The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost

This book by the American writer and journalist Andrew Solomon looks at the community of Soviet artists during perestroika. These are the memoirs of an American who knew the main personalities of unofficial art during the 1980s and 1990s.

Solomon was present at the Sotheby’s auction, held in Moscow in 1988, which introduced to the West a generation of non-conformist Soviet artists. He had entered by chance into the very heart of the unofficial Soviet art, the famous squat in Furmanny Lane that housed a warren of artists’ studios. There, he met in person the prominent figures of the underground art scene, including Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Vadim Zakharov, Dmitry Prigov, Josif Bakshteyn, Andrey Monastyrskiy, and Sven Gundlakh. For several years, Solomon would associate with Russian non-conformists both in the Soviet Union and in the West, and eventually wrote this book about the Glasnost-era artistic community.