Dmitry Fesenko sent his opinion on the book "Soviet Modernism 1955 - 1985" for the acquaintance. He seemed biased to me. In response, he tried not to settle down, but simply to assert his right to his own position. For this I received the 2nd edition with the quoted fragments of my text. Thus, I unwittingly became a co-author of the review. And the bias, as it was, has remained. How to be? And then I remembered how the Soviet commanders of the Patriotic War, anticipating the offensive, immediately before the start suppressed it with artillery fire, reducing the effect of the attack. And I decided to do this - to make a counter move, to pre-empt the publication of the review with a response to it. That's better than "making excuses" later. I will answer in order of reproaches.
Reproach No. 1 - Among the 100 structures presented in the book, there are no works by V. Lebedev, A. Larin, M. Bylinkin and A. Shcheglov. There are no M. Posokhin's pavilions in Montreal and Osaka, the Lebed microdistrict of Meerson, Krasnaya Pakhra and Otradny I. Chernyavsky, V. Kuzmin's Tourist House, B. Ustinov's Wedding Palace, V. Zhilkin's Ponizovka boarding house. The author of the review believed that this happened unwittingly. Nothing of the sort makes sense. After all, I limited the number of works presented and therefore, as I wrote in the book, there was an interspecific struggle for a place in it. The assessments were carried out according to many criteria. For example, similar forms of the Directorate of the river shipping company of Maxim Bylinkin and the Exhibition Palace of Vytautas Chekanauskas competed. In terms of figurative expressiveness, purity of style and quality of the photo, the second object won. Of Meerson's works, I preferred the house on Begovaya, near Chernyavsky "Voronovo", and frankly speaking, the false pathos of the named Soviet pavilions is not to my taste. So what? This anthology is mine and, therefore, my choice. But the most interesting thing is different.
In the second paragraph of his text, Dmitry Fesenko recalls the exhibition “Soviet Modernism”, which I initiated, held in 2006 in MUAR, and the catalog made by its curator Andrey Gozak with the participation of the “Architectural Bulletin” magazine. So, despite the participation of Dmitry Fesenko in this case, only Bylinkin and Otradnoye Chernyavsky are present in the catalog. Everything else listed above is not there, just as not. It turns out something like a "double standard". But no matter how many such books there are, they will certainly differ in the selection of objects. Normal business.
Reproach No. 2 - In the presented panorama and the accompanying text there is no mention of the NER and, accordingly, the names behind it A. Gutnov, I. Lezhava, A. Baburov, Z. Kharitonova. And then it says "… as F. Novikov rightly notes, the urban planning theme is absent in the book, and it would be somewhat strange to make an exception for someone, even if it is more than worthy." Then what are we talking about? Note that in the text of the catalog of Andrei Gozak, with the same participation, there is not a single word about NER either.
Rebuke No. 3 - The reviewer is dissatisfied with the presence in the book of annotations by A. Ikonnikov and I. Shishkina, extracted from their works. But for me, on the contrary - the assessments made in the Soviet past are quite appropriate here. And if I found them for the entire hundred, then I myself would not write in any case. Ikonnikov's texts are very interesting, and some of them are beautifully, one might say, inspiredly written.
Rebuke No. 4 - Inhomogeneity of the technical quality of photographs. I agree with this. But how could it be uniform if the shots were made 30, 40, 50 years ago, sometimes with an amateur eye and technique. The main thing was something else - a fresh look of the object, extracted from that time. Finding these photos was not easy. By the way, it was an exciting activity - searching in the funds of the MUAR, the architectural office of the Central House of Artists, in the Zelenograd Museum, on the Internet, in the home archives of the descendants of the departed masters - there were calls in Russia and the CIS and in America too. Something was found in books and photo albums and in Gozak's catalog, including (although not all photographs there are content-wise and qualitatively impeccable). It is clear that such material is difficult to "bring to a common denominator." And even, as it is rightly noted, somewhat exaggerated images of the concert and sports complex in Yerevan, in their own way, romanticize the image of the building.
Of course, the publication is not free from shortcomings, and apart from the typo noticed by the reviewer, Belogolovsky and I (unfortunately "after the fight") found three more. It would be necessary to eliminate the inappropriate man in the interior of the foyer of the Zelenograd concert hall. But the biggest annoyance I experience is that I was too late to find the necessary background and words for the portrait of Khrushchev in order to turn it into something corresponding to the Stalinist poster. As a result, he ended up in a book with no background and no proper slogan.
And the review consoles her with the last paragraph, which begins with the words: - "All these nit-picking do not detract from …", and then speaks about the kind words of parting words that Charles Jenks, Jean-Louis Cohen and Alexander Ryabushin sent to the album. But they couldn't find their own. However, perhaps the fact is that the author performed in a genre alien to him. He spoke dryly and succinctly about the positive, but the "nit-picking" turned out to be pedaling and lengthy. Either way, I'm not offended. Moreover, I should be grateful to Dmitry Evgenievich for the opportunity he gave me to communicate with the readers of "AV". Thirty-six issues of the magazine contain my "Letters from Rochester" and other texts - six years of collaboration. For this I am sincerely and deeply grateful to him.
