Words Will Break Cement Read Online Free PDF

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collective action
—the Moscow Conceptualists staged a series of performances under that title in the 1980s—and other staples of Soviet officialdom, as Prigov had done with the bureaucratic habit of addressing people by their name and patronymic; he made it his artistic name.
    Nadya added the Moscow Conceptualists to her extracurricular list of “reading for the soul.” And she decided to apply to the philosophy department of Moscow State University. “The philosophy department appeared to me as paradise,” she wrote to me from prison, “a place where everyone (or so I thought) was a researcher and an experimenter and everyone had his own little pocket Chernyshevsky, his own little critical thinker.” (Nikolay Chernyshevsky was a Russian materialist philosopher.) Nadya’s mother said the philosophy department would be hell. She started smoking in the apartment and having constant extremely loud telephone conversations to give Nadya a taste of life in a dormitory. In fact, after sixteen-year-old Nadya miraculously gained admission to the philosophy department despite having no connections in high places, she was assigned to a dorm room with two pious Russian Orthodox fourth-year students who made dorm life feel infinitely better than home. Otherwise, though, the philosophy department was hell.
    It took a few letters back and forth to get Nadya to describe precisely what was wrong with the philosophy department—other than everything. It seemed a topic she found almost too distasteful to discuss. “I was flummoxed,” she finally wrote, “by the students’ immaturity, the irresponsibility of their worldview, their mediocrity, their constant readiness to act true to type, to stick to the norm, their lack of passion—of something that would be authentic, eccentric, outside the norm.” Nadya herself stuck to the philosophy department student norm for one semester. “I hate that time and I hate who I was during that time. And I cannot understand how people can spend five years out of their finite lives in such a talentless, slavish, bureaucratic manner.”
    At the start of her second semester, Nadya met Petya. He was older—twenty—and in his fourth year in the philosophy department, and he was worldly in a real and almost unfathomable way. When he was a teenager, his parents had accepted an extraordinarily generous offer from friends in Toronto, who had suggested sending their troubled adolescent to stay with them and go to high school there. After two years, Petya spoke near-native English; then he spent a year in Japan, where his father was working at the time. He had actually seen the poststructuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler give a talk on the University of Toronto campus. He used the phrase
contemporary art
—words that Nadya had held sacred ever since she first saw Prigov—as though they belonged to him. Or he to them.
    Like anyone who ever met Nadya, Petya was struck first by her looks: she looked perfect—like a circle drawn with a compass looks perfectly round or a cut diamond placed on velvet looks perfect with the light falling directly on it. She was tall and taut and curvy in all the places that are theoretically appropriate for the qualities of tautness and curviness, and in practice she inhabited this perfection with perfect ease. She had long straight brown hair that shone as hair should shine, and she had a perfectly symmetrical face with large brown eyes and a striking, mesmerizing mouth with full, fleshy, exaggerated lips. Which she used to speak.
    “What struck me—aside from the way she looked,” said Petya, acknowledging the obvious, “was that she was this girl from Norilsk, a first-year student, and she had an idea of who the Moscow Conceptualists were. You have to understand that as far as the aesthetics chair of the philosophy department was concerned, Andy Warhol was edgy.” Whereas Petya and Nadya knew that Andy Warhol was ancient history, Moscow Conceptualism