Apraksina had different tools in her hands, logging the experience that grounded her earliest exhibits.
Tatyana Apraksina. Side Entrance to Apraksin Court. 1984-1985
Most of Apraksina’s early art has long since dispersed among collections and friends. Yet now, decades later, some works from that time have suddenly found her in the United States. Returned to the author after many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen drawings and paintings, by now a part of history, determine the focus of this exhibit, entitled “Visitors from the Past.” The majority of these works haven’t seen their author in at least twenty years. Sometimes much longer. Images half-effaced in memory reassume their original clarity, dimensions in physical space. “Nothing’s ever really gone,” says a viewer, recalling personal witness of such transitions. “Everything returns.”
“Visitors from the Past” is scheduled for three days: October 29-30 and November 1, 2015. Showings then extend through the whole of November. An autumn marathon. Complex symmetry can be sensed with the Petersburg trip undertaken by the artist the previous spring, when for the first time in sixteen years Apraksina set foot in her own court and own original studio, a site which also hosted a meeting with the past, with paintings miraculously intact after their author’s long absence. There, on that side of the earth, other keys to truth surfaced. And here, more keys appear, no less needed.
Recently Apraksina compared art with gates: it doesn’t replace reality but may help gain entrance there. Moreover, she added, no gate is final or absolute. This justifies crafting ever new gates, as well as restoring the old. Among these early works, the theme of gates sometimes occurs literally, as more than metaphor, in the shapes of city archways, vivid symbols where the commonplace merges seamlessly with fate.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Prepared for the exhibit, sheets and canvases from the Leningrad of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s form a semicircle facing the studio loft’s entrance. Among the works created off Apraksin Lane in Leningrad are some from the artist’s Gaze from Within cycle of courtyard landscapes. The full cycle was first shown at the city’s Library of the Academy of Sciences in 1984. One scene shows a side street leading into Apraksin Court. Others complement the panorama with interstitial courtyards from adjacent neighborhoods. All the courtyards are approached from a personal perspective, with no attempt to exit a human scale for the sake of effect. “Painfully familiar,” says one viewer — who grew up in these mazes of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg — then repeats, “painfully familiar. Even after I left, I kept seeing these courtyards in my dreams. Like labyrinths of the subconscious. ” In these monochrome pastels, the solitary figures who make rare appearances seem at one with the courtyards, while the courtyards themselves, even when deserted, seem at one with human life.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Shortly after its opening, says the artist, the Academy of Sciences exhibit was hastily removed under pressure from state security. Yet in that brief interval, this first large-scale showing managed to cause a stir, to become an event. “Why was the exhibit taken down?” many now ask, Americans and not only. “What was there to dislike, what was offensive?” That era is separated from the present not only by a change of government but also by altered aesthetics. The specific defiance implied in visual language fades into the past. Yet such memories are easily refreshed. “Come on!” scoffs Apraksina, paraphrasing a fellow of serious rank who debriefed her back then. “‘Couldn’t you find something more appealing in our beautiful city than garbage bins and a blind old lady?'”
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
“Exactly!” another viewer lends a vintage stock remark. “And our beautiful country has no such thing as old age.” At any rate, apparently neither human aging nor architectural decrepitude ought to have been shown like this — unfiltered: free of the lens of political ideology, even of the ideology of naive sentimentality. Here reality is shown open to discourse, inclusive of the full range of human reactions, from fear to love, even love addressed to shambles, free of artificially imposed subtexts.
Incidentally, says Apraksina, she herself has no information as to the woman’s blindness, a trait simply assumed by many — including luminaries of nonconformism, with their specific criteria of contemporary relevance — mainly because the figure carries a cane.
When interpreting art, there’s something questionable about overemphasizing the times of its creation. These works’ content transcends topical issues of stagnation-era Leningrad. Nonetheless, it’s natural to respond personally to traces of historical moments. “I was exactly like that,” professes one viewer, pointing to an unabashedly declarative image of a nude cellist against the backdrop of a withdrawing street crowd comprising solely men, defined by impenetrable backs and anonymous hats. “Always a black sheep. I know just how he feels. Since then the dark guys have disappeared, and the naked and strange ones remain. It’s a great painting, right out of Magritte.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Cellist. 1983-1984
“New dark ones took their place all the same,” his companion, recently returned from Moscow, corrects him.
The viewer accepts the fairness of this rejoinder. Still, he says, he no longer feels alone: black sheep, he ventures, manage to find one another.
Tatyana Apraksina. Self-Portrait. 1974
Meanwhile, other works — drawings dating from a still-earlier time (they even include exact dates of creation: 1974, 1975, 1977…) — delineate people with little or no reference to surroundings. Such works might be said to portray the inner life within the courtyards’ domiciles. Not without attention to such inner, hidden life does the artist’s creative course turn to the courtyards’ emptiness and wornness to buttress further stages of progress. The exhibit gives an inkling of origins. Despite a certain randomness in the set of works that found their way into this particular collection, this sampling offers, for instance, a self-portrait from 1974, a pivotal year for its author. Beside this drawn portrait is an old photograph, taken that same year by Boris Mikhalevkin: the artist sits by a piano, in front of a wall completely covered by provocatively sharp, freshly completed sheets. “Isn’t it just pure ’70s?” adds Apraksina. “So expressionist. Posturing, longing for self-declaration.”
Tatyana Apraksina, 1974, Apraksin Lane. Photograph by Boris Mikhalevkin
Maybe. But the current spontaneous time warp serves as an occasion to ponder the values of that time’s rebels and where their rebellion led — in this case, say, contrasted with others.
A professional therapist attending the exhibit sees everything in her own way, interpreting the works’ subjects in terms of inherent sexual energy. “But you’re an artist, you sublimate!” This could be stated with other tropes, but some kind of sublimation certainly has a place here. Another viewer, surprised by the variety of themes, media, styles, posits that the author may have several personalities. But the author asserts the opposite: one personality simply need not subordinate life’s diversity to a single mold.
All the works reveal a feminine origin, with formal symbols of this, says the therapist, though various cases find varied sublimations, sometimes transitioning into masculinity. Yet it occurs to the artist that, for instance, in traditional Chinese yin-yang symbology, the same symbols — curve and corner, vertical and horizontal — carry diametrically opposite connotations. One way or another, namely a totality of opinions is adequate to the fullness of art itself.
Much discussion surrounds a large-scale pastel of 1975, “Premonition,” depicting a mutual embrace between a child — a “golden boy” — and a “green man” (as one viewer calls him) who clearly has many years behind him. The nature and meaning of this pairing is enigmatic: the “green man” hardly wins every viewer’s sympathy and trust. Perceptions diverge. “I think the feelings here are familiar to any mother,” one woman say. “She wants to hold her child all her life!” Or, in another version: “‘It’s my baby! Don’t touch!’ That’s written all over that face.” The author proposes a new hypothesis, more general but no less substantive: “When I look at this scene now, I think it depicts how age or tradition encounters novelty. The old both protects and supports, while simultaneously assimilating, dominating the new, which needs the old but also feels a bit afraid of it.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Premonition. 1975
An American visitor to the exhibit has a memorable response, after familiarizing herself with the early works from the German collection, then with the studio’s wide range of fresh paintings: “Not one dead face.”
In turn, one of the artist’s compatriots, enthusing over the exhibit, asserts that he particularly likes frightening works of art, that he sees plenty of them here, but isn’t afraid. This art is frighteningly alive.
One might note a frightening aliveness and expressiveness lingering even in faces depicted in stylized manners bequeathed by bygone fashions. Behind such faces are individuals, personalities, whether real or imagined, as in the pastel with the strange English name “The Bells,” comprising stained-glass-like overlays of faces and chimes. “I know all these people,” someone says, then begins to narrate each of their tales in turn. The title is placed directly on the picture — a decision later quite rare for the author. “Why is the name in English?” she tries to answer. “Everyone was drenched in English-language rock lyrics. Some floated up out of that source, gave a hint…”
Alternatively, the name may allude to John Donne’s “For whom the bell tolls,” also figuring as the title of the novel by Hemingway, a writer much in circulation then. Here the visual image, like the poem bearing Donne’s line, invokes the interconnectedness of fragile human lives. No life in this world is insignificant, each life is inseparable from the other.
Tatyana Apraksina. The Bells. 1976
A peculiar feature of the collection-based exhibit is to mark the strongest, deepest side of the artist’s Leningrad span of creative development — her working out of the theme of musical performance — by no more than one piece, far from the most striking example. This is a modest portrait sketch of a violinist, drawn in charcoal during a rehearsal. A subdued presence. Yet this violinist is Mikhail Gantvarg; namely he was to be the muse, the heart of the artist’s whole musical line.
Tatyana Apraksina. Mikhail Gantvarg. 1985
Seeing the portrait, a former Leningrader suddenly recalls her onetime attendance of Philharmonic concerts and her admiration for the orchestra’s then-concertmaster, whose name she hadn’t known until now. So these impressions, too, come full circle, are restored, concerning not only that life but life itself.
The composition of the audience at this exhibit warrants separate attention. Viewers make their way here from many different places: some from walking distance, others from nearby and even not-so-nearby towns and settlements. Half of the audience are Russian émigrés, while the rest are Americans of varying backgrounds. As for the Americans, besides having an eye-opening encounter with a hitherto completely unknown phenomenon at the intersection of Russian history and culture, they apprehend something more universal, common to all. The presence of violins, for example, in later pieces. From violin imagery it’s no stretch to talk of vibrations of the universe — indifferent to political, social or ethnic distinctions.
One American, however, expresses surprise over suddenly realizing her favorite artists have always been Russian. Another is thrilled by a feeling of seemingly popping up at a meeting of Russian intelligentsia. But the quality these people denote with the word “Russian” foremost likely relates to tastes native in themselves.
Those more used to viewing European art see more, while those for whom this is novel find it sufficient to contact the surface content or study spots of color… In this single studio has suddenly appeared “more art than the eye can take in at one time,” “more than in many museums,” in one American’s words.
And in this abundant studio, everyone feels uncommonly good and relaxed. People are pleased to spend time among the paintings, conversing, enjoying the spontaneous performance of Chopin and Schumann at the piano, an instrument more than appropriate here. In parallel occur unusual acquaintances, unexpected points of contact, the discovery of hidden meanings and connections. Some might be coming here for the first and only time in their lives, while some start visiting the show all but daily.
“You’ve created something unique here in this place,” one of the last viewers says on the way out. “It’s a great achievement. We’ll come again.”
Why is everything that’s been described happening here? “Artists’ creativity often shows up in the spaces they find to do their work,” an expert viewer says. It’s hard to escape a feeling of more than accidental convergence. Including the presence, with the works that traveled from Germany to this studio by boat and yacht slips, of a painting of a boy in a sailing uniform.
Tatyana Apraksina. Sailor. 1988
Apraksina plans to keep some of these recovered works. Others may continue their path onward, freeing their author for new creativity. In any case, part of attaining such freedom lies in willingness to face the self, including selves from the past.
Also abiding at the exhibit is an oil portrait of the woman in whose collection all these “visitors” spent many years, of whom it was said she lived in a museum. She found inspiration in these works; through her, these works inspired others. And at the exhibit’s close, having faced a new audience, she too seems to exude an aura of satisfaction. When the sacrifice of the past is accepted by the present, life wins. Even the past is capable of change, which brings more change to view a new horizon.
Tatyana Apraksina. Neonila. 1985
Congratulations on turning twenty
Congratulations on your anniversary! You’ve managed to create a readable, respected, totally unique magazine with an audience of devoted readers. It’s a great achievement. We wish a long life, full of creativity, to the Hero of the Day.
T., California
20 years — it really is a solemn moment. We, your readers, are the ones who ought to thank you for the cause to celebrate at the arrival of each issue of this magazine, beyond comparison with any other. I can’t imagine a time without it in my hands, without it bringing me new discoveries. Thank you for these 20 years.
Ira, Sacramento
Wishin’ you rain for your Blues.
Bill
Apraksin Blues is indubitably an original and strong artistic and human endeavor. The music of thought and form permeates each page. May it live on — as it has been, and as it may become. Wishing you success!
Alla Hodos, California
Vive le Blues!
Michael Buckley, NY, NY
Congratulations on the anniversary of AB, dear to my heart! It’s a huge event, in my opinion! Truly an historical date.
Congratulations also on the aroma of a new era of Blues, the age of adulthood, maturity, the age of a higher level of its development. I wish your intuition maximum realization and materialization in all things!
A., Russia
such a beautiful message and sense of the time / space dimension of Blues and blue and blueness — the expansiveness of 20 years anniversary and birthday — we celebrate you and with you.
meredith and thom
Congratulations and best wishes for the prosperity of your amazing and unique creation — now almost adult, but with as youthful a soul as ever. I very much liked what you wrote about the “music of Blues” — indeed, every issue develops the musical theme announced two decades ago — what might be called the “Symphony of High Culture” (or “Russian-American Suite,” if you will — Blues contains these two motifs, constantly intertwining). With each issue, the music is a bit different, but the most important thing is that it never ends.
A., USA
Congratulations for your big anniversary! I had not realized Apraksin has such a long history.
Elizabeth
Your Blues hits a High Note!
My sincere wishes for you to continue on as a vessel of Spirit and high Petersburg traditions, bringing these values to the New World!
Nadezhda Ovsyannikova, Washington
Congratulations to those who brought this amazing publication to life and continue nurturing it. Its development is impressive, but even more so is its adherence to its principals. Best wishes for even greater satisfactions for all who experience Apraksin Blues now and in the future.
From fans on the northwest corner of the continental United States
We join our voices to the chorus of congratulations on the 20th anniversary of Blues; from where we are in Florida, the phenomenon of your bilingual and intercultural exploration and artistic interpretation of contemporary experience looks especially unique.
We continue to admire your tireless search, its uncontrollable and unpredictable trajectory. We are glad that the first twenty years find you wholly ready for and open to the immense and still-rising tide of the new, which goes by the name of the 21st Century.
Mila and Kostya Vodopyanov, Florida
Blues is completely unique against the background of everything published today. It’s terribly interesting, although, when reading it, I sometimes catch myself thinking that I don’t have the education to comprehend some of the articles. But that in itself is great!
Basically — “don’t drop your palms from the brow of your thought.”* Please!
S., California
* Translator’s note: Bulat Okudzhava, “Little Song about Mozart.”
Russian translations by James Manteith.
A vertical slice of Blues infinity
Its history’s third decade unsealed, Blues begins to understand that the childhood of becoming belongs irrevocably to the past. The precedent is now created. We are making a smooth transition to the age of adult infinity. We exist. And although, throughout its first twenty years, Blues has regularly undergone rebirth, time and again, the probability of new births is inseparable from conjunction with the permanent fact of its own a priori presence.
“Blues is bottomless — it’s so deep,” wrote one of its admirers. What can be added to the image now formed, the picture painted? Infinite possible additions, with endless opportunities to draw upon its bottomlessness. But only a closed matter can fully open. And thus today, even as we pay tribute to what has come to pass, we also bid it farewell, stepping over its threshold. Where to? Emphatically beyond!
When the time comes for a choice, seeking tips and hints is ill-advised.
Yet Blues, even going past its own limits and continuing its work of being unrecognizable, always stays the same Blues…
Marking the solemnity of the moment, I congratulate the Blues community on sharing this twenty-year anniversary. I bow in grateful reverence to all who with their approval, participation, support, censure, suspicion, resistance or perfect indifference have helped shape and affirm the music of Blues.
T.Apraksina
(Translation from Russian)
Photos by E.Starovoitova and D.Yegorova.
Nonoctave attunement
AB 31, our first issue since 1998 to be produced and published entirely in St. Petersburg, is imbued with the spirit of reconnecting with one’s beloved milieu.
The issue nonoctavely combines:
* the philosophy of pantheism in art (Sofia Saryan on her renowned grandfather’s worldview), of Tibetan monasticism (a new entry from Vagid Ragimov’s translation of “The Essence of the Ocean of True Meaning”) and of the human being as a project (highlights from the January 2021 seminar held by A. Lvov in our editorial office)
* the surprising songs of Vsevelod Gakkel and his disciple BG — through the eyes and ears of their admirers James Manteith and Andrei Advaitov
* the Decembrists at war, in a panoramic study by Olga Shilova
* inspired ways of measuring time, by Anna Kogan
* an apt, timeless critique of a failed musical, according to Alexander Donskich von Romanov
* the domestic wisdom of Tina Tiffany
* the poetry of Romania (translations by Anton Kiselev, in his first appearance here), Italy (Yulia Sventsitskaya, long known to our readers) and St. Petersburg (a wonderful cycle by Olga Alekseeva, who tragically passed away at the end of last year)
* the non-similarity of realities (according to the editor-in-chief).
All of this is now available in our Russian-language issue! Some can be available in English! If you know Russian, please feel free to help with translations. If you don’t know Russian, you can still help prepare translations — just get in touch to learn more. Meanwhile, please consider learning Russian — the language opens new worlds.
AB in SPb
The Apraksin Blues editorial board is pleased to announce the long-awaited publication of AB №30, “On the Way.” Authors and other interested persons who have seen it before only on the screen can contact the editorial office to obtain copies of the issue.
At the presentation of Apraksin Blues №29
November 9-11, 2019, St. Petersburg, Russia. Editor in chief Tatyana Apraksina and AB supporters in the Apraksin Lane editorial office.
AB Invites!
All-All-All!
Authors, readers, admirers, past and future! And just good smart people!
To everyone who knows us, who know each other, whom we know, whom we can get to know!
Epochs are replaced by epochs, the end of the era of separation becomes the beginning of the era of union.
It’s time to connect — on a new floor, in a new meaning.
Apraksin Blues is looking forward to meeting you!
The doors of the editorial office will be open to all inclined to attend our general meeting
and the St. Petersburg presentation of the new issue, “The Career of Freedom.”
The event will take place three consecutive evenings: 9 (Saturday), 10 (Sunday), 11 (Monday) November starting at 6 pm. .
Editorial address :
St. Petersburg, Apraksin Lane, 3, apt. 3
phone: 310-9640
I will also be happy to meet separately with everyone who so desires, in the second half of any day of the whole next week.
Tatyana Apraksina
Photos from conference on Mike
On April 18, 2017, on Mike Naumenko’s birthday, a conference on him was held in the historic editorial offices of Apraksin Blues on Apraksin Lane in St. Petersburg. The evening’s program included literary readings and sharing of memories. We thank the conference organizer Alexander Donskich von Romanov, office coordinator Elena Starovoitova, and those invited, among them Aleksei Rybin, Rodion, Igor and Lyuda Petrovsky, Natasha Krusanova, Pavel Krusanov, Willie Usov, Vsevolod Gakkel, Pavel Krayev, Igor Gudkov, A. Naslevod, Andrei Tropillo.
Read about Mike on Apraksin Lane here.
“If I were known as a violin bow”
Gregory Korchmar and Tatyana Apraksina, St. Petersburg, 2010
Composer Gregory Korchmar wrote his cantata If I were known as a violin bow in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting the composition in August 2012 and finishing in February 2013. The eight-movement composition, scored for soprano, violin and cello, sets texts from ten poems by a fellow St. Petersburg native, artist and writer Tatyana Apraksina. The texts selected by Korchmar reflect meditations on the metaphysics of music and musical performance. Korchmar’s and Apraksina’s resonance with St. Petersburg’s musical traditions informs the cantata, as do related spiritual and cultural affinities.
Gregory Korchmar, a composer, pianist, harpsichordist and professor who studied under the Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), has long been a visible exponent of St. Petersburg’s musical culture. He teaches composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and since 2006 has chaired the St. Petersburg Composers Union, having previously assisted the prominent composer Andrei Petrov (1930-2006), his predecessor in that post. For many years, Korchmar has served as the primary organizer for the annual Petersburg Musical Spring festival of contemporary classical music. He is the author of four symphonies and a series of operas, ballets, cantatas, oratorios and other choral and solo vocal works. He is an Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (1996), a laureate of the St. Petersburg government’s prize for work dedicated to the city’s three-hundredth anniversary (2003), and the recipient of a Pushkin Medal for contributions to the development, preservation and proliferation of national cultural traditions.
Tatyana Apraksina’s visual and philosophical investigation of the specifics and spirit of classical music performance was significantly furthered by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which began to facilitate this direction in her work starting in 1984, while Shostakovich associate Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) still conducted the ensemble. Major musical and scholarly centers in Russia and abroad have hosted her exhibits and lectures on creativity, artistry and cultural history, themes also explored in her ongoing essay and poetry publications. Collaboration with original members of Shostakovich’s preferred Borodin Quartet, including cellist Valentin Berlinsky (1925-2008), has had a major influence on her thought, as has the noted St. Petersburg violinist and Soloists of Leningrad founder Mikhail Gantvarg, a central muse for her art and writing. Her two jubilee-year memorial portraits of Shostakovich belong to the collection of the St. Petersburg Composers Union, as does her 1996 portrait of the composer’s favorite pupil, Boris Tishschenko (1939-2010), an important ally for her work.
The “voices” and “hands” of these mutual “friends” interweave in the texts and music of Korchmar’s cantata, as does Western and Eastern musical rite’s “frankincense of canon.” Korchmar’s opening movement sets Apraksina’s restatement of a Pythagorean-type creed of musical cosmology. His chronologically last setting, placed at the cantata’s center, gives a pentatonically inflected evocation of the legendary meeting between the sages Confucius and Lao Tse, as imagined in a 1999 poem dedicated by Apraksina to the sinologist Evgeny Torchinov (1956-2003), her professor at the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies. The closing movement, “To the Violinist’s Hand,” musically follows the trajectory of “whirlwind ascent” of sound from virtuosically played instruments, with the musical anagrams of Bach and Shostakovich fused in the culminating sonic “communion” envisioned in Apraksina’s 2001 source poem. Interstitial slow and waltz movements seem to extend other lines suggested by late-period Shostakovich, in varied moods of pastoral lyricism (“I discovered my violin…,” “A mountain cello…”), existential starkness (“The measurement for my love’s weight…”) and rhapsody in the “transmutation” of creative immersion in the sublime materials of musical craft (“My friends are notes…,” “Fetish”).
The cantata’s texts, written in anticipation of and during the early stages of a productive sojourn in coastal California, alternately seek to articulate the essence of Apraksina’s known experience of “music culled from altars” of “distinguished stage boards” from a vantage point of “gathering distance” an “ocean” and “continental stage” away from St. Petersburg, while also finding the wild setting’s “wave bows,” “vapor fingers” and “cello range” unlocking further layers of this essence for reporting back to the Old World, to “deliver information to the bureau.” In St. Petersburg, Korchmar responds with music steeped in that place, in the larger heritage of classical music and culture, and in headily transcendent “notes and numbers” sensed as measuring “heaven’s interval” and signifying the “vibration” that reconciles places, times, modes of thought and being for both composer and poet.
James Manteith, also the translator of Apraksina’s poem sequence California Psalms (bilingual edition 2013, Radiolarian) and other works by the author, has prepared an English-language singable rendering of the soprano part for Korchmar’s If I were known as a violin bow cantata, broadening the opportunities for the performance and comprehension of the work beyond Russia.
To inquire about this work’s recording and performance status and availability in its Russian or English versions, please contact apraksinblues@gmail.com.
Tibetan lessons
The historic Apraksin Blues magazine editorial offices in St. Petersburg are hosting regular Tibetan language classes.
(Photos by Elena Starovoitova.)
EXHIBIT
VISITORS FROM THE PAST
After many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen historic paintings and drawings by Tatyana Apraksina were recently returned as a gift to their author.
All these works were created in Leningrad in the 1970s and 80s. The earliest dates from 1974.
These visitors from the past were first on view at T. Apraksina’s studio on each of three days:
Thursday, October 29, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Friday, October 30, 2015 – beginning at 7 p.m.
Sunday, November 1, 2015 – beginning at 5 p.m.
Due the number of additional people wishing to view the exhibit, the show was extended through the end of November.
Below are photos from the exhibit, followed by an article about it.
Reproductions of works from the artist’s early period and part of her cycle “Gaze from Within” can also be seen at Tatyana Apraksina’s Studio.
AUTUMN MARATHON: VISITORS FROM THE PAST
— James Manteith —
An unknown man’s voice sounds in the receiver.
“Is this Apraksin Court?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming to the exhibit. How do I get there?”
Directions follow. And no one on either side of this conversation seems surprised until somewhat later, even though everyone knows Apraksin Court is in St. Petersburg, while the display under discussion is in Oakland, California, by San Francisco Bay.
That evening, the morning’s caller climbs a flight of outdoor stairs to the second floor, enters Tatyana Apraksina’s studio, has a look and says, “It’s Apraksin Court!” He well remembers the sight of these buildings: in the ’70s, he worked among them, loading crates of heads for hammers. Such things stay in the memory! And in those same ’70s, in the same city sector, the artist who unexpectedly for herself would be known as Apraksina had different tools in her hands, logging the experience that grounded her earliest exhibits.
Tatyana Apraksina. Side Entrance to Apraksin Court. 1984-1985
Most of Apraksina’s early art has long since dispersed among collections and friends. Yet now, decades later, some works from that time have suddenly found her in the United States. Returned to the author after many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen drawings and paintings, by now a part of history, determine the focus of this exhibit, entitled “Visitors from the Past.” The majority of these works haven’t seen their author in at least twenty years. Sometimes much longer. Images half-effaced in memory reassume their original clarity, dimensions in physical space. “Nothing’s ever really gone,” says a viewer, recalling personal witness of such transitions. “Everything returns.”
“Visitors from the Past” is scheduled for three days: October 29-30 and November 1, 2015. Showings then extend through the whole of November. An autumn marathon. Complex symmetry can be sensed with the Petersburg trip undertaken by the artist the previous spring, when for the first time in sixteen years Apraksina set foot in her own court and own original studio, a site which also hosted a meeting with the past, with paintings miraculously intact after their author’s long absence. There, on that side of the earth, other keys to truth surfaced. And here, more keys appear, no less needed.
Recently Apraksina compared art with gates: it doesn’t replace reality but may help gain entrance there. Moreover, she added, no gate is final or absolute. This justifies crafting ever new gates, as well as restoring the old. Among these early works, the theme of gates sometimes occurs literally, as more than metaphor, in the shapes of city archways, vivid symbols where the commonplace merges seamlessly with fate.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Prepared for the exhibit, sheets and canvases from the Leningrad of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s form a semicircle facing the studio loft’s entrance. Among the works created off Apraksin Lane in Leningrad are some from the artist’s Gaze from Within cycle of courtyard landscapes. The full cycle was first shown at the city’s Library of the Academy of Sciences in 1984. One scene shows a side street leading into Apraksin Court. Others complement the panorama with interstitial courtyards from adjacent neighborhoods. All the courtyards are approached from a personal perspective, with no attempt to exit a human scale for the sake of effect. “Painfully familiar,” says one viewer — who grew up in these mazes of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg — then repeats, “painfully familiar. Even after I left, I kept seeing these courtyards in my dreams. Like labyrinths of the subconscious. ” In these monochrome pastels, the solitary figures who make rare appearances seem at one with the courtyards, while the courtyards themselves, even when deserted, seem at one with human life.
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
Shortly after its opening, says the artist, the Academy of Sciences exhibit was hastily removed under pressure from state security. Yet in that brief interval, this first large-scale showing managed to cause a stir, to become an event. “Why was the exhibit taken down?” many now ask, Americans and not only. “What was there to dislike, what was offensive?” That era is separated from the present not only by a change of government but also by altered aesthetics. The specific defiance implied in visual language fades into the past. Yet such memories are easily refreshed. “Come on!” scoffs Apraksina, paraphrasing a fellow of serious rank who debriefed her back then. “‘Couldn’t you find something more appealing in our beautiful city than garbage bins and a blind old lady?'”
Tatyana Apraksina. From the Cityscape Cycle “Gaze from Within” (Courtyards of St. Petersburg)
“Exactly!” another viewer lends a vintage stock remark. “And our beautiful country has no such thing as old age.” At any rate, apparently neither human aging nor architectural decrepitude ought to have been shown like this — unfiltered: free of the lens of political ideology, even of the ideology of naive sentimentality. Here reality is shown open to discourse, inclusive of the full range of human reactions, from fear to love, even love addressed to shambles, free of artificially imposed subtexts.
Incidentally, says Apraksina, she herself has no information as to the woman’s blindness, a trait simply assumed by many — including luminaries of nonconformism, with their specific criteria of contemporary relevance — mainly because the figure carries a cane.
When interpreting art, there’s something questionable about overemphasizing the times of its creation. These works’ content transcends topical issues of stagnation-era Leningrad. Nonetheless, it’s natural to respond personally to traces of historical moments. “I was exactly like that,” professes one viewer, pointing to an unabashedly declarative image of a nude cellist against the backdrop of a withdrawing street crowd comprising solely men, defined by impenetrable backs and anonymous hats. “Always a black sheep. I know just how he feels. Since then the dark guys have disappeared, and the naked and strange ones remain. It’s a great painting, right out of Magritte.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Cellist. 1983-1984
“New dark ones took their place all the same,” his companion, recently returned from Moscow, corrects him.
The viewer accepts the fairness of this rejoinder. Still, he says, he no longer feels alone: black sheep, he ventures, manage to find one another.
Tatyana Apraksina. Self-Portrait. 1974
Meanwhile, other works — drawings dating from a still-earlier time (they even include exact dates of creation: 1974, 1975, 1977…) — delineate people with little or no reference to surroundings. Such works might be said to portray the inner life within the courtyards’ domiciles. Not without attention to such inner, hidden life does the artist’s creative course turn to the courtyards’ emptiness and wornness to buttress further stages of progress. The exhibit gives an inkling of origins. Despite a certain randomness in the set of works that found their way into this particular collection, this sampling offers, for instance, a self-portrait from 1974, a pivotal year for its author. Beside this drawn portrait is an old photograph, taken that same year by Boris Mikhalevkin: the artist sits by a piano, in front of a wall completely covered by provocatively sharp, freshly completed sheets. “Isn’t it just pure ’70s?” adds Apraksina. “So expressionist. Posturing, longing for self-declaration.”
Tatyana Apraksina, 1974, Apraksin Lane. Photograph by Boris Mikhalevkin
Maybe. But the current spontaneous time warp serves as an occasion to ponder the values of that time’s rebels and where their rebellion led — in this case, say, contrasted with others.
A professional therapist attending the exhibit sees everything in her own way, interpreting the works’ subjects in terms of inherent sexual energy. “But you’re an artist, you sublimate!” This could be stated with other tropes, but some kind of sublimation certainly has a place here. Another viewer, surprised by the variety of themes, media, styles, posits that the author may have several personalities. But the author asserts the opposite: one personality simply need not subordinate life’s diversity to a single mold.
All the works reveal a feminine origin, with formal symbols of this, says the therapist, though various cases find varied sublimations, sometimes transitioning into masculinity. Yet it occurs to the artist that, for instance, in traditional Chinese yin-yang symbology, the same symbols — curve and corner, vertical and horizontal — carry diametrically opposite connotations. One way or another, namely a totality of opinions is adequate to the fullness of art itself.
Much discussion surrounds a large-scale pastel of 1975, “Premonition,” depicting a mutual embrace between a child — a “golden boy” — and a “green man” (as one viewer calls him) who clearly has many years behind him. The nature and meaning of this pairing is enigmatic: the “green man” hardly wins every viewer’s sympathy and trust. Perceptions diverge. “I think the feelings here are familiar to any mother,” one woman say. “She wants to hold her child all her life!” Or, in another version: “‘It’s my baby! Don’t touch!’ That’s written all over that face.” The author proposes a new hypothesis, more general but no less substantive: “When I look at this scene now, I think it depicts how age or tradition encounters novelty. The old both protects and supports, while simultaneously assimilating, dominating the new, which needs the old but also feels a bit afraid of it.”
Tatyana Apraksina. Premonition. 1975
An American visitor to the exhibit has a memorable response, after familiarizing herself with the early works from the German collection, then with the studio’s wide range of fresh paintings: “Not one dead face.”
In turn, one of the artist’s compatriots, enthusing over the exhibit, asserts that he particularly likes frightening works of art, that he sees plenty of them here, but isn’t afraid. This art is frighteningly alive.
One might note a frightening aliveness and expressiveness lingering even in faces depicted in stylized manners bequeathed by bygone fashions. Behind such faces are individuals, personalities, whether real or imagined, as in the pastel with the strange English name “The Bells,” comprising stained-glass-like overlays of faces and chimes. “I know all these people,” someone says, then begins to narrate each of their tales in turn. The title is placed directly on the picture — a decision later quite rare for the author. “Why is the name in English?” she tries to answer. “Everyone was drenched in English-language rock lyrics. Some floated up out of that source, gave a hint…”
Alternatively, the name may allude to John Donne’s “For whom the bell tolls,” also figuring as the title of the novel by Hemingway, a writer much in circulation then. Here the visual image, like the poem bearing Donne’s line, invokes the interconnectedness of fragile human lives. No life in this world is insignificant, each life is inseparable from the other.
Tatyana Apraksina. The Bells. 1976
A peculiar feature of the collection-based exhibit is to mark the strongest, deepest side of the artist’s Leningrad span of creative development — her working out of the theme of musical performance — by no more than one piece, far from the most striking example. This is a modest portrait sketch of a violinist, drawn in charcoal during a rehearsal. A subdued presence. Yet this violinist is Mikhail Gantvarg; namely he was to be the muse, the heart of the artist’s whole musical line.
Tatyana Apraksina. Mikhail Gantvarg. 1985
Seeing the portrait, a former Leningrader suddenly recalls her onetime attendance of Philharmonic concerts and her admiration for the orchestra’s then-concertmaster, whose name she hadn’t known until now. So these impressions, too, come full circle, are restored, concerning not only that life but life itself.
The composition of the audience at this exhibit warrants separate attention. Viewers make their way here from many different places: some from walking distance, others from nearby and even not-so-nearby towns and settlements. Half of the audience are Russian émigrés, while the rest are Americans of varying backgrounds. As for the Americans, besides having an eye-opening encounter with a hitherto completely unknown phenomenon at the intersection of Russian history and culture, they apprehend something more universal, common to all. The presence of violins, for example, in later pieces. From violin imagery it’s no stretch to talk of vibrations of the universe — indifferent to political, social or ethnic distinctions.
One American, however, expresses surprise over suddenly realizing her favorite artists have always been Russian. Another is thrilled by a feeling of seemingly popping up at a meeting of Russian intelligentsia. But the quality these people denote with the word “Russian” foremost likely relates to tastes native in themselves.
Those more used to viewing European art see more, while those for whom this is novel find it sufficient to contact the surface content or study spots of color… In this single studio has suddenly appeared “more art than the eye can take in at one time,” “more than in many museums,” in one American’s words.
And in this abundant studio, everyone feels uncommonly good and relaxed. People are pleased to spend time among the paintings, conversing, enjoying the spontaneous performance of Chopin and Schumann at the piano, an instrument more than appropriate here. In parallel occur unusual acquaintances, unexpected points of contact, the discovery of hidden meanings and connections. Some might be coming here for the first and only time in their lives, while some start visiting the show all but daily.
“You’ve created something unique here in this place,” one of the last viewers says on the way out. “It’s a great achievement. We’ll come again.”
Why is everything that’s been described happening here? “Artists’ creativity often shows up in the spaces they find to do their work,” an expert viewer says. It’s hard to escape a feeling of more than accidental convergence. Including the presence, with the works that traveled from Germany to this studio by boat and yacht slips, of a painting of a boy in a sailing uniform.
Tatyana Apraksina. Sailor. 1988
Apraksina plans to keep some of these recovered works. Others may continue their path onward, freeing their author for new creativity. In any case, part of attaining such freedom lies in willingness to face the self, including selves from the past.
Also abiding at the exhibit is an oil portrait of the woman in whose collection all these “visitors” spent many years, of whom it was said she lived in a museum. She found inspiration in these works; through her, these works inspired others. And at the exhibit’s close, having faced a new audience, she too seems to exude an aura of satisfaction. When the sacrifice of the past is accepted by the present, life wins. Even the past is capable of change, which brings more change to view a new horizon.
Tatyana Apraksina. Neonila. 1985
Congratulations on turning twenty
Congratulations on your anniversary! You’ve managed to create a readable, respected, totally unique magazine with an audience of devoted readers. It’s a great achievement. We wish a long life, full of creativity, to the Hero of the Day.
T., California
20 years — it really is a solemn moment. We, your readers, are the ones who ought to thank you for the cause to celebrate at the arrival of each issue of this magazine, beyond comparison with any other. I can’t imagine a time without it in my hands, without it bringing me new discoveries. Thank you for these 20 years.
Ira, Sacramento
Wishin’ you rain for your Blues.
Bill
Apraksin Blues is indubitably an original and strong artistic and human endeavor. The music of thought and form permeates each page. May it live on — as it has been, and as it may become. Wishing you success!
Alla Hodos, California
Vive le Blues!
Michael Buckley, NY, NY
Congratulations on the anniversary of AB, dear to my heart! It’s a huge event, in my opinion! Truly an historical date.
Congratulations also on the aroma of a new era of Blues, the age of adulthood, maturity, the age of a higher level of its development. I wish your intuition maximum realization and materialization in all things!
A., Russia
such a beautiful message and sense of the time / space dimension of Blues and blue and blueness — the expansiveness of 20 years anniversary and birthday — we celebrate you and with you.
meredith and thom
Congratulations and best wishes for the prosperity of your amazing and unique creation — now almost adult, but with as youthful a soul as ever. I very much liked what you wrote about the “music of Blues” — indeed, every issue develops the musical theme announced two decades ago — what might be called the “Symphony of High Culture” (or “Russian-American Suite,” if you will — Blues contains these two motifs, constantly intertwining). With each issue, the music is a bit different, but the most important thing is that it never ends.
A., USA
Congratulations for your big anniversary! I had not realized Apraksin has such a long history.
Elizabeth
Your Blues hits a High Note!
My sincere wishes for you to continue on as a vessel of Spirit and high Petersburg traditions, bringing these values to the New World!
Nadezhda Ovsyannikova, Washington
Congratulations to those who brought this amazing publication to life and continue nurturing it. Its development is impressive, but even more so is its adherence to its principals. Best wishes for even greater satisfactions for all who experience Apraksin Blues now and in the future.
From fans on the northwest corner of the continental United States
We join our voices to the chorus of congratulations on the 20th anniversary of Blues; from where we are in Florida, the phenomenon of your bilingual and intercultural exploration and artistic interpretation of contemporary experience looks especially unique.
We continue to admire your tireless search, its uncontrollable and unpredictable trajectory. We are glad that the first twenty years find you wholly ready for and open to the immense and still-rising tide of the new, which goes by the name of the 21st Century.
Mila and Kostya Vodopyanov, Florida
Blues is completely unique against the background of everything published today. It’s terribly interesting, although, when reading it, I sometimes catch myself thinking that I don’t have the education to comprehend some of the articles. But that in itself is great!
Basically — “don’t drop your palms from the brow of your thought.”* Please!
S., California
* Translator’s note: Bulat Okudzhava, “Little Song about Mozart.”
Russian translations by James Manteith.
A vertical slice of Blues infinity
Its history’s third decade unsealed, Blues begins to understand that the childhood of becoming belongs irrevocably to the past. The precedent is now created. We are making a smooth transition to the age of adult infinity. We exist. And although, throughout its first twenty years, Blues has regularly undergone rebirth, time and again, the probability of new births is inseparable from conjunction with the permanent fact of its own a priori presence.
“Blues is bottomless — it’s so deep,” wrote one of its admirers. What can be added to the image now formed, the picture painted? Infinite possible additions, with endless opportunities to draw upon its bottomlessness. But only a closed matter can fully open. And thus today, even as we pay tribute to what has come to pass, we also bid it farewell, stepping over its threshold. Where to? Emphatically beyond!
When the time comes for a choice, seeking tips and hints is ill-advised.
Yet Blues, even going past its own limits and continuing its work of being unrecognizable, always stays the same Blues…
Marking the solemnity of the moment, I congratulate the Blues community on sharing this twenty-year anniversary. I bow in grateful reverence to all who with their approval, participation, support, censure, suspicion, resistance or perfect indifference have helped shape and affirm the music of Blues.
T.Apraksina
(Translation from Russian)
Photos by E.Starovoitova and D.Yegorova.
**HOT ISSUE**
AB №31 – Nonoctave Scale
Realism (Blues Mondo). Tatyana Apraksina
“And is common reality even possible?”
Petersburg, the Fourth Rome. Oksana Alekseeva
“How good, creating, being fate’s creation.”
The Art and Ethics of Martiros Saryan: A Pantheistic Cosmology. Sofia Saryan
“I lived thoughts of the cosmos.”
A House Concert in Isolation (Questions for BG). Andrei Advaitov
“It doesn’t occur to them that I might have a different system of values, different pleasures, and that whatever they attribute to this made-up BG, it just doesn’t interest me.”
Any Idea is Ephemeral. Mihai Eminescu
“And I called in dreams to you: / O peerless Kamadeva!”
Does the Posthumanist Era End the Odyssey of Spirit? Alexander Lvov
“The world is explicatio homini, an explication of man, since outside of him the world abides only in possibility.”
How We Pass Time. Anna Kogan
“People are becoming more and more inventive in their struggle with time.”
Antibody Rock (Blues Report). James Manteith
“Seva’s good cheer and irritation combine in a terrorist act of love. “
Decembrists in the Napoleonic Wars. Olga Shilova
“The Great Patriotic War was one of the starting points for the Decembrist movement.”
Live Simply! Tina Tiffany
“What we can’t do ourselves is often unnecessary and frivolous anyway.”
The Birth of Impassioned Dawns. Sandro Penna
“Now I’m not alone.”
Arisen from Hell. Alexander Donskiсh von Romanov
“On the restless path of creativity, ‘Prophet’ is only a forerunner of a true Prophet.”
From “The Essence of the Ocean of True Meaning” (continued). Translated by Vagid Ragimov
“One must behold it with an elephant’s eye and, as if amazed, plunge into that state.”
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The Age of Blues
AB 31, our first issue since 1998 to be produced and published entirely in St. Petersburg, is imbued with the ...
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The Apraksin Blues editorial board is pleased to announce the long-awaited publication of AB №30, "On the Way." Authors and ...
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All-All-All!
Authors, readers, admirers, past and future! And just good smart people!
To everyone who knows us, who know each other, ...
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VISITORS FROM THE PAST
After many years in a private collection in Germany, eighteen historic paintings and drawings by Tatyana ...
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Congratulations on your anniversary! You've managed to create a readable, respected, totally unique magazine with an audience of devoted readers ...
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Its BILLBOARD
for gourmets
Dmitry Kakhovsky – PAINTINGS, GRAPHICS, WOODEN SCULPTURE
Dear friends, come to the exhibit!
MUSEUM OF THE ST. PETERSBURG AVANT-GARDE (HOUSE OF M. V. MATYUSHIN)
Professor Popov St. 10.
Dmitry Kakhovsky –
PAINTINGS, GRAPHICS, WOODEN SCULPTURE.
JUNE 11 – JULY 13, 2021.
Opening: June 11 (Friday) at 5 p.m.
Those wishing to visit the vernissage, please sign up in advance by e-mail:
jouliali@gmail.com
Responses to the exhibit:
Kakhovsky is a very interesting artist (well, who would doubt it? “Its Billboard” would never offer anything less than essential) with life stages formed under the influence of now-classic Picasso, Miro, Malevich (his work looks very organic in the House of Matyushin). He’s a good artist, which is rare these days (or do I just not encounter them very often?). I’d never been in the house itself before, so it’s all the more interesting. An aesthetic feast.
О.
“Tomsk Rock Traveler”
In spite of it all, Artyom Zhilyakov‘s book “Tomsk Rock Traveler. Promo-Assistant Producer from the West Coast of Siberia” has been released at last. The book’s third part, “The Emperor Suite: “Weatherburg”” is featured in AB №30, “On the Way” (2020). Read the author’s introduction in English translation here, and all of “Weatherburg” in Russian here.
Alekseeva’s wartime poems in new anthology
New bilingual anthology Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War (Smokestack Books, 2020) includes examples of poems by Anna Alekseeva (“On the lips, an incandescent word.” A. Alekseeva (1899-1945), AB No. 30, “On the Way”), translated by Maria Bloshtein, Boris Dralyuk and Caroline Walton.
Anthology editor and compiler Maria Bloshtein also translated and supplied commentary for much of the large volume’s contents.
Maria Bloshtein and Boris Dralyuk are known as translators and editors for The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and for many other books and projects.
Caroline Walton is the author of The Besieged: A Story of Survival (Biteback Publishing, 2011), a book on the siege of Leningrad. In The Besieged, Walton devotes pages to Alekseeva’s fate and legacy.
Since the publication of AB № 30, “On the Way,” our editorial staff has continued to decipher Alekseeva’s recently discovered poetic archive.
Listen to a round table about the anthology.
Read Alekseeva’s poems in Russian in the issue. More poetry and biographical translations forthcoming, hopefully!
Book presentation: Twilight of “Saigon”
November 28, 2019, 6:30 p.m.
Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum at the Fountain House
St. Petersburg, 53 Liteiny pr.
The book is addressed to philologists, historians, culturologists, sociologists, Sovietologists and everyone interested in the history and realities of the Leningrad underground. In 2011, the first edition received the Andrei Bely Prize in the category Literary Projects.
This new edition is dedicated to the blessed memory of those of the book’s authors and heroes who have left over the years, and to the wellbeing of all residents of Saigonia.
Twilight of “Saigon”: [collection/compilation, general editing, interviews, introductory article: Yulia Valieva]. – [2nd edition]. – St. Petersburg: ZAMIZDAT, 2019.
Read in Apraksin Blues: an interview with Julia Valieva and a report on Twilight of “Saigon”.
Presentation of the first translation from TIBETAN to RUSSIAN of “A Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa”
November 16, 2019 (Saturday) at 2:00 p.m.
Presentation of the first translation from TIBETAN to RUSSIAN of “A Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa”
St. Petersburg
Antikafe – Marat Street, 36–38, elevator to the top floor
Two-volume edition translated by Vagid Ragimov
A chapter from the book appears in AB No. 29.
Read about the project in English here.
SF, SJ: Bridge Piano Quartet world premiere, July 1 & 7, 2018
Photos from the presentation of volume 2 of the “Audio Archive” project (March 31, 2015, St. Petersburg. Anna Akhmatova Museum)
On the History of Unofficial Culture and the Contemporary Russian Diaspora: 1950s-1990s. Autobiographies. Authors’ readings. / [Compiled, edited, annotated by Y. M. Valieva]. St. Petersburg: OOO “Contrast,” 2015. 600 p. + 3 CDs.
ISBN 978-5-4380-0099-0
The book includes new materials on the history of unofficial culture and the contemporary Russian diaspora: autobiographies, manuscript facsimiles, photographs. Among texts published here for the first time are autobiographies of samizdat leaders Boris Ivanov and Vyacheslav Dolinin, transfuturist poets Sergei Sigei and Ry Nikonova, Malaya Sadovaya Circle writer Alexander Churilin, and poet and artist Tatyana Apraksina.
The section “Materials on the History of Unofficial Culture” features interviews, memoirs, documents on the history of samizdat.
This edition includes three audio CDs containing recordings of readings by all writers represented in the book, including: Naum Korzhavin, Yevgeny Rein, Ludmila Shtern, human rights movement participants Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, former political prisoners Nikolai Brown and Anatoly Berger, modern Russian emigre authors Vladimir Lazarev, Vladimir Gandelsman, Bakhyt Kenjeev, Vladimir Druk, Katya Kapovich, Yevgeny Slivkin, Irina Mashinskaya.
The “Audio Archives” include 1970s-1980s by authors including OBERIU writer Igor Bakhterev. The book draws on materials from Russian and foreign archives, as well as from private collections. Most of the material is previously unpublished.
The book and audio set is addressed to specialists — linguists, historians of culture, teachers of Russian language and literature, as well as a wide range of readers.
Participants in the evening presentation included: Vyacheslav Dolinin, Nikolai Brown, Anatoly Berger, Mikhail Eremin, Irina Tsymbal, Sergey Stratanovsky, Petr Cheigin, Tatyana Tsarkova, Tatyana Apraksina
THE HALL IS PACKED
YULIA VALIEVA (LEFT), ANTHOLOGIST, AUTHOR OF THE “AUDIO ARCHIVE” PROJECT, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, AND SVETLANA DRUGOVEYKO-DOLZHANSKAYA, EDITOR
March 31, 2015, 6 pm, St. Petersburg. Anna Akhmatova Museum (Fountain House). Presentation of volume 2 of the “Audio Archive” project
On the History of Unofficial Culture and the Contemporary Russian Diaspora: 1950s-1990s. Autobiographies. Authors’ readings. / [Compiled, edited, annotated by Y. M. Valieva]. St. Petersburg: OOO “Contrast,” 2015. 600 p. + 3 CDs.
ISBN 978-5-4380-0099-0
The book includes new materials on the history of unofficial culture and the contemporary Russian diaspora: autobiographies, manuscript facsimiles, photographs. Among texts published here for the first time are autobiographies of samizdat leaders Boris Ivanov and Vyacheslav Dolinin, transfuturist poets Sergei Sigei and Ry Nikonova, Malaya Sadovaya Circle writer Alexander Churilin, and poet and artist Tatiana Apraksina.
The section “Materials on the History of Unofficial Culture” features interviews, memoirs, documents on the history of samizdat.
This edition includes three audio CDs containing recordings of readings by all writers represented in the book, including: Naum Korzhavin, Yevgeny Rein, Ludmila Shtern, human rights movement participants Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, former political prisoners Nikolai Brown and Anatoly Berger, modern Russian emigre authors Vladimir Lazarev, Vladimir Gandelsman, Bakhyt Kenjeev, Vladimir Druk, Katya Kapovich, Yevgeny Slivkin, Irina Mashinskaya.
The “Audio Archives” include 1970s-1980s by authors including OBERIU writer Igor Bakhterev. The book draws on materials from Russian and foreign archives, as well as from private collections. Most of the material is previously unpublished.
The book and audio set is addressed to specialists — linguists, historians of culture, teachers of Russian language and literature, as well as a wide range of readers.
Participants in the evening presentation include: Vyacheslav Dolinin, Nikolai Brown, Anatoly Berger, Mikhail Eremin, Irina Tsymbal, Sergey Stratanovsky, Petr Cheigin, Tatyana Tsarkova, Tatyana Apraksina
Feb. 14, 5 pm. Roerich Family Museum-Institute, St. Petersburg
Feb. 14, 5 pm. Roerich Family Museum-Institute, St. Petersburg
Translations Department
- Summer Report: Love and Attentiveness
June 22, 2021
Summer has arrived. According to Far Eastern traditions, it’s now a horse month, during which the sages advise to take special care to curb all manifestations of power now faced by and available to many. Our authors continue to work or rest as b…
Read more - Robert Monteith: A Knight for Peace
May 27, 2021
(English translation of a May 17 lecture for the International Association of Historical Psychology conference “Societal Atmosphere on the Eve of the Wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Historical and Psychological Aspects”) — James Manteith (A…
Read more - Long Echoes of Contrarian Crusades
May 27, 2021
Presenting on Peacemaker Robert Monteith in St. Petersburg via California — James Manteith (Apraksin Blues, Mundus Artium Press) In the wee hours of one morning in May 2021, it was my privilege to have a chance to give a remote Russian-la…
Read more - How AB met the New Year in St. Petersburg for the first time in 22 years
January 19, 2021
There’s no tree to be found, only fake ones or bunched branches. But just before New Year’s, a man appears on Garden Street with beautiful real trees brought from the Volosov region. The Haymarket tree fair at is closed due to the pandemic. AB c…
Read more - Voices in the Petersburg Desert
December 18, 2020
For obvious reasons, many have voiced surprise that we, AB editors, decided to make an attempt to come to St. Petersburg in 2020. We were also surprised, and even more surprised it’s happened. We already had enough challenges in 2020: in addition to ou…
Read more - Arrival!
November 23, 2020
AB’s editor-in-chief and translation editor will be in St. Petersburg through early 2021. The phone number of the St. Petersburg editorial office is as before: +7 (812) 310-96-40. The Editors apraksinblues@gmail.com
Read more - Distance Learning
July 4, 2020
Now, with the release of Apraksin Blues №30, “On the Way,” another crucial phase begins — the stage of readers’ time with the issue, authors’ mindfulness toward each other, and discussion of what it’s all about. For the AB Translations Department, ther…
Read more - A beautiful chord: AB in St. Petersburg plays on
December 14, 2019
What might be said about the time spent by AB’s editors in St. Petersburg after the presentation of issue 29? Perhaps that it was a time of deepening relationships, joint initiatives and expectations. Let’s review some aspects of this deepening. First,…
Read more - Rapid development for AB’s physical existence in St. Petersburg
November 13, 2019
Events of recent days hint at a new cycle of development. AB has again made the crossing from California to St. Petersburg. Less than a day after arrival, Tatyana Apraksina managed to reopen a space and sit down to work at her desk in the magazine’s hi…
Read more - “Freedom” declared in Petersburg
November 2, 2019
by contributing translation editor James Manteith Photo: Irina Serpuchyonok Just a few days remain until the planned presentation, in St. Petersburg, of the latest issue of Apraksin Blues, №29, “The Career of Freedom.” As in 2015, for the presentation…
Read more - Preparing for St. Petersburg
October 31, 2019
What needs translation, in this case and maybe always, is reality.
Read more