Nikola Sologub’s workshop is located on Podil. In peacetime, he arranged performances and art shows in his own home, exhibiting paintings on the fence and on the walls of his house, mentally traveling to different countries and eras. He created a special underground space in his house, which he turned into a museum of art and art objects, such as artistically decorated trumpets.
Since childhood, he was interested in ancient cultures, ancient artifacts for which he did not find parallels in modern life, therefore set out to draw them, thus creating parallels between works of art in ancient cultures and the world of today.
A technique that allows the artist to get closer to his goal is a specific fusion of book graphics with sculpture. His works intend to reveal the old meaning of painting as a myth – the artist recreates this myth with unique means available to him, working outside the canvas, painting the canvas as one would a sculpture, adding three-dimensional elements to the canvas. His search is for a new artistic language that will return the picture to its former meaning.
Sologub’s work has been exhibited in Kyiv and in several European countries.
Nikola Nikolayovych Sologubov (Nikola Sologub) was born on August 6, 1969 in Kyiv. His father, Mykola Vasyliovych Sologubov (Sologub), was a well-known Soviet artist born in Kyrgyzstan. His maternal grandfather was the Ukrainian Jewish poet Matvey (Motl) Hartsman, who volunteered for the front and was killed in action in 1943. Nikola’s brother is the artist Matvey Weisberg. Nikola studied art at the Kyiv Art School for Gifted Children, specializing in sculpture. However, at the age of 14, he was expelled from the school for bad behavior, and after that, the only school he was allowed to graduate from was a school for the blind and deaf. All of this made it impossible to officially continue art education, therefore he set out to educate himself, studying philosophy and art history. He received his art education from his father. As a child, he painted in his studio on Andriyivsky Descent in Kyiv, and when, in 1989, many new galleries opened in Kyiv, Nikola began to exhibit in them. His artistic career took off immediately.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!
“Cold War Casual” is a collection of transcribed oral testimony and interviews translated from Russian into English and from English into Russian that delve into the effect of the events and the government propaganda of the Cold War era on regular citizens of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Julia Wiener was born in the USSR a few years before the Second World War; her youth was spent during the “Thaw” period, and her maturity coincided with the years of “Soviet stagnation”, which, in her case, ended with her emigration to Israel in the early 1970s. Her wartime childhood, her Komsomol-student youth, her subsequent disillusionment, her meetings with well-known writers (Andrei Platonov, Victor Nekrasov, etc.) are described in a humorous style and colorful detail. Julia brings to life colorful characters – from her Moscow communal apartment neighbors to a hippie London lord, or an Arab family, headed by a devotee of classical Russian literature. No less diverse are the landscapes against which the events unfold: the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Garden of Gethsemane, New York, Amsterdam, London.
Julia Wiener’s novels focus on those moments when illusory human existence collapses in the face of true life, be it spiritual purity, love, old age, or death.