Vadim Sidur. The Formula of Grief (the memorial to the Jews in the town of Pushkin). Photo of Evgeny Luchin.
Vadim Sidur, a celebrated avant-garde sculptor, poet, and writer, was born in 1924 in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro, Ukraine). His father Abram Sidur, an economist, was Jewish, while his mother Zinaida Adrianova, an English teacher, was an ethnic Russian. According to Vadim Sidur's memoirs, Monument to the Current State, although he lived in a Jewish community, he did not attach much importance to this fact. Since Sidur was not a religiously observant Jew, he sometimes played the role of a “shabbos goi” at the local Synagogue. Although there was a Jewish school not far from the family home, Sidur attended a Russian class at the Ukrainian school. He later recalled: “At that time, there were no Russian schools in Ukraine at all; only Ukrainian, Jewish, and German ones. In terms of educational level, the Jewish schools were considered the worst”1. Sidur was lucky, since the Russian class was opened the very year he entered the school. According to him, his classmates were mostly Jews, but there were some Ukrainians and Russians there, as well; this did not bother the children. He writes that, before the war, he never thought about his national identity, and never witnessed instances of antisemitism. When a neighbor asked him what his nationality was, he replied: “a Russian Jew.” Sidur describes numerous curious episodes from his childhood. Thus, he recalls that several elderly Jews opened a law firm of sorts at the entrance to his house. They were helping illiterate individuals write applications and petitions to various state organs. The Jews made a lot of money this way, since there were many illiterate people in the city. Sidur’s family lived through the Holodomor (the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, which resulted in millions of deaths). Hunger was a constant reality in his childhood, and that period remained etched in his memory. In his school years, Sidur was fond of modeling and drawing, but he dreamed of enrolling in the Medical Institute.
At the time of the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Vadim Sidur was a 9th-grade student. His family initially evacuated to the Kuban region, where he worked at a kolkhoz, and then to Stalinabad (Tajikistan), where he finished high school and began to work as a turner at a factory. In August 1942, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted into the Red Army and sent to a machine gunners school in Kushka (Turkmenistan). In 1943, after completing the school, he was attached to the 40th Rifle Division and sent to the 3rd Ukrainian Front, not far from his hometown. There, he commanded a machine gun platoon, in the rank of second lieutenant. Presumably, it was there that he joined the Communist Party.
On March 7, 1944, during a battle in the village of Latovka near Krivoi Rog (Ukraine), Sidur was gravely wounded in the jaw. The wound was almost fatal, but he miraculously survived, having been saved by random people from Latovka who evacuated him to a hospital in the city of Dnepropetrovsk. In October 1944, after a long and painful treatment, he was released from the hospital and discharged from the military as a disabled veteran, in the rank of senior lieutenant. His face remained permanently disfigured, and from that time on he grew a beard, to hide this deformity. In 1946, Sidur was nominated for the Order of the Red Star, and in 1947 he received an even higher decoration: the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class.
In 1944, Sidur enrolled in the Medical Institute in the city of Stalinabad. However, he dropped out a year later, having decided to devote his life to art, in lieu of medicine. He then moved to Moscow and entered the Central School of Arts and Industry (now the Stroganov State Academy of Arts and Industry), where he studied at the Faculty of Monumental and Decorative Sculpture. His diploma project, a composition titled Peace, was initially rejected. He reworked it, but still failed to get an “excellent” grade, because of the excessive height of the composition. After graduating from the School, he worked as a sculptor and book illustrator.
In 1954, Sidur and two of his fellow graduates, Vladimir Lemport and Nikolai Silis, banded together and formed the “LeSS” union, setting up a common workshop. In 1956, they took part in the famous 2nd Exhibition of Young Moscow Artists, and a year later Sidur joined the Union of Artists of the USSR, thereby achieving official recognition. In this early period, he created realistic ceramic sculptures, as well some other works, such as Heads of the Blind and the rock-hewn Portrait of Ernst Neizvestny”.
Already in the late 1950s, the works of this sculptor grew increasingly unconventional, while the language of his art became more concise and geometric, attaining a high degree of generalization. He used diverse materials – bronze, aluminum, wood, parts of engines, sewer pipes. Shorn of all concrete detail, his work turned into a sign, a symbol that was relevant for all times. His art gradually diverged from the official canon, until he abandoned it completely, developing his own artistic language. He wrote:
“The artist should speak the language of his time”2. Sidur's work became known in the West from the 1960s, much earlier that in his homeland. Soon, he became famous. In the Soviet Union, his works were not exhibited from the late 1950s until his death, with the exception of a single one-day exhibition at the House of Writers in Moscow in 1968. In addition to his sculptural work, Sidur also wrote poetry and prose, which could not be published in the Soviet Union, either. However, these works were published in the West and circulated via “samizdat” (the unofficial, and therefore uncensored, publication and distribution of literature) in the USSR.
At the age of thirty-seven, Sidur suffered a massive heart attack, which left him unable to work with heavy materials for some time. From that point on, the motif of approaching death began to feature prominently in his art. He felt that he might die unexpectedly, before he could make his central artistic statement. His new works were filled with a global tragic sense. One particularly traumatic subject for Sidur was the history of the Holocaust, to which he dedicated several works from different periods: Treblinka, Babi Yar, and The Formula of Grief. The last of these now stands in the town of Pushkin near St. Petersburg (the former Tsarskoye Selo, the residence of the Russian imperial family and a place connected with several significant Russian cultural figures), in memory of the more than 250 Jews who were killed there in 1941. It is a semi-abstraction, depicting a kneeling human figure whose back is bent like a wheel, with drooping shoulders, hands folded on the knees, and the head leaning upon them. The monument was erected only in 1991, long after the death of the sculptor, by a group of Jewish activists from Leningrad who were researching the history of the Holocaust. The young artists Alexander Pozin and Boris Beider took part in creating this memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Of all the works by Sidur that have been erected in Russia, this one is now the most celebrated.
In 1966, Sidur illustrated the novels What the World Rests On and A Stalemate Lasts But a Moment, by the Lithuanian-Jewish author Icchokas Meras. The second of these is dedicated to the history of a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania.
In 1970, Sidur became acquainted with Karl Eimermacher, a Berlin-based scholar of Soviet culture who was interested in his work. The two became friends, and Eimermacher made a great effort to have Sidur’s works exhibited in Europe and the USA. He was able to arrange more than twenty exhibitions by Sidur. Sculptures based on Sidur's models were erected in Germany (Monument to the Victims of Violence, Monument to the Current State, Treblinka, The Beseecher) and in the United States (The Head of Albert Einstein). The first monograph on Sidur was written in 1972 by the Australian scholar Sasha Grishin (Vadim Sidur – A Study in Modern Soviet Sculpture).
Because of his growing fame abroad, Sidur was persecuted by the Soviet security apparatus. He was denounced by the press as a "formalist" and expelled from the Communist Party. From 1972, he was unable to earn money as a book illustrator, and had to switch to creating tombstones.
At that time, he came up with his own artistic concept, which was centered on the artist as a prophet of future global catastrophes. He named this new artistic style Grob-Art [“Coffin Art”]: It reflects on the path chosen by humanity, which is being led to destruction by our “iron-nuclear” civilization, which has already debunked the naïve view of the world and the human being as whole and harmonious. In his works, both the macrocosm and the microcosm are shattered into fragments, particles, ashes. Sidur never attempted any formal experiments, and he was unable to speak about the post-Holocaust world in the language of Auguste Rodin. He referred to himself as a “reluctant conceptualist.”
In 1974, he completed the book Monument to the Current State, an autobiography of sorts. He also made an underground movie based on the book. It is a two-hour-long, silent, black-and-white documentary about the life of the sculpture. It was shot underground, in his basement workshop. In the 1980s, shortly before his death, he also wrote a book of poetry titled The Happiest Autumn.
Sidur died on June 26, 1986. Shortly afterward, with the beginning of the new period in Russian history known as Perestroika, the Vadim Sidur Museum was opened in Moscow.
Related Resources
Sidur's autobiographical essays
"Report to the recruitment office with gear…"
The meat-packing factory and the general school are over.
I AM GOING TO WAR.
I put on my best, and only, suit. The one discerned by Av in the tiny photograph.
As a recruit, I was given a new pair of shoes at the factory.
Good working shoes…
We are sitting in one of the city schoolyards. With gear.
We sit there for a day.
And then another.
And another.
Our parents and relatives are nearby.
The are feeding us something, fussing over us.
- "When will they ship us away?"
- "No one knows."
- "It is said that we'll be sitting here for another couple days."
We meatpackers have it worse than the others.
This school lies some ten kilometers from the factory. It's no easy walk from here to there.
Mom and Dad have been sitting near me for two days, and for the third one, too.
- "How much longer do we have to wait?"
- "No one knows."
At night, I slept fitfully on the school floor. There was not enough room for Mom and Dad, so they did not get to sleep at all.
On the evening of the third day, we decided that Mom and Dad should leave.
Have a full night's sleep at home, and come back in the morning.
They had told us with near-complete certainty: "You will stay here for another couple days. There are no trains available."
We bade each other farewell for the night.
At about 2 AM: "COME OUT AND LINE UP!"
We leaped to our feet.
- "Faster! Faster! Faster!"
They counted us.
And we made our way through the city to the train station, at a near run.
Some fathers and mothers were running along – those who had not gone home, and those who lived nearby.
The train was already there.
Waiting for us.
- "Faster! Faster! Faster!"
As soon as we had boarded, the train was underway. Without a whistle.
WE ARE OFF…
And a howl went up from all those who had accompanied us. They began to run after the heated cars, stumbling and falling in the dark.
The boys crowding the car doors began to weep as one.
But the train quickly picked up speed.
The mothers and fathers started lagging behind, and only their shouts could be heard for some time.
I was happy to know that my parents were not in the mob running behind the train in the dark.
I kept repeating silently: "Farewell, Mom. Farewell, Dad. Farewell, my loved ones…"
From: Vadim Sidur, Monument to the current state, p. 247-249.
