On 23 November 2023, the Atrium of the General Staff building became the arena for the intellectual game PROVostok that was organized jointly with the Diaghilev P.S. International Arts Festival. The quiz was broadcast live on the website and in the social networks of the Saint Petersburg TV channel.
Three teams took part under collective nicknames – researchers and heads of museums (“Susanna and the Elders”: Susanna Gorodetskaya, Lia Chechik, Yevgeny Cherlionok, Liudmila Davudova, Vasily Uspensky, Olga Krayeva and Anna Sirro); figures from the arts (“Drunken Sakura”: Darya Pavlenko, Sergei Riabinkin, Boris Smolkin, Irina Mazurkevich, Natalia Severina, Alexander Perepelkin and Stanislav Yershov) and students from leading Saint Petersburg institutions of higher education (“Drunken Vishnu”: Darya Starkova, Viacheslav Kuzmin, Polia Tamraleyeva, Sergei Gazetov, Maria Serba, Anna Perevozchikova and Anatasia Oleya).
The State Hermitage’s Orientalists and the creators of the Diaghilev P.S. festival had prepared twenty questions, half of which related to items in the collection of the Oriental Department, while the other half concerned links between ballet, especially Russian ballet, and the world of the East.
After the first round, Drunken Sakura took the lead, being the only team to correctly answer the question about a ballet master exceptionally well-versed in mutinous matters – Antoine-Titus, who staged La Révolte au sérail at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre (Nicholas I).
The gaps between rounds were enhanced with musical interludes. Yekaterina Sergeyeva, a soloist of the Mariinsky Theatre, accompanied on the piano by Yana Zubova performed Delilah’s aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson and Delilah, while Sergei Gasanov and Yury Lebedev played the tune Twinkling Stars on two rare Eastern instruments – the saz and the goblet drum.
In the second round, it was the students who distinguished themselves first, identifying most precisely the resemblance between different depictions of animals in Islamic art (“killing” connected with the sin of idolatry), but then only the representatives of art could correctly name the animal with which Anna Pavlova and Mathilda Kschessinska danced in the ballet La Bayadère (an elephant).
Before the start of the third round, Sergei Gasanov (saz) and Yury Lebedev (goblet drum) played the Dance of the Dervishes, and the Atrium resounded to the Song of the Indian Guest, an aria from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Sadko performed by Mariinsky Theatre soloist Alexander Trofimov, accompanied by Yana Zubova.
In the third round, the museum team showed their class, correctly answering the question from Honoured Artist of the RF Yelizaveta Boyarskaya about why the ballet Lalla Rookh was not staged in Russia in the mid-19th century. (Lalla Rookh was a nickname of Nicholas I’s wife, Alexandra Feodorovna; the character could not be portrayed on the stage of an imperial theatre by any ordinary ballerina.)
All three teams failed to answer a couple of questions. They took the udu earthenware drum with an additional opening in the side that the Igbo and Hausa peoples of Nigeria use in rituals of communication with ancestors for a urn for remains or a resonator that was buried in the ground during the said ritual. Also unsolved was the mystery of the marks on the front side of a 17th-century Iranian plate that were left by a stand during its firing.
After twenty questions, the teams of museum workers and representatives of art were tied on 12 points each, while the students were just one correct answer short of that number. Before the deciding question, posed by Zenit football club half-back Honoured Master of Sport Alexander Yerokhin, each of the teams nominated one of their number. The question referred to the use of a “Turkish silk or woollen article with a vertical opening intended for men”. First to give the correct answer (a barber’s salon cape) was Darya Pavlenko from the representatives of art. The Mariinsky Theatre prima ballerina received a ball bearing the footballer’s autograph, and her team, Drunken Sakura, was awarded victory in the PROVostok intellectual game.
All the participants in the game received souvenir gifts from the State Hermitage and the Diaghilev P.S. International Arts Festival.
The intellectual quiz was the final event of the marathon “PROVostok/The Hermitage’s Oriental Collections” that began on 9 November. It included numerous lectures by museum researchers, meetings with the curators within the displays and master classes that introduced those participating to the Oriental Department’s extremely rich collections.
We thank the Saint Petersburg TV channel for its support
