Museum of Matches

by Sasha Chavchavadze

“The following of … thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.” So Vladimir Nabokov declares in Speak, Memory, just after describing a game played with matches. When Sasha Chavchavadze learned that her Romanov-descended father, a CIA agent during the Cold War, had played a similar game, she realized that she had found the thematic “matches” she must follow to understand her early life.

Chavchavadze, a multimedia artist, began by building a body of “matchwork,” including a tabletop battlefield with massed armies of kitchen matches, and an archive of books, documents, photographs, and other relics of the Cold War. First exhibited in New York galleries, this project evolved into the Museum of Matches, a one-room Cold War museum at Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room co-founded by Chavchavadze.

Now as a book Museum of Matches makes a similar assemblage of visual and thematic forms arranged in memory-patterns: the author as a baby being wheeled through the parks of Berlin as a part of her father’s “cover”; her grandmother Nina’s stormy friendship with her cousin Anastasia and the other daughters of Czar Nicholas; President Kennedy found hiding behind the refrigerator in her house during a visit to her mother; and her grandmother’s romance at Cambridge with Vladimir Nabokov.

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