On the death of Massimo Boffa, a friend, an expert on the Soviet Union and an outstanding painter

Massimo Boffa, a man deeply in love with Russia, died last night in Milan at the age of seventy-six, surrounded by the love of Melissa and Angela, who provided constant care at the end of a life that had been private to the extreme. The death of a friend can take you by surprise, just as his life did. Like Carrère, Massimo had lived on a kolkhoz with his parents, Beppe and Laura, as a native of Cervia in Romagna who was born in Paris and grew up in Moscow during the very early years of his adolescence. Beppe was an expert on the Soviet Union, on which he had written a long and complex specialist history. Laura had been a friend of Lili Brik in her later years, in Moscow between the eras of Stalin and Khrushchev; she had thus become part of the most famous romantic and lyrical love triangle in twentieth-century literature – that between Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lili and Osip Brik – and was surrounded by paintings, icons, matryoshka dolls, shawls and Chagall-style canvases from provincial markets; she always lived with her children in that enchanting world of bold, silent colours, after returning to Rome to number 5b Via Angelo Masina, near the Vascello.

In that house we studied Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, both of us hopelessly entangled in spirit and history, our own time learnt through thought, the reality of the rational, the rationality of the real, and other generous and subtle, misunderstood vagaries uttered by Minerva’s Owl. Then parallel lives, but only up to a point. The 1960s and 1970s. The Communist Party. Terrorist violence. Repetition and simplification, experience and wisdom. Il Fogliuzzo somewhere in between. Finally, an unforgettable trip to St Petersburg with Patti Chendi, his beloved wife, to whom he has now gone to bid farewell. For a time in the 1970s, he had also come to Turin, a fascinating but needlessly mythical city where I lived as a party official. 

Readers of Il Foglio are also familiar with Massimo Boffa’s intellectual output, characterised by a Russian-Putinist style and subject matter; up to a certain point, he freely anticipated here all the arguments that subsequently led to the deployment of a powerful military force and the invasion of Ukraine by a strongman whom he regarded as the rebuilder of his beloved Russia – a nation destroyed by the oligarchs and brought to its knees by the Cold War – the ‘defensor amoris’ and not a nostalgic for Soviet tsarism. All these things are of no importance – disagreements, wrongs and rights, nonsense in short – except for those who have suffered them directly.

The important thing is that Massimo, disillusioned with journalism and politics, had in the meantime revealed himself to be an artist, and his sole true subject as a painter – and what an excellent painter he was – was the Russian and Simenonian colour of the snow: the snow was white, the snow was dirty, the bare silhouettes of the trees, the red brick, the railway lines, the blocks of flats on the outskirts of Moscow, the Soviet parks – a world of childhood for which, to depict it, he had found an excellent Milanese master; he had followed that master’s principles and conventions, resulting in beautiful oil paintings, undimmed portraits imbued with great passion. His Russia is not, as it is now called, the Radisson Royal Hotel or the Radisson Collection, as Carrère writes, ‘the menacing and grandiose essence of Stalinist Baroque reduced to the muffled banality of an American five-star hotel’; his Russia was the marvellous skyscraper full of priests, children and hideous kascha, that buckwheat porridge which was the pride of the Gostinitsa Ukraina. Massimo was handsome and slender; women were mad about him, and he always responded with a lovely smile and a wonderful sense of restraint.