Searching for Icons in Russia by Vladimir Soloukhin

 

Tangible reminders of Russia’s Byzantine heritage, icons are intensely venerated images of Christ, Mary, saints, and holy scenes popular in Orthodox pre-revolutionary Russia.  As they age, the varnish that gives their surfaces a brilliant luster turns black. In the past, the darkened images were often painted over, the new image reflecting what was generally a less artistic manifestation of the underlying image.  This could occur several times, and, as Vladimir Soloukhin discovered sometime in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s (his chronology is obscure), it was relatively easy to strip off the later images layer by layer, ultimately revealing a pristine and vibrant sixteenth century painting below the accumulated later works. This discovery led to an obsession which consumed much of Soloukhin’s time as he traveled from village to village in Soviet Russia, searching out the icons that had, for decades, been devalued, reused to make vegetable crates, watering troughs, and window coverings, or axed into kindling.

Translated into English in 1971 and now out of print, this work (originally titled Black Boards in Russian) is an anecdotal account of some of the author’s encounters with rural villagers as he seeks out rare and beautiful icons. It is in part an elegy for the destruction of a part of the Russian heritage, and while Soloukhin wisely does not debate the wisdom of Soviet policies towards religion, he does write passionately regarding the beauty of the icons as a unique manifestation of the Russian artistic heritage.  He seeks them in abandoned or repurposed churches and in the homes of elderly village women who have managed to salvage a few icons and continue to venerate them, if not as religious objects, at least as relics of a disappearing past. 

Some of Soloukhin’s attempts to separate the objects from their caretakers may raise an eyebrow, but in general, the caretakers feel somewhat reassured that the images will be respected and tended to, rather than fall into the hands of heirs who would just as soon burn them for firewood. Most of the villagers the author encounters are bemused, rarely hostile, as he collects the relics.  A few give him a good ribbing as to why he values such useless items, but he counters with passionate arguments in favor of beauty for beauty’s sake (pointing at the lilacs along the fence line - “What did you plant them for? They’re not potatoes or carrots, you can’t eat them”).  What is most disconcerting is the general indifference to the past, that not a thought is given to the bulldozed churches where their parents were married, or the cemeteries where their grandparents lie, the stone and marble grave markers carted away and cheap plywood markers used for the graves of those who have died under the Soviet regime.

Soloukhin begins the book with a chapter on collecting, on the mania that people can suddenly develop for stamps, books, chinaware, etc.  The scene where his artist friends show him the technique for revealing ancient icons beneath the layers of the “black boards” soon follow, and one assumes that he is simply entranced by their beauty and intrigued by their fairly easy availability in the rural areas of the Soviet Union.  It is only much later in the book that he reveals that, as a child, he and his friends would take the boards and figurines abandoned outside the church in the village in which he grew up and float them off in the nearby stream, lobbing rocks at them to sink them. Surely Soloukhin – the poet who later published impassioned works on the necessity of preserving the Russian artistic heritage and who was denounced for his troubles, only to be revitalized as an enthusiastic supporter of perestroika – felt a sense of shame for the unperceived callousness of his childhood games.

Searching for Icons in Russia is a pleasant and unique testament to one person’s passion, and a love letter to collectors everywhere, who pursue their objects of desire with enjoyment of the chase and the pleasure of acquisition, with a sense that they have done a small service to the past by preserving an aspect of it for the future.