Creative workshops in Vitebsk in the basements of houses 15 and 17 on Zhestkova Street, which since the mid-1970s have become a refuge and a place of power for a galaxy of young artists.

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• Selected dates:

• Mid 80s

• The workshops on Zhestkov Street existed until the mid-80s and were closed due to the deteriorating political situation and the beginning of the "era of stagnation".

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The first chapter of Alexander Malei's book "Vitebsk "Square": An Artistic Study of the Nonconformist Movement of Artists in Vitebsk and Minsk (1987–2000)" is devoted to recollections of the workshops. Fragments about the workshop:

"Sometimes several artists worked in the same workshop. In ours, for example, with Slepov, Valery Schastny, Nikolai Dundin and Ivan Veremyev were painting at the same time. I painted watercolors, and Alexander Slepov, a sculptor and woodcarver, crowned the creative process with deafening blows of a mallet on a cutter "We argued fiercely and certainly wanted to become only great artists. An exclamation, like a battle cry: "Give-n-ne-shee!!!" burst out of the basements so that birds fell from the trees. We were young, self-confident and ready to fight to the death with those who interfered with the development of art. "

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"The cellars at 15 Zhestkova very quickly became a gathering place for young artists. And in any get-together there is a central platform where the main action takes place. In the Zhestkov cellars, this platform was the workshop of Alexander Dosuzhev

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In the kitchen, they furiously "let off steam" in disputes about politics, literature, art and simple philistine life. This is the kind of "kitchen" that Dosuzhev's workshop was. Not only young artists gathered here, but also actors, such as Nikolai Tishechkin, Arkady Kuleshov, Zhenya Shipilo, Valentin Tsvetkov, Valeria Voichenko. Felix Gumen and Alexander Solovyov were also frequent guests. Dosuzhev almost never had "black booze", even when one of the artists went overboard. These were real bohemian evenings, the unspoken condition of which was communication on a certain topic.

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Around the workshop of Dosuzhev, in the cellars of Zhestkov, a future cohort of artists was formed, who determined the art of Vitebsk at the end of the 20th century, the perestroika and post-perestroika period with their work.

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" From time to time, projects of active social action arose. Dosuzhev himself, for example, dreamed of organizing an exhibition on a fence: choosing a decent fence in the city and hanging his works on it. The desire for such actions was dictated by a rigid system of official exhibition committees and artistic councils.

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By the way, the exhibition on the fence did not take place, just as other desperate projects did not take place. I think the main reason was that the time we lived in seemed to last forever. We thought that we ourselves and our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would never see changes in society, so our efforts seemed empty and useless."

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"The second hangout point in the same house was our workshop with A. Slepov. Here, thanks to I. Veremyev, more serious topics were discussed not only in social terms, but also in terms of art. We tried to define, first of all, what art is. The answer to this question for us lay more in the plane of society than art itself.

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• "We, as artists in the Zhestkov period, hardly represented the underground in the classical sense of the word, although we worked in basements. Most likely, this was a manifestation of dissent as a spiritual opposition to the System. Our spirit and worldview were formed in the Zhestkov basements. It was in the basements that the backbone of a team that, with its creativity and social activities at the turn of the century, was able to restore the broken connection of times in the culture and art of their city.