Respect is born in struggle

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with the remarkable Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk. We spoke about a lot of things, including museums. Pamuk wrote the book The Museum of Innocence. There is a lot in there about the psychology of collecting, about what one should collect in one’s life. The love story is embodied in the novel and in the objects that the writer collected. Pamuk has opened a museum of his personal collection associated with the romantic story of his own life and the life of Istanbul. It’s something like our apartment museums.

On the one hand, Pamuk is a theorist of museum work, on the other a practitioner. We discussed common problems. He asked what I got most criticism about. I said it was contemporary art.

For a long time two conceptions of museums existed in this country. One of them was a dusty place with few people in it, the other was a repository of treasures. The understanding of a museum as a sacred place, a temple, disappeared from our life. Due to a whole series of events that we are observing, the situation has changed. The word “Museum” has begun to sound differently, with a capital letter. Even Sergei Shnurov, the leader of the group Leningrad, has responded with a poem.

In this new stage, we need to reflect on our eternal theme of Petersburg as a museum city. 

In a recent survey asking students what in their opinion needed above all to be preserved in Saint Petersburg, St Isaac’s came out in first place. That was never the case in previous surveys. For a long time, the cathedral was altogether considered a poor piece of architecture. Thanks to the museum, St Isaac’s has become a civic sacred place, has acquired a significance that raised it to the first rank of Saint Petersburg’s monuments. Or rather, the fuss that has arisen around it.

Museums always find themselves on the front line of the struggle for civilization. They stress the supra-national, supra-religious significance of heritage. And they become an important symbol for society.

The question of the preservation of a museum as a repository of heritage has arisen in Chersonesus. Only very recently it was known as a site for archaeological excavations, and nothing more. Not all museum people had an understanding of the importance of Chersonesus. That became clear too during the discussion of the concept for the development of the museum-preserve at the Ministry of Culture. Now the ideological role of Chersonesus is understood.

A museum needs to be regarded with respect, and respect is born in struggle. In Saint Petersburg, Chersonesus, Ryazan, Vladimir and Suzdal problems are arising and coming to the fore that are connected with the significance of museums in society, their ideological or place-shaping role and their interaction with the authorities. 

This is especially important for our city, where for a long time the museums were perceived as tourist sights. They deserve more.

Apartment-museums re-create the atmosphere of a period. We do not have so very many “talking” apartments.

The suburban palaces, former imperial residences, are often thought of as parks where people can look at beautiful things and satisfy their curiosity about how the tsars lived. But they are a united circle of palaces that preserve history and retain the spirit of Saint Petersburg. In 1918 they were declared museum-preserves. The hundredth anniversary of that event should be exploited to the maximum. A committee has been created to organizze celebrations. Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof, Pavlovsk and Gatchina will mark the date jointly. On 18 May next year, International Museum Day, an exhibition will open in the Manege central exhibition hall. It will show the history of the museum-preserves with all its ups and downs, from the selling-off of items in the 1920s and ’30s to the post-war reconstruction.

In our city until recently there was a museum of four cathedrals, something that doesn’t exist anywhere else. The museum provided the cultural component of the four places of worship. Smolny Cathedral lived at the expense of St Isaac’s. The arrangement worked. It could have been altered. What will be now?

People often say that a church was built not as a museum but for people to worship there. In Amsterdam, at the Nieuwe Kerk in the very heart of the city, people do not worship: it’s a museum. When important state events take place, however, such as a coronation or the marriage of the Crown Prince, it becomes a cathedral for a time.

Palaces too were not built as museums, and that means not for crowds of people to visit them. The Winter Palace and the suburban residences are “museums of themselves”.

People either love or hate museums. Many people love the Hermitage and many people hate it because it was great at the time of the tsars, in the Soviet era and now too permits itself to have independent views. Museums should permit themselves that. They respond to the demands of the time and to some degree determine them. It is possible to regard the success of the Serov and Aivazovsky exhibitions in different ways, but the museums did identify the demand of the day, they determined it.

The attacks on Fabre bear no relation to the artist. They are attacks on the Hermitage. The majority of those who protested had not even seen the exhibition. People do not like the Western influence. They do not like contemporary art because it doesn’t look like the paintings of Serov and Aivazovsky. You cannot call what Fabre does beautiful. But are Egyptian mummies beautiful? Tibetan art is full of swastikas. We need to remember about differences and that variety is beautiful.

Museums enlighten people, nurture them, make them think. One of the chief pleasures in life is finding out things.

The exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery from the Pinacoteca Vaticana reminded people about what the Vatican is and about its museums. It became an event. A vogue has arisen for the period in this country’s history known as the “Thaw era”. There is nothing better about that period than the exhibition project now running in the Tretyakov Gallery. The museum presentation is many times superior to films and TV serials.

With its exhibition “Petrov Vodkin and His Time ” the Russian Museum allowed us to see some remarkable art. Our “Byzantium“ became an event in the religious life of Saint Petersburg: people prayed before the icons. The exhibition was not just pretty pictures. A comparison of the Zaitsev and Fortuny exhibitions was an occasion for reflection. Television and the cinema have not provided such food for thought for a long time. 

People come to appreciate the role of museums among other things through conflicts and disputes. In Saint Petersburg, Ryazan, Vladimir, Suzdal and Chersonesus, Museum problems are becoming noticeable. People react keenly to them and we need to make use of that.

An important topic today is wars of memory. They are being waged in the Caucasus, in Central Asia and in Russia. The new paganism, Vikings, pseudo-history… The 100th anniversary of the revolution will be a great trial for society. All sorts of things are already pouring from the screen. And here too museums have an enormous role to play: their considered approach to history is vital.