The Art and Time of Eduard Bersudsky

by Julian Spalding

First-time visitors to St Petersburg don't usually notice the lions. They are more likely to be struck by the pink and white, yellow and blue gilded palaces viewed from a distance across the rivers and canals, looking as if a painter had brushed his brightest colours along the horizon before washing them into the sky above and the water below. Yet when you begin to notice what's closer to you, lions are everywhere, on balustrades and benches, on gates and gateposts, in fountains and around monuments, serving as door knockers or bound together with chains to form barricades. People who live there call St Petersburg the city of a thousand lions. There are so many of them, yet they all have the same expression: they stare straight ahead with an imperious mien.

The two lions that lie in the little park tucked beneath the gold-encrusted, candy-coloured onion domes of the Church on Spilled Blood are, however, very different. They don't stare straight ahead but gaze up into the sky, their manes framing their sad faces like the sun's rays. They crouch near where children play, in a clearing between the trees which shelter their mothers from the sudden showers that so often catch people unawares in the eternally long summer days of St Petersburg. These two old lions are life-size but they are not cast in bronze, like all the others. They were carved out of tree trunks nearly thirty years ago by Eduard Bersudsky, and have been battered and bruised since then by generations of kids climbing over them and by seasons of winter frost and summer rain. The rear haunch of one has been gouged away, leaving only a black, gaping wound, as if it had been struck by lightning.

Bersudsky's lions do not have a look of terror or fear on their faces; they appear to be saying that they've seen everything, the suffering caused by the elements and by human nature, and now all they want is to be left in peace to gaze forever up into the sky. They are two of the artist's earliest carvings and among the few that have survived in the city of his birth, which was then called Leningrad.

Eduard Bersudsky lived through the Kruschev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev years in Russia. He was born in 1939 into a Jewish family who lived in Leningrad. His father was called up during the war and was killed almost immediately, in 1941. Luckily Eduard, his mother and brother were evacuated out of Leningrad before the terrible siege during which nearly a million people died of starvation, disease and the bitter cold. Eduard had no idea that he would become an artist. He went to technical college at fourteen to train as an electrical engineer. When he left college he was asked where he would like to work. He was bored and romantic and said 'as far away as possible'.

That's a long way in Russia.

He was sent to the coal mine at Inta, in the very far north. It was a revelation. He met there the survivors of the Stalin camps and experienced the magnitude, horror and deception of the Communist regime. His art is about this and about human nature, which can be so destructive. But it was many years before he found the means to express his feelings.

Eduard returned from the north in 1961 and worked first as a lorry drive, and then in a military factory. This was when he began to carve small figures. He became interested in art, learning through books in the library, which were heavily censored - Breughel was allowed, but not Bosch. An exhibition of Barlach's work made a great impression on him. He became interested in Russian folk traditions, particularly the old wooden churches and he started to read the great Russian classics.

There was no question of Eduard becoming an official artist. That would mean joining the Communist party, and he couldn't do that. Like many creative people at that time he took menial jobs that gave him time to create, first as a night watchman, later as a skipper on naval barge. In 1975, he started working part time for the Parks Department, carving wooden sculptures for children's playgrounds. This job was unworthy of the official artists, so they didn't mind non-union artists doing it. It enabled Eduard to work on a big scale for the first time.

Everything else he made at home. In 1967 he finished his first kinetic sculpture - a carving of a very ancient organ player. He's an old hunched figure with a long beard and sunken eyes and he's turning the organ handle as if it's the last thing he will ever do. When Eduard saw it work for the first time, he told me he jumped back a metre with surprise. He'd found his language.

Then wonderful moving sculptures began to pour from him. You have to imagine a room about fifteen feet by nine feet where he lived and worked. There was a bed and kitchen, and a raven with a broken wing (Eduard kept the poor thing as a pet) and sculptures everywhere, all moving.

One he worked on for three years came to be called Babylon. It is a tower the height of the room, nine feet. It has several stories and on every one there are figures - fifty-three in all - all carved and painted and each one animated. There is Stalin chopping away in the basement and Lenin gesticulating from a pulpit near the top, there are lovers and policeman, old men and young men, workers and bosses, wives and mistresses, mayors and madmen, and foxes and monkeys and donkeys as well, all of them pulling everyone else's strings or fishing for nothing in empty space. The whole of human society is there, not just the Communist state, but all societies. It is funny, mad, wonderful and unbearably sad.

And that was only one of the pieces in this remarkable, crowded room in Leningrad. Eduard went on making them obsessively, through the Brezhnev epoch. It was a time of stagnation - they called it zastoy - which doesn't just mean stagnation but the smell of rot. Nobody but idiots believed in the system any more, but the ideological control became more and more severe and more and more absurd. If you stepped out of line you were in danger of being sent to prison or to a psychiatric hospital.

He was still working on Babylon when Tatiana Jakovskaya, a theatre director and well-known critic, came to visit him in 1988, brought there by a mutual friend, Victor Schvartz. Tatiana recognised Eduard's genius at once, and realised that she had no choice but to help him. She knew that he and his work could easily just become lost in the uncertain times that lay ahead. She gave up her own career and devoted her considerable energy, political awareness, practical theatrical experience and artistic creativity to him. She saw that the priority was for people to see his work, but the problem was how. The way forward became clear when she realised that what he had created was essentially a theatre of mechanical characters - and that they could best be presented in a performance. However, she knew that few people would come to see such an unfamiliar art form, so she arranged a show in which three actors mimed around the sculptures first, and then stopped to let the sculptures come to life. It worked. People came at first to see the mime and only later realised that they'd actually come to see the sculptures. News spread, and soon more and more people came. They called the theatre after the first moving sculpture Eduard had made; it was as if Eduard had finally traced this old barrel-organ player's life back to where he had come from. And so the SHARMANKA theatre was born.

The urgent need, then, was for permanent accommodation where Eduard could work and people could come and see the performances. Tatiana found this at 151A Moskovskiy Prospect, in a grim tenement block, like thousands of others in the endless suburbs that circle the old city. The local residents resented the newcomers (the block was owned by the Electric Power Factory and was occupied by their employees) and they threw dog excrement wrapped in paper on to their doorstep. But though it was far from the centre, the theatre had the advantage of being on the road to the airport, and it became a convenient place for their supporters in the Tourist Board to take the growing number of tourists who began to visit the city. Among these, in 1990, were the wood sculptor and furniture-maker Tim Stead and his wife, Maggy. They immediately responded to the imagination, humour and humanity in Eduard's work and struck up a friendship that eventually led Eduard and Tatiana to settle in Scotland.

In 1991 they were invited to perform at the International Puppet Festival, Ontpoppen & Verbeelden, in Utrecht. The visit was their first experience of the west, and everything struck them as miraculous: smiling people, clean toilets, and above all the old houses, spires and canals of Utrecht itself, a child's dream of a city. And even more miraculous, a museum of barrel-organs and automata! Eduard's work became a star attraction and, when visitors realised that the maker of these machines was still alive, they were so affection towards him that he began, slowly, to speak again without difficulty. They made many friends there, including a team of technicians that helped them modernise their equipment. They took a short trip to Amsterdam, where Eduard had difficulty getting past the red-light district, an experience that later inspired a kinetic sculpture On the Road

But they had to go back to Russia. The situation was getting worse. There was little local support for their theatre, and increasing rent made their situation impossible. Eduard's mother, to whom he was very close, was diagnosed with cancer, and died two years later. He continued to work in increasingly desperate circumstances. In 1993, they were offered a life-line when they were invited to show in a group exhibition in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig. They packed everything up in crates and went without any idea what they would do afterwards.

Earlier that year I had been shown a group of photographs of Eduard's work, which Tim and Maggy Stead had brought back, and I realised that I had to see it, as I was looking for art that was popular and profound for the Glasgow's new Gallery of Modern Art. I visited them in Leipzig and discovered, in a run-down gallery with black polythene masking the windows, a whole city of the imagination. It was a visual feast I will not forget. I arranged for them to have an exhibition at the McLellan Galleries in 1994, and immediately bought for Glasgow three of his latest pieces which, for me, summed up the whole sorry tale of the Communism era.

The first was The Great Idea, showing Karl Marx winding up the machine of state. The little bearded wooden figure turns a handle as a great contraption above his head, made of bits and pieces from Soviet factories - car hubs, weighing machines and music stands - slowly springs to life. It gains momentum, and bits look as though they are about to fly off when it begins to slow down again and eventually comes to a grinding halt, while Marx is left desperately still trying to turn the handle. The second sculpture was about the dictators in the Kremlin, a skull-headed monster incapacitated in a wheelchair arouses himself and prepares to leave his cage. The last in the trilogy showed the coming nightmare that was Perestroika, two beds were strapped together to create another cage in which strange things happened, a suitcase opened, a monkey mask turned round, a pair of boots started to march, a toy horse cantered and a clock went backwards.

The sale of three large sculptures and the promise of a major exhibition gave Eduard and Tatiana the support they needed to survive and leave Russia. With the help of the Steads, they rented a cottage in Blainslie in the Scottish Borders. Eduard even had room for a workshop. The first Scottish "kinemats" were produced there. One called Jock's Jokes, was a tribute to the local chimney-sweep who was an inveterate collector of junk, which Eduard found most useful. Titanic, which he made during the summer of 1994 is, for me, an image of mankind's doomed but irrepressible desire for freedom, made all the more profound when viewed from the perspective of Eduard's experiences in Russia. This sculpture is now in the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow.

In 1996, with the help of a Lottery grant, the SHARMANKA Theatre was established in King Street with space in the rear for Eduard's workshop. He has never stopped working since: it was as though characters and machines were queuing to get out of him. The Tower of Pisa, made after a short visit to Israel in 1995, encapsulates his feelings at that time. He carved a self -portrait on the top. He is clinging for dear life on to the roof as it spins madly round and tilts up while this or that member of the community try to assert how the whole contraption should be run. It leans this way and that and becomes, at the height of its gyrations, dangerously unstable. It is not just about the Jewish state, but like Babylon, about all states, except that now instead of being a victim, Eduard depicts himself as one of a family of people trying their best to make things work. He has undergone, as Shakespeare might have said, a sea change, from fear to affection, without for a moment losing his insight into the terrible, destructive power of the human spirit.

Eduard began to receive commissions. The Old Viking was commissioned by the Experimentarium in Copenhagen in 1996, and this led directly to another Danish commission from the Storm P Museum. The World of the Artist (1997) is Eduard's tribute to the great cartoonist and social satirist, Robert Storm Petersen. The museum includes Storm P's early, harrowing paintings of suicide. Storm P's whole life was his answer to that. Eduard's portrait of him is also a self-portrait; death sits on one shoulder and a clown on the other. In 1998 "The Big Idea", a visitor attraction in Irvine, on the West Coast of Scotland, celebrating inventors and invention through the centuries, commissioned Eduard to make a kinetic sculpture for their entrance hall. Homage to Leonardo is the flying machine Leonardo dreamt of making, lifting him and all creative dreamers above our mundane realm.

I had often thought of Eduard as a medieval clock-maker come to life in our times, looking around with dazed disbelief at the world we had created but recognising at once the same old human beings getting up to the same tricks, dreaming the same dreams, falling into the same traps. I thought what better way to celebrate the new millennium than to commission him to make a clock, like one of those great mechanical clocks one occasionally comes across in European medieval cathedrals, but expressing the hopes and fears of our own times, the tragedy and triumph of our own century. He immediately began to work on the idea, and enlisted the help of Tim Stead, with whom he had long wanted to work, and two other craftsmen working in the Scottish borders, the clock-maker and restorer, Jürgen Tubbeke and the glass artist Anika Sandström. They were responsible, respectively, for the wooden case, the clock itself, and the stained glass panels. The clock tower quickly grew to be ten meters high. I had intended it for the great central court of the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, but it was impossible to raise the money. However, the National Museums of Scotland proved to be the clock's fairy godmother, and it was finally created for the great hall of the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

On 1st January 2000, the clock will strike and all the figures will come to life, from the brooding giant in the basement to the circle of victims at the top, representing the suffering of so many millions, slowly turning on their eternal round. Above a woman holds a dead man in her arms. This is a masterpiece of the sculptor's art.

(November 1999)

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