16. «Gallery of the dead homeless people» (1997)

       - Gennady, when did the idea to represent homeless people come to you for the first time?     
       - For the first time I faced them in 1962 when I worked as the policeman on point duty at the area of the Belarussian station. And everywhere around on benches, and even directly on the earth slept the hungry and torn-off bums whom I had to wake up and deliver to the 10th police station. Then my head was stuffed by "correct" things, and there wasn't any pity to people.
       Certainly, those bums differed from the today's. Usually the people who had come from prisons and colonies became the bums. They came back to Moscow to their  home, but their wives had already lived with others, and relatives didn't accept them back. People couldn't leave the familiar places, neighbors and usually remained at the entrance of their house, lodging under a ladder near the battery. Neighbors brought them food and left it in bowls directly on a floor. They looked awfully - chilled, beaten, tied up by rags instead of bandage... Never fought and didn't resist, were in a borderline between life and death - "live corpses". In 1997 I decided to make a series of bums in oil. I judged that the real bums is the dead bums. Who lived as the bums and died as the bums. And there is still a big tragedy as the last minutes of life of such people are awful...
       - So anybody hasn’t seen these pictures yet?
      - In 1999 when the "Moscow-Petersburg” exhibition in TsDH was organized, I showed my works to the selection commission. At first all the members of the commission grimaced and didn’t want to take anything. But then they chose one picture. The organizers found sponsors and published the magnificent catalog. There were presented all the works, except mine.                    

Darya Molostnova.

"Megapolis-Novosti” newspaper, No. 8 of 2003.