the mitki send a letter to an oligarch

By Sveta Graudt

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Published: February 27, 2004 (Issue # 947)

For The St. Petersburg Times Shagin's "The Mitki Send a Letter to an Oligarch" is his largest canvas.

In difficult times like these, it sometimes takes an artist to speak out for the people. Even if all he's doing is writing a letter.

That's the attitude of Dmitry Shagin, an artist who helped found the offbeat Mitki group in St. Petersburg in 1984. Twenty years on, Shagin is still pushing boundaries. His latest canvas is based on Ilya Repin's "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan."

But unlike Repin's masterpiece, "The Mitki Write a Letter to an Oligarch," which went on display at Moscow's One Work Gallery two weeks ago, is addressed not to one specific person but to all those opposed to progress in Russia.

Change is what the Mitki have championed ever since they came together in 1980s Leningrad. From the very beginning, they used their own vocabulary and wore striped blue-and-white sailor shirts and sailor hats to mark their good-times attitude. Their philosophy of nonaggression was streamlined into a memorable slogan: "The Mitki aren't out for victory."

Dedicated to the group's 20th anniversary, "The Mitki Write a Letter to an Oligarch" is Shagin's largest canvas to date, and shows a group of 17 Mitki artists, including Shagin, gathered around a low table in what appears to be a boiler room. Most are wearing the Mitki trademark sailor shirts, felt boots and padded peasant coats. A fluffy striped cat sits in the corner.

The painting comes with a letter styled after the one sent by the Cossacks to the Turkish sultan some 330 years ago. Written in Mitki-Speak on a big cardboard sheet, it requires a Mitki dictionary to decipher, which the gallery staff is only too happy to provide.

"We thought that the bread was getting expensive," Shagin said about the painting in a recent interview. "'Who ate our bread?' we asked ourselves. In the 1980s, when Gorbachev introduced prohibition, we fought against this inhuman law. And we won. We drank quite a bit back then, but then drinking stopped being compatible with art. I haven't had a drink in 11 years. Now we have a problem with food, especially in St. Petersburg, where bread was more precious than gold during the siege. The prices have doubled before our eyes."

Shagin is doubtful that the oligarchs will read his letter, but said that "if they read it, they might start thinking that they should help people."

While the Mitki no longer suffer the frequent police raids that plagued them in the late Soviet period, they continue to address questions of social injustice in their humorous, eccentric manner.

In addition to painting and writing poetry and music, Shagin has a role in "The Streets of Broken Lights," a popular television series about St. Petersburg cops.

In celebration of Defender of the Fatherland Day on Monday, a separate Mitki event was held at Club na Brestskoi in Moscow. The festivities kicked off with an art exhibition called "Mitki for the Motherland," and was followed by the chance to aim at Mitki-made targets at a shooting range.

"The Mitki Write a Letter to an Oligarch" is on display at One Work Gallery, located at 5/6 Sredny Kislovsky Pereulok, Office 40, Moscow. Tel: (095) 290 5974.