I was born on October 20, 1934, in the Grauerman maternity hospital in the Arbat neighborhood. We lived then at the Tverskaya, in the Nastasyevsky Lane. I have a memory of being Christened, having a lock of my hair cut off with the scissors. It must have been a screen memory—I was just a tiny infant then. I remember distinctly my grandfather, who was a dekulakized Orthodox priest, but that was later, in 1937.

1937. We move to Pushkino where my father worked at the Forestry Research Institute.

1939. I am listening with great concentration to the black dish of a Telefunken radio. It is  broadcasting reports on the fighting in the war with Finland. My father was drafted into the army in the Finnish campaign. It was his third war. Before that, he had served in WWI and the civil war. I also remember Walt Disney cartoons. My first books were: Three Little Piggies, Korney Chukovsky Mukha-Tsokatukha (Chatterbox Fly), and Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

1941. June. It’s war. The sound of an anti-aircraft siren is blaring

 repeatedly from the black dish. I am excited by the anticipation of an important announcement. My grandmother chides me for that.

1941, November. We are evacuated to Buzuluk, in the steppes of the Orenburg Region, to a virgin pine forest preserve. The Forestry Institute has a station there, and my father was assigned to it before and after the war. Now there are four of us: myself, mother, grandmother and my cousin, a little boy. I remember how we got there: a forty kilometers ride in a peasant sled in a minus 40 degrees cold. At first, we slept on the desks in the station’s office. From the walls, stuffed birds peered down at me. They looked alive.  I also remember a spotted deer, a buck, scratching his antlers against a fallen tree. I was terrified and fled. After starving in Moscow, we were overwhelmed by the abundance of food. Grandmother baked rye bread in the oven. We ate pumpkin, rutabaga… Summers were hot: the same forty degrees centigrade. There was a strip of black earth at the river’s  bend. Edibles were aplenty: watermelons, bird cherry,  mushrooms. I was then reading Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Jack London’s White Fang, books by Arsenyev, Obruchev. Living there turned my attention to nature: I used clay to make figurines of deer and moose.

1943. We return to Moscow and settle in the suburb of Pushkino. Father greets us when we arrive. He had already been discharged from the hospital—one leg missing. It is a meager existence. The broad streets of Pushkino are dug up to plant potatoes. I, too, do the digging and the planting.

From early childhood, I loved climbing trees. What attracted me most was the possibility of living at the very crown—in the space formed by the top branches.

I am enrolled in the second grade of the local school. There is an after-school art class, taught by Ivan Ivanovich Gorokhov, a very good man.

1949. Our neighbor saw my moose and deer figurines and suggests to my parents that they send me to take an entry examination at an art school in Moscow. I am accepted and enrolled in the sculpture class at the fourth year level (corresponding to the seventh grade of the regular school). The school is situated opposite the Tretyakov Gallery. The school is under endless repairs, and we are taken to the Fine Arts Museum to draw plaster cast copies of pieces from the Classical Antiquity. Two months later, the Fine Arts Museum is closed on the occasion of preparations for the exhibition of gifts for Comrade Stalin.

I sign up to use the Lenin Library. To this day, I remember the smell, the weight of books, as they fall into my hands from some mysterious nowhere. The sensation is indescribable.

1953. Stalin dies in March. In August, I enroll in the Department of Monumental and Decorative Sculpture at the Moscow Higher School of Arts and Industry (the former Stroganov Academy). My teacher there is Saul Rabinovich.

1960. I complete my studies at the School. I am filled with revulsion at what was called sculpture at the School. I take up ceramics, graphic arts. I go to work for the Office of Design of the Future Palace of Soviets in my capacity as a sculptor. I worked there for almost a year. After that, I was hired as the artist-in-chief at the Moscow Polytechnic Museum. There I lasted eight months. This was my last time as a state employee.

The early 1960s. I work on my first large-scale contract: a children’s playground for a resort hotel in Gelindzhik.

1964. I have rented a studio at Nizhnyaya Maslovka in Moscow. There is a lot of interaction with other people, a community emerges. Among many friends, there are three with whom I have been close for the rest of my life: Dmitry Shakhovskoy, Nina Zhilinskaya, Alexander Bogoslovsky.

I work a lot in wood.

1968. Thanks to the support of the “left,” I am elected candidate member of the Artists Union.

1969. I receive an offer to design a large-scale bas-relief for the entry hall and ticket office in a new theater in Tula that was being built by two young architects V. Krasil’nikov and V. Shulrikhter. I came up with a new technique: I first prepared a counter-relief in a sand form and then poured plaster into it. The result was a surprisingly original work. A few preparatory casts that I made then are now at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and in a few private collections.

The 1970s. I work in a village. Architect V. Krasilnikov and I are doing a big job for the palace of marriages at a collective farm in the Crimea. The work is still standing there—all completely boarded up.

I waste a lot of paper without thinking that years later, all of this will be called “paintings and drawings.”

1979. I participate in a group exhibition, the “Exhibition of Eleven,” at the Kuznetsky Most Hall. This is my first and last exhibition under Soviet power.

1978-the early 1980s. I produce a large sculptural work for the Moscow Physicians Re-Training Institute.

1980. Not being excessively modest, I imagined that after my death, some of my works would wind up at the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery. Defying my imagination, the Russian Museum purchases two of my works. At this time, it owns over seventy of my pieces.

The 1980s. I produce a series of architectural reliefs. I come in second in the competition for a monument to Vysotsky.

1982-1990. I design a wall for the Philharmonic Hall in Ryazan. This is a wooden wall covered subsequently with the texts of the Psalms. This was the first time I became interested in calligraphy. I pursued this interest for several years.

I feel drawn to working in color. I cover with paint wooden planks, boxes, cardboard without ever thinking that this should be called “painting.” My fascination with the kitchen stool begins.

1989-1990. I design and install a monument for Soviet prisoners of war who died and  were buried at the concentration camp cemetery in Ebensee in Austria.

Soviet power ends, there are no more contracts for monumental sculpture. Thank God.

1989-1990. Now I live with my father in Pushkino and leave it rarely. Father is now over 90 and is beginning to age. I do a lot of bicycle riding, tend the vegetable garden, draw a lot of trees and kitchen stools.

1990. I take part in the exhibition Figuration Critique, along with a few Moscow  painters, and later, in the exhibition Sculptura sovetika contemporare in San Giovanni al Natisone. It is after these two exhibitions that my normal life as an exhibiting artist begins. Just to think: during the previous thirty years, I participated in only one exhibition!

1991. I move to a new studio in the Moscow Sokolniki district. I feel certain I no longer want to do sculpture. All I want is to work in color, do painting. Right there and then, I produce a huge series of new sculptures and large-scale constructions from fitted wooden planks that were used for as flooring at my old Maslovka studio. I now begin to get used to the word “painting.”

1991. The Tretyakov Gallery is the site for the exhibition Paris-Moscow. Since that time, exhibitions have become part of my life as an artist (and the most important among them are listed in this catalogue).

I do not know what to call what I am now producing. Is it painting, sculpture, graphic arts?… Frankly, I am not at all concerned with the nomenclature.

1997. Design and installation of the steel cross—a monument in the town of Dmitrov to the prisoners who perished during the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal

2001. A monument for the grave of Nikolay Andronov at the Vvedenskoe Cemetery in Moscow.

2002. I create my first monumental work after a twelve-year hiatus: a wooden bas-relief at the Moscow International Music Center (V. Krasil’nikov, architect).

2003. A sculptural design for the façade of the new Pyotr Fomenko Theater (S. Gnedovsky, architect).