Russlands Seele (The Russian Soul)

Thankfully, the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublic Deutschland (Federal Art Museum), which I visited next, was much busier. This museum features a handful of traveling exhibits. And what luck! The first was about Mother Russia!

The collection was taken from the first National Gallery in Moscow, which was created by a wealthy industrialist named Pavel Tretyakov. The curators went to great lengths to point out that Tretyakov believed that wealth should be acquired only to give back to the society in some way. (The concept of a common good is strong in Germany, likewise in this exhibit.)

I stepped over to the first piece and attempted to read the Cyrillic text. Just as I was beginning to string together some phonetics, the man next to me spat out some quick German and started laughing. I looked at him and realized that he was looking back at me.

“Ich verstehe nicht,” I said. (I do not understand).

“Ja!” he replied happily, and walked away.

I realized that he was laughing about the fact that he did not understand the Russian text. And by my reply, he thought I meant that I did not understand the Russian either.

In reality I probably understood the Russian better than I understood him. But there was an even greater irony: I am Russian and German. That is what I tell people in the States. And here I was, only decades removed from these ancestors, and I would not be able to talk to them if they were alive today.

Anyway, at this exhibit, the art labels were detailed and in English, so I was ready to move on.

I must admit, I was not terribly familiar with Russian art before coming to this exhibit. The Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, which dominated the first few rooms, was obviously influenced Neoclassical and Romantic techniques in Western Europe. So they did not feel very “Russian.” But I had never seen paintings by Leo Tolstoy or some of the bright, cartoonish drawings of Russian fairs. Both were delightful.

The works began to take on a more "Russian" feel in the 1860s with the “Wanders” movement. These artists strove to portray late-19th Century society truthfully, which (in most cases) meant critically. Some of the paintings were positively heartbreaking – ragged old women who had lost everything in political reforms and dark Orthodox churches whose only light came from a few clusters of candles and reflections they made off the gold icons.

The Russian landscape scenes of were similarly bleak. “I love the monotonous nature of my home soil,” wrote writer Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, “for what it instills in its people.” There were pictures of immense swaths of land that grew nothing; they merely froze and thawed. Painters often used the same grey paint for the skin of Russian people and the grey, Russian slush.

There was, however, some comic relief from the ridiculousness of Russian drama. The “Wanders” often painted scenes intended to capture a single, suspenseful moment. They all made me laugh, particularly Ilya Repin’s “They Did Not Expect Him.”