«LosT», 2021
There is nothing sacred.
Everything that was dear to us,
Every resource found,
Everything that shines and attracts attention
We pollute, portim, desecrate,
Selling the fruits of our self-destruction to each other,
I don’t want to think about what I’m losing
And I leave behind the created…
From the series “Altered carbon”
Nike, 120×190cm
Menada, 120×175cm
Grandmother and Dionysus
When I was born, my mother left me to my grandmother, and she left. So I was mainly brought up by my grandmother, it was on the Black Sea coast. The sea and the mountains have made a naughty, wayward tomboy out of me. My grandmother had a strong character and kept me in a tight rein, punished me more than once, and I had to hide my feelings and emotions, close myself from everyone. Then I decided that the world is cruel and I need to rely only on myself and on the image of Dionysus, I read about him in books that I loved very much and absorbed in huge quantities. It was Dionysus that I imagined myself as a boy. He was raised in a kind of isolation, I also felt a little unnecessary, lonely … His father intended his fate as reconciliation, in my heart I also wanted to become the one who would reconcile everyone with everyone, my grandmother would become affectionate and kind …
Madness
Once my mother and I were swimming in a storm. There were big waves, and I was small. I drowned. Then he escaped by turning into a fish.
I sank to the bottom. This was the first syndesmosis. Dionysus looked in the mirror and saw how he turned into a bull, the Titans killed him and ate only the heart remained.
Nietzsche’s idea of the superman, when analyzed in depth, is quite closely combined with the ancient Dionysus. This is what Vyacheslav Ivanov says about this: “In the doctrine of the “superman”, the legends from the mouth of the “Dionysian” Zarathustra, the fatal duality in Nietzsche’s attitude to Dionysus matures to a crisis and is resolved by a certain turn to the anti-Dionysian pole, culminating in the final development of the doctrine in the “will to power”. “… as the idea of the superman grows in Nietzsche’s reverie, the reader becomes a witness to the gradual replacement of the Dionysian with the anti-Dionysian what, because at first Nietzsche is captured by the idea of the death of the old God (“der alte Gott ist todt”) and the God-inheritance of the human self.But then Nietzsche “hypostases the superhuman as something, gives his fiction arbitrarily defined features and, falling into the tone and style of Messianism, elevates the coming of the superman.
Nietzsche was carried away by the idea that music differs from other arts in that it is not a reflection of a phenomenon, but is a direct image of the will itself and therefore represents, in relation to every metaphysical principle, a metaphysical principle, to every phenomenon, a thing in itself.
Women and Hera
Women of our kind treated men somehow inexplicably coldly and indifferently because they probably knew that grandma would never approve of their choice. From the anger of their disappointment, I had to hide under the guise of detachment. How Dionysus hid with the nymphs from the wrath of Hera.
Nietzsche presented a philosophy that reveals to the researcher of the spirit of tragedy the essence of Dionysus as the beginning of the destruction of individualization. Dionysus is the divine unity of existence in its sacrificial separation and suffering existence in every ghostly fluctuation between the appearance and disappearance of Nothingness and the World, God suffering eternal sacrifice and rebellion forever. In the popular naturalistic belief, he is the god of martyrdom and the secret life in the depths of death. He is represented as a victim, as Dionysus-the resurrected, Dionysus-the comforter. The Dionysian principle, antinomic in nature, recognizes and at the same time denies every predicate, in its cult the victim and the priest are identified. In this pathos of the gods, the polarizations of the living forces resolve themselves in liberating thunderstorms. Here the essence flows through the idea of phenomena. The universal life in general and the life of nature have a Dionysian character. The state of the human soul can reach the Dionysian state, provided that it exits, dizziness from the limits of the empirical Self, provided that it belongs to the unity of the universal Self.
Scary secrets
Dionysus sent madness on everyone. It was his secret. Because Hera wanted to destroy him. Grandma had a lot of secrets. A terrible secret that she kept from everyone and into which she shone me only when I was 20 years old. This news drove me into madness (transformation). Since childhood, I thought that I was somehow different from everyone else. But I could not even imagine that my grandparents were Germans. My world has been turned upside down. My origin has been hidden from me all my life.
In the legend of Dionysus, we meet a place where the Demon, after a long silence, he said: “Poor today’s generation, children of chance and need, why do you demand from me what it would be better for you not to hear? The best thing for you is completely unattainable: not to be born, not to be at all, to be nothing. The second, with dignity for you, is to die sooner.”
We need to know who we are and who we have become, otherwise our life has no meaning at all. After all, living someone else’s life is also wrong…
Grandma ‘s titanomachy
Amid the chaos of Soviet stupidity, war, disease, revolution, civil wars, terror, World War II, stagnation, perestroika. Grandma stood like an unsinkable battleship, which was respected even in the KGB.
In the Battle of the gods with the titans, everyone lost…
Grandma knew the secret of life and death… as it seemed to me.
Man is a “zoon politicon”, a political animal, Aristotle believed. Politics, that is, life in a “policy”, life together, life in a community where you can talk, prove, find compromises, make joint decisions – all this distinguished this “animal”, this living being among other living beings. In polis, you don’t have to kill to survive. Just talking is enough.
Zoopolitik does a simple operation: she whispers that there is no difference between man and beast. That life is a battle of animals, and politics is a battle of large collective animals. You can call them nations, races, classes, religions or civilizations – it doesn’t really matter.The main thing is that this is a war of annihilation. Life is impossible here-together.
Today everything repeats itself. There are people on the world stage who strive to be predators. Who want to return zoopolitics, take it out of the museum, revive the mummy.
Aggressive, instinctive, “determined”, “whizz balls” – ready to cut off a piece from you, ready to bite into your throat. The jungle does not tolerate polite people. The jungle does not tolerate sympathy.
Civilization exists only where you can negotiate instead of killing. Where you can respect, not just be afraid. Predators cannot be respected. You can’t respect a virus, even if it’s stronger than you.
Afrod, 75×150cm
Dionis, 65×150cm
A civilized person is, historically, a gentilhomme, a gentleman, a gentle person. He may have “Balls”, but he believes that intelligence and talent are more important. He can eat raw meat, but he thinks it’s better to practice a little gastronomy.
Grandma’s God
Zeus incinerated the Titans for killing Dionysus. People were born from their ashes. Zeus resurrected Dionysus himself.
Grandmother had a portrait of the leader, and only the leader was her only lover and faithful friend. Although she had never seen him alive or dead. He was uncompromisingly always right in everything and always in her words.
Now is a very tense and dynamic time, if you do not set a goal and do not achieve it, then you will not survive in today’s society. Previously, there were other relations between the state and people, but today everyone has to think for himself about how to arrange his life. And most importantly, you need to be honest with yourself, learn to balance between good and evil, remain honest under any circumstances, and not be deceitful.
Grandma and the fascists
Athena is a virgin goddess wise and just.
Grandma didn’t have anyone, Grandpa died a long time ago… She told me that she was a Komsomol member of the 20s. During the Second World War, the NKVD decided to shoot her because someone reported that she was German. At that moment, fascist troops, the Edelweiss group, approached the city. Frightened, all the NKVD officers fled, leaving their property and documents on the streets of the city. Grandma collected the documents and saved them. After the war, my grandmother was awarded.
Today, all these things seem old-fashioned to many. Cruelty has lived for a long time in a cage, humiliated and discarded; today it craves revenge. Predators wake up, they break the cages of aviaries, but no one stops them.
The twentieth century has made us victims of predation. We were destroyed by millions, and we still can’t talk about it properly. We were crushed between two predators, Nazism and communism, and neither of them had any sympathy for us. But we survived.We were not innocent victims: which of us has become a predator himself. He destroyed some of us himself and was ruthless. If the people were a victim, it does not mean that there were no executioners in it.
But if we were victims of predators, is that a sufficient excuse to become a predator yourself?
Predation, and the love of predation is not really a strength, it is a weakness. Running down a mountain is easier than climbing it. It is easier to surrender to instincts than to control them.
Cosmogony of order and disorder
Whatever grandmother was doing: planting a vegetable garden, pruning grapes, whatever was planted in the ground – grew, whatever animals were – grew, the wine was the best, and whatever grandmother wished was fulfilled – as if the earth obeyed her.
One day, a rooster in her chicken coop sang at 4 a.m., waking up her grandchildren. Grandma took an axe and cut off his head the third time.
Man did not come into this world to be another wolf. Man came to prove that a world different from the world of wolves is possible. That a world is possible where there is enough for everyone. The only question is how much intelligence is enough for this.
We know better than many others what real predation is.
When you find yourself in the forest among the animals, it seems to you that you can survive only by becoming a beast. Tough, ruthless, suspicious. Desperate to find traitors. In search of “internal enemies”. You can survive, of course, but only as an animal, not as a person.You will only join the ranks of those against whom you are fighting. Your flag will be different, your soul will be the same.
Me and Grandma
According to Procol: “Dionysus was the last of the gods, who was made king by Zeus himself. After all, his father put him on the throne and gave him the scepter in his hands, made him king over all the gods.”
The last time we saw each other, before my departure, my grandmother and I had a fight. Grandma didn’t even accompany me. On the train, an eyelash got into my eye. The eye swelled beyond recognition in a few minutes. There was a woman on the train who saved me: she licked my tumor with her tongue and took out an eyelash. I didn’t see my grandmother again, she left.
The wisest, most mentally healthy people in their hearts do not forgive anyone – precisely because they do not blame anyone. Forgiveness is the removal of claims and accusations, the cessation of resentment and anger… And why start claims and accusations? Why fall into resentment and anger? Wise people do not do this, so they do not need to forgive anyone.
However, it is not always necessary to hide your grievances and anger, and it is not always necessary to get rid of them immediately. The fact is that some people react only to the language of feelings. They really do not understand normal requests and calm words, and until they see tears or at least serious resentment and frustration, they do not react. So, in such cases, you need to be offended / angry, hold a grudge and forgive not immediately …
It is wiser to live – in principle, without accusations, accepting people and situations as they are, making the necessary (including, if necessary, tough) decisions about people and situations, but – without insults and accusations.
Poseidon, 120×60cm
Epilogue
Friedrich Junger argued that the era of the 21st century belongs to the Titans.
Nietzsche called himself the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus.
One day I was at the Forum looking at the ruins and destroyed temples, tears came to my eyes. It seemed to me that my house was destroyed – the barbarians turned it into ruins.
I turn to my ancestors as a source of truth about myself, and to antiquity as elements of order that can restore my world by bringing it back from the hustle and chaos.
In numerous statues, bas-reliefs and paintings we see Dionysus young, handsome, fresh, with very delicate, well-groomed features, in a wreath of ivy or grape leaves, with a thyrsus in his hands, with a bunch of grapes or a glass with two ears (arba). He rests in the shade of a vine or rides a chariot drawn by lions or tigers. As a rule, he is accompanied by a panther, a leopard, a tiger, and he sometimes leans over to them to give them wine to drink. Nietzsche, in the end, remains quite integral, consistent and does not contain contradictions, this fact suggests that ancient mythology, perceived by Nietzsche through the prism of his mentors, remains the foundation for the formation of the middle and late stages of Nietzsche’s creativity. Thus, the primary source of Nietzsche’s metaphysical view of man can be considered Greek mythology, in which Nietzsche saw truly, in his opinion, the natural state of man, whose mentality is metaphysical.