Boris Kudryakov archive

The archive of photographer, artist, and writer Boris Aleksandrovich Kudryakov (1946–2005) contains documents relating to his life and artistic practice and creative works, including literary texts, photographs, and graphic art dating from the 1950s to the 2000s. The collection was acquired by Garage in 2024 from Kirill Kozyrev, a St. Petersburg publisher, editor, and advocate of Leningrad's Second Culture.

Boris Kudryakov's documentary legacy has survived only in part, largely because throughout his life he repeatedly destroyed drafts and personal papers, both out of fear of political repression and as a way of shaping his own archive. The biographical materials in the collection include a number of autobiographical statements and questionnaires, bibliographies of his literary works and publications, lists of works submitted to exhibitions, and miscellaneous personal notes. The correspondence consists of letters from prominent figures of the Second Culture—including Konstantin Kuzminsky, Vladimir Nesterovsky, Sergey Sigey, and Mikhail Yupp—as well as several detailed letters addressed to Konstantin Kuzminsky. A separate group comprises letters from unidentified women with whom Kudryakov became acquainted through newspaper personal ads.

The core part of the archive features visual materials, poetry and prose manuscripts, and working materials, including drafts, sketches, and descriptions of artworks.

The photographic section is the most systematically organized, evidently arranged by Kudryakov himself during his lifetime. It includes black‑and‑white and color prints, as well as negatives preserved both in rolls and as cut strips. The negatives are generally annotated by the artist with information about the subject, date, and location of the photograph, and are classified using his own system of symbols and markers. A similar system of symbols and abbreviations appears throughout many texts in the literary section of the archive.

Kudryakov’s literary work is represented by handwritten and typewritten drafts, fair copies, and corrected proofs of books and journal publications. The presence of revisions and authorial annotations on nearly every version of his literary texts reflects his distinctive working method, which treated the literary text as fundamentally open‑ended and subject to continuous revision.

Some documents occupy an intermediate position between literature and photography. These include collages, literary texts accompanied by drawings based on photographs, and short texts preserved in notebooks or on loose sheets, which may be understood both as commentaries on photographs or descriptions of planned works and as independent literary pieces.

The archive also contains published texts and images (newspaper and magazine clippings), as well as ego‑documents created by other individuals that Kudryakov apparently regarded as found objects or used as source material for his own artistic practice. Among these is the teenage diary of an unidentified girl, kept during the 1960s. It survives both as a handwritten manuscript in notebooks and on loose sheets, and as typewritten copies prepared by Kudryakov, which may also have undergone literary editing.

The archive further preserves thousands of pages of notes and excerpts, including fragments of drafts, notes for literary works, commentaries on photographs and image concepts, outlines, and everyday records. Literary works by other authors are represented by handwritten and typewritten copies of texts by Konstantin Kuzminsky, Benedikt Livshits, Sergey Sigey, Mikhail Yupp, and other figures associated with the historical avant‑garde and late‑Soviet Second Culture.

Boris Kudryakov (1946, Leningrad–2005, St. Petersburg) was a Soviet and Russian writer, photographer, and artist. He became interested in photography in his youth, attending a photography club at the Moscow District House of Pioneers (according to Konstantin Kuzminsky, the studio at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers). He graduated from Vocational School No. 47 named after the 50th Anniversary of the Komsomol (now the Social College) in 1965, with a qualification in photography. He served in the Soviet Army from 1965 to 1968. After returning to Leningrad, Kudryakov worked briefly as a photographer before supporting himself primarily through unskilled labor from the 1970s onward.

In 1968 he joined the photography club at the Vyborg House of Culture, where he met Boris Smelov. The two photographers were nicknamed by Konstantin Kuzminsky Grand Boris (Gran) for Kudryakov and Petit Boris (Petit, Ptishka) for Smelov. Kudryakov’s nickname became widely used among his acquaintances and later appeared in memoirs, although he never adopted it as an artistic pseudonym. In samizdat and émigré publications (tamizdat), he published under the names Oleg Osinsky and Mark Martynov.

In the mid‑1960s Kudryakov entered the circle of the Malaya Sadovaya Street poets through Nikolai Akselrod (A. Nik), with whom he had studied at vocational school. From the late 1970s onward, his work appeared in samizdat journals including Chasy, Transponans, Obvodny Kanal, and Mitin Zhurnal. In connection with a planned publication in the journal Maria, he was repeatedly interrogated by the KGB during the investigation of the feminist Natalia Lazareva, who was arrested in 1982. According to Valery Valran, political persecution and Kudryakov’s unsuccessful attempt to emigrate to Israel in the late 1970s contributed to his growing paranoia and prompted him to burn a substantial portion of his personal archive.

From the 1960s onward, Kudryakov participated in multiple group photography exhibitions in Leningrad, both official and unofficial, including apartment exhibitions hosted by Konstantin Kuzminsky and Vadim Nechaev. His first solo exhibition, The World of Dostoevsky and His Characters, took place in 1981 at the Sophia Antipolis science park in Valbonne, France, as part of events marking the centenary of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s death. Kudryakov is the author of photographic portraits of writers and artists associated with the Second Culture, as well as documentary photographs of unofficial cultural events. During the 1990s and 2000s, museums and galleries in St. Petersburg began exhibiting his photography and paintings, while numerous prose works appeared in periodicals. Two books of his prose were also published: A Shot Glass of Lead (Ryumka svintsa, 1990) and Dreadful Horror (Likhaya zhut, 2003).

Kudryakov was the recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize (1979), the David Burliuk International Mark of Distinction (1992), and the Turgenev Prize for his contribution to the development of the Russian short prose form (1998).