POST-MODERN
M.C. Gardner
I saw him only once. With a remnant of a sandwich he fended off a pressing throng of importuning black birds. Behind him rose the improbable spires of Antoni Gaudi’s Cathedral of the Sacred Family. I am an old man, my hand unsteady, searching for a promise in words not certain I will find. I realize now that he was more improbable than the monument and swirling wings rising to the heavens lowering behind him. That was Barcelona in the spring of ‘67 – three years later the earth had swallowed him.
The votaries of Nikolai Iylovich Kaleninkov had skirted the Iron Curtain for a score of years before its dismantling. At the advent of the new millenium their conviction of his genius flourished and their adoration remains unencumbered by curtains – iron or otherwise. In Post-Modern design they assert his spirit is present and palpable. A diversity of architects from E.D. Stone to Frank Gehry are as unstinting in their praise as they are reluctant in attribution – but they acknowledge a debt, long withstanding.
He was born in the winter of ’37 when Moholynagy opened what was later to be called the Chicago Institute of Design. He succumbed to a burst appendix – April 1970. His father spent three months in Wiemar shortly before expulsion by the National Socialists. It is said that Mies van der Rohe admired the elder Kaleninkov’s portfolio. His mother was a promising member of the Kirov’s corp de ballet. Some months before securing tenure she shattered an ankle during a revival of Stravinksy’s Firebird. She was sent to her husband’s apartments for recovery. The dispirited Maria Pavlovena knew she would never return to the world of professional dance. Grigory Kaleninkov nursed his wife by day and tutored Nikolai each evening for the length of half a candle. He found his art of little worth in the daily rigor for cheese and bread. On the shores of the Caspian Sea he and his son would gather driftwood and salvage in the shadow of the Ural Mountains near the medieval enclave of Gurvev.
For the parents, artistic recognition would come only through the celebration of their son. They believed their most important work was in nurturing his prodigious talent. The Kaleninkov Institutes of Prague and Paris are testament to their vision. The Guggenheim Archives are further evidence of an esthetic still very much alive.. Nikolai’s father, Grigory Fyodor Kaleninkov was executed in September 1949 – one of millions in Mother Russia whose crimes were not contested or submitted to the sanctity of record.
Maria Pavlovena was spared to raise the vestige of her family. Nikolai was forced to watch Grigory’s grim march to the pillar and the ensuing moral lesson. The father declined the proffered blindfold. The child clinched his eyes as if in darkness he could convert the passing minutes to the oblivion of a dream – but he had made no provision for the witness of the ear. His early work was marred by the distillation of that nightmare. Only later he would find the love of what he’d lost was more sustaining than the hate which had come to clasp him. The slap of death then lost its sting and the rifle’s echoing report fell silent – the scourge of Stalin was dispelled.
The majesty of St. Basil and the strength of the Novodevichi spurred his interest in architecture. He was fourteen when he first talked of it to the masters at the University. It had been on his second trip to Moscow. His mother had feared him lost until she remembered their proximity to the galleries of the conservatory. Several drawings of Grigory Fyodor’s had been included in the collection. The doctors were delighted with the young aesthetician. More than one has recorded a haunting perplexity at the acuity and depth of the child’s knowledge. Nikolai had retained, as well, several of his father’s renderings. In them the critical eye discerns those subtleties of line with which the maturing youth would one day imbue stone with spirit and enflame the conscience of European design.
I am told he struggled fiercely for all but the last. Where there is much of life, death will not sup easily.
It is reported that the tremors of his body ceased in the final minutes before the dawn of evening. Perhaps a fleeting image of his last work was a source of respite. It was dedicated to his father – a memorial chapel in the shape of a Latin cross.
I record these words because soon there shall be no others. Barcelona was a prayer that only now I’ve come to utter.