Siege Artists in the Hermitage

From the memoirs of Vera Vladimirovna Miliutina

In February (1942), Andrei Andreyevich Bartashevich (who was [Boris] Zagursky’s deputy in the Leningrad branch of the Committee on Artistic Matters) came to me. He said I had been included in a group of five artists entrusted with recording “the Hermitage’s wounds”. It was proposed that we would immediately, the very next day, set about depicting: 1) the damages caused to the buildings by bombs and artillery shelling; 2) the rooms being cleaned through the efforts of those museum staff who remained in Leningrad; 3) the appearance of the halls already set in order after the evacuation of exhibits and the elimination of damage. Each artist could choose a subject according to their own wishes, any material and produce a work of any size.

The group included the painters [Vasily] Kuchumov and [Viacheslav] Pakulin, the graphic artist [Adrian] Kaplun and me – a stage designer, but I have, sadly, forgotten who the fifth was.

I was very pleased: it was the thing that I had wanted to do, although I didn’t know whether I would have the strength (admittedly, there was also the promise of an additional portion of soup in the canteen). So I started to leave home of a morning, tightly wrapped up in everything woollen that was to be found: in a quilted jacket, quilted trousers too, tightly held together by a belt. On my feet I had valenki [felt boots] with warm insoles, wrist bands on my arms and a staff in my hands. Although I had eaten exactly half my ration of bread and drunk a mug of freshly boiled water, I was unsteady on my feet. (A staff is the friend of the malnourished!) I had on my back a rucksack that contained two plywood “boards on frames”, sheets of paper and tracing paper, a box of pencils and a little lump of sugar (just in case…). I went joyfully – I was going to draw!

The splendour of the empty Hermitage, damaged in places, seemed unreal. It was at one and the same time a picture of calamity and of exceptional, unprecedented luxury! A striking, unforgettable spectacle! Marble and gilding beneath a layer of rime. The Jordan Staircase… it was frightening to tread on the stairs as they were completely covered with little pieces of some kind of film – that was the ceiling painting flaking off and showering down. The deserted halls were majestic and huge; their walls covered with crystals of hoarfrost. Previously one’s attention was arrested by the paintings, sculpture or applied art, and the art of the remarkable architects and decorators who created the palaces went barely noticed. Now only their marvellous art was left (plus traces of cruel senseless fascist barbarity everywhere)…

It was below freezing in the halls. An icy wind blew through the gaping window apertures. The open doors revealed a long series of halls running off into the distance. Familiar rooms looked unusual, even eerie. The empty frames from evacuated pictures hung in their former places. Huge chandeliers lay there that had torn away from the ceiling and crashed onto the floor. I worked slowly. It was difficult to draw. The charcoal would not immediately obey my frozen fingers, crooked from hunger, from working in the trenches, from scurvy… The tragic character of what I was seeing could, it seemed to me, be most accurately conveyed by the velvety blackness of pressed charcoal. I was also greatly aided by the very texture of the rough-grained paper that by some miracle I still had in my possession.

Only rarely would I encounter in the halls the other artists who were working on the same assignment. Viacheslav Vladimirovich Pakulin was painting his splendid canvases in oils. Most often I would see him near the windows. He once told me: “Give up your bricks! You’d do better to paint the Neva. Just look, what an expanse!” I didn’t take his advice. Adrian Vladimirovich Kaplun worked on quite small pieces of paper. He apparently wanted to use the material he gathered as the basis for a series of engravings. Vasily Nikitich Kuchumov, an excellent painter and experienced “interiorist”, had painted and drawn a lot in the palaces of Leningrad and its suburbs before the war. He had a good knowledge of their architecture, décor and fittings. I had learnt plenty studying under him in the monumental art department of the Art and Industrial Design College. Now, in such a harsh period in the history of our homeland, we were fated to meet again and work together.

Alongside Pakulin, I did once paint a watercolour View of the Winter Canal and Hermitage Theatre through a “pink” Hermitage pane of glass (while he depicted it in oils through an ordinary one). I drew the Hanging Garden at the same time as Kaplun. The Hermitage people would get out into the light there from the damp, darkish rooms, and now they were digging vegetable plots in place of Catherine’s flowerbeds (having to uproot the rose bushes to do so).

There I am depicting the Golden Drawing-Room. Lilac-coloured panes smashed to smithereens lie scattered in an amethyst layer that crunches tiresomely beneath my feet. Through the windows is the grey camouflaged dome of Saint Isaac’s; beyond them there’s already a spring-like warmth. The marble statue of a young maiden (with a finger broken off) covered with golden reflections, the intense azure blue of the walls, everything together does not have a tragic look. All the damages are temporary; everything can be put right and will, undoubtedly, be restored. And my heart grows lighter.

Still, my memory retained for ever the magical spectacle that I saw and felt: the handsome frozen and majestic halls of the Hermitage and the glorious Neva from its windows. The glowing gold springtime sunsets behind the Exchange and the Rostral Columns. It seemed to me that my native city was never as beautiful as it was then! We only needed to live until the Victory… And we did!