Commentaries from Jonathan Waterlow:
Image 5
These two pages draw together several motifs that we see throughout Azazello’s notebooks regarding his inner world and his relationship with drugs.
On the left-hand page, we see a sketch of a hippie holding a syringe aloft. The face is unclear, but a large trumpet or horn extends from one side of the head, while a delicate, feathered wing is attached to the other. Leaves and a single flower sprout from his crown. Throughout Azazello’s notebooks, we find figures like this, with their heads supporting or housing fantastical imagery, giving us a glimpse of the worlds and experiences that both drugs and his imagination conjured up. In this one, there’s a sense of freedom and expansiveness at play: from his posture, the figure seems about to fly into the air, lifted by the wing (or ultimately by the contents of the syringe). The trumpet is more enigmatic, but whether it serves as an inlet or outlet, it seems to create a channel between the figure’s mind and the world around him (again, facilitated by the opium he holds proudly aloft). As well as the obvious ‘flower children’ association we can draw from the greenery sprouting from his head, there’s also a sense of flowering and growing in fertile soil; a healthy mind giving birth to new life and, again, a sense of harmony and connection to the world around him. These themes and associations are not just generic hippie tropes, but, as I’ll explore below, were deeply personal issues for Azazello.
If this figure is in some sense a guide (he certainly seems to be leading the way, glancing back to check that we’re following behind him), then the syringe takes the place of a lantern to light the path. And lanterns are another significant and repeated image in Azazello’s mental landscape: on the opposite page we see one sprouting from a tree branch, which ultimately emerges from the head of another hippie figure. In other drawings, Azazello has lanterns hanging from people’s foreheads, lighting a pathway for them. These images are resonant of Azazello’s personal search for meaning and for self-understanding and, when allied to his deep interest in Buddhist philosophy, are richly suggestive of a search for a path to enlightenment. Whether or not he consciously intended it, the fact that the lanterns emerge from the mind of the seeker beautifully and quite brilliantly captures the Buddhist teaching that enlightenment always already lies within us – it is ‘only’ a case of being able to recognise what is already there.
This page vibrates with activity, so let’s focus on some particular elements.
The hippie’s head opens up to reveal the fantasy worlds within. A fantastic creature – perhaps some kind of elephant – extends its nose to the gateway of a storybook castle decorated with symbols of love and peace. Above this creature, a tree emerges. From its branches grow the lantern, but also a candle, a flower, a leaf, and what appears to be a poppy. Beneath the latter, another syringe is suspended, pointing towards the castle.
Azazello specialised in drawing inner worlds in this manner – the imaginary literally bursting forth from the head, as he tried to capture on the page what he saw in his mind’s eye. Like many artists, he seems to have felt compelled to bring his visions into the everyday world, to give them a presence and life beyond his imagination. These are not exclusively ‘drug visions’, however. Mind-altering substances draw on and draw out images and symbols from within the mind; they cause us to see new and unusual connections between these things, as children do, or they draw out elements of the subconscious – but they do not implant wholly new ingredients. What we see in Azazello’s drawings, then, are symbolic pieces of his own mythology – aspects of what he found meaningful in his life.
For Azazello, the sprouting tree, opium, and lanterns are repeated symbols which seem to represent life, the natural world, enlightenment, and freedom – a freedom which stood in stark contrast to the society in which he lived and felt (often painfully) apart from. The natural world, drugs, and ‘enlightenment’ (see my essay for more on this theme) were all vital ingredients in his sense of self and connection to the external world – together, they constituted a freedom which he did not feel in the Soviet world.
The storybook castle also appears in myriad forms throughout his notebooks, as do knights on various quests. For Azazello, the world of fairytales and chivalry, whether at a spiritual or simply a narrative level, seems to have carried more emotional resonance and meaning than the Soviet world in which he found himself. Perhaps he felt he belonged in those old, romantic tales, in which a quest for self-discovery always had a result.
A spacecraft rockets into the air, but standing atop it is a peculiar winged figure holding an arrow which points, and is labelled, ‘DOWN’. Arrows like these (some labelled, others blank) are strewn throughout Azazello’s notebooks and most likely symbolise ‘coming down’ from the highs of his drug experiences – here, in particular, it seems to be the unpleasant counterpart to blasting into outer space. (Conversely, ‘down’ is a common slang term for opiates and other ‘downers’, as contrasted to stimulants, or ‘uppers’, such as cocaine. So it’s also possible that ‘down’ wasn’t a negative association for Azazello, placed in contrast to the positive elements of his trips, but was a peaceful, calm state that he actively sought as part of his drug experiences.)
The lyrics on the left-hand page are Azazello’s riff on ‘Gimme Shelter’ by The Rolling Stones. The original song only includes the first line (although The Stones sang ‘shot’, not ‘shout’), so the rest comes from Azazello himself. In the context of the tripping, syringe-wielding figure, these words sound like a promise from the opium – to give Azazello some sense of shelter and relief in life, which was clearly one of the principal attractions of taking this drug.
The preceding pages (pp.3-4) in this notebook contain rough poetic lines (in English) which resonate with this image too: they ache with a sense of dislocation and loneliness matched by a forlorn yet desperate desire for connection. But the final lines of the poem on p.4 seem in their emotional upswing to herald the arrival of the figure we see on the current page: ‘I open the door into new world / You get me, the door is the window on my head / I open the door into new world / and can get everything’. Suddenly the stultifying deadness of his life can be escaped through a window or door in his mind – when he walks through it, he’s reborn into a new world of infinite possibilities.
Drugs and love are twinned in the mythology of hippiedom, and here we can see them mixing together in the allusive language and the drawing itself. Perhaps it’s opium that ‘opens the door into [a] new world’ for Azazello (it certainly opened his mind to all manner of worlds, as his psychedelic artwork bears witness), but it may also have been love. Hence on p.5 we read that ‘shelter’ is ‘just a kiss away’, but positioned next to the tripping figure, one can’t help but think that the experience of drugs and love were entwined in Azazello’s emotional world.
When exploring Azazello’s drug use, it’s important to ask not simply or only what he was escaping from, but where he wanted to escape to. In these pages, we find some clues. To escape loneliness and isolation, he sought out a sense of love, understanding and connection. Opium and other substances didn’t simply numb the pain; they allowed him to access a different emotional world in which he felt free to be himself – a world he felt he understood and which could understand him. This is certainly one way to read the word ‘get’ in the lines ’You get me’ and ‘[I] can get everything’, but even if ‘get’ implies possession here, the emotional timbre of these lines clearly thrums with a desire for belonging and to be cared about.
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Image 12
In the top-left corner of the left-hand page we find a sketch which reveals something about Azazello’s relationship with drugs: a rocket-ship, blasting into outer space, but shaped like a syringe. This was the Space Age, after all, and Azazello was living in a country obsessed with beating the United States to take humanity into space. For him, though, it wasn’t the Space Race which brought him a sense of exploration and discovery.
Instead, the rocket-ship syringe was one which took him into what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called ‘the inner reaches of outer space’. For Azazello, opium took him on internal voyages into his own mind and subconscious. These were his own voyages of exploration – a search for himself and a sense of his place in the world, which is the personal, individual equivalent of humanity’s search for its place in the cosmos.
But the voyage is one ‘into the nebula’ – into something nebulous (the Russian word has similar connotations of ‘haziness’ and the unknown). Azazello’s opium journeys were enigmatic, thrilling, yet uncomfortable, and inevitably tinged with the pain of withdrawal and increasing dependence as his relationship to the drug became more abusive by the 1980s.
The warped and strange images adorning the rest of the page offer fleeting glimpses of the visions Azazello likely experienced under the influence of the drugs he took. Animals, humans and hybrid creatures (which we find throughout his notebooks) are given a fluid, disturbing air. Mind-altering substances blur the boundaries between material things, visually and conceptually, which contributes to the experience of ‘ego dissolution’ – the end of separation between ‘me’ and the rest of existence – that is so common in trip reports. Although Azazello didn’t have access to LSD and (as far as we know) the other ‘classic’ psychedelics which are most closely associated with these experiences, opium reveries similarly blur the world into fantastical or lurid waking dreams.
But, very unlike psychedelics, opiates are highly addictive (creating a dependence on them merely to feel ‘normal’) and Azazello ultimately had a much more troubled relationship with drugs than his acid-dropping Western counterparts. These rather disturbing images perhaps hint at that drug relationship souring as time went on. All the same, while these drawings may seem unsettling, they are not very different from Azazello’s general, less overtly trippy style, which has a near-constant brooding intensity to it.
The ‘darkness’ of Azazello’s drawings may well reflect his choice of drugs, at least to an extent. As far as can tell, he favoured ‘downers’ – substances which produce calmer, even dissociative states (although opiates can certainly produce experiences of euphoria during the trip experience). More likely, however, these ‘darker’ qualities are expressions of Azazello’s inner world. Taking vision-inducing drugs is more akin to holding up a mirror to our unconscious than to jumping on a rocket-ship into entirely unfamiliar worlds. The true source of the things people see and feel in altered states ultimately – or largely – comes from within. The intensity and darkness we can feel in many of his drawings no doubt reflects some of the weight and intensity of his emotional world – difficulties which, it seems clear from his more autobiographical writing, he sought to alleviate through drugs.
Although he might blast off in his opium rocket-ship into fantastical worlds, this was a journey into himself and, as a result, these were clearly not straightforwardly ‘enjoyable’ trips.