CIVIL SOCIETY
12/23/08
A EurasiaNet book review by Andrew Iacobucci
One of the most powerful images in Jason Eskenazi’s new book Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith depicts a long line of Russians waiting in a bread line, only their legs visible. In the middle of the line, a young girl is sitting on a wall, her face clasped between her hands with a look of confusion. The image perfectly captures the mood of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a time when Soviet citizens plunged down a rabbit hole and found themselves caught in a world where nothing worked as it had before.
Dramatic political changes have only a bit part in the book, a collection of photographs spanning 10 years of work documenting Russian life during its tumultuous transition from Communism to a market economy. Instead, Wonderland explores the more personal aspects of the transition, delving into the mindset of the Russians as they coped with the social changes around them.
"I didn’t go there to make this book," said Eskenazi in an interview with EurasiaNet. "This book came together as I lived there. I started to understand the Russians and became absorbed into their lives, and that’s what I was trying to capture with the book."
True to the title, the photos feature people, often children, gazing expectantly into the distance, as if looking forward to a new future. Their expressions are often juxtaposed against a background of rural desolation. In one picture, a young girl in the foreground smiles broadly at the camera, while bits of agricultural debris float in a giant puddle behind her. In another, a group of people huddle together to peer over a wall. "This picture could be seen as people looking over a wall towards a new future, but actually it was taken at a horse race. I look for pictures that have that transformative character," said Eskenazi.
Throughout the book, a theme of optimism about the future mixes with a sense of lost innocence. "I was wondering how to format the book, and I thought about how Russians like fairy tales, so I thought it would be nice to turn it on its head and make sort of a ’black fairytale,’" said Eskenazi. "Because fairy tales are for kids, I wanted pictures that showed kids living in an adult world."
While each picture displays this change on a personal level, the collection as a whole is a parable for the Soviet Union’s dysfunction.
"The Communist system was basically a fairy tale in some ways, because they kept all of their citizens in a childhood fantasy of utopia -- ’The state will provide everything for you; we live in a perfect society’ -- which in reality didn’t work at all," said Eskenazi. "The fairytale opens up as the child is sent out into the world; when the wall fell down, the ’children’ of the Soviet Union were sent out to make sense of the capitalist world."
Despite the absurdity and despair evident in many of the photos, they are capable of evoking nostalgia in some. "Even if I ask a Russian today who is working in New York, they would always say ’the past is better,’ no matter what," said Eskenazi.
In his search for meaningful images, Eskenazi finds a number of photographs which represent the best and worst aspects of the Russian character simultaneously. This is perhaps best represented in one of Eskenazi’s favorite photos, a picture of two junkies holding each other.
"It was a tragic situation, these people were both heroin addicts, but yet there’s a real tenderness here, with him putting the necklace around her neck. Beauty and tragedy mixed together -- it’s an important part of Russian life. I was shocked by how cruel people could be to each other, but there’s also a real sense of generosity, the ’Russian Spirit.’"
In spite of the serious and often uncomfortable nature of the world Eskenazi portrays, the book manages to exude a sense of humor. Many of the pictures contrast the monotonies of everyday life with an absurd image, be it a boy playing trumpet to an attentive cat or a museum worker dusting off the stuffed bodies of Russia’s famous "space dogs."
"I was looking for absurd little funny things," said Eskenazi.
The Russia depicted in Wonderland is a tangled web of contradictions, capturing the moment when people had to react to sweeping social changes by looking optimistically towards the future while retaining a deep nostalgia for a greater past, exposing the beauty and tragedy, innocence and brutality of their character.
As Eskenazi himself puts it, "I wanted to record the history -- not so much in the events, but the feeling of the time," he said. "The Soviet Union was funny, romantic, absurd, et cetera. I was looking for images that have resonance, things that tap into an iconic past."
Editor's Note: Andrew Iacobucci is an editorial assistant at EurasiaNet.
