April 2019 – Russian American History Month
March 26 – May 10, 2019
Curated by Natasha Sharymova
Photo exhibit “Listen to Silence and Speak: Leningrad Underground and Joseph Brodsky” presents a look into the unofficial culture of the Soviet Union from 1950s and into the 1990s.
Where: Columbia University, Harriman Institute
Address: 420 W 118th St, 12 Fl., New York, NY 10027
Phone: (212) 854-4623
More:
The exhibit displays photographs by Nina Alovert, Nataliya Dyakovskaya, Leonid Lubjanitsky, Mark Serman, Natasha Sharymova, as well as photographs from archives of Andrey Ar’ev, Kirill Kozyrev, Nina, and Lev Loseff.
“At the end of the 1950s, I met and befriended a group of young artists and poets. I devoted all my time to photography then and became a unique chronicler of the life of these nonconformists.
Those who made up this stratum of the city were heterogeneous beyond definition and small in number, but extremely fruitful in the artistic sense. It was in this environment that Joseph Brodsky and Sergei Dovlatov developed as artists, their creative aspirations coinciding with those of other Leningrad writers of the same generation.
The poets united in friendship, bound by their common interests and mutual fondness. Later these informal groupings were referred to by philologists as “Akhmatova’s Orphans,” “The Philological School,” “The Circle of Khvostenko-Volokhonsky,” “Poets of Malaya Sadovaya,” and
“Khelenuki.”