O, These Dark Eyes

Here, Ladyzhensky drifts through a series of memories, connected only by associations with the song, O, These Dark Eyes, divulging his grievances toward popularization, and his commitment to the particularity and individuality of his own expression.

He questions and protests the elevation of homogenized popular culture and Soviet culture over folk culture. Comparing music, he recalls how the introduction of the pathephone began to affect tastes and his perception of what was “popular.” He pits the popular appeal of famous music against the emotional resonance of folk music, which was “sung, whistled, wailed, strummed, played, and danced to by everyone,” and took special “hold of our vocal cords, hearts, and minds.” He draws an abrupt connection to the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, saying, “I know that anything large-scale or universal displaces the individual,” concluding that an individual killed, “isn’t even a tiny flea – he’s nothing in the mouths of the living. He is a statistic. Not only does that person not exist, he never existed.”

Although Ladyzhensky draws out these questions in relation to music, he is evidently concerned with his own output as a painter. His flattened compositions and patterned surfaces recall folk styles and naïve art, but this is a deliberate choice; he was a trained and masterful draftsman.

In the final episode of this story, young Ladyzhensky frets about the originality of his stage designs. He confronts writer Maxim Gorky himself in his home, hoping to acquire a copy of Gorky’s play, Egor Bulychev and the Others. Referring to the Vakhtangov Theater, Ladyzhensky promised Gorky “that my version wouldn’t be like the Vakhtangov’s.” Later, he is told to design the set for Nikolai Pogodin’s My Friend, a play he had seen several times, and says, “You can imagine how every line I drew reminded me of the four previous iterations I’d seen. Only youth and imagination were able to shut out the other artists and their visions.”