The Master and Margarita:Collages by Oleg Grachev

Oleg Nikolaevich Grachev was born in Moscow in 1945. He became interested in collage in the early 1970s—just after the first publication of The Master and Margarita. Riding the wave of interest in the novel, the artist created a series of illustrations for it. In 1978, Oleg Nikolaevich showed them to David Borovsky, the set designer of the Taganka Theatre, where the first stage production based on The Master and Margarita had already been mounted. Yuri Lyubimov saw the illustrations, and within the walls of the theatre the idea arose to organize an exhibition of illustrations to the novel by various artists—an idea that, unfortunately, was never realized.

A few years later, in 1986, Oleg Nikolaevich created seven collages for The Fatal Eggs for Smena magazine, which had decided to republish this Bulgakov novella for the first time since 1925. However, at the last moment the novella was withdrawn from publication (it would appear only two years later, published in Dushanbe).

…For forty years I have kept my scissors sharp, my glue at the ready, and I have been accumulating mountains of illustrated ‘secondary raw material.’ I cut and scatter. ‘If only you knew out of what trash’… a collage is born.

I work only with paper materials. It might be more entertaining to use splinters, scrap metal, broken glass, all sorts of discarded objects in one’s works, but all of that was long ago taken in hand and set in motion in his creations by the famous Swiss artist Jean Tinguely; the rest of the ‘construction’ material froze and sang in the videopoems of Andrei Voznesensky and in the installations of young artists.

I have little affection for computer collage. There is less unpredictability in it; it is ‘smoother,’ harder to load with thought, and in our time it is often an unnecessary occupation anyway: such is the time we live in—such are the songs.

— Oleg Grachev