Russian vision of new reality

work has been on show and for sale at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh,

during the Festival in an exhibition entitled Russian Art: The New

Reality.

The Gushunins' top-floor suburban apartment has a balcony-view over

the vast sprawl of Moscow and dacha-style wooden houses nestling in

gardens below like forgotten survivors among street after street of

apartment blocks. Stalin's grotesque skyscraper blocks, his architects'

attempts to emulate New York, pierce the distant view.

Here, with Tanya's help, Nikita Gushunin reconstructs astonishing

paper collages and metal sculptures from thousands of pieces, often

collected at the Ismailova Market. To get there we make three changes in

bustling, vast, marble-lined underground stations.

Economic chaos in the guise of Nomenklatura Privitization rules this

transitional phase. Gushinin reminds me, gently, that the patchwork

quilt he helped me to bargain for cost, at #12, twice the monthly salary

of a doctor. Hundreds of stalls skirt the edges of the central market

where swarthy dealers from middle-Asia attend a richly patterned field

of oriental carpets. The Gushunins eagerly scan the stalls for

flat-topped nails, old watches, cuff-links and other bits which Gushinin

transforms into inspirational works of art like Big Fish and Fly on the

Wall, now at the Traverse.

''Of course you must see Red Square.'' Of course; it has a fairytale

look tonight under an opaline sky which emphasises the multi-coloured

domes of St Basil's Cathedral. ''Instead of the usual military parade we

had cancan dancers this year!''

We are en route between the studios of Boris Belski and Olga Fradkini

who, with Pavel Makov, worked at the Glasgow Print Studio workshop last

year. We buy a bottle of champagne from a line-up of entrepreneurial

street vendors selling anything from shoes to cigarettes.

''Our first self-employed business people.'' At the other end of the

scale is the grabbing, looting and auctioning of state-owned property

for and by the former elite. ''Whatever corruption is possible we have

it here,'' someone says as we grope our way in total darkness up

tenement stairs to Fradkini's studio. She feels apologetic: ''I am

sorry, but we can't buy light-bulbs now.''

Fradkini grew up in land-locked Moscow, now spread under a full moon

beyond the window of her spacious studio, so it is surprising to find a

collection of shells on her table and to discover that images of the sea

dominate her work: sea weed, stones, shells, feathers, and shifting

tides. A treasured momento, a book of Scottish landscape photographs,

prompts a toast to the success of the Edinburgh exhibitions.

Waiting in Boris Belski's nearby, poet Misha in cap, hodden clothing,

and metal-rimmed spectacles (like Pierre from War and Peace) establishes

his credentials in a challenging discussion of one of his favourite

poets, Robert Burns.

He and Belski are collaborating on a limited edition of poems and

prints (several at the Traverse) depicting the Battleship Potemkin. ''A

telling episode in our country's history,'' says Belski, whose work

transforms military and industrial images into poetic warnings against

war and human roboticism.

The phone rings. It is Pavel Makov from the Ukraine. The receiver is

handed round. He wants to speak to everyone. I tell him how much I

admire the soft-line etchings being shown in Edinburgh including the

masterly Morning which he produced in Glasgow last year.

A last stop. The studio of Leonid Tishkov, the exuberant director of

Dablus Press whose extraordinary art books are each a limited edition

adventure. Something he said gave the title for this exhibition: ''We

must dream awake a new reality and a new sky; a vision with just that

shade of nightmare necessary for the purification of the human soul, so

that we can see ourselves where we belong: in the perspective of the

galaxy.''