Russia’s oldest university – Saint Petersburg State University – has reached the age of 300. Academician Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, Dean of the Oriental Faculty of Saint Petersburg State University, told the magazine Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn’ [International Life] about present-day students, oriental studies, museum practices and world culture.
– Mikhail Borisovich, at present we have to hear a lot about the “cancellation” of Russian culture. We are not answering in kind. Is it indeed at all possible to cancel culture, especially Russian culture?
– I think that people have got everything mixed up here – that’s why we are not answering and there is nothing to answer. There are two processes: firstly, there is the process of cancelling Russia, not Russian culture. Russian culture is wonderfully present everywhere. Russian athletes are at the Olympics, but Russia is not. There is an attempt to cancel Russia as a state, to create a kind of blockade in the information sphere, when Russia seemingly does not exist. Russian culture exists; Russian people exist; Tchaikovsky is not going anywhere. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is more serious: now there is a general process underway of cancelling culture per se. Culture is being washed out of the public realm, as it were; its level is declining; culture is not especially needed. Everything that we consider to be culture is beginning to be assigned to other things. For example, pushing the idea of cancelling museums: “Museums are keepers of stolen goods. They keep what was not created for them.” Then, based on this, there is, on the one hand, the demand for restitution within the country is (here the Orthodox Church takes the lead, with the mutual pretentions of museums coming next, the regions against the central museums, descendants of private owners, and so on). On the other hand, there is a worldwide issue that everything in universal museums is stolen booty. Guides say that; people write that. This is part specifically of the cancellation of culture, because museums are one of the highest categories of culture. It is an analysis of what is created by humans for the preservation of humanity’s memory.
Culture exists among each people, but at the same time (and much is being said about this now), culture should and can only exist as a united world culture. And that is a practical thing, very much so. Culture cannot be cancelled. Russian culture cannot be cancelled, not because it is good, but because it is a part of world culture. It is not possible to cancel Russia, although people are trying, and by no means possible to cancel Russian culture – Tchaikovsky and Kandinsky belong to world culture. And when the Hermitage in Amsterdam gets shut down for political reasons, the first exhibition to be held in the new institution that appears is of Kandinsky. That is again Russia.
Nowadays there is constant talk of decolonization, a re-examination of established cultural practice. All of this means destruction of the world culture that has been created. Let me repeat, though – culture should not be cancelled, because it belongs to the world. If a culture is yours alone, then you can readily destroy it. And people have. Muslim radicals destroyed their own culture at Palmyra; we destroyed churches; Christian culture destroyed that of Classical Antiquity. It is an existing process, but one which needs to be guarded against. We need to preserve things as part of world culture. That is what this is really about. Altogether, in the multipolar world that we are creating, which is founded upon the sovereignty of the cultures of different countries, while proclaiming sovereignty, we need at the same time to find mechanisms for those sovereign cultures to function as part of world culture. One of those mechanisms is museums.
Incidentally, it is no coincidence that in the world that has recently emerged with new strength and is called the East they are creating universal museums, such as the well-known Louvre in Abu Dhabi. Now one is being created in Saudi Arabia. Their creation follows the example of the Hermitage. When Catherine the Great established the Hermitage and brought paintings to the back of beyond, there were the same kind of moral objections in Europe as over the Louvre Abu Dhabi – “why take them to savages?” Universal museums are an understanding that all cultures are a part of a single whole, and that they are in a kind of dialogue. That is what the museum exists for, and what, in point of fact, oriental studies exist for.
– People are indeed attempting to cancel Russia. And that is probably to a large extent bound up with the degradation of the West’s political elite, which many are now talking about. Has this affected museum affairs?
– It has not affected museums, but it has touched on museum affairs as part of the general state of culture. In culture in the West there is a middle stratum that for the past twenty years has only concerned itself with bringing in money. This is the mid-level cultural administrators, not the ones at the top. Down below, people labour away who are truly dedicated to culture, but people come into the middle stratum with an entirely different background – making money, management through the assessment of profitability and that sort of thing. They have not had the time to attain a high cultural level. That’s lacking and so there is no understanding of what ought not to be done for culture, because it ought not to be done at all. Some of them laugh when it’s put that way, but they’re wrong to do so, because that “ought not to be done ever” is culture.
– I am asking more specifically with regard to one of the most notorious museum stories of recent years – that of the so-called Scythian Collection which never has come back to the Crimean museums from Europe, having been effectively stolen from the Crimea.
– That is an example of an absolute failure to understand what is actually going on. Something more serious is going on.
First of all, there is no “Scythian Collection”. Three or four pieces in it are Scythian. That is just a fine slogan – “Scythians, gold” – to paint the background. It is the collections of Crimean museums. That is a completely different matter. They were detained and not returned to the museums. Here a question of principle arises: to whom do museum collections belong – to the museum or to the state? If it’s the state, then they belonged to the state of Ukraine. They are registered in the museum fund of the state of Ukraine. If it’s the museums, then they belong to the museums. The agreement with the Dutch side was signed by the museums. They were given a guarantee of return, but the things were exported through customs with the permission of the Ukrainian state. Now they are a part of the state museum fund of Russia.
We also have a Russian museum fund, and museums are not the owners of their collections. The state can take them away at any moment and pass them on somewhere else. We have now restored important amendments to our legislation stating that museum collections are indivisible. That is a matter of principle. The fact that the lawyers were not able to win them back is a different matter. Yes, a theft did take place, but they stole from the museums.
There are a fair number of similar situations in the world. Who is the proprietor of a museum? It might be trustees, as in the case of the British Museum. They are the owners of its items, entrusted with them by the state. There are private museums. That is a complicated business and in different cases the matter is resolved in different ways. The people of the Crimea had their collections stolen from them – that’s the correct way to put it. But whether they were stolen from Russia is another question. Russia’s right to those collections is not recognized by the international court, because the reunion of the Crimea with Russia is not recognized.
The emotion is fine, but this needs to be gone into, to be opposed in a serious manner: in what way is it possible to take things out of museums, what guarantees are there that they will come back. That is a serious question not only of international law, but also of international practice.
– But after that story, and also due to the problems with the return of Russian museum’s paintings from exhibitions in France, our exhibition activities in the West have effectively ceased.
– By the way, exchanges with museums in the United States already came to an end 20 years ago, because the USA refused to provide exhibitions with the guarantees that we requested. Knowing about the worsening situation – and people in museums have seen it for a long time – the Ministry of Culture and museums introduced a very firm system of guarantees for the return of things. The sense of them was that the organs of state administration (not parliaments) should give firm guarantees that items would be returned on schedule, The USA refused to do so, alluding to their having “good” law that can be used to recover things if they do get confiscated.
Europe did accept such guarantees. They are quite rigid, right down to things being returned even if there are law suits of any kind. Everything was quite well thought through. Those guarantees worked, when the situation arose with our exhibitions in Europe after the start of the Ukrainian affair. It was not easy. We had to insist, demand intervention at the highest level, but everything was set down on paper, and it was a matter of honour for those who were hosting the exhibitions. They complied fully. Thank goodness, too, that it was private companies hosting us and not state bodies. The European Union even introduced special instructions that museum items could travel [to Russia – Editor’s note] because there were guarantees.
That is an indication that in general everything is fraught with danger – and not only for us. All over there are endless arguments about what belongs to whom. That also includes questions of restitution. For example, disputed items cannot travel anywhere outside of Britain or America, because law suits will be filed, by private individuals as well. Or else, let’s say, an exhibition of Egyptian items from Germany arrives somewhere else – the Egyptian government might advance a legal claim. Suits do indeed get filed. I am not talking about wartime time now. There are a great many people claiming ownership of art because intellectual property rights got invented. There never used to be rights of that sort.
Just now, the pattern of relations is such that museum items are in danger. The problems remain unsolved, so exhibition activity at the moment is declining. Under present conditions it may well be better not to take things anywhere. The fever of endless exhibitions that engulfed the world in the past 20 years meant some sort of danger all the time. In order for that to be appreciated more, it may be necessary to hold exhibitions more selectively.
– On the other hand, the opportunity has probably now arisen to show more to our own people?
– It varies. A million people will come to the Hermitage for a major exhibition, but fewer in the Hermitage “satellites”.
We have many Hermitage centres. We take amazing exhibitions to them each six months. Our own folk see everything, but they are fairly uninquisitive. People are busy with their own affairs. Now, though, fresh visitors are gradually coming in, new generations, people for whom this is not a fashionable obligation, as it used to be, but something genuinely interesting.
The main thing is to understand that all of this belongs to the world. We just need to show it more broadly to everyone, to make more use of new technologies and see to it that people are prepared. We really like the present-day visitors to the Hermitage. You can tell by their eyes that they have come prepared. These are people who know how to buy tickets through the Internet and hence visit the Internet, and when they come to the museum they do not trot around following the guide’s little flag, and they aren’t there just to tick a box. By the way they look, you can tell that they have seen parts of the wider world and that means that they have also prepared for their visit to the Hermitage. They will certainly then go on the Internet and take another look at what they have seen with their own eyes.
– It’s probably indeed true that we are lacking an exhibition culture, because there is hardly anyone in the splendid display in the General Staff building. Everyone heads for the main complex.
– In the General Staff building there’s a completely new museum setting, a different display. It’s very spacious there – a good place to walk, to stroll around. There you need to know what you are doing. While people complain about finding their way around here, over there it certainly is difficult to navigate, because there are bigger spaces. You get a different category of the public there – people who are prepared, who possess a certain level of culture. There are some remarkable spaces, but they do require a certain amount of preparation. When Matisse was hanging here, on the top floor, everyone would go anyway, to see Matisse as well. Now, though, he is hanging over there. We have CCTV in the Raphael and Matisse halls, and, when it comes to level of interest, you can see how many people visit the Matisse hall, although Matisse’s Dance is a generally acknowledged world-ranking masterpiece. It is among the top five Hermitage paintings.
Someone wrote in the social media, quote “that can’t be right, I’ll never believe” that the main type of visitor in the General Staff building is under 35. We are indeed getting many visitors under 35 now – they come on their own, as couples, with children.
The General Staff building is a laboratory of museum art. There is modern art there and also the guards, but Russian military tradition demands a special kind of attention and approach. You need to have a taste for it. You cannot simply go there and say you have spent time where the tsars once did. We have trouble with people coming to the General Staff building because the tsars are there, and if we do not tell things properly then they do not always come away with the right idea.
That is a function of the Hermitage – we nurture and educate. Also over the past 20 years we have accustomed people to emperors and tsars, and we do get a lot of protests on that score as well. They write that we are making a show of the emperors, while they exploited the miserable people. That social stratum has come crawling out in the West, but it also exists with us. We teach, explain what Russia is, what emperors are, what culture is, what the museum is as a product of Russian history and culture, then further, through that, what world culture is as well. I like, and am constantly repeating, that the Hermitage is an encyclopaedia of world culture written in Russian.
– Is there any kind of monitoring of visitors? What is the proportion of young people who come not as part of a group, often as a group assignment, but as an individual, out of personal interest?
– We have sociologists and they study everything thoroughly. The one thing we do not count is how many visitors are from Russia and how many are foreigners. Although we do investigate whether they are locals or from outside Saint Petersburg. For us that is important – the number of the latter is increasing.
By age, there is Generation Z, Generation Y. There are increasing numbers, as I said, of people coming on their own, as couples, with children. That is the main characteristic of our present-day public. Less of those who come with tourist groups to tick a box, although the tourist groups too have changed somewhat, become more intellectual in appearance.
– You spoke earlier about a complex system of relations between museums and states, but are relations working out all right with colleagues in the West?
– Nothing is all right. Now the Soviet Union has shifted to the West – just as we used to have and, God forbid, may have again a ban on any sort of contact without ten authorizations, that is what things are like there now. There is a ban on official contacts by all official institutions with state institutions of the Russian Federation.
There are human-level contacts: we correspond regularly. People may travel here on their own. And they do, so as to study in libraries and the like, but it’s nothing like it was in the past 15 years. Cut off – and to a considerable extent the occasion for that was found by the West, because essentially everyone has grown a bit sick of us. A new generation of museum people appeared there with their eyes on money and PR – and they don’t want to be seen next to large Russia-based companies that buy shares in petroleum producers and become forces in the world, just as they are not very comfortable with Russian museums that tell full blast about Russian history, the imperial history of Russia. There people write about a Hermitage that “whitewashes” Russia’s imperial history. We do indeed tell about the emperors and empresses from morn to night. That got on some people’s nerves. They have their own point of view, believing that the most important thing is advancing a socio-political agenda. We have just created a Frans Snyders exhibition. If we had held it in Amsterdam, given the present intellectual situation in the West, we would have been obliged to say that all that wealth in Flanders with its still life paintings conceals the terrible exploitation of the unfortunates in the colonies. There would be a protest because you simply have to exhibit some or other black people. It would be compulsory to state that the Age of Discovery was also the start of colonialism, forgetting that the very word colonialism was invented in Europe. I think that there would be protests on account of the drawings from Peter the Great’s time made on parchment (that being the skin of a unborn calf, very fine). There would be protests by ecologists.
This world has reshaped itself a little, and in this world that sort of narrative on our part about Russia (and all our exhibitions are a narrative about Russia, about its place in the world) would no longer entirely have fitted into the agenda that is beginning to form in society. The situation with Ukraine is a pretext. because we had become bothersome – we are too special, too good and so immediately, with the slightest cause, you get to hear “The Hermitage preaches imperialism!”
Our people need to know this too – these are not sweet treats that we are giving to others. The Hermitage exhibitions are a mighty soft power, demonstrating this and that, and that is why people have started rejecting it.
- A few years ago, a turn to the East was proclaimed. Have we really turned to the East?
- There is no turn to the East with us. We don’t need a turn to the East. We are intelligent people, a great country. The East is present in the world, just as the West was present. It has always been present in the Hermitage too, so we don’t need to turn anywhere – come and we will explain to you what the East is. And that is necessary. The Hermitage has new displays about the East, and our centres are hosting an exhibition called “Five Symbols of Chinese Good Fortune”, which explains what the East is because many people lack the cultural level to understand it.
The main thing is that there is no turn. It’s simply that now something has become clear to many which has always been obvious – it is a big world and there are equally different cultures in it. The cultures of the East are just as remarkable and important as the cultures of the West. While museums in the countries of the East are now even better, because new museums are being created there, like the Louvre Abu Dhabi I already mentioned. Contemporary art is being collected better there too, and in China really remarkable museums are opening practically every day. Plus all the latest technologies are there. When exhibitions of contemporary art take place nowadays in the West, in America, just look who is being exhibited – Chinese, Korean, Japanese artists. They’ve started exhibiting Arab artists, but considerably fewer of their own already. That is the reality – the world is diverse and it should be built upon the sovereignty of different cultures. They are all united. That’s the first thing. The second is that that they are sovereign. That’s multipolarity. We should just smarten up a bit and grasp that this is as important as economics and politics. That’s the reason for the existence of the Oriental Faculty, which explains what the East is and what oriental studies are.
That’s why the Hermitage exists too. We are always prepared for rich Russian culture being more and more in need of knowledge about the East.
–Many Hermitage directors, yourself included, have been orientalists. How do you explain that phenomenon?
– Hermitage directors should always be scholars. That principle sets us apart from many other museums. There are few museums where it is a strict principle. For European ones it is, in American ones there are mainly managers and public educators. Ours is a special museums – in the Hermitage all the directors have always been scholars, and not only orientalists, but academicians as well.
The Hermitage is a museum of world culture. It’s important to stress that, because people will consider it at one moment a picture gallery, at another the palace of the Russian emperors. Both things are true, but in actual fact this is one of the few greatest museums that tell about world culture and bring those cultures together in a dialogue. The theory of that dialogue is built upon the field of learning known as oriental studies, because an orientalist always studies the East along with European culture. He lives in two cultures and understands that there should be the one thing and the other. If you simply study Russian history, then you don’t care a jot about anything else in the world. An orientalist, though, cannot take that attitude in principle because he knows that there are more cultures than one.
It's the same with the study of the West – there one-side Eurocentrism is overcome by scholarly means, by oriental studies, by an understanding of eastern cultures and their evolution. Such is the character of oriental studies – it’s a synthetic field of learning that essentially is about how to understand one another. The East is a conventional term. The East is others. And oriental studies is learning about how to understand others, how to study the culture of other peoples from within one’s own culture and how to construct a dialogue so as to understand one another. That lies at the basis of the museum.
Nowadays there is talk of colonialism, of fighting its legacy. In Soviet Russia, that happened 100 years ago, in the 1920s, when we declared our own country a “prison of peoples”. After which, decolonization began, only it was not like in the West now, when they just hysterically pull down some statues, daub filth on monuments to Voltaire, and so on. With us, it took place through raising peoples up, through telling how great the heritage is of peoples who were colonized to a greater or lesser extent, subjugated by Russia or not by Russia. Celebrations of Nizami, of Navoi, began. If it had not started at that time, if there had not been those conferences during the siege [on 19 October 1941, the 800th anniversary of the birth of Nizami Ganjavi was celebrated in besieged Leningrad on the initiative of Hermitage Director Iosif Orbeli – Editor’s note], there would not now be the great Nizami, who is known all over the world. There was a Congress on Iranian art, which was organized by the director of the Hermitage, Academician Iosif Orbeli. All this was a powerful elevating movement, a sort of compensation to these peoples through the dialogue of cultures. Further, it contributed greatly to the development of national consciousness. It ended with the break-up of the Soviet Union, but that had to happen at some point because people's ethnic and cultural consciousness was growing. When they see their own cultural heritage in museums alongside the great cultural heritage of Europe and Classical Antiquity, they realize how great their own heritage is.
After that, intellectual property begins – ”Why is that here and not where I live?”. That’s a separate discussion.
– You are not only Director of the Hermitage, but also Dean of the Oriental Faculty at Saint Petersburg State University, which produces orientalists. Have there been changes in recent years is the quality of teaching and the quality of entrants compared to when you were a student?
– We were better, of course [laughing]. We had hardly any girls. Very few got accepted because the orientation was towards work abroad, the military, politics. Now there are wonderful girls. All the students are wonderful, excellent.
The faculty is excellent in itself and, if we are talking about a turn to the East, then it is prepared to provide for all Russia’s interests – both cultural and political. Still, everything continues as before to be built upon academic learning, on its principles – a profound knowledge of languages, profound knowledge of texts is necessary to enable a person to then become anything. Academician Yevgeny Primakov, an Arabist by education (but not a graduate of our faculty), was prime minister.
An orientalist can be anything in any sphere, but he should have a deep academic knowledge of the languages, the culture of countries. Nowadays it is very easy to say what sets an orientalist apart from others: here you have Google Translate, and the orientalist is not simply in competition with it, but can do things that Google Translate can’t. Google Translate handles texts in a primitive mechanical way, but it is incapable in principle of understanding the sense of texts and the five senses present in a text. Orientalists ought to understand that, that is what they are taught. It’s an important characteristic. You need to understand what every word means in every context, that is why flesh and blood people are needed.
We have arguments. We are constantly having to defend the right to term oriental studies a separate field of learning, to have a separate faculty. Practically every dean faces such a task, and so do I. Several times now I have had to campaign to retain it as a separate teaching discipline; right now we are fighting to retain oriental studies as a separate academic discipline. All the time there are objections of some sort. We say that it is a special discipline with its own separate subject matter (in principle, it is a synthesis of fields), which is actually the study of others, of the other – imagology. It is a special subject. It is not elucidating the truth, which does not exist, but a basis for the potential study of cultures and for turning wars of memory into a dialogue of cultures, because a great love for one’s own culture at the expense of other cultures can lead to wars of memory. And it does. Oriental studies ought to create a basis for turning that memory into a dialogue of cultures. That is why oriental studies is an elite field of learning.
Sixty very rare languages are being taught in our faculty. New ones are constantly appearing. For us it is a field with its distinctive subjects and methodology, but sometimes people say that it is a sort of “abstract mill” providing the same kind of expert information as about the West, only about the East. That’s absolutely wrong. There is a rather fierce dispute between practitioners and scholars. It is clear to scholars that this is a field of learning, and practice should proceed from learning, while practitioners reckon that it is just a case of “Write a reference book and I will figure things out myself.” Only they won’t figure things out just from a reference book.
One of the greatest achievements of our diplomacy, and a competitive advantage which still exists, is that all ambassadors in the Arab East, which is my area of study, speak Arabic. Almost all of them are Arabists. That tradition goes back many years. The Americans don’t have that. Our contingent of diplomats is made up of people who have studied in those countries, lived there, know and understand. That’s a special category of people.
We need to advocate a synthetic orientalist approach, when through an understanding of other countries we combine political science, history and philology, while the basis for that is a deep knowledge of the language and the ability to master it. Besides, nowadays an important change is taking place – in this multipolar world, the world of sovereign cultures, languages are coming to the fore. For a time, it was English everywhere. Enough of English, be so kind as to use Chinese. That’s not just regarding work, either, but in principle. These peoples want to have their languages spoken and translated. Now there is an interesting clash: at various international gatherings, some Arabs speak their own language, while others speak English. Here again Google Translate comes into play.
There is a major programme underway in Africa. People are starting to demand that their own languages be spoken and written. While there are 60 languages in South Africa. They are creating a system under which the majority of those languages are official. Thank goodness there are resources for machine translation and each language can be translated. That means that each language may not become extinct. If it is recognized, and readily machine translated when you go to the tax office, that means that when you get back home you can speak your mother tongue and do not necessarily have to speak the official language of the country. In that way African languages will be preserved.
We have no need to change anything. We are continuing as we are. We have long since had departments for the languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus that were part of the Soviet Union. The Uighur language has appeared in our faculty and Somali is on the way. African languages are acquiring a new significance.
– Might that be connected with the fact that we are now returning to Africa to work more actively?
– It is due to them being active now. You cannot talk with them solely in the language of the colonizers. They will speak it, but if you talk to them in their regular language, then you can speak about other things.
We are returning, but in order to do so we should understand the reality – you cannot get by with English and French.
– Practically all countries in the Global South, in Africa, have gone through a colonial period in their history in one form or another. How relevant is the anticolonial agenda nowadays?
– As I already said, we went through all this in the Soviet Union 50, 60, 80 years ago, when there was decolonization of a positive kind – people studied and raised up the cultures of the peoples of the East, their own specialists were trained up and developed those cultures further. That was all done by oriental studies and orientalists, and it is continuing today. We have departments of Central Asia and of the Caucasus; we have marvellous ties with universities and oriental faculties in the republics that were once part of the Soviet Union. That is a continuation of what Soviet and Russian oriental studies are about.
Our oriental studies always provided, at a high level of scholarship, practical support for Soviet, then Russian policy in the Middle East and the East generally and the preservation of respect in relations between peoples – both those who were once in the Soviet Union and those who weren’t. Now that is beginning to even out.
We have one more distinction – our former territories may or may not be termed colonial, there are debates about that, but they were all within the borders of the empire. Not in other lands. You did not have to travel anywhere by ship, because this East is ours. We have Islam and Buddhism, Chinese and Korean people within our borders. That changes the situation somewhat and renders it specific: we always have the problem of our East and not ours. Back in imperial Russian times we had a complex attitude towards Islam. There was our Islam and the foreign sort. Ours was good, the other was bad.
We continue the traditions. We study the East. Only I am starting to say, heretically as yet, that colonialism is a Western word. Fierce wars were fought between European empires and powerful Eastern empires. What the result was is another conversation. Yet the colonial system, colonial relations, colonies have always existed. We are proud of the Greek colonies on the Black Sea. We are part of Europe because we have that heritage going back to Classical Antiquity.
– Is the economic component studied more at the faculty now?
– With us people study everything, but first there has to be language and culture. Economics is a Google Translate.
In order to study Arab economics, and ours too, you have to understand what interest on a loan is. Understand that lending with interest is forbidden in Islam and Judaism because it is considered immoral, so only non-believers engaged in lending things. Jews would only lend to Europeans and take a loan from them. Jews also lent to Muslims, Muslims to Europeans and so on. You have to understand what those moral foundations mean, the moral values that exist. This is the simplest example that is got around in a thousand different ways, but that’s another discussion.
You have to understand about cultural values. We all speak of “traditional values, historical memory”. Traditional values are completely different all over the world. In one culture women cover their faces, in another they don’t. In one culture you can have four wives, but in another four husbands, and so on, all down the line.
We need to find where the common values are. That’s easy to say, but hard to do. That is what oriental studies exist for, having always interacted with such things and understanding from the outset the existence of traditional values, how they have become transformed, how they have changed, so as not to alter self-awareness and belief in oneself, how Europeanization took place. Oriental studies are concerned with all of that, they are prepared for it. They do include economics. We teach eastern languages in the economics and politics faculties, so that they know a language. We have a master’s programme, the study of society in all its aspects, but on the basis of academic knowledge.
There is a difference between the university and the Hermitage. At the Hermitage, people are accustomed to holding a thing in their hands.
– Two schools of oriental studies are considered to exist in Russia – Petersburg and Moscow. Is that the case?
– It used to be. In Peterburg things were always more academic, in Moscow more practically oriented. Here it is more the university, while in Moscow it’s the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, diplomats and so on. In Soviet times, too, it was more academic here than in Moscow, but there was not as big a difference as people painted. In practical terms it was simply different people: more remote from politics in Petersburg and closer in Moscow.
All of that has changed. People changed, and I belong to the generation that changed. We all studied and worked together, We know that you need to read the manuscripts. We worked as translators alongside Muscovite colleagues, engaged in practical and academic learning, went on expeditions together.
On the level of concurrence and real life, there is no particular difference. Both here and there, people study one thing and another, because they are all very good orientalists – both the Moscow and Petersburg ones. The Arabists are all the very best.
– And what about the Western school. Some political scientists and politicians now are very fond of saying that there are no proper orientalists left there.
– The Western school is as it was. It is, in fact, very divided between countries, between confessions. Oriental studies are one thing in Catholic countries and another in Protestant countries, but we shouldn’t exaggerate that the way the warriors against colonialism do.
There are different attitudes towards China as well. There is a lot of malice towards China in America now, but, in the main, the image of China in America was formed by Orientalists who loved China very much, so at bottom it is a benevolent picture. Now people are trying to change that, but hopefully they won’t manage. It all very much depends on where someone learnt, who they learnt from. You always have to bear that in mind. We have an Orthodox culture at our core, and we have persecuted Islam just as much as Catholics, but with our own aspects to it.
In fact, you have to know everything – the details and complexities. You have to understand that all factors operate in a complex world, and they should not be the reason for rejecting something. There needs to be a precise analysis for each specific situation.
Just now, not a single Orientalist in Western countries has the right to say anything good about Russia, but someone outside the state system can, a retiree, can. Pensioners do come to visit us.
–Next year we will be marking the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist Uprising – one of the most important events in Russian history. Has the assessment of it changed over the years? Is the Hermitage preparing anything?
– The assessment has, of course, been changing repeatedly, because people started to measure themselves by historical events. For some the Decembrists were revolutionaries, fine fellows, for others they were traitors. That is food for thought.
We are not preparing any major events or huge exhibitions on the Decembrists’ account. We will have many different pinpoint events, because there are many topics to consider about the Decembrists. There is the War Gallery of heroes from 1812. Among them was one of the Decembrists – Sergei Volkonsky, whose portrait was painted, but never did get installed there. He was among the Decembrists who survived. We have a photograph of him, because he even lived on into the age of photography in Siberia.
The second story is that we have the halls (in the Hermitage Picture Gallery) where Emperor Nicholas I interrogated the Decembrists. We know that they all informed on one another. They all confessed, because they felt themselves to be traitors. They needed to make a frank confession, or at least they were unable to lie, and so they told Nicholas everything.
The third story is one of the heroes of 1812, Mikhail Miloradovich, who was killed during the uprising by being shot in the back. We possess the uniform that he was wearing. The President of Serbia even visited us for a ceremony commemorating Miloradovich.
There are many different stories that our historians have investigated very well in recent years, many questions that can be talked about, various details connected with the Decembrists. That will be the sense of it – to cast light on all the complexity of the event. Not how bad or marvellous they were, but going into the finer details – did those who forced their way into the garden of the Winter Palace intend to kill Nicholas and his family or not, and so on. We have a Constantine rouble that was minted in the name of [Nicholas’s older brother who gave up his claim to the throne]. All those stories, firstly deepen people’s historical knowledge, and secondly make them understand that these are very complicated matters, that there are no precise positions. It’s like with the exhibitions from the Crimean museums – there is the viewpoint of the Crimean museums and that of the state, which has everything entered in a register.
– How do you see the Hermitage evolving?
– We are not a museum. We are one of the highest achievements of Russian culture. The Hermitage is an immense ship ploughing its course. After we ploughed the way, everyone is imitating us: the Greater Hermitage system, Hermitage centres – now people are doing similar things around the world. We are going further – shaping a fresh cultural dialogue between sovereign cultures in a new pattern: on the one hand there is the Celestial Hermitage [a digital copy of the museum –Editor’s note] and a great many tricks of all sorts that will be produced using state-of-the-art technologies, on the other hand maximum assistance through horizontal links, the Hermitage centres. There is a great need for horizontal links around the world just now, no longer so much through exhibitions, though. Links between people.
A great achievement of ours is restoration. We give classes in restoration, and now there are exchanges with different countries – restorers are travelling to China, Oman, Syria and other countries. This is an exchange of museum knowhow, the knowhow of a universal museum, because the idea of a universal museum should be spread about and spread using the latest technologies, through exchanges of people, so that they absorb the experience, nurture cultural self-awareness and internationalism at the same time.
– How is the Museum of Heraldry project progressing?
– There is the Exchange, now a Hermitage building, that will be a kind of stand-in for the Winter Palace, because it will be dedicated to Russian symbols, Russian glory, the history of the Russian state. It will have a hall of Russian martial glory. That will be a sort of copy of our St George’s Hall, where we hold ceremonies all the time. I should remind you that the Hermitage has revived many ceremonies and holds them regularly. Those will take place there. The hall will be decorated with paintings, flags, and so on. There will be a museum around it – galleries of heraldry, awards and decorations, the Museum of the Russian Guards, which will be moving from the General Staff building. Everything that is the pride of Russia. That upon which pride and love for one’s country should really be fostered.
Alexander Savelyev (orientalist), Olga Savelyeva (journalist)
