38/100: Our Own Tsoi Wall
This vignette is one in a series of 100 about what happens at my local library.
The man who paints with watercolors always sits in the same spot: a table beside the window in the Science and Technology department that overlooks the park. It’s a well-situated table; good light and a near-panoramic view of the room. Sitting here, you can monitor who comes in and out, which librarian is on duty, who’s doing weird things worth writing about.
Since he’s not here today, I’ve temporarily occupied his seat. I know it’s his — not only because I’ve seen him painting here a number of times — but because, on the strips of wood that border the table’s edges are traces of his work. Brightly colored flecks of purples, fluorescent and forest greens, aquas, ochres, blues, whites and grays sprinkle over eachother, hinting at the artistry that has transpired in this space.
It’s not graffiti per se — there’s no message, no intended expression here. These speckles of color are instead the remnants of his creative enterprise; unintended vestiges of one person’s process of making. They will likely be scrubbed away soon, though I hope not too soon: they’ve become part of the library’s story, and as I put words to them, they’re now part of mine too.
On August 15th, 1990, a well-known singer in the Soviet Union called Victor Tsoi died in a car accident. Just after the news broke, the inscription “Today died Victor Tsoi” appeared on the wall of the house number 37 on Krivoarbatskiy Lane in Moscow. A reaction appeared almost immediately: “Tsoi is alive!”
In the course of the next several days, the wall was transformed into a sort of shrine, where fans came to express their feelings and leave messages of mourning, along with confessions, written lyrics from his band’s repertoire of songs, and poems dedicated to the late musician. The quotes from the lyrics, fans’ inscriptions and emotional confessions appeared side by side with their names, dates and the cities they come from. The wall served at the time as a place for solidarity, for storytelling, for remembering. For decades, fans made pilgrimages to the wall, or to its copycats that popped up across Russia, in order to make their own mark.
In 2006, the wall was painted over in the attempt end the cycle of transitory graffiti, but the painted and written tributes to Tsoi were quickly restored by his fans. A few years later Moscow authorities tried anew to paper over the landmark, but plans were refuted by locals and eventually dropped. I don’t know whether the wall still stands in today’s Moscow.
The fragments of watercolor are markedly different from the imagery that decorates (or decorated) the Tsoi Walls. The latter are explicitly intended to be art: forms of expression that allow the artists to convey a message or an emotion through the work. These paint marks are by-products of art: not express self-expression, but the unintended consequences of said expression’s process.
And yet upon seeing the paint marks, my mind immediately went to the Tsoi wall.
Timelessness of the Ephemeral
The Tsoi Wall is a lesson in impermanence; how nothing ever stays the same. Each visitor that passes through adds their unique and personal touch to the collective composition, forever altering the narrative the moment they paint themselves into it. With each new story comes new meaning, helping to build the Wall’s reputation as a place for imagination and play in post-Soviet Russia. It reveals the significance of the always changing “us” — those from whom the Wall is for.
This is not to compare the library to post-Soviet Russia — though to be fair I wasn’t in immediate post-Soviet Russia and I’m sure it was a really interesting time to live through. Nevertheless, the library is supposed to be a place of order and quiet and tidiness. Indications of a painter’s refusal to color inside the lines doesn’t necessarily fit with this traditional vision.
Yet alongside the its vision of order and quiet and tidiness is the vision of itself as a place where ideas and imaginations come to flourish. Where creativity is boundless and ever-evolving, where the narrative is constantly being re-written and re-read, where everything is always growing and nothing ever stays the same. In this version of the library — of anywhere — order and quiet and tidiness must take a backseat to ingenuity.
In this version, imperfection is bound to make an appearance. And what more perfect image — an ephemeral sprinkle of color — could one ask for to celebrate the very imperfection of the creative enterprise?
Thanks for reading!
