33 Monsters

The starting point for this artwork has been the novel 33 Monsters by Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal (1866–1907).The work is a young woman’s intimate diary written to her lover, Vera. Older than the narrator, Vera forces her to sit for 33 male painters who paint 33 versions of her beautiful body. The novel was first published in 1907 in St Petersburg. With its open discussion of lesbian desire, the novel has remained a milestone that is brought back to our attention by de Montesquiou’s work. Since Zinovieva-Annibal was one of the artist’s foremothers, in telling the story she is addressing the marginalization of people within a family based on their unconventional identities, a process that contributed to the wider forgetting of her work. Lydia’s self-adopted family name, Annibal, is a reference to her descendence from Abraham Petrovich Hannibal, a black man who was abducted as a child and later worked in service of Peter the Great. Although Zinovieva-Annibal belonged to the higher upper-class, the artist has observed that “her way of living, her energy, her words and the scenes that she produced are liberating”. In 2023 de Montesquiou and her collaborators republished the book 33 Monsters in English and Russian with illustrations of de Montesquiou and Varvara Toropkova. The installation produced for the exhibition consists of a tower structure as a reference to the way Lydia and her work, as well as her intellectual engagements with artists and intellectuals in Saint Petersburg, can offer emancipatory lessons from the past to contemporary society.