USA-CCCP. Points of Contact.
Catherine Mannick – (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
Correspondence 1979 – 1990

USA-CCCP. Points of Contact

Synopsis • Chronology and Archival Numbers

Synopsis

In 2022, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection at Harvard University received an outstanding donation related to the last decade of the Soviet Union: the correspondence (1979-1990) between Catherine Mannick, then a student from Boston, and artist (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, a leading member of the Leningrad avant-garde art group The New Artists.

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Their letters, bridging the gaps between some rare personal encounters in Leningrad and Moscow, touch personal matters as well as that of Soviet underground artists and musicians exploring the new possibilities of perestroika. Also part of the donation are numerous pictures and other gifts and artefacts from those years – most importantly, Kozlov’s works of art, a total of 51, many being an integral part of a letter as “mail art”. They offer a wide range of stylistic and technical approaches: pencil, gouache and watercolour drawings, monotype prints, objects, and collages, as well as elaborately painted photographs of Kozlov’s artist friends and of Mannick. In conjunction with reproductions of Kozlov’s works in vintage prints and digitised slides, they mirror the rapid stylistic evolution of his art in the 1980s and demonstrate his genius as a generator of new ideas and concepts.

Together with Kozlov’s diaries (1979-1983), also now in the Davis Center Special Collection, this unique contribution to the history of US-Russian relations can be accessed on-site at Fung Library, archived as “(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive)” external link >>.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Diaries I- IV, 1979-1983 Each diary is protected by a textile bag bearing the diary's number and provided with additional pieces of "hidden" information. Custom-made box: 20.4 x 54.3 x 3 cm, 2021. Textile bags: Hannelore Fobo, 2021. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection, Harvard University Harvard Accession Number: KMFP_0301 more >>

The letters have been contextualised by Hannelore Fobo, a German specialist on Leningrad’s alternative culture of the 1980s. Her texts focus on Kozlov’s contribution to the correspondence, as his letters present an intimate view of the challenges experienced by an independent – “unofficial” – artist in the last decade of the Soviet Union. More than thirty articles, supplied with images of Kozlov’s letters and gifts, are available online on Kozlov’s website www.e-e.eu with links to other articles Fobo published under the heading Leningrad 80s.

Hannelore Fobo and (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, 2018, with E-E's painting Точки соприкосновения / Points of Contact Oil on jute, 237 x 112 cm, 1989 more>> E-E archival number: E-E-189031

The correspondence is now entitled “USA-CCCP. Points of Contact”. The title is a reference to one of Kozlov’s paintings from 1989, where the artist synthesised the polarity between the two superpowers, overcoming Cold War through art. The constructivist composition was inspired, last but not least, by his friendship with Catherine Mannick.

With the variety of questions it touches and the abundance of original artefacts, “USA-CCCP. Points of Contact” offers interesting research topics not only to art-historians, but to scholars exploring psychological, economic, and socio-cultural aspects of American-Soviet relations.

Catherine Mannick is a former international lawyer who spent 20 years of her career representing U.S. businesses in the countries of the former Soviet Union. She is currently a member of the Davis Center’s Advisory Board. Catherine earned an undergraduate degree in Russian Studies from Yale University and a J.D from Harvard Law School, followed by a year as an IREX fellow on the Law Faculty of Moscow State University. She also earned an M.A. in history from Harvard University, where she was a tutor in the History and Literature Department. Catherne lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Padua, Italy..

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, born 1955 in Leningrad, lives and works in Berlin. From an early age, he felt a passion for art, which first manifested itself in the Leningrad Album (1967-1973), a large cycle of erotic drawings presented at the 55^th Biennale di Venezia (2013). In 2007, Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick selected him as one of 100 visionary artists – “unheard prophets, voluntary outcasts, great solitary masters and freaks” (Charley 07). External link >>

Since 2005, Kozlov has been signing his works exclusively with “E-E” (prior to that, occasionally), pronounced “ye-ye”, and in 2013, made his signature part of his name, wishing that his proper name should ultimately disappear. His works are in international collections and museums, among them Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, The Berlin House of Representatives, and The Wende Museum, California.

Hannelore Fobo is a German (Berlin-based) independent researcher who graduated from Freie Universität Berlin with a degree in linguistics, political science and Latin American studies, followed by a post-graduate course on Eastern Europe. She has received scholarships from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Fobo has been curating (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov’s work and coordinating his art projects since 1990. She has worked on sign and image theory and published more than one hundred articles about Leningrad’s unofficial cultural scene of the 1980s, accessible via www.e-e.eu. Her latest contributions in print media are “Kunst ins Leben. Die russische Kunst im Berlin der neunziger Jahre und was daraus wurde“ (50 Jahre Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2024 External link >>), and “Action on a totally global scale. A short history of Sergey Kuryokhin’s Pop Mekhanika (1984-1995)” (Unearthing the Music: Footnotes to Sonic Resistance in Non-democratic Europe 1950 – 2000. Leipzig, Forthcoming).

Hannelore Fobo: Chronology and Archival Numbers of Letters.

Catherine Mannick and (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov started exchanging letters immediately after they first met in Leningrad in the summer of 1979. The young American had studied Russian in college, and before taking up her law studies at Harvard, she visited the Soviet Union together with her friend Ann; the correspondence, written in Russian continued up to 1990. While Kozlov kept the vast majority of Mannick’s letters – fifty-seven all in all – his friend chiefly kept those related to his art, for instance double cards with a painted collage on the cover.

The total number of Kozlov’s letters preserved, some in a fragmentary way, amounts to eighteen. They also include a telegram and some notes, but for the sake of simplicity, in my nomenclature, all written documents go as “letters”, numbered alphabetically from A to R in chronological order. The nomenclature of Mannick’s letters, on the other hand, follows Kozlov’s own system of Arabic numerals from 1 to 48, with a sub-series to Letter 14 of seven letters sent from Moscow and a subseries of two documents to Letter 35. This makes it easy to assign a specific document or quote to either Kozlov (e.g. “Letter G”) or Mannick (e.g. “Letter 25”). In the letters, they both address each other by their short names, as this is common for private relationships in Russia – Женя, Zhenya for Евгений, Yevgueni or Evgenij, as Kozlov himself transliterates his name, and Катя, Katya or Katia, for Catherine. (In the 1990s, Kozlov started using his birth-name Evgenij). For the sake of variation, Kozlov occasionally used different forms or wrote the names in English, Catherine / Eugene (Letter B, 1980)

Mannick’s letters often display three different dates: the day she wrote them, the date stamped by the US post office on the envelope, and the date stamped by the post office the Leningrad borough where Kozlov lived (Petrodvorets / Peterhof), marking the letter’s arrival before it was delivered it to the addressee.

Catherine Mannick, Letter 10 from 31 March 1981 (fragment), stamped Boston April 3 1981

Catherine Mannick, Letter 10 from 31 March 1981, reverse (fragment), stamped Петродворец (Petrodvorets) May 4, 1981 The old and present name of Petrodvorets is Peterhof. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection, Harvard University

These dates helped reconstruct the chronology of the correspondence. In 2021/2022, after Catherine Mannick sent me photographic reproductions of Kozlov’s documents, pictures, and art, I compiled a chronology folder with 302 pages and a finding aid annex with tables. Those of Kozlov’s letters missing a date – because the corresponding page is no longer available – could be dated approximately by their content. On average, letters from Boston to Peterhof and vice versa took three weeks, and messages sometimes crossed each other.

Statistically, the distribution of Kozlov’s archived letters per year is 1.5 – one and a half letters for each of the eleven years of the correspondence – twelve, if we fully count the first and the last years. Factually, there is a focus on 1986 with five letters, while many years are documented with a single letter and one (1981) with none; there are, however, pictures from 1981 more >> and slides from 1980 to 1983 more >>. The factual distribution would change if one took into account those letters that have not been preserved; we know of their existence because they are mentioned in Catherine Mannick’s correspondence. I haven’t counted them, but noticed that in terms of Kozlov’s total number of messages, the first years outnumbered Mannick’s letters and the years up to 1986 were more prolific than the late 1980s. The frequency of Mannick’s  writing also somewhat decreases towards the later years. This corresponds to the fact that up to 1986, Kozlov and Mannick were able to occasionally meet. Then there was a break until 1990, which saw some last encounters in Moscow and Leningrad.

Mannick preserved a total fifty-one artworks, partly sent as an integral part of a letter, partly sent as loose inserts and sometimes given over personally – drawings, paintings, monotype prints, objects (a sculpture and a painted T-shirt), painted photographs, and collages.

Numerous photographs from Mannick‘s archive illustrate the correspondence: Kozlov’s black and white vintage prints (a total of forty-eight; see Chapter 8, column 5), Kozlov’s and Mannick’s slides (approximately one hundred), and some colour prints.

Mannick kept most of Kozlov’s vintage prints in a box of their own. In many cases, such “loose” pictures could be connected to specific letters. Some of the vintage prints indeed constitute at once pages of a letter, with texts on the reverse (see Letter N). The slides, preserved in a digital format on a hard disc, offer additional information about Kozlov’s art and that of his fellow artists.

In 2022, Mannick’s letters kept in Kozlov’s archive and Kozlov’s letters and notes kept in Mannick’s archive joined each other at Fung Library, where they are now part of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection. Kozlov’s gifts to Mannick, generously donated by his friend to the Davis Center, make another important contribution to the correspondence. 

In 2023, to facilitate research, I published Kozlov’s letters online using the photographic and scan reproductions Mannick sent me. Each letter is presented on a separate web page with a transcription of the handwritten text, preceded by an introductory text setting it into its historical context and inspiring the chapter headings.[1] The pages include the corresponding works of art and most vintage prints from the donation, as well as additional pictures, in the main from the Kozlov & Fobo archives. In 2024, theme chapters, an overview of “Leningrad Artists and Musicians in E-E Kozlov's Pictures”, a table with Harvard accession numbers, and two articles dedicated to vintage prints (1981) and slides (1980-1983) followed. Quotes from Kozlov’s diaries (1979-1983) help describe the period up to 1983. Texts are linked to each other, and readers can retrieve further information by following the links to articles I have published on Kozlov’s website under the heading Leningrad 80s. More than one hundred articles about private and public exhibitions, performances, artist groups and clubs, experimental music, unofficial recordings, and more make the Leningrad 80s the largest available English language online resource on this extremely productive period of Leningrad’s independent art and music scene, with Kozlov as one of its protagonists.

Archival (inventory) numbers on the web pages are of two kinds. E-E archival numbers starting with the letters E-E refer to Kozlov’s archive; they exist independently of the fact where the works and photographs in question are located today. The registrars at Fung Library use a different nomenclature for all artefacts now in the Davis Center Collection – Harvard accession numbers, starting with the letters KMFP. KMFP numbers appear on the web pages once the documents have been accessed (see Chapter 8: Harvard Accession Numbers of Art and Photographs).

A few “loose” photographs from Mannick’s collection are not included in the online letter pages, but the complete material – Catherine Mannick’s letters, all pictures and Kozlov’s gifts, as well as two documents explaining the chronology of the letters – can be accessed on-site at Fung Library.

Hannelore Fobo, Berlin, 11 February 2024, revised 4 October 2024