ity we’d imagined—of being and not
being at the same time.
An eccentric quality, for sure. Un-
like his fellow wartime painters, Trunov
had no interest in the battlefield. Or,
rather, he had an interest—those were
the times he lived in, after all, and it
would have been impossible not to ex-
press that in some way—but it wasn’t
the kind of thing he wanted in his paint-
ings. The ranks of soldiers in the field,
the cavalry with flags raised. He didn’t
capture the upheaval, the triumphant
generals, the human suffering. Instead,
he focussed on the soldiers’ everyday
lives, when they weren’t at the front: the
little breaks, the downtime when noth-
ing was happening, soldiers with grubby
faces waiting to hear the whereabouts
of their artillery batteries or playing
cards at a staging post.
Something else I learned was that
Trunov—born in 1818 in the city of
Odessa, died in 1860, at the age of forty-
two, a man Klaus described as full of
energy and self-respect—had very par-
ticular methods when it came time to
paint. He didn’t do full-scale studies
for his paintings, for example. He did
almost no studies. He had the habit of
starting his sketches with no plan in
mind. He used to paint figures and set
them aside, then arrange them against
backgrounds he’d prepared separately.
So, even when the figures interacted
with one another, the connection be-
tween them seemed unnatural. Their
eyes, Klaus told me, almost never
seemed to meet, which gave the paint-
ings an unusual psychological dimen-
sion and a dreamlike ambiguity. In one
of Trunov’s most famous paintings,
some soldiers play chess with pieces
made from scraps of bread. In another,
a lieutenant dozes atop a white horse,
looking like he’s about to fall off. In
another, soldiers talk, or seem to be
talking, while a plump woman holds a
colorful feather duster.
From 1854 to 1855, when Sevastopol
fell, Trunov lived in neighboring Sim-
feropol. In 1855, while the Russians were
losing up to three thousand men a day,
Trunov spent about four months shad-
owing a regiment. He nearly died more
than once. He did this on his own,
spending his inheritance, because join-
ing the war voluntarily cost money. It
was a very prolific period for him. One
of his first paintings from that time
shows two soldiers, surrounded by
smoke, sitting on the stones of a col-
lapsed wall, eating watermelon. One of
them is slicing the whitish melon with
a pocketknife. They appear to be talking,
but most likely, Klaus says, they were
painted separately and then mounted
against the background of the canvas.O
ne morning, while we were eat-
ing breakfast, I told Klaus that I
didn’t quite understand why he was
writing a play about Trunov. “You like
the guy’s paintings,” I said. “There’s
something about them that moves you,
fine, but it’s just a weird story where
nothing happens.”
Cars streamed past in the street out-
side. Klaus wiped milk from his mus-
tache with a napkin and said that all
stories, at heart, were weird stories where
nothing happened. “We are the past,”
he said. I said, “No, we’re the future.”
He laughed at that. I asked him to ex-
plain what was funny. He said no, he
wasn’t going to explain anything to me.
And, besides, it wasn’t true that noth-
ing happened in the story. He was just
now working on a very rousing scene.
“A very rousing scene,” I repeated.
“Yes,” he said, “a very rousing scene.
A very rousing scene in the life of Bog-
dan Trunov.”
Klaus and I had got drunk the nightbefore and were trying not to die. My
head was about to explode. It was a
cold, sleepy morning. We were sitting
in a sheltered part of the café, away
from the draft. He wore a scarf with a
brown moose on it that matched the
color of his mustache. I ate my toast,
looked at Klaus, and thought that, if
anything was weird, it was my life.
My parents lived in the countryside,
and whenever they called I’d say that
things were going well—my job, school.
I’d tell them about mundane stuff, like
when the microwave broke and I had
to get it fixed. I made up a story about
meeting a new guy, who was very smart
and had a job. To be honest, I wanted
to be able to tell my parents that I’d
gone through a terrible breakup, that
I’d dropped everything and was work-
ing with a famous director on a play—I
mean, they wouldn’t have had a clue
who he was, of course, but I’d explain
that Klaus was a famous director, a vi-
sionary genius. I was just waiting for
the right moment to say it. I came close
several times. But the months passed
and I said nothing. When it was all
over, when the play débuted, I’d have
my revenge, I thought. They’d tell me
that I was right and forgive me for ev-
erything. I ordered a mint tea. My head
felt detached from my body.
Klaus went on to tell me about this
rousing scene, which, of course, was far“ You boys might as well dig in—this could smolder for days.”