Wandering an Eternal Present (Part 4: The Lessons of Comrade Quixote)

In 2023 I visited the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis to see an exhibition of the painter Geli M. Korzhev, entitled Premonitions of a Russian Dystopia. Korzhev was a painter of the socialist realist tradition, whose career overlapped the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. He is notable for his Mutants series, produced through the nineteen eighties and nineties, portraying the continued political disintegration through the metaphoric lens of ambiguously feudal fantasy creatures; in his painting Altervista, he would portray Boris Yeltsin as a hairless potbellied gremlin, reaching spindly arms to address a crowd of equally deformed onlookers.

This collection was, however, not limited to mutants, it hosted a substantial collection of his more orthodox work as well, of which his portrait Don Quixote and Sancho Panza struck me as both important conceptually and ideologically. Korzhev had a particular fondness for Quixote, dedicating an entire phase of his work to his likeness, and in doing so composed an identity for the adventurer that most media has lacked the empathy to articulate. Quixote is presented in most-all depictions as a madman, but where the Baron Munchhausen was simply a liar, Quixote truly experiences the world which he describes; empirically, he is quite consistent. To most this is nothing more than a tragic hallucination, a crude but effective dramatization of some great mental illness. Alternatively, to Korzhev, it was the evidence of a heroic idealism.

An adherent to the founding principles of soviet socialism, Korzhev saw his own continued idealism, in the face of descending hypernormality, as parallel to Quixote’s sincere belief in his fantastical adventures. For him, if beauty were at odds with political realism, it was preferable to be called mad, then to capitulate to an uninspired reality.

Quixote, if anything, is the perfect antidote to disciplinary power. No systems can organize Quixote, as his subjective experience makes the confines and pathologies of his status quo invisible to him. It is in this metaphor that we can gleam a powerful political message. Our struggle should not be to rationalize our condition, to reorder past and present to be without contradiction, it should be to radically distance our collective imagination from the bourgeoise limit on plausibility. Away from the melancholic and defeated promise of “socialism in our lifetime” and towards the uncaring demand of socialism now! Only a shared derealization of assumed power can reopen the horizons of possibility. We can and must embrace the instability of the creative act, categorize ourselves not as the underdog contender for social power, but another world, seeking to bring itself into this one.

This call, I can only summarize in a single sentence:

Something beautiful is going to happen. (10)

(10) Savvy readers may recognize this line from a particular mural in Martinaise.