Remizov Symposium at Amherst College
A decade after my first book Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art was published by Northwestern University Press, Amherst Center for Russian Culture held their second Remizov Research Symposium. The Center also mounted a concurrent exhibition of Remizov’s graphic work from the collection, first one in the United States, since Thomas P. Whitney’s generous gift of his Remizov archive to the Russian Center in the mid 1980s. This gift was marked by the first Remizov symposium, which more or less introduced Remizov’s graphic legacy to the public.
Because most of his visual art ended up in private collections, at the time of the first symposium at Amherst, Remizov’s illustrated albums were virtually unknown. Even when I started researching Remizov’s illustrated albums ten years on, in the mid-90s, he was still seen as a writer who drew “on the side.” My book aimed to show how this was not the case, and how Remizov, who could not fit his creative élan entirely within the bounds of the visual or literary, experimented with graphic art, eventually inventing a new genre of handwritten, illustrated albums that mix india-ink and watercolor drawings with collages and texts. It was wonderful to see such a rise of interest in Remizov’s drawings and illustrated albums, and to hear colleagues’ though-provoking presentations on the various aspects of his visual legacy. I participated with a paper on Remizov’s use of the fourth dimension, mediated by his readings of Pyotr Ouspensky, Gaston de Pawlowski and Maurice Maeterlinck.
