Mikhail Piotrovsky: A Hand as a Talisman

I have said repeatedly that the Greater Hermitage concept includes open storage, a global presence and what we call the Hermitage forum – interaction not only with the museum-going public but, as people are fond of saying nowadays, with society.

Today one of the questions that is discussed most among the museum community is who teaches whom: do museums teach people or is it the other way around? The current idea is that a museum should listen to what people want. It is possible to experiment in the sphere of the Hermitage forum, participating in matters that are not entirely museum related.

One of those was the recent presentation in the Hermitage Theatre of the Baltic Star international prize for strengthening links in the humanities among the countries of the Baltic region. That is an interesting initiative from the Baltic House theatre. The annual festival awards prizes to people in the cultural sphere from countries around the Baltic. When it was thought up, everything was wonderful. Each time it was said that there are two worlds of culture: the Mediterranean world and the Baltic world. It is a special cultural model, a special mentality. Now the Baltic Sea model has become even more important. Twenty years ago, relations between everyone were splendid. Now that is all different, but the choice of cultural figures has to date been irreproachable. People come for the presentation ceremony from the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, Germany and Russia. Saint Petersburg is in itself a Baltic city, but when a company like that gathers it is evident that the city is the face of Russia.

Each time, the presentation of the prize is a festive occasion. The recipients are prominent people. There is no rejection, as sometimes happens when people say, “They gave the prize to the wrong person…” When it comes to the Baltic Star, nobody raises objections, although the range of recipients has been broad – from Anatoly Sobchak to Eimuntas Nekrošius.

One more important event in recent days was the 80th anniversary of the holding of a scholarly conference devoted to the 800th anniversary of the birth of the great poet Nizami in the Hermitage in besieged Leningrad. At the time, it made an impact and subsequently remained in the memory as a great symbol of culture’s defiance of war.

Poets, writers and scholars came back from the front for just one day. The speakers at the conference included Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli and Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky, Alexander Nikolayevich Boldyrev presented a paper on Nizami. Nikolai Semionovich Tikhonov read translations of Nizami, Mikhail Mikhailovich Dyakonov spoke about miniatures in Nizami manuscripts. Stars of the first order in Iranian and Oriental studies who went on to make history, including that of the Hermitage. And all that in a city under siege.

We regularly hold evenings commemorating that event with guests coming from Azerbaijan. Now we had an evening for the same reason. Eighty years on, nuances are emerging that never occurred to people before. It was always stated that in the rest of the country the Nizami jubilee was not celebrated, while in beleaguered Leningrad it was. Orbeli persuaded the city’s party leadership that it would be a fine gesture. At the time, it was seen as good propaganda, but there was also a mystic element to it: Leningrad, the siege, starvation and an Oriental poet. An event from the same series as the renowned siege-time tours around the empty halls and empty frames in the Hermitage. Tikhonov wrote about those in his essay “People of Light”. There is a mystic light in all this.

Today, finding ourselves in some way under siege, not knowing what to do about the coronavirus, we look at many things in a different way. We are starting to understand that historical events have a mystic side to them.

Nizami is a remarkable poet. He had an influence on European art. During the recent evening, his poems were recited in Persian and in Russian translation. Artistes from the Mariinsky Theatre sang arias with lyrics by Nizami.

His works are five poems, known collectively as the Quintet. Five fingers on a hand. A complex gesture. In the East the depiction of a hand is a talisman. It can be found on rocks around the world.

Nizami wrote his five poems when the Renaissance was only just beginning in Europe. His poetry is the quintessence of the whole of Islamic culture that absorbed previous cultures and combined many of them. The first book, the thumb, is the Treasury of Mysteries – stories of what rulers should be like. Mystical conversations with wisemen. The little finger is the poem Eskandar-nāma – a tale about Alexander the Great, who conquered the whole civilized world and created Hellenism – the union of East and West out of which Islamic civilization and culture were then born.

One of the tales, Khosrow and Shirin, is about Iranian shahs. The celebrated Layla and Majnun is an Arabian Romeo-and-Juliet story, written considerably earlier than Shakespeare’s. The Seven Beauties is the story of an Iranian shah sent off to learn from Arab rulers.

Nizami occupies a firm place in the pantheon of great writers. He wrote in Persian and lived in northern Azerbaijan. Of course, he is a great son of the Azerbaijani people, who take a pride in him. Much credit for that is due to Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli. The conference in the Hermitage was not simply a desire to hold an intellectual celebration in wartime, but a continuation of a deliberate serious policy among scholars and cultural figures. The policy to elevate major figures in the culture of the peoples who made up the Soviet Union.

The revolution demolished the empire. Peoples came together in the union. State entities were created in which a separate national awareness began to take shape. Among other things, that took place on the basis of figures who became central. For Georgia it was Shota Rustaveli, for Azerbaijan Nizami, for Uzbekistan Ali-Shir Nava'i, for Tajikistan Rudaki.

People often forget that over the long years spent in the USSR national cultures formed that became the foundation for nations with their own sense of a separate identity.

It is fashionable to say, as was stated at a museum seminar recently, that colonialism was an insane evil, that it destroyed everything. Museums should tell how people suffered under colonial rule. In 1917–18, Russian colonialism collapsed. It was considered that countries were living in an empire, a prison of peoples. One may, or may not, argue with that, but it is obvious that they were subordinated to the interests of the Russian Empire.

Cultural figures, including Orbeli, were not just scholars, but also active politicians. They did not weep and apologize for the sins of the empire. They started saying and demonstrating how great the peoples who had been living under the colonial yoke were. In the Hermitage, Orbeli created the Department of the East. Celebrations were held and exhibitions opened that told about the East being even greater than the West. And it is true that Nizami’s wonderful verses about the role of writing, of reason and of mystic love were written long before Dante and Petrarch. A great level of culture.

That was a policy that cultural figures and Orientalists deliberately pursued. That is how they sought to achieve equal rights. It is possible to claim that such a policy led to the breakup of the USSR. Yes, it did lead to nations becoming mature, gaining self-awareness. When they became part of the USSR few of them had that.

The gathering in the Hermitage touched upon one more aspect – the figurative. During our evening there was a ritual: they brought out in a special climate-controlled display case a Nizami manuscript that had been produced for Shah Rukh, the younger brother of Timur the Great. It is a masterpiece of miniature painting, In a culture that believed that it was not permissible to depict God and religious history, subjects were found that called out for artistic depiction. Poets presented them for the Persian miniature. These are stirs in pictures: people recognize each other from a portrait; a traveller, Alexander the great or someone else, sees a woman bathing; there are hunting scenes, episodes of battle… Of course, not everyone would have seen the miniatures. The were for the chosen few and very costly, but they appeared when nothing but religious symbols were being depicted in European churches.

We talked about that too at the gathering that turned out to be not so much a commemoration of Nizami as discussion of the ideas and images that were born during the siege. Boris Borisovich remembered that the Assyriologist Igor Mikhailovich Dyakonov brought a little tin of sprats from the front. They shared out the fish and drew lots for the oil. It was in such an atmosphere that they held a scholarly conference where there was talk of miniatures and Nizami’s era, and his poems were recited. Sometimes events take place under the most difficult circumstances that stick in the memory for a long time.

Recollections of how people lived and worked during the siege teach us a lot. They help us to survive in our own time that is made hard not only by COVID but also by the existing disunity.