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Golden Section: The Newspaper
of the Hermitage Student Club In May 2005 the Hermitage Student Club released the last issue of its newspaper Golden Section (N3(8)2005) for this academic year. The production team of the newspaper and the entire Club are going on vacation, but in October plan to treat readers to notes on their summer impressions, new articles and reviews. This final spring issue draws conclusions from the year gone by. On 30 April the Section on "The Artist and the Poet" had its final session of the year 2004-2005. The students were dressed up in apparel reminiscent of Classical Antiquity and performed a musical and poetic composition entitled The Tree of Life, which brought together verses by poets including Ovid, Gumilev, Tsvetaeva, Aronzon, Verlain, Stanchev and Brodsky. The guest of the evening was the modern Petersburg poet Valery Chereshnya, who took part in the presentation. He read verses he composed at various times in the past. All of this is described in an article on the second page of the newspaper. The newspaper column entitled "Profession" has another interesting interview, this time with the Artistic Director of the Hermitage Music Academy, composer Sergey Nikolaevich Yevtushenko. He speaks about the history of the Academy’s creation, about his views on life and art. According to Yevtushenko: "The Hermitage Music Academy is a dream. For it to exist at all, you have to walk through fire and experience humiliation and misunderstandings. However, once we passed through all this, we created what we now have. This is surely the joy of it all…" Page two gives us a story about a trip taken by the section “The Artist and the Poet” to the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, where the students became acquainted not only with its history but also with how porcelain was developed in general. Porcelain objects are not merely tableware, but include as well statuettes of every variety, decorative plates that are made in presses, and even paintings, copies of sculptures and doors. The original meaning of the word "porcelain," or "farfor" as it is called in Russian, is "the rarity without a name." An article about the Hermitage exhibition of manuscripts transports us
to that miraculous world of handwritten books. As the author tells us:
"Today we are used to seeing books around all around us and we take
their existence for granted, while in the 8th - 12th centuries books were
a rarity. The binding, the text, and the illustrations were all done by
hand in special workshops called a scriptorium. For a very long time this
art was possessed only by monasteries and a handful of court ateliers,
such as the workshops of Charlemagne. Books are objects which we experience
one on one. They have no tolerance for noise and fuss. In the Middle Ages,
books were holy objects, bearing the words of Divine Truth and knowledge.
This is the context which has been recreated at the exhibition. The light
in the hall has been dimmed and the pages of the books in the showcases
have been illuminated, so that the visitor wants to spend some time looking
at each one. To an onlooker, it seems as though this could be an exhibition
of fine jewelry." |
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Copyright © 2006 State Hermitage Museum |
