FRIDAY - The State (Old) Tretyakov Museum

FRIDAY - Today we visited the State Tretyakov Museum (sometimes referred to as the Old Tretyakov Museum) with a personal guide named Irina. Irina met us at the embassy gate and was instantly a pleasure to talk with. She was a retired guide who loved to travel and who had been trained to be a personal guide for visitors to Moscow. It was wonderful to speak directly with someone from the city and learn about her daily life, her family, and her outlook.

Irina helped further our confidence using the metro here (still a bit of a challenge, we don't have the alphabet down yet, plus at least for me, it's the first time I've used the mass transit system of any large city - I'm a taxi guy normally).

On the way to the museum Irina talked about how she loved winter and was so pleased that it had finally started to snow regularly. Until we arrived, there had been very little snow in Moscow. She talked about how clean and fresh the city seemed after a snow, and today was no exception with a gentle snow all day.

She was surprised to learn that we loved winter and snow, and that it was actually colder in Iowa before we left. Irina said, "I love the feel of the cold on my face in the winter - it's refreshing and makes me feel energetic and alive!" Couldn't have said it better myself, Irina.

She started us out with a brief history of Tretyakov himself and of a dozen or so artists from the 19th century who were prominently featured at the museum. It was wonderful information, but I humbly admit... I could keep track of the faces in the photographs... but the names escaped me.

Every name ended in 'kov' 'skov' 'nov' 'lov'.... they all could have just as well been 'Smith' for as much as I was capable of retaining. I thought at that moment it must be an awful bitch to come to the US as a non-native speaker and try to remember the difference between Johnson, Johanssen, Christensen, Hendersen, Mason, Furgason... those names must sound like the same gobbledy-gook to them too.

Then we were into the exhibits. We started with marble and bronze busts and worked our way from the 17th century painters to the early 20th century.

Some paintings were amazing in their photo realism for a picture painted in the 1800s. Some were incredible in their depiction of light, like Arkhip Kuinji's Moonlight on Dneiper, a 5'x8' oil painting that I could not take my eyes off of (sorry the pic here does not do justice). It's the most amazing representation of moonlight I've ever seen. When it was first exhibited in the 1800s, patrons would ask to see where the lantern was that was lighting the piece from behind.

Another picture I couldn't walk away from was Vasily Vereschagin's The Defeated. Office for the Dead, a 12 foot high, 20 foot long canvas so powerful and so somber that you felt you were on that now silent battle field, surrounded by thousands of dead soldiers. You really must click on this image to appreciate it at a larger size.

While there were pastoral scenes and some very heroic landscapes, the paintings that Irina spoke of the most, that Russians visiting the gallery seemed to flock to, and that overwhelmingly populated this cross section of many pre-twentieth century artists were those paintings associated with pain, loss, extreme grief, enormous hardship, and powerful leaders with ruthless behaviors. At first, I thought this represented a national psyche that had been so beaten down that they had finally accepted suffering as an identity as a way of life. I thought this was defeatist and sad.

But as Irina explained the subject matter each painting with a reserved passion and a pride, I came to see these paintings, not as cries of desperation, but as an expression of the pride Russians feel about the history of their country: a people who have prevailed, and worked on, no matter the circumstances, because they must. Because despite bad things happening throughout the centuries, they love their country.