Self-portrait of an artist as a young girl or Not so short biography of a contemporary female artist.
"Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power."
Benjamin Disraeli
Prologue
I remember a story about Hillary Clinton writing her bio in a third grade or something like that, which turned out to be over twenty pages long. When I heard that story I was thinking what the hell a little girl could've written in her bio that made it so long. I used to have a page-long bio on this page and one night I set out to add some things to it and ended up rewriting the whole thing. If I didn't restrain myself my own bio could've ended up as long as George Sand's novels. After this experience I have a better understanding of how Mrs. Clinton was able to compose such a long bio at such an early age, but of course, I am much older now than she was then. I apologize in advance for making it so long and seemingly whiney. My purpose wasn't to make people feel bad for me (I hate pity), but rather to make people understand that life is what we make of it and no matter what kind of obsticles we encounter on our path the final outcome is always up to us.
***
When I was a kid I knew how to dream big. I remember sitting in my mother’s lap, when a woman riding in a trolley next to us asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. “I don’t know, but I want to be awfully famous,” I answered without any hesitation. At that time I already considered myself an artist. However, I didn’t think that being an artist was a real profession. I thought that being an artist was who I was as opposed to what I could do. If one were a part of so-called intelligentsia in the Soviet Union one was supposed to grow up to be an engineer. I didn’t figure out that I could actually become an artist until I was already living in the States years later.
I started painting under my grandfather’s supervision when I was two. Paralyzed from the waist down he spent his days sitting in a chair next to a coffee table that I used as my drawing board. I would draw a crooked circle and he would compliment me on drawing a beautiful apple or a beautiful stone, depending on how crooked the circle was. Pretty soon all I cared about was painting on the backs of discarded student projects that my father would bring from the University where he was teaching, (finding real watercolor paper in a store wasn't an easy task).
I don’t remember the day when my parents brought me to a prep studio for high-school students who wanted to apply to my dad’s university. Apparently my kiddy portfolio and I made a good impression, because I ended up as a student there. I was four. A little while after I started attending the studio my father started wondering why the professor who taught there allowed me to paint whatever I wanted instead of drawing from observation, like everyone else was required to do. My professor told him that he doesn’t want to kill my talent with something that anybody could be taught how to do. He believed that I’ll be able to figure things out on my own, (which is still my favorite approach to learning). Needless to say, I felt like a star, a little four-year-old star that all the other students liked and treated like a younger sister.
My life was absolutely wonderful. I didn’t have to attend kindergarten. I tried it for several months and ended up spending most of the time being sick in bed. Apparently I had a special ability to catch every type of sickness any of the other children had. So my parents finally decided that it would be better for me to stay home. I was psyched, because it meant that I could spend my days painting. I also had a new friend who lived in the house next to our apartment building. She introduced me to a fun and exciting way to spend time outside – tree climbing. Pretty quickly it became my second passion in life and for the next decade I ended up hanging like an apple from a tree every time I went outside to play. The last time I did it was my junior year in college. I would probably still keep on doing it, but I don't want to freak out my neighbors.
My life changed drastically in the summer of 1986. Chernobyl turned everyone’s life upside down. People were trying to get their kids as far away from Kyiv, (where I lived), as possible. My parents entrusted me to my aunt who took me and my cousin to her mother that lived in Russia. However, my stay there was short, because I got really sick within a week and my aunt brought me to a local hospital. The hospital was over-flown with Chernobyl refugees. I remember the first night that I spent there as if it happened yesterday. I was seven, I was far from home and I felt all alone. In the room with me there was a woman from Chernobyl. She had a five-year-old daughter who was sick from radiation poisoning. I still remember her name. It was Inga. I remember Inga’s mother talking to a nurse. She was telling her that when Chernobyl started burning the people were told to go outside to wait for the evacuation buses. They weren’t allowed to take anything with them except for their passports. They waited for hours, standing outside, while the reactor was burning. I remember the woman talking about it sort of matter-of-factly. Nobody realized back then how bad things really were. I also remember her comforting me. Her own little girl was much worse off than I was and she still took the time to make somebody else’s child feel better. Sometimes I wonder if both of them are still alive and I pray that they are and that they are well.
I was transferred to another hospital the next day. It was in another city, so not even my aunt could visit me. My mother couldn’t come right away, because by that time my grandfather had a second stroke and was completely paralyzed while my grandmother just had a heart surgery. At first I was OK with a new place. There was a bunch of kids in the room with me and despite our sicknesses we managed to enjoy ourselves. However, there was a lack of competent doctors in the hospital and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me. Every day a bunch of medical students would come to examine me. They took so much blood from me on daily basis that up until this day I start crying whenever I have to go for a blood test. I was constantly pocked with needless and even though I was getting tons of shots I wasn’t getting any better. My liver was going berserk and it was enlarged to a point that made me look pregnant. So it was decided that I should be placed into an isolation room, just in case. There was a tiny table there, a small bed and nothing else. I had a window with metal bars on it. I’m still not sure why, because I wasn’t going to escape. The window was overlooking a park where kids played and watching them was my lone source of entertainment.
My only visitor was a nurse who brought me food and gave me shots. Some good Samaritan who was visiting her child in a hospital saw my face pressed against the window and after enquiring about me gave a children book to my nurse to pass on to me. Then, my mother finally came. I had to spend another few weeks in the hospital, but I was really happy. My mother bought construction paper, scissors and thread and we ended up making cute little animals that could move their legs, because we attached them to their bodies by pieces of thread. I saved a little cow from that time for years, which I now think was a bit of an omen since I ended up participating in several CowParades years later.
When I came out of the hospital it was still not safe to go back to Kyiv, so my mom asked our relatives who lived in a nice small town on a sea shore if I could stay with them for a while. They took me in and the next couple of weeks were wonderful. Until the day I overheard a conversation that I wasn’t suppose to hear. That day I found out that my parents were already divorced for over six months and my father was staying with us only until he would find his own place, (renting an apartment in the Soviet Union was more than a college professor that he was could afford and he wasn’t going to get a government supplied apartment for a while). Obviously, I was in shock upon hearing the news. Interestingly enough I didn’t figure anything out sooner, since my father moved into my bedroom a while back.
I was still trying to come to my senses when my father took me to a resort with him and his new girl-friend. I guess it was better that I overheard that conversation and already knew what was going on, because without it I probably would’ve had much deeper psychological damage. 'Fortunately' I only ended up concealing my parents divorce from all of my friends for the next seven years. I think the fact that on the first day of school that year, my teacher asked for us to rise our hands if our parents got a divorce and nobody raised theirs didn’t help much.
By now you’re probably thinking that I had an awful life as a child, but it’s not true. Despite everything I was able to have a lot of fun. Of course, my life was very different from what is considered to be a normal child’s life in the Western world, since my family which consisted (after my father moved out) of both my grandparents, my mother and my great aunt lived in a tiny two bedroom apartment. My grandmother and my mother had to care for my completely paralyzed grandfather and my mother also had to sew every night in order to support us. However, our time together was joyful. Everyone fought a lot, but our house was always filled with my grandmother’s older neighbor friends, my mother’s friends and mine and we were all very happy there. My grandmother was into theatrics and I always loved watching her and my mom fight from under the coffee table. Their fights were spectacular and hysterically funny. Plus I always knew that they were going to make piece shortly thereafter.
Towards the end of the "summer of Chernobyl" my mother and I went to Odessa, (a sea port on the Black Sea). It was a very memorable experience because we got to spend a wonderful time together and she gave me one of the greatest gifts a mother could give to her child – she made me fall in love with literature. Up until that time I never liked reading. I thought that books were boring in comparison to tree climbing. And then my mother started reading Bulgacov’s “The Master and Margarita” to me and my life changed. She read it to me every night and one day I couldn’t wait for the evening to find out what was going to happen, so I started reading the book myself. Since that day I’ve never stopped reading. It felt like the flood gates were finally opened and this unbelievable new world started rushing in. I’ve barely slept for the next ten years, because I was reading till four or five in the morning every single day, consequently ruining my eyesight and forever changing my sleeping (or rather not sleeping) patterns.
During school vacations I would read ten to twelve hours a day. I mostly vacationed in my father’s summer house in a small village in the middle of nowhere, where there was not much to do. But I was happy because I had my books. My paternal grandmother had a wonderful library with complete collections of works by all the famous authors. I invented my own reading technique. I was reading by the shelves. My dad would go to my grandparents’ apartment and he would bring me all books from one shelf to read and once I was done he’d bring me all the books from the shelf directly below it, regardless of what kind of books were on the shelf. This way I actually ended up reading Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant a summer before I read Jack London and James Fenimore Cooper. In some cases I made myself really suffer. I remember reading George Sand’s “Consuelo” and thinking that it was a bit boring and way too long to be so boring and right after that I forced myself to read “La Comtesse de Rudolstadt” which I must say was a horrible read for a ten-year-old. Although it sparked in me enough interest in George Sand to read her biography by Andre Maurois and that book was absolutely wonderful. OK, enough about books. You’re probably bored by now with my literary exploits.
Let’s move on to the next chapter in my life. It’s called “Mom leaves for America”. It happened when I turned thirteen. By that time my grandfather died, my father got remarried and my mother has gone back to her regular job as an engineer. The times were grim and we could barely make ends meet. So my mother decided it was time for a change. The Soviet Union fell apart a month before she was suppose to leave for a visit to the States and it made my mother’s decision to seek asylum in the States even stronger.
Up until that point I was a somewhat quiet child. I hung on trees, I painted, I read and I loved spending time at home. However, things tend to change when one becomes a teenager and has zero parental supervision. After all, both people that I lived with (my grandmother and her sister) were well into their eighties and sneaking out of the house at night was extremely easy. I became a grown-up overnight. I also became quite pretty which was a surprise for me as well as for other people who knew me, because up until that point I looked like a boy. Even when I had long hair and was wearing a skirt people still thought that I was a boy. It was upsetting, but I was kind of used to it. What I was not used was the attention that all of a sudden I started getting from the boys when I turned thirteen. All of a sudden everybody realized that I was also smart and funny, the fact that has previously escaped them, because up to that point they've never paid attention to me. All of my classmates wanted to hang out with me and in a year I was the most popular girl in school. I dated the upper classmen and all the girls who previously looked down on me fought for my attention. I was very gracious as their ‘queen’ and never reminded them of the previous abuse that I had to take from them. I even became good friends with a girl who used to hurt my feelings on everyday basis when we were younger. I loved my life. It was a true ugly duckling story and I felt like a heroine in a fairytale.
At that time I started hanging out with a girl who was to become my best friend for life. Her name is Tania and I still can’t think of anybody that I ever felt closer to. She also had a somewhat tough childhood and I felt like I could really relate to her. She was my pal and my partner in crime. We used to skip school together and had the most awesome adventures for a while. One day things changed. We were fifteen. The school year was almost over and it was a beautiful sunny day. The evening before we talked on the phone and decided to grab our bathing suits with us in case the next day will be nice enough to trade school for a day at the beach. We met the next morning and I suggested going to a lake that I knew was located in the suburbs where my aunt lived. We hopped the train and got there twenty minutes later. The lake was deserted. Everybody was at work or in school. We had a great time there and started heading back into the city a bit before 2 PM, because we still had to pretend that we actually were in school that day. As we were standing at the train station I looked up at my aunt’s house. From the train station it was a two minute walk to her house and I suggested to Tania that perhaps we can stop by to see my little cousins. We talked it over and decided not to blow our cover. I was home a bit over ten minutes when the phone rang. It was my aunt crying on the phone. My little cousin just drowned in the same lake fifteen minutes after we left. There were no grow-ups there to pull him out and by the time his friends ran to his mother it was already too late.
Several weeks later I found out that my grandmother had cancer. My mother rushed back from the States to take care of her. Mending my relationship with my mom after three years would’ve been hard any way, but my grandmother’s sickness made it much harder, because we didn’t have time to spend with each other.
I remember the day my grandmother died. She had an operation a week before and there was a tube coming out of her stomach that we used to feed her through. She was unconscious and we took turns looking after her. It was my turn. I was sitting by her bed reading when the woman in the bed next to hers told me that my grandmother was dead. I looked at her and she looked the same to me. I didn’t realize right away that she stopped breathing. I remember coming out of the hospital room. I was very composed. I went to the lobby and called my uncle. My mother was due back any minute, so I went back to my grandmother’s room and just stood in the doorway. I remember a very long hallway and I remember when the door at the end of it opened and there was my mother carrying a huge watermelon she bought as a present for the nurses. She knew what has happened as soon as she looked at me. I remember her looking at me. Everything after that is a blur.
My mother went back to the U.S. shortly after the funeral and I joined her in a couple of months. I didn’t know what to expect, but by then I had enough self-confidence not to be afraid of the unknown. I thought that people will be friendly and I’d have no problem learning the language and adjusting to my new surroundings. I started high-school in the middle of junior year and things didn’t quite work out as I anticipated. Nobody talked to me. There was a mean girl in my home room who constantly tormented me and I didn’t even have enough vocabulary to say something back to her. I ate my lunch alone and felt thoroughly miserable. Pretty soon I asked my art teacher if I could spend my lunch in her classroom.
I’ve never felt so lonely before. Even when I was unpopular I still had a few loyal friends that I could count on. In the States I didn’t have anybody. A few months after I moved to the U.S. my paternal grandmother died and I couldn’t even talk to anybody about how I felt. So I studied. I would come home from school and study till midnight. I would memorize hundreds of words every single day and I entered my senior year of high-school as a regular student. I was done with ESOL in just a few months. I graduated high-school at the top five percent of my class with numerous awards. I was fluent in English, but still didn’t have any friends. Back then I thought of my year and a half in high-school as the worst time of my life. Little did I know...
My college years were great. A lot of good and bad things happened, but I felt that at least I was living a full life. Being at the University of Connecticut taught me a lot about people in general, as well as about who I was and what I could handle. I felt like myself again. I lived by my own rules and became a very strong person. I also started going out with Val, a boy whose face I drew for years before I even met him. We had a turbulent relationship with lots of ups and downs. We partied constantly and after several years I felt like I wanted a different type of life. I wanted to spend my time painting and not going out to clubs and drinking. We parted after four years. Later on I found out from his mother that Val believed that he was dragging me down and he thought he needed to give me space to become what I was meant to become. I’ve always thought about myself as a woman that is very easy to be with in a relationship. I now realize that being easy-going and laid-back didn’t make me into a good girl-friend. It must be hard to be with somebody who always has something else to do that appears to be more important to her than you are. Sometimes, Val would tell me that I loved him, because he loved me. I would ask him if that was so bad. Now I know that it is. I was almost like Greta Garbo in her older years. I just wanted to be left alone, so that I could paint. Try going out with that…
For a while after Val and I split things were going smoothly for me. I painted, I exhibited my works, I participated in a CowParade in West Hartford. Articles about me appeared in the newspapers and people recognized me on the streets. Just as it often happens in my life, as soon as I find some inner peace something bad would happen. I’m not complaining. I’m really grateful to God for giving me the life I have. I’ve learned more in my three decades on this Earth than a lot of people do in a lifetime.
In the summer of 2004 my chinchilla Boo got sick. Val gave her to me as a present for my 21st birthday and I loved my little furball more than anything. She was my little daughter, my buddy and my escape from reality. Boo had teeth problems and had to undergo operation after operation. For six months I had to feed her through a syringe and I was praying night after night for God to spear her little life. I couldn’t watch her suffer, because I was suffering with her. I could feel her skinny little body under my sweater when she was trying to warm up and I bargained with God, offering everything I had for her to live. She died during her forth operation and I was heart broken. You would think that by then I should’ve gotten used to the idea that everyone dies, but somehow that was not the case. Death is just not something I could ever get used to.
I was still trying to cope with Boo’s death when one Sunday morning in February 2004 Val’s sister called me to let me know that Val was in an accident. I rushed to the hospital just to find out that the accident was very serious and he would probably never recover. I spent the next four days next to his bed. I was very hopeful the first day, the second day I knew that he would probably remain a vegetable if he lived. I knew that he was going to be turned off life support on the third day and on the forth day I watched him die. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy. I felt such despair that I didn’t think I could go on. The night he died I came out of the hospital as a different person. I realize now that if I could survive his death I can survive anything. Nothing bothers me anymore. All the problems that people tend to get upset about have no affect on me. If I’m alive it means that things are good. I appreciate and enjoy every moment I'm given on this Earth. I know what each breath that I take means.
Epilogue
My life is great now. I have family, friends and pets that I love and who love me. I'm never bored. My life is great…
