The Luxury of Solitude

What connects Raphael and Cecil Beaton? Why is a museum good medicine during a pandemic? Does the “Russian expulsion” provide an occasion for patriotic self-affirmation? Why is solitude during a pandemic something not only to be overcome but also to be constructed? Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, explains his “pandemic philosophy” to the Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Take a look at what sort of people are going round the Hermitage.

The Hermitage is now open. Are many of the staff ill?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: A few of our people fall ill every day, but they aren’t getting infected from the museum visitors. That could only have been the case, perhaps, with General Galkin, whom we have lost, as the man in charge of the whole entrance zone. Still, the others are catching the disease in public transport, while en route. It’s hardly likely in the museum halls: visitors are rare and go around singly. Tour groups are a maximum of five persons and we very meticulously, every week, change the whole protection system. Museums are in fact one of the safest places. People come to us at most in pairs; they have fixed routes arranged for them; tickets are sold in advance; distancing is being observed.

We are experiencing a second wave of the epidemic. It’s a dangerous disease. People are dying. That’s why life is fettered, the world has come to a halt, we are working remotely. We are often left alone with ourselves.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, that would seem to be the main tendency during the pandemic – for everyone to keep away from each other and isolate – “we don’t want to see anyone”. That’s how it is between individuals, between peoples and between countries. We aren’t only changing towards estrangement, though. Take a look at our website broadcasting video from the Raphael hall. The way people walk around there – with children, on their own. The way they are looking! They are completely different people. We have not had viewers like that for along time. A museum should, after all, be an oasis, dissimilar to everything around. On Palace Square people are often running around without masks, there’s loud music playing, but you enter the Hermitage and at once it’s a different world: people walk quietly; there are no noisy tourists, just guides with small groups, and a dress code. That should remain with us afterwards.

During the epidemic, the Hermitage is a ten-fold bridge between people. Even when they are going around our large halls one by one, they still perceive themselves as part of a whole. Simply because they aren’t sitting at home, but walking around the halls of the Hermitage…

Sins bring punishment. I regard the period of the pandemic as a punishment from God.

There should be a slightly greater amount of people and possibilities, but some of the things that we have acquired during the pandemic should be kept going forwards, including, for example, the fact that museums with us are presently staying open longer. We are reorganizing the work of our sponsors, so as to have them pay for concessions to visitors.

Are things still very busy as before?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, but they are being reformatted.

Because, after stopping and thinking, we can see more clearly what we were doing wrong. During this time, we have grasped once and for all that the museum has its limits. There are limits to visitor numbers. There are limits to the extent that a museum should be an amusement, and beyond which it should not go. There are limits to commercialization. Those are all in point of fact sins – partly ours, partly those of our organizers and supervisors. Sins bring punishment. I regard the period of the pandemic as a punishment from God.

The quarantine period, of course, confirmed once again the correctness of the duty of the state and society to support culture, as is written in the Constitution. During that time, it became clear that a museum remains a museum even without visitors, and that it needs to be supported. Yes, there should be more people coming in than there are now, but it is already clear, nonetheless, that museums should not be financed by money earned from crowds of tourists.

The museum as strong medicine

Mikhail Piotrovsky: One more thing that the pandemic has highlighted: a museum is a medicine, and a very strong one at that. Even things that sometimes arouse irritation in museum practice have proved therapeutic.

We held a Sokurov exhibition from the Venice Biennale. It was received with delight by some people, but not by others (Sokurov is not easy), but the intonation here was completely different to that in Venice. And its main motif – turn around and look what the prodigal son is going to do afterwards – proved powerful medicine.

During the Hermitage Days, we opened a highly therapeutic exhibition – “After Raphael”. Not many paintings came from elsewhere, even those that were intended haven’t been able to yet. They’ll be coming later. Still, it has turned out to be a remarkable exhibition, making it possible to seek and find answers to questions of why a cult of Raphael arose in world art. Why it lasted so long. Why Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy had photographs of the Sistine Madonna hanging in their homes, and why avant-gardists in the 20th century thought it shameful to admire it, while now, on the contrary, there is reviving interest in Raphael.

This exhibition is a medicine, too, because Raphael is sweetness, beauty, charm, direct museum therapy. and because we conduct an intelligent conversation about ideals and conceptions. It’s an exhibition that stimulates the mind to work.

One more tranquilizing medicine is the Cecil Beaton exhibition: beautiful life, beautiful people.

Isn’t looking to fashion usually interpreted as chasing after the market?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: There is no market right now. As many people come as we let in. And in actual fact, there is plenty that is serious in the Cecil Beaton exhibition. Beginning with the story of the man who took the photographs – a man from the middle classes who gradually gained entry to the circle of stars. In his works one can “read” the era and the way that he creates images of the era. There are many of his own statements in the exhibition – he’s a very interesting writer. There’s the story, for example, of how he transformed Marilyn Monroe. He also transformed Marlene Dietrich. He reworked their images a little in keeping with his own idea. And there is also a notable “Russian line” present there. He photographed Russian models that included members of the Russian nobility. That’s a very interesting topic. I wrote about it in the foreword to the exhibition. We are accustomed to lament the tragedy of expulsion, but we forget about the gift that those who were expelled brought to Europe.

From Berdyaev to models.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: That’s right, from philosophers to models. And when Princess Paley became an ideal of beauty there, that’s more than a fashion model.

Beaton has photographs of the elderly Felix Yusupov, whom he spent a long time shooting in his Paris apartment. And the young ballerinas of the Diaghilev ballet, who only became great after the revolution in Paris, were also bearers of a certain Russian spirit. That too is an entire act of patriotic self-affirmation. I have encountered many Russian people who, travelling the path of the exile, became British or French nobles, but those were isolated episodes. Here, though, a line emerged: look what we gave them. Yes, it’s bad that we lost that, but it’s a good thing that the cultural heritage – transformed in this way – was preserved. Because God preserved it.

I hope that, against the background of the Karabakh conflict, our permanent Caucasus Christian-Islamic display will also become a medicine.

We will be holding a major exhibition as well about Alexander Nevsky. We will be presenting his iconography. We will make an exhibition about the restoration of his long-suffering shrine that is still continuing.

The idea of art as therapy always used to strike me as somewhat mundane. What therapy, when there are big ideas there, philosophy…? You want some joy? Have you understood everything? Then take joy from that. Now though, in this atmosphere of hysteria, I get the feeling that it is very important.

In the Hermitage every person can remain alone. Even in a crowd.

Life during the pandemic has two centres – fear and loneliness

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, but also the overcoming of them.

Here as well two lines are in evidence, two moods. One is what they call “a feast in time of plague”. Feeling scared? Let’s have fun, go around without masks, you only live once! That’s the psychology of “live it up” without thinking about anything, including the consequences.

The second mood entails efforts to overcome both fear and loneliness. Reflecting, drawing conclusions. Drawing conclusions is sometimes a gloomy occupation, but you can avoid the gloom. You can simply look at what has got done, disregarding the superfluous and the routine, the things that bring a sense of having accomplished SOMETHING. I think that is going on right now.

Loneliness and fear would seem to go together. Right now, darkness is falling here in Komarovo and it will be scary. That’s if you’re alone, but if you’re not, then it won’t be.

But there is solitude that overcomes fear. As a matter of fact, solitude should not be accompanied by fear. We try – and in the museum sphere, at least, manage – to seek out ways of formatting, of organizing such solitude.

In her article about Joseph Brodsky, the well-known poet Olga Sedakova, analyzing the time in which he lived (the 70s – the era of Tarkovsky, Mamardashvili, Brodsky, the “new Renaissance” in the words of the philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin), states that the non-conformism of the “people of the 70s” comes down to personal independence, the firmness of a person’s self. It seems to me, by the way, that you are more a man of the 70s than of the 60s.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Most probably.

And Sedakova writes that “it was necessary to construct solitude” as the situation of someone who found himself one to one with the cosmic landscape. Doesn’t the situation of a pandemic that increases solitude ten times over present us with the task of “constructing” our own solitude.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: I think you are right in comparing our solitude with that of the people of the 70s. Back then, though, there was solitude and at the same time a keen sense of your own small group. You had just a few like-minded people, but they were genuine. So, in essence, there wasn’t that solitude, because there was a very strong sense of some sort of belonging to a circle. Such “solitaries” came to the Filonov exhibition at the Artists’ Union and then went on their way, without necessarily socializing. Still, their solitude was only partial, and it increased each person’s attractiveness for others and for themselves. The Hermitage – its “top floor” – also created the solitary people of that era. The Hermitage always served the construction of a person’s contemplative solitude. With a name meaning “the refuge of hermits or recluses”, it was made for solitude. And that is always inherent in everything with us: here each person can be alone. Even in a crowd. All the more so when there are no crowds. What we have now is not a repetition of the 70s, all the same, and we need to reassess our own solitude.

Coming back again to Brodsky as a classic representative of solitude, when turning to the English cultural tradition (Sedakova writes) he chose within it the coldness, restraint and distance of Auden. The word “distance” gives us all pause at the moment, but for Brodsky back then that distance was necessary for the introduction into his poetry of the principles of thought and awareness. Doesn’t our solitude set us similar tasks?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: It certainly does. That is why I have been speaking about the reassessment of solitude, and I think that reassessment should be an intellectual one. All our exhibitions – from the “Iron Age” to Fabergé and “After Raphael” – are first and foremost intelligent exhibitions with many thoughts. Multi-layered, calculated (to a greater degree than before) to provoke thought, demanding reasoning from the viewers. That is our Hermitage intellectual contribution to the periods of enforced distancing. Distancing is necessary for reassessment, yes. To combine the word and the image with the mind. They can, incidentally, be combined even without much personal interaction. If you have understood what they wanted to say, then you have become a companion-in-arms. That alone gives a sense of being both alone and not alone.

Iron Age online

Mikhail Piotrovsky: All these online things that have people sitting in the Internet for days on end create loneliness, yet there is a certain overcoming of loneliness in it too. Museum objects on the Internet connect you not with a social media group but with the museum. You on your own get into the museum, you on your own are given a guided tour. You complain (“They’re saying the wrong things!”) or enjoy. And you always have the right to express your opinion. We take careful note of what people say when they are shown around the museum.

The Hermitage always served the construction of a person’s contemplative solitude. With a name meaning “the refuge of hermits or recluses”. Here each person can be alone. Even in a crowd.

Thanks to us that stupefaction from the Internet can be transformed into a more pleasurable solitude, creating not simply formal groups of subscribers, but a sense of this being “us”… Those who have viewed all the Hermitage’s restoration laboratories in our online broadcasts (something you could never do, if you simply come to the museum) can and should consider themselves as belonging a bit to the Hermitage people. I often say words that irritate many about the museum having now become a luxury, but the luxury should be accessible to everyone. And this sort of solitude will perhaps result in accessible luxury. So, solitude needs to be shaped, constructed and, maybe, it will give us something good in the future.

Has your day changed very much right now?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: It has changed emotionally. I get up, sit at the desk and sign on the computer the same papers that I would have signed in my office. Then come the online meetings. I travel in to open the exhibitions offline, but in a mask and with full precautionary measures. The public is present on screens. It turns out that to keep the attention of your conversation partner or the public on screen you have to make considerably more efforts than in a live conversation. You would think that the opposite would be true, but it turns out that online everything is more difficult. It’s harder to overcome various mishaps and solve problems when you don’t know what to do.

You’re in Komarovo. Do you have the opportunity to go for walks?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, I go out for a stroll in the evening, but as I am walking I usually catch up on all the Hermitage online for the day – the guided tours and lectures. Although in a house out of town (where we had never lived for long even in summer), life is somewhat different. Boris’s house is on our plot too. And we have never lived together with Boris like this, although he comes round only at the end of the day, wearing a mask, and doesn’t stay long.

To the point

Have art and culture told us anything substantial about the situation in which we have found ourselves?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: In the visual arts, not so far, but I think the first to tell us something about what’s going on will be writers. Artists maybe a bit later.

What has the Hermitage done during the pandemic?

1. The museum has kept to its traditions and organized a salvo of exhibitions. We have held Hermitage Days in Vladivostok, Kaluga, Samara, Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg.

2. The Hermitage has managed to open and rotate exhibitions in its satellite centres. The exhibition “Tsars & Knights” in Amsterdam, telling about the Russian Empire’s fascination with the Middle Ages and about Bazilevsky’s collection, was heroically prepared by members of the Hermitage staff under near prison conditions – “hotel, museum” and nowhere else allowed. They had barely managed to create the exhibition when the museums in Holland closed, but recently they re-opened and the first visitors have seen “Tsars & Knights”.

3. The Hermitage dedicated a new display in Kazan to Catherine the Great and her trip to that city.

4. The Hermitage made two changes of exhibitions in Vyborg – “Nature in Porcelain” and “Japanese Art of the Edo Period”.

5. “The Art of the Portrait. Personality and Era” opened at the Hermitage–Siberia centre in Omsk, an exhibition rich in cultural diversity from antiquity to the present day.

6. In Saint Petersburg, a series of exhibitions to suit any taste: Raphael, Fabergé, Beaton, Bronzino’s Apollo and Marsyas after restoration, Art Deco sculptures, Soviet porcelain of the Thaw era, the history of exhibitions in the General Staff building.

7. The “Iron Age” exhibition has become a whole phenomenon for which “German pieces” – archaeological artefacts – came. Despite the fact that the exhibition is bound up with the delicate issue of attitudes to trophy art, it became a real celebration of museum solidarity.

A key question

Piotrovsky, son of Piotrovsky, grandson of Piotrovsky

In September last year, your son moved into cultural management, becoming the first deputy chairman of Saint Petersburg’s Culture Committee, and now he has been advanced to the post of Vice-Governor for Cultural Matters. What do you regard as interesting in his new work?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Just now at the European University, we are discussing the creation of a course in museum management, and it seems to me that the history of the Hermitage – from beginning to end – provides us with a course in cultural management. Absolutely everything in that history can be cited as examples and included in the catechism of museum management. I think that my son knows that catechism.

He has proved to be well prepared. While he never worked in the Hermitage, he has always been somewhere nearby. It is a bit like me when I was engaged in Oriental studies and always knew that the Hermitage would inevitably influence everything I do. Although my son’s background has been somewhat at a tangent, as it were, it has, all in all, turned out good – two foreign languages, a higher degree in economics, a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts.

80.7 million people visited the Hermitage online between 17 March 2020 and 17 January 2021

He has gone into it, of course, at the very best time – a crazy number of problems, no money, people falling ill, the theatres now opening, now closing, but Boris wants to solve those problems. He’s keen, and that keenness of his is evident even to us.

He has plenty of acquaintances in the city. Somehow even he didn’t expect that he knows everyone, and everyone knows him. At the same time, he realizes full well that he is supposed to care about people and defend the interests of culture.

Growing up with us, he also saw the prosaic side of the work of two Hermitage directors, his grandfather and father. My father raised me by showing things: look, we do it this way, you can do it differently, but take our experience into account. I think it was somewhat similar in his case. He has turned out to be well educated in cultural matters, he knows the museum and non-museum worlds. And he’s very up to date. He was the one who taught me the latest technologies, explaining why the Hermitage can’t get by without Instagram and so on. He has a Petersburg-Hermitage style that developed, I think, through contact with the museum. You can sense he’s a person nurtured by the Hermitage. He’s taken to wearing ties…

Irina Leonidovna says that he’s gone out of his mind and is cleaning the veranda. She is worried as he was ill recently… He caught COVID immediately somewhere or other. He ran a high temperature for a week, but now, generally, all is well, antibodies. Yes, he is indeed clearing away the leaves. Well, he doesn’t get many days off now. He is not his own master.