Petrograd, a winter afternoon, December nineteenth, 1915. The Field of Mars lies silenced beneath snow, and inside the Dobychina Art Bureau, fourteen artists have gathered under a cypher: 0,10, zero-ten. You step in and, as every visitor does, your gaze drifts upward, then you slide inevitably to the corner.
The krasny ugol, the beautiful corner, is where the icon hangs and the little lamp burns under it, and you cross yourself towards it from the door; you do not approach, no one stands there, and yet it steadies the room as a keel steadies a boat, anchored in a place forever out of reach.
In the far corner of that room, high up, across the angle of the two walls, there is a black square.
Alexandre Benois saw it and wrote in Rech’ that January that it was the abomination of desolation, a sermon of nothingness and destruction.
