A while ago I watched a movie about Goya, the painter. Fictional story, a bit tacky, despite showing excellent actors…

At the beginning and at the end one can see many works of Goya, oil paintings and etchings. They don’t say it, but most of these latter ones are from the series Los Capriccios. (The dream/sleep of reason produces monsters.)

Those images took me down the proverbial memory lane, although that lane is as wide as the 401 around Toronto, and unlike the highway, it goes in many directions.

This is how it started. I had a classmate in the high school, a very gifted little Jewish guy (he was really short) and we became very good friends. His mother, an artistic soul, not only painted their crumbling half-basement apartment’s wall with imitations of the Altamira cave paintings, but also encouraged us to try all kinds of artistic endeavours. We listened to music – jazz and classical –, we read books, looked at art albums, and… Our high school (another interesting story; founded about 50 years before the Mayflower arrived in this continent where I live now) organized each year a drawing/painting competition for the students. So, as we discussed it at my friend’s place, we decided to use some paints and tools from his mother, and make some “art” to present it for the competition. We were teenagers in the late sixties…

To my complete surprise, I won the 1^st place with my work. Look at me: I was all into acting and, eventually, writing. Painting? Never considered it. I was told I had something for the colours, and later it turned out I see more nuances and hues than the average person, plus somehow I knew how to combine them. Talk about intuition. The award for that first place was a nice art album with Goya’s works. Francisco Goya. I have it even today, here in Canada. It was the very first album I owned in my then modest library. By the time I had to relocate to Canada, I had to leave behind a library of over 2,000 books, among them many beautiful art albums. But that’s in the distance future yet, so let’s get back to Goya.

I’ve read that book many times, and I looked at those pictures often. Mainly because I did not have any other one. I was mesmerized by those etchings, technically, aquatints (btw, in the film they show how that specific graphic art form is done). Till then somehow I thought art was to be “pleasantly nice”, maybe beautiful or something like that. I believed just as Aristotle did, that order and symmetry equal beauty, although I didn’t know anything about his Poetika yet. But those images… scary, terrible, emotionally disturbing and so expressive that they burned a permanent imprint on my mind. I can recognize them anytime and anywhere.

Fast forward a few years, we are in the early, mid-seventies, and I am preparing to find a subject for my “diploma thesis” as it was called in that system, quite different from the (today) ubiquitous Bologna system¹. It was a strange mixture between the Soviet scientific “degrees” and some French model, and obviously maintaining certain Prussian system methods, as well. Such was the world we lived in… And as a new “reform”, in 1971 when I started my university studies, somebody decided that no more major and minor specialties, instead we would have two majors – labeled “Specialization A and B”. Thus on my university documents, Diploma de licentiat, it says that I majored both in (A) Russian language and literature; and (B) Hungarian language and literature. Yet, there was still some hierarchical difference between A and B – we had to write our diploma thesis in A, which for me was Russian, and not being then interested enough in linguistics to study it systematically, and also having certain artistic/literary inclinations, I decided that a subject from Russian literature would be my area of interest. As I remember, it was in the second half of our third year, that the officials started to nudge us: pick a subject from the suggested list of topics, or come up with your own… but get started in time.

I always liked Gogol (1809—1852), the often misunderstood genius of the early 19^th century, and an unusual idea started to develop in my mind for a thesis. The only(?) problem was that the professor whose specialty was that era of the 19^th century failed me at the “history of literature” exam, even more, I offended him criticizing his methods of examination. In plain language: he kicked me out from the exam with a failing mark². On top of that, I was told that he was the party secretary (I mean the only existing party, the Romanian Comunist Party’s local group at the departament), and a few nice older ladies from the department, teaching assistants for life, predicted I would never graduate because the guy was out for revenge. But Gogol was his territory so to speak, and I had in my mind a more and more enticing outline for my thesis – namely, to compare (lacking a better word) the imaginary world described by Gogol with the concrete images of Goya (1746—1828).

The prof. was indeed shocked when I entered his office and asked him if he would supervise my thesis. But, being a smart man, he got interested in the subject when I started to explain it.

Now, exactly 50 years after these events³, I imagine what a superb thing could be done today with the computers, internet and all the technology available to create a “multimedia” opus: illustrations of Vyi, etchings of Goya, with text in Russian and Spanish, together with English – since today if you are not published in English you seem to not exist! Crap… At that time we were not only without internet and computers behind the Iron Curtain, but in the whole city I couldn’t find a typist to type my paper in Russian. Allegedly, there were a couple of such typists, as I learned later, but I was told, if I can write it legibly, they will accept it. Since I’ve always been proud of my penmanship – in elementary school we had a subject called calligraphy! – I wrote my whole thesis with my nice handwriting, and in Russian, of course.

On this fifty years anniversary, I am looking at that old painting of mine on the wall of my office room (study as a friend of mine likes to call it) – it’s something about an atomic bomb explosion… We were just as scared of a nuclear catastrophy as were our American counterparts at that time. We just didn’t know about their drills. Somehow, it ended up here with me in Canada. About the “thesis” I knew it was here in a box, and now I started to re-read it, and surprisingly, it is a difficult read… I have started to forget my Russian. And the Goya-album is also here on my left on the shelf. And my son will also turn fifty this month.

I am getting old.