Photograph provided by the Rossiyskaya gazeta newspaper

War as a cultural clash

Yelena Yakovleva: Any war is also a clash of cultures, you once said, speaking about the Napoleonic dining service with Egyptian motifs…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I am prepared to repeat again that for me it is important to be with my country when it is making a historic choice, although I have been criticized from all sides for that stance. Now I will be ripped into again, but I will say… Until the 20th century, wars generally were a means of cultural exchange. While not being such bloody and mass events as now, they did, of course, partially destroy culture (but one religion also destroyed another), but on the whole a cultural exchange took place. During the Crusades, the Muslims learnt from the Crusaders how to build mighty fortresses, while the Christians took to washing in bathhouses, recalling the Roman sort…  And they also adopted luxury items: the general cultural standard among Muslims back then was higher than in Europe.

In February we opened an exhibition in Kazan “Alexander the Great. The Road to the East” with frescoes from Central Asia, Bactrian silver, a Quran, and Persian manuscripts, including Nizami’s Khamsa. So, Alexander’s campaign led to an interaction of cultures, the birth of Hellenism, cultural evolution.

In the 20th century, wars of course became more destructive and more ideological. The Crusades were nothing in comparison. Due to the heightened rancour, their cultural role all but decreased to zero, and the element of an interaction of cultures weakened. Still, I hope, that with time it will acquire other forms. For example, the struggle against “cancel culture” may take such a turn that in future something new will emerge from it. Although any talk of cancelling any culture is in any case talk about the cancelling of culture in general.

Yelena Yakovleva: Is there a cultural clash at the present time? What do people in the frontline zone, within an artillery duel, feel?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Well, above all it is noticeable that what is happening is influencing national self-awareness. Both ours and the Ukrainian. Look how strongly the Ukrainian nation is forming. And how Europe, which was disintegrating altogether, has regained its unity. The existence of an “enemy” aids unification.

But there are also cultural aspects, since those are always present everywhere. Because on the one hand culture needs to be protected (in the heat of battle everything is a danger to it), and on the other there is a need to look at the important cultural features appearing within it.

Yelena Yakovleva: Futurologists stress that armed hostilities are humanity’s customary state, and we should be surprised that there was no war for so long…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Indeed, today it is clear that 50 years without a war is a gift of the sort you never get.

Still, now history has not come to an end, no, but it has changed.

And after the shock that accompanies the start of hostilities, the time for domestic mobilization starts. For example, the Hermitage has held 50 exhibitions over the year: 30 on our premises and 20 around Russia. 55 books have been published. 30 archaeological expeditions were organized with two super finds – the kind that only occur once in decades.

Yelena Yakovleva: The theme of war was probably to the fore. I catch myself thinking that I would like to view Otto Dix .

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We do have Otto Dix, but I don’t think we need to address things quite so bluntly.

More important for us was the exhibition about the Siege: porcelain in the Armorial Hall and next to it the fragments of the shell that struck the hall in 1944.

The Last Shell. Marking the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Leningrad. Photograph by Alexei Bronnikov

Permanently on display in the Small Manege is a large photograph showing how the shell that landed there wrecked several historical carriages.

The Siege is a special war-related theme for the Hermitage, and that experience is required today because a military blockade is usually accompanied by blockade of culture and information. We are well aware of the need to speak across the ring of the blockade, just as we did in 1941 with the exhibitions and conferences devoted to Nizami and Navoi. The more so, since the latest cloud technologies allow us to do it.

After the initial shock, though, the need comes as well to determine one’s position. Now mobilization is happening in a positive sense of the word. Although in a negative one too: checks are starting to be made on whether people are at their workplaces, while I would like to avoid superfluous mobilization to work to no purpose.

Because an internal self-organization is underway. In the past decades we relaxed a little, reckoning that all is well, and there are no more problems, nor will there be. They do exist, though, and they will.

And they require us to work in a more complex manner.

Yelena Yakovleva: Is therapy again at the forefront of the museum’s work?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: During COVID we got used to saying that art and museums are a medicine. In times like the present their therapeutic role is also great.

That is not the whole of it, though. That is merely a part of the museum’s mission.

A second one is the discussion of difficult issues. Although blunt discussion is not necessary right now. And we can also do without powerful provocations according to the recipes of contemporary art for the time being.

Because everything is serious. And when everything is serious, one ought to do one’s work properly – precisely and well. And mentally reflect, but not be in haste to set all one’s reflections down on paper, or toss them out into the Internet.

Yet we in the museum are simply obliged to create cultural products that prompt reflection – in those who are ready for it.

How should “black and white” be countered

Mikhail Piotrovsky: At the moment we have a huge problem in society: people with little competence fail to grasp that they have little competence and are extremely self-confident in their opinions and actions. Scientifically that is known as the “Dunning-Kruger effect”. In practice, it usually expresses itself in perception using a scale that only has black and white. Without any understanding of allusions, metaphors or subtleties. They read a headline and already know what’s meant – although in actual fact it’s something different.

With all that simplifying division into black and white, though, you usually get confused more quickly than if you have a desire to grasp all the nuances.

Countering that, we in the museum seek to produce ever more complex things and meanings, stimulating conversation at an elevated level.

In the “Egyptomania” exhibition, for example, we take exception to the present-day European zeal for decolonization (down on your knees, apologize ten thousand times, give everything back!) and recollect our own Soviet experience of decolonization, superbly displayed in the Hermitage by Iosif Orbeli.

The opening ceremony for the “Egyptomania” exhibition. Photograph by Svetlana Ragina

With the exhibition devoted to the architect Alexander Sivkov, who was given a prison sentence for the “wrong” price being paid for the restoration of the portico with atlantes, but then fully rehabilitated, we are joining in the highly topical discussion on the theme of “things not made for museums”. Sivkov worked on the reconstruction of the Winter Palace. After all, palaces too were not made to be museums, but for rulers to live in. Then they acquired a different function and, to meet that, Sivkov constructed a passageway between the Small and Old Hermitages, which he had no right to do as the laws stand today. Without it, though, the museum could not exist.

And that is the way with almost every exhibition.

Alexander Sivkov’s book The Palaces of the Hermitage in the Soviet Period (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2018). Photograph by Svetlana Ragina

That does not bar the desire to simply come to the museum and admire the paintings. However, to avoid our present-day mobilization of the spirit being reduced to “Put it more simply!” and “There’s no need for complexities!”, we do need a deeper conversation all the same.

There is a need for complexities!

I would advise everyone just now to re-read Daniil Dondurey’s famous piece about the complex person published at one time by the [Rossiyskaya Gazeta]. You will immediately realize that the essence of what is happening does not come down to which singer or actor said what about what.

Rembrandt – not just in Amsterdam

Yelena Yakovleva: Regarding singers and actors, why is their opinion so important?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I don’t know why a performer’s opinion is important for society. I don’t think it is. After all, you can be a wonderful actor, but no kind of public figure. For example, Basiliashvili is a great performer, an outstanding public figure and simply a splendid human being, but such people are a rarity.

Of course, we should keep track of great performers with the stature of a Chaliapin, but ordinary performers can live any way they please; people shouldn’t go delving into their lives and opinions. We do still love to dig into someone’s life, and then to feel dissatisfied with what we discover.

If, however, actors suddenly become the standard bearers of public opinion, then they should already be regarded as public figures. The fact that they are actors is not relevant here.

Yelena Yakovleva: Artistic talent and civic activeness are different matters…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, and much of their civic activeness ought not to be heeded at all: let them say what they want.

One ought to argue with representatives of culture, but not with actors.

The public should, of course, be selective in choosing their idols… And in general – “You shall not make for yourself an idol”. If you cannot help making them, though, then you should be very careful in your choice, and not turn everyone you like into idols.

Why are there heaps of idols and no real authorities? Because it’s easier to create an idol. While with an authority you need to go into thing, to know everything that they wrote, listen carefully to what they have said. To also disagree with them, without losing respect for them…

Yelena Yakovleva: And how should we regard the words of those who want to turn their country into radioactive ash?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: There have always been plenty of people who wanted to turn Russia into dust. Plenty who wanted to turn Washington into dust too. In Leningrad at one time it was the fashion to sing that Soviet sailors’ joking ditty “Aboard a submarine with a little atomic motor…”

But that was always 70% a desire to shock – a thirst for scandal. We just shouldn’t turn those hysterical little jokes into real-life events.

Because alongside that sort of “culture”, normal great culture is needed. To avoid the shouts born from a habit of shocking the public being perceived as something important. For that, one needs to pay attention to everything that is genuinely important, including threats.

Otherwise, following on from the “cancellation of culture”, the cancellation of museums will start breathing down our neck. Museums are “keeping stolen goods” or “that was not created for museums”… So, everything should be taken off them and reshuffled, handed out to those who ought to have it… That set of demands would end up with Rembrandt being just in Amsterdam.

Photograph provided by the Rossiyskaya gazeta newspaper

There is little Spartan hardiness in the modern generations

Yelena Yakovleva: Regarding the most serious disagreement – the split among the intelligentsia over the special military operation. A person has a right to be for or against – each has their own experience, their own way of perception, their own sense of the world, their own arguments. What is irritating, though, besides boorish self-assertion, is the way some take their truths as given. Their contempt for those who think differently. You sometimes suspect that there is cowardice hiding behind this feigned pride. And you also sense that we are not dealing with the highest quality of generations in terms of world view and ethics. You grew up in the Hermitage, in an academic family, but you went – almost unpaid – on research expeditions around the mountain villages of the Pamir. Now, though, we find ourselves among hothouse people with experience of life in only one social milieu. No-one follows Gorky’s example and goes “out into the world”. There’s very little Spartan hardiness…

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I think that’s the main thing – little Spartan hardiness. It’s already possible to look across the decades and see that a very complicated demarcation is taking place with us now. We have arrived at a moment when a choice has to be made – and not just a choice in words, but a very serious one, which brings consequences.

We have become used to a life where our choices have no particular significance. “Well, I said one thing, now I’m saying another.”

I think that there will be some form of demarcation. And I believe that now we need to teach a new generation, because the present one is not prepared for serious challenges. Here it is not even a matter of the military operations, it’s also the domestic challenges. People need to determine their position, understanding that the previous comfort has gone and will not come back in the near future.

Let’s remember the ’90s and all we went through to get to a period of free and calm existence. That is over, though, and people have to determine their position. In life there are moments when you need to step out from the ranks and say, “Yes, I am acting in this way…”

From that point of view, even all those shouts just for effect are good, because the different positions become clear. It is possible to live with that.

Yelena Yakovleva: During the special military operation we have found ourselves in far more ideological times. What ideas need to be taken into account just now?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: With the idea of respect for what is real in culture… Respect for another’s opinion.

What does that respect mean? Multiculturalism, when everything is equal, any idea is correct, and you can do whatever you want? Or when one idea forcibly compels you and throws everything into a dug out pit?

No, we need to find something else.

Yelena Yakovleva: About those pits. According to Platonov, we still have since Soviet times a fear of high-principled people, because for the most part they create pits.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Pits do need to be dug, all the same. We need both those who dig the pit and those who will then write a novel about the pit.

Both participants and non-participants. And every effort should be made for it all to happen with a minimum of bloodshed and malice, although there will be some anyway.

High principles, of course, need to have some sort of inner constraints.

But we have only one real constraint, and that is called “culture”.

There are some things that we do not do because they should never be done. That is something ensured by education, upbringing, sensitivity and culture. And it is entirely possible for people with the most diverse principles to have that.

And if we lack inner constraints, history will create them by some means.

Previously we had the experience of different ideological systems coexisting; now we need to find a means for different views to coexist.

Photograph provided by the Rossiyskaya gazeta newspaper