Song of the Lost Soldier

Song of the Lost Soldier: Interview with Artist and Collector Grecht, who paints with soot, buries swords in the ground and writes letters to nowhere

Why are digital soap boxes a modern antiquity and how do they help to look into a world that has not yet been named? What can be found during misanthropic walks along the shores of reservoirs and then turned into art? Why fasten cans to gas masks and write letters to anyone anywhere? This time the special correspondent of "Knife" Pavel Korkin talked with the artist and collector Grekht - about the wind biting the cheeks, about the rusty tumbler, about the weather vane of the future and much more.

Pavel Korkin: Hi. Tell us who grehtsteinmann is and how it all started. How and where did you spend your childhood? Where did the military aesthetics and the song of the lost soldier, extracted sadness, sadness and hopelessness come from?

Grecht: Hi. I got acquainted with the computer quite early and gradually began to get involved in different games, mainly RPGs and strategies. And in RPG, I often had to give a name to my hero, I tried different ones, but I felt that the classic names that we know did not suit me.

Around the same time, I got acquainted with the work of Tolkien, and there I was very interested in the race of orcs and goblins, who make weapons, armor, their names and language from garbage - in general, the way it was portrayed, I was very impressed. So Grecht is such a rude name that gradually came to me by itself. It seems to me that this combination of letters is akin to the sound of stones that roll from the top of the mountain to its foot.

My childhood was spent mainly where I was born and live, in St. Petersburg and in the region, in the house of my family. At that time, there were many abandoned construction sites or simply foundation pits around, which for one reason or another stopped in construction. These quiet, abandoned structures of brick, rebar and concrete fascinated me.

War has always interested me, and I grew up with some kind of constant stories about it, flipping through albums dedicated to the Second World War. It seemed that it ended quite recently.

Often, when I came across photographs that depicted a soldier at the end of the war or after it, a prisoner returning home, this image always felt unbearable sadness, longing, trauma, detachment and something else, which is somewhere deeper ... I have experienced and continue to experience similar feelings myself, which is why this image is probably so deeply embedded.

As a child, when I was walking among the fields, and these unfinished ruins, it seemed that it was like the end of the war: silence, summer sun and wind, and you are alone, and there is uncertainty ahead.

It seems that there is a world, there is you, but there seems to be nothing but memories and your own thoughts, as if you are the last living person on earth, and it is not known how long your life will last in this capacity, a day or 100 years.