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Review
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Unfinished Dissertation by Boris Mikhailov was published by Scalo, 1999.
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Other work by Boris Mikhailov
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from Unfinished Dissertation
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from Unfinished Dissertation
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Bleak And White
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The world of Boris Mikhailov's Unfinished Dissertation is black and white and blue. Black and white photographs, pasted on cheap, Soviet-quality paper - the reverse side of which contains someone's dissertation - are framed by handwritten quotations and personal reflections in the photographer's unlovely ballpoint blue. The pages are reproduced so faithfully that one almost expects to be able to feel the rutted track of the pen in the pulpy paper. Readers who recoil from cruelty to language may be tempted in turn to leave the track of their own blue editorial pencils in the paper, as they encounter some of the photographer's more pretentious jottings.
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The English versions of Mikhailov's Russian texts sometimes leave one wondering whether bad prose has been made worse by translation. Does the Russian really refer to 'the standardized stream out of which everyone finds in his own way'? Or - to cite one of the passages in which self-criticism is used as a shield against criticism - can the second of the following sentences really sound so unidiomatic in the original?: 'The photographs shown here lack imagination. This can also be judged a maximum of culture and aesthetics.' Mikhailov's ruminations are at their sharpest when they aim for irony rather than strain after profundity. A photograph showing a scroll of torn plastic, entangled in a tree outside a block of flats, is wittily counterpointed by a quotation from Sei Shonagon: 'A letter on thin, green paper is tied to a branch of the spring blossom tree'.
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Unfinished Dissertation is sub-titled 'discussions with oneself'. If Mikhailov's gnomic self-dialogue - whether his wishful thinking ('Minimum creative effort = maximum aesthetic satisfaction') or his ongoing debate about the nature of beauty ('The beneficial is the beautiful') - leaves one as cold as a Ukrainian winter, it fails to drain the photographs themselves of interest. The images in Mikhailov's 'dissertation' are chosen from hundreds taken in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov (where he was born in 1938) during one month in 1984. It is winter time and the living is not easy. The Soviet empire is heaving its last bronchial gasp. The babushkas are well-wrapped against bread queues and power cuts. The ground lies muffled in snow. A truck delivers concrete to a concrete tower block. There is scrubland and wasteland, construction and destruction. Whatever the angle - whether from train window or prison yard, from hospital rear or cemetery edge - the view is generally bleak.
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Notwithstanding the fact that the photographs were taken in 1984, Margarita Tupitsyn (in an essay appended to Unfinished Dissertation) makes no claims for Mikhailov as an Orwellian satirist: 'Mikhailov saw no point in providing an explicit critique of Soviet society, either through mocking it or through unmasking its endless vices. Instead, his goal was to preserve Soviet reality's sense of totality, but without its layer of systematically sustained external joy.' Joy in these photographs is mainly confined to pregnancy. Mikhailov's proudly pregnant wife is portrayed with her cat in an apartment scarcely large enough to swing the pet in. The television (black and white, no doubt) is always on. A balding man in suit and tie dominates the screen.
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For a book displaying so many concrete buildings, there is a marked absence of concrete detail. I wanted to learn something of the boys playing soldiers in the mud, the owners of the squat Ladas in the nocturnal car park, the widow waving stiffly from a bench. The documentary interest of these photographs outweighs their artistic merit, which is why images of pipelines and railway lines, of hand-strapped commuters and cash-strapped shoppers excited my curiosity about life and survival in the Ukraine of the early Eighties. Mikhailov's silence about people and places is all the more frustrating since he is anything but silent when it comes to penning his homespun philosophical outpourings. Of the books numerous quotations, my favourite comes from a 'former amateur photographer': 'in the beginning I still took pictures, but I no longer developed the film. Then I photographed with an empty camera, and now, I just look'. My advice to Boris Mikhailov would be to keep his camera stocked with film but to write with an empty pen.
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Dennis O'Driscoll
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