Friday we went to the Russian museum and saw a bunch of stuff from the late 19th and early 20th century (one of my favorite periods). I couldn’t take many pictures because the museum babushkas were especially cranky. I was able to get some pictures of a few Vrubels there (even though the Russian museum doesn’t have a great collection of his stuff).
From the Russian Museum:
(if you look closely you can find a face in there)
The pictures do not do him justice at all. The colors are far more vibrant and there’s much more depth to the paintings. Vrubel is sometimes loped in with the Symbolists and Romantics, although he seems to be in his own world to me. His paintings also have elements mixed in from Medieval, Venetian, and Byzantine art. His images are very dreamlike, both frightening and lyrical, and they show a frozen and fractured existence that can be strange, uncomfortable, but still beautiful. You can see the influence of the Russian icon in the eyes of his figures, although some of his figures’ eyes look more pained by whatever knowledge they contain than icons (although you definitely get icons that have a similarly pained and knowing expression—especially in this one icon I saw of Mary). He has this one painting of the Madonna that is absolutely breathtaking. I was hoping to see it in Moscow, but it’s in Kiev. Vrubel has a lot of images of demons, which are not meant to be sinister, but rather represent the human soul torn to pieces by the contradictions of existence and by the questions of the world created by God (don’t you just love artists?). Since I’m writing this later, I’ll mention that I saw an enormous room of his works in Moscow at the Tretyakov Gallery, and they were some of the most magnificent paintings I have ever seen. They were far more complex and had a more amazing use of color than I remember having seen them in slides and in books. It was only with Vrubel that I realized how necessary it is to see paintings live to get a sense of not just their true color and detail but also their size, which has a bigger impact than I expected on how you read the image and its mental/emotional impact. At the Tretyakov we saw The Demon Seated (one of his really well known pieces). I also really loved his Swan Princess and his image of this dark haired ambiguous figure huddled beneath this glowing lilac tree (I can’t remember the name).
These are photos of postcards I bought since you’re not allowed to take pictures at the Tretyakov. They look really bad, but imagine them as enormous, especially Demon which is especially big.
Swan Princess:
Enough art.
So in the evening we all went to one of Ohara’s hockey games, which was really far away on the metro. It took forever to get there (Akademeechesky, if you’re familiar with Petersburg). It didn’t help that Ohara gave us the old name of the sports center, so we walked too far and ended up at this massive Soviet era sports arena that was all boarded up and creepy. It was interesting to see the suburbs of Petersburg though.
Eventually we found the right place and were able to watch a fair amount of the game. We weren’t prepared for the frigidness of the arena though… Here are some pics of Ohara and the Russian guys. Her team won, by the way, thanks to her (no goals scored on her).
Yay Ohara!
Hockey guys:
More Ohara:
Deserted subway home:
I was really tired and not feeling that well so I headed home after staying at the game for an hour. I had wanted to go to bed, but when I got home Olga (my host parents’ other daughter) had just arrived home and was celebrating her birthday with maybe a dozen friends. So there was lots of flowers, lots of Russian food (including a Soviet style olive salad), and lots of Russian drinking, which I unfortunately was a part of. Like I’ve mentioned before, I have a really low tolerance, and whenever there’s a toast you have to drink to it (and if you don’t drink to the bottom of your glass it’s thought that you don’t want whatever nice thing was mentioned in the toast to come true). So after about 5 toasts with a “martini” (at least that’s what the Russian called it) made up of mors (a Russian fruit drink made from whortleberries) mixed in with two kinds of hard liqueur (I know one was vodka) and then Russian champagne, I was pretty out of it. But if babushka was even taking part in the festivities, I had to follow suit.
In any case, I was able to talk to a bunch of Olga’s friends who were all in their late 20’s or early 30’s, which was interesting. I felt kind of awkward at first because there were so many people and most of them spoke very fast in Russian. As the night wore on though some switched to English, which was nice. I met Irina’s (the woman I went on the boat trip with) two daughters, and the husband of the married one. I also talked for a long time with one of Olga’s friends she’d met while living in China (Olga speaks Chinese, English, Spanish, French, German, and Russian of course). I also met this really cool guy who was helping to set up and translate for this big jazz festival that was going on in Petersburg over the weekend. He was translating between Spanish, English, and Russian for the musicians and television. He was talking about all the people he was getting to meet, like musicians who had played with Santana and stuff.
But it was very fun, especially seeing my host parents so relaxed and having a good time with their kids and their friends. There doesn’t seem to be as strong a barrier between children and their parents here, maybe from that whole communal living thing again, or maybe it’s just some general aspect of Russian cultures (ignoring the whole generational conflict thing). It was just hard for me to imagine a situation in the US when three generations were hanging out in the same room drinking and eating and getting along in such a free manner.
Excepting the mix of generations, there was something about this group of young people who were teenagers and young adults when the soviet union collapsed and who (in some cases) are/were forced into military service and even served in Chechnya that reminded me of the Lost Generation of the ‘20’s. I haven’t really thought about it enough, but there’s just something about the attitude, a sense of disillusionment with life after the bubble reality of Soviet Russia burst, and after the frenzied influx of capitalism and pop culture became a disappointment. Many of them are also “ex-patriots,” living in other countries (although not changing citizenship) and only returning home to Russian on visits. They were all extremely intelligent and knowledgeable about literature and languages, yet none of them seemed to be especially settled down (even the married ones), and it seemed as if they just float from person to person, job to job, party to party. I was rather surprised how few were settled down given my initial impressions of Russia’s more “traditional” value system.
Anyway, it was nice talking about Russia and art and books and the Russian language. I got the same advice, for about the 4th time, that the only real way to learn Russian is to get a Russian boyfriend. Haha. I don’t think that’s going to happen though (don’t worry Patrick). They were all very warm and helpful, even if the later it was getting (and by that I mean the more the alcohol was taking effect) the less I was able to understand what they were saying to me in English, let alone in Russian. A little alcohol seems to make my Russian flow easier, but at the point when I had to strain all mental faculties to understand something in English, I knew I was in trouble. It was also difficult because I was trying desperately hard not to show how drunk I already was, while they were all pretty much still sober. I eventually excused myself at around 3am explaining that I had to wake up at 6:30 the next morning to go on an excursion to Pushkin. So that was the end of that fun filled night. I couldn’t tell when I woke up in the morning whether I was still drunk or completely hung over… I have a feeling it was the former…
No more Russian parties for me, even if they’re with my host family.
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