ART REVIEW : Notes From the Soviet Art Underground : ‘Keepers of the Flame’ at Fisher Gallery spotlights 25 ‘unofficial’ artists from pre-<i> glasnost</i> Leningrad.

Russian literature reflects a belief that suffering redeems the soul, ennobles the spirit and improves one’s art. Dostoevski believed it, so did Tolstoy. If you are stuck being miserable, it’s comforting to hope that that is at least good for something.

By now, everybody knows that nonconformist artists in the Soviet Union had a very bad time until glasnost set them free. If they didn’t qualify for membership in the official artist’s union they were non-persons, often obliged to find work as janitors, dishwashers and the like. They made their art beyond the pale and were not allowed to exhibit publicly. Everybody remembers the notorious 1975 incident in which the KGB bulldozed an outdoor show of underground art.

Since the Cold War thawed, an increasing number of exhibitions devoted to this once-proscribed work have trickled into the West. The latest is “Keepers of the Flame” a show of 25 “unofficial” artists from Leningrad. Organized by Selma Holo, director of USC’s Fisher Gallery, it remains on view there to Jan. 19 after which it will travel to three other college galleries.

Holo insists that this work can only be understood in the grim context in which it was made, so the foyer gallery introduces four paintings acceptable to communist taste. There are frequently copied portraits of Lenin and Stalin and an original by Ivan Markov depicting a boy denouncing his father as a spy. Predictably dreary bureaucratic art, it symbolizes the forces that caused suffering to artists who insisted on doing their own thing.

One would have to have a heart of granite not to admire their bravery and endurance. It would require extraordinary cynicism not to feel contempt for communist officialdom. First, it created circumstances designed to drive its artists to distraction, then accused them of being crazy. There is no doubt they suffered. One hopes all their travail was good for their souls because it certainly did not do much for their art.

Just what is going on here?

By now the American audience is not entirely unfamiliar with this sort of work. Its most famous practitioners are the emigre art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid . We have come to an admiring affection for their satires on Socialist Realism and funky sympathy for the little guy on both sides of the globe. We know about the extraordinary transcendence of an artist like Ilya Kabakov .

Exhibitions in Tacoma and San Francisco taught us to appreciate Soviet underground art on its own terms. It was a form of private expression shared mainly with colleagues, friends and family. Trying desperately to keep up with Western art trends, it nonetheless comes across as wry, woolly and heartfelt. If a small extra measure of sentiment must be called up to like it, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.

The work in “Keepers of the Flame” is another matter. Aside from pictures incorporating words in Cyrillic letters, the art resembles nothing so much as what L.A. viewers used to see in the old annual amateur-cum-professional art free-for-alls at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park.

There are touching efforts by the likes of Marta Volkova and Gennadii Ustugov but they are more interesting as psychological documents than as art.

Expressionism abounds as in Alexander Arefiev’s “The Hanged.” The pictures caused him trouble because of subject matter that was distasteful to a leadership that wanted the communist world seen as happy and productive. Artistically, however, the pictures are innocuous. Some of Max Beckmann’s muscular power lingers in Vladislav Afonichev’s “Cain and Abel” but it is diagrammatic and undeveloped. The slickest work trys to hang on to the spirit of the original Russian avant-garde but the vigorous, rigorous style is romanticized. Sergei Kovalsky’s “Danger Zone” incorporates a big arrow pointing to a plastic bubble. Inside, a scrap of paper bears the word designating what the artist regards as the greatest present danger. At the moment the word is perestroika . That’s not so unusual. Other Soviet artists have expressed the fear that the opening to the West will expose their once-private work to corrupting commercialism. Oddly enough, there is art here that already looks commercialized.

The truth is that when we have to start asking questions about artistic motivation, we are in trouble. What we have here is work that is not as good as it should be. Maybe that’s because it was produced in an oppressive society. But we also have examples of similarly muddled art from our own, less constrained culture.

These Leningrad artists kept the flame of individualism alive. Suffering bought most of them survival, but now they have to grapple with the problems of freedom. Freedom is is not easy either. It’s just the most desirable form of suffering.