A letter from the Director of the Hermitage

"The Hermitage as a Russian museum"

The Hermitage is part of our shared world culture. At the same, the Hermitage is a great Russian museum with in-born, specific national traits that has become a symbol of the country. At various times in the past, reproaches have rained down on the Hermitage: not only was its name found to be foreign, but it was said to have little influence on the cultural life of Russia and to be oriented towards a Western public and Western criteria. The fact is that such accusations are wholly unjustified. The Hermitage has played a huge formative role and has been a living part of Russian culture. It has also had huge significance for defining the prestige and cultural role of Russia in the world. And what is more interesting and important is that the example of the Hermitage shows all the complexities and all the simplicity of a concept of national heritage in which "national" does not mean "local" and "heritage" does not mean "exclusive property." This museum is a typical phenomenon of Russian culture with its characteristic openness to the world, convergence with and assimilation of the most diverse traditions, transforming them into Russian tradition. Precisely this "transformation" is the key word in Russian culture, a culture that is at the same time national and universal, without borders. The Hermitage transforms Rembrandt into the Russian Rembrandt. Matisse becomes the Russian Matisse, and Scythian culture becomes the cradle of Russian culture. It transforms the Russian icon, Russian Empire style, Russian Classicism and Russian Avante-garde into worldwide phenomena. This is accomplished thanks to the amazing way monuments from different cultures are neighbors in our halls and engage in dialogue, all set in the context of Petersburg architecture and Russian imperial history. It is precisely remembrance of the great and touching human events that took place within these walls that makes this museum both a unique phenomenon and a symbol of Russian culture for us and for foreigners at the same time. This demonstrates how a universal national heritage is formed and how it functions. The Hermitage is a pleasant cure for primitive understandings of what culture is and who we are.

Mikhail Piotrovsky
Director of the State Hermitage

Table of Contents:

From the editor-in-chief

Events

Klimt, the champion
Elegy with a continuation
A misfortune has occurred in the Hermitage
New acquisitions
A turning-point season

National?

Anna Yegorova, Marina Kozlovskaya
The sarafan à la chinoise
The sarafan peasant dress, matryoshka doll, Gzhel ceramics and other archetypal Russian accessories are purely and simply imports

Vadim Bass
Take-away architechture
Architecture as the visiting card of a nation

Olga Roginskaya, Yan Levchenko
Theater of substance
Of all theaters in Russia, the main one is - Lithuanian

Alexander Stepanov
Nostalgia
The followers of nationalistic ideology in Russia today are nostalgic not for the country’s early secular portrait painting, the parsuna, nor for matryoshka dolls or the early 20th century painter Shishkin. Instead they dote on Soviet art, which was essentially anti-national.

National: point five

Alexander Zholkovsky
"You wouldn’t be Jewish, would you?"

Lev Masiel Sanchez
Nationality by decimals

National: exhibitions

Anna Tolstova
The Age of Menzel. Drawings by 19th Century German Masters

Rudy Fuchs
Willem de Kooning

Photo session

Vadim Bass, Yuri Molodkovets
A Russian Museum

Iconography

Arkady Ippolitov
The first man
Whom would you prefer to recognize as your ancestor - a nameless and defenseless creation of Prometheus, the Indian Purusha, the Biblical Adam or Darwin’s ape?

Portrait

Natalya Semenova
Tretyakov. An attempt at a scenario
Over time people have forgotten that the Tretyakov Gallery arose thanks to the efforts of a flesh-and-blood person, although he may have seemed ethereal - so very ideal was Pavel Tretyakov

Collection

Maria Haltunen
Ladies and hooligans
Erotic drawings by Sergey Eisenshtein

.doc

exhibitions
books
concert

Forecast

Announcements of exhibitions by Russian and foreign museums

My Hermitage

Vitaly Komar

Contact information:
Contact person: Maria Berntseva
Director of Marketing
E-mail: berntseva@sptimes.ru
Telephone: +7 812 325 60 80

Hermitage Magazine, Autumn Issue, 2006 No. 4