Museum of Matches

Museum of Matches

by Sasha Chavchavadze

A “museum of matches”?

The “matches” began when Sasha Chavchavadze read Speak, Memory:

The following of … thematic designs through one’s life should be … the true purpose of autobiography.

So Vladimir Nabokov declares, just after describing a game played with matches by a general. When she learned that her father, a CIA agent during the Cold War, had played a similar game, Chavchavadze realized that she had found the thematic “matches” she must follow to understand her early life.

As for the “museum,” that first took form in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, in an old house where

shelves, closets, and attic exploded with books, toasters, manuscripts, wooden puzzles, diaries, rubber bands, victrolas, guest books, albums, and the odd dead mouse,

and out of an opened book spills a postcard:

On the back, dated 1917, were four practiced signatures by the Tsar’s daughters: Maria, Tatiana, Olga, and, in a child’s hand, Anastasia.

This was the house that Chavchavadze’s grandmother bought with a brooch that had been given her by her own grandmother, Queen Olga of Greece. Now the author’s, this house contains more unusual and significant relics than most American houses: memories of her grandmother Nina’s stormy friendship with her cousin Anastasia; of Edmund Wilson getting tutored in Russian; of James Jesus Angleton’s implicating David Chavchavadze, the author’s CIA-agent father, as a Soviet mole; Uncle (Grand Duke) Bimbo, socialist and member of the Académie Française, who kept a white kitten in the cell from which he was led to his execution; of a man who rescued a baby owl and another who got hit on the head by a falling radiator and went on to man the nuclear-attack switchboard during the Cuban Missile Crisis; of the tsarist night-club song “Casse Tout!” (Break everything!), composed by the author’s great-grandfather.

Chavchavadze’s museum includes a host of things that seemed broken beyond all mending and assembles them in their lovely brokenness. It has evolved through her whole career as interdisciplinary artist and has taken the forms of mixed-media paintings and assemblages, magazine articles, and a full-scale installation of a “one-room Cold War Museum” that has recently reopened in Brooklyn along with a website.

Now, in book form as a “pocket museum,” Chavchavadze has “matched” the stories and images that rhyme in her experience. She opens windows into several historical moments, especially the Cold War in which she grew up, and the views from those windows are alive and intensely felt.