The Pen-and-Ink Is Mightier Than the Sword

He has never studied art, and he is more interested in the people in the world of politics than the philosophies behind them. But Konstantin Kukso, the head artist for Izvestia daily newspaper, spends nearly every day on the eighth floor of the paper's Ulitsa Tverskaya offices, churning out caricatures of Boris Yeltsin, Yegor Gaidar and the rest of the motley assortment of personalities who make up the always-colorful Russian political world.


The razor-edged art of caricature is a relative newcomer in the former Soviet Union, where poking fun at party leaders had long been enforcedly taboo. Forty-year-old Kukso, already considered one of the country's premier political cartoonists, has in fact been working as a newspaper caricaturist for just over a year.


"We never drew our politicians," said Kukso, a friendly, mustachioed man, while sitting in his spacious office. "Political caricatures existed only in the form of portraits of imperialism."


Even then, he added, cartoons usually took the form of concepts -- a rendering of Uncle Sam or a bald eagle, for example, to represent the United States -- rather than politicians themselves. Rather than being a true arm of the press, the genre was considered a tool implemented from above; "purely the propaganda of the Communist Party," Kukso said.


Cartoons of political figures slowly began to emerge during the glasnost period, starting with the eminently renderable Mikhail Gorbachev, although such drawings for the most part were completely favorable.


It was only with the fall of the Soviet Union -- and much of the chaos that went with it -- that more satirical drawings finally made their way onto the scene, Kukso said. Now political cartoons can be found regularly in a number of Russian publications, although the art form is still somewhat more mannerly and reserved than cartoons in the West.


"In Russian caricature, you have to set certain limits on how much fun you make of a person," he said. The well-aimed punches of not-so-subtle portraits of Bill Clinton in cartoons in the U.S. press, for example, would not work in similar Russian caricatures of Boris Yeltsin, where politicians are still less subject to critical public scrutiny than their Western counterparts. "In some cases, Russian caricature is more like bitter satire than humor," he added.


Kukso, a Minsk native who worked as a book illustrator before starting with Izvestia, now uses his job as a daily gauge of his personal position on Russian politics. Of all the politicians, the artist speaks most favorably of Yeltsin, and says he hopes there will be harmony in Russia soon. At the same time, he admits, such harmony can be the death knell for any gainfully-employed political cartoonist.


"On the one hand, of course I want the whole country to be calm," he said. "But on the other hand, it's political conflict in the country that provides the grounds for my work."


Still, Kukso says, he sees his role at the newspaper as being more artist than social commentator, and even if his drawings lost their political bite, they would still have a more lasting creative value. "I'm interested more in the graphic and the artistic side of the caricatures," he said. "That's more important to me than any political games."


Even his portraits of some of the most powerful of the world's policy-makers, he says, are more character study than critique -- a politician, in effect, is nothing more than a person in a unique situation.


"I can be interested at the same time in Saddam Hussein, in Arafat, in Kohl and Yeltsin and Rutskoi, in all of them," Kukso said. "But they all interest me in slightly different ways. I consider myself generally independent, just fulfilling my creative role."


Using photographs as a guide, Kukso works up to five hours on a single drawing. It is painstaking, but he refuses to rush. "When I work, I want to get pleasure out of what I do," he said with pride. "If I get pleasure from my work, then maybe someone else will, too."


A self-proclaimed workaholic, Kukso can often be found in his office on Saturday and Sunday, working overtime to get his drawings just right.


"Despite the current situation in our country, the troubles, the changes, I have to evaluate myself according to my highest standards," he said. "Every time I do my work, I always try to do my best so that my conscience is clear. Not many people do that today. What matters is my own estimation of my effort. That's what keeps me going, what supports me in difficult times."


The effort that goes into rendering the political faces of these difficult times -- the faces that Kukso spends his days capturing with his spare, sweeping pen-and-ink lines -- is one that the artist knows may ultimately go unheralded. In the ephemeral world of contemporary Russian government, the politico of the day could quickly end up a very forgettable flash in the pan.


"I understand that my work won't last forever," he said. "If I were to draw very popular people, maybe actors, for example, then they might stay interesting for something like 20 years. But politicians retain interest for a much shorter time."


Kukso, who became interested in drawing at the age of five, at one point hoped to give up his hobby for work in theater and film. But when his post-high-school studies led him to the University of Minsk's department of language and literature, he found himself unexpectedly taking back up his pen. "Everything was so excruciatingly boring," he said, "that I started drawing during the lectures."


As a young student, Kukso drew what was around him: people. At the suggestion of a classmate, he began drawing for a Minsk literary newspaper. The work pleased him so much, he said, that even when he was offered a position in the theater department he chose to study art instead. His talent and energy eventually brought him to Moscow, where he has lived with his wife and stepdaughter since 1989.


Life and work in the capital city have agreed with Kukso. Sitting in his Izvestia office and pondering the future, the artist admitted to ambition. "While I still have ideas, while I can still work and feel I can do new things, I want to spread my wings and soar," he said.