The Russian museum. The history of its foundation.

Unit 11

Mikhai1ovsky Palace

The Russian museum

Exercise. Put the verbs in brackets into correct tense.

The Russian museum. The history of its foundation.

On April 13th 1895, not long after the death of Emperor Alexander III, his son and heir Nicholas II ….. (to sign) a Decree On The Establishment Of A Museum of Russian Fine Art In The Capital Of The Russian Empire St. Petersburg In Memory Of Our Father. Three years later, on March 7th 1898, the doors of the Mikhai1ovsky Palace in St Peters­burg …… (to open) to welcome visitors to Russia's first ever state museum of national fine art.

The idea for the creation of a national public Russian Museum, in which the fine arts ….. (to occupy) a central place, ….. (to mute) first amongst educated sections of Russian society long before Nicholas's decree.

The 1812 campaign against Napoleon, which ….. (to become known) in Russia as the Pat­riotic War, ….. (to leed) to a natural upsurge of patriotic fervour and ….. (to renew) interest in the history of Russian culture and the sources and paths of its development. The “Syn Otechestva” (Son of the Fatherland) journal ….. (to print) Fyodor Adelung's article "Proposal For Establishing A Russian National Museum" (1817) and Burhard Wichmann's A Russian National Museum" (1821).

In 1824 Vasily Grigorovich, later conference secretary of the Academy of Arts, ….. (to compile) a "Report on the Desirability of Forming a Special Department of Works by Russian Artists in the Hermitage". Such a gallery of Russian works of art ….. (to collect) subsequently from the Imperial palaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg and opened in 1825.

The XIX century in Russia ….. (to see) the birth of a new craze for collecting works of art. The "social portrait" of collectors and collec­tions also ….. (to change). Alongside the old ancestral collections, gathering dust in country estates and ….. (to pass down) from generation to gen­eration, new collections ….. (to begin) to appear.

These new collections ….. (to put) together by people from various classes of Russian soc­iety, amongst them the intelligentsia, the merchant class and raznochintsi. Such collec­tions often ….. (to disintegrate) just as quickly as they ….. ….. (to put) first together. And yet whilst for some buying works of art ….. (to be) nothing more than a fashionable diversion, for others serious collecting ….. (to become) their main pastime and purpose in life.

In the first half of the XIX century, the overwhelming majority of collections ….. …… (to be concentrate) in the capital, St. Petersburg. Besides the Russian Gallery in the Hermitage and the museum of the Acad­emy of Arts (in existence since the XVIII century yet pursuing primarily academic aims), the collections of Alexcei Tomilov (1779-1848), Pavel Svinin (1787- 1839), Nikolai Bykov (1812-1884) and the gallery of Fyodor Pryanishnikov (1793-1867) ….. (to be) all worthy of mention.

Pryanishnikov's collection ….. (to acquire) by the state in 1867 and (to transfer) to the Moscow Public Museum, also home to the Petersburg collection of Count Nikolai Rumyantsev (1752-1826) since 1861. This move symbolically ….. (to reflect) the relocation of the center of collecting in the mid-nineteenth century to Mos­cow, where art life ….. (to be) always more vigorous and democratic. Amongst prominent Muscovite collections ….. (to be) those of the palace book-keeper and head of a family of painters Yegor Makovsky (1802-1886), the architect Yevgraf Tyiirin (1792-1870) and the merchants, Kozma Soldatenkov (1818-1901) and Dmitry Botkin (1829-1889).

At the same time the accent on the “museum factor" - a collection's diversity and public accessibility - ….. (to intensify) amongst collectors. The wine merchant Vastly Kokerev (1817-1889) a special building ….. (to build) to house his short-lived gallery.

More lasting was the collection of the hereditary merchant Pavel Trelyakov (1|832-1898). His intention ….. (to be) to make his collection fully accessible to the public and it eventually grew into the country's largest museum of Russian art.

Towards the end of the century, however, there ….. (to be) still no private museums in St. Petersburg or Moscow large enough to offer a complete picture of the history of art in Russia, right up to its most recent period - the 1860s-1880s, the heyday of the peredvizhniki. What ….. (to need) - was a state museum.

"The organization of an exclus­ively Russian public picture gallery would undoubtedly be highly desirable here in Russia... Construction of a new mus­eum is vital to the history of our national art” were the words of a report ….. (to make) by Alexander Vasilchikov, direc­tor of the Hermitage, dated October 8^th 1881.

"We still do not have a national museum and it is high time we did," Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906) wrote in 1882, "... and not only because the capitals of all other European nations boast national museums (and not for all that long, either)... No, there is a much more import­ant reason. Because our very own national school of art has finally come into its own... No matter how fine and outstand­ing the initiative of all the Pryanishnikovs, Trelyakovs and Soldatenkovs, this task should not be left to such noble and magnanimous volunteers alone... The state itself must create first one, and then several, centres where works of national art can be assembled, where they can flow as one mighty wave and where the whole nation will always he able to find them, its most precious property."

The historical specifics of the situation ….. (to be) in that the idea ….. (to be) "stirred" by the coinciding of the national patriot aspirations of both liberal society and Emperor Alexander III, who - as officially (to cultivate) - ….. (to say) to be a connoisseur and patron of Russian art.

Alexander's acquisition in 1889 of Repin's picture Nicholas Mirlikiisky Deliver­ing Three Men Unjustly Sentenced To Death from the 17th Ex hibition of the Soc­iety of Travelling Art Exhib­itions ….. (to regard) thus as expression of the intention "to found a national public museum, in which all the best works of Russian art would be concentrated."

Regardless of the political angle, there ….. (to be) an un­doubted need to create a stale museum in the capital, to fill the space that ….. (to leave) between the biased private collections and the equally biased "depart­mental museums". The fail­ings of the former ….. (to wit­ness) in the long drawn-out crisis that ….. (to afflict) the board of the Tretvakov Gallery. The problem ….. (to arise) when its owner, in his twilight years, …… (to attempt) to unite unsuitable motives when writing his will and only ….. (to end up) contradicting himself. On the one hand he ….. (to desire) to leave his collection intact and immutable after his death. On the other he ….. (to wish) to see his gallery become a living, developing and growing museum. The shortcomings of the departmental institutions could be seen in the caste secrecy and "academical-educational" aspirations of the museum of the Academy of Arts, ignoring both the interests of the public and the possibilities for non-Academic paths in the history of art.

It ….. (to hope) that a non-departmental state establish­ment ….. (to avoid) these extremities, actively part­icipating in both the histor­ical aspect and the modern art process. This ….. (to be) what the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum ….. (to propose) subse­quently to become, and for which a fitting build­ing was so successfully ….. (to find) that unique monument to early XIXth century Classical Russian archit­ecture, the Mikhailovsky Palace.

Exercise. Express the same in English.

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