Mikhail Piotrovsky: Russia is drawn by a troika – Peter I, Alexander III and Catherine

• 1944 – born in Yerevan (Armenian SSR) on 9 December
• 1961 – enrolled in the Arabic philology department of the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad University
• 1973 – obtained the higher degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences
• 1992 – appointed Director of the State Hermitage, where he is still in charge today
• 2001 – became head of the Union of Museums of Russia as its president

A person with such a status should pronounce nothing but bombastic platitudes, but not in this case – any conversation with Piotrovsky enriches you with several precise yet paradoxical statements.

This conversation is roughly half of our meeting in the “Direct Speech” lecture hall, a remote encounter, as they all are right now. You can listen to the whole thing on the website pryamaya.ru. There’s plenty more of interest there.

“The best queue is a queue for culture.”

– You have said that the world – and the Hermitage – will not be what it was before. What are the main problems that the pandemic brought you, and are you glad to be emerging from it?

– First and foremost, we have all become used to living and working with remote access. That is very convenient and the closer we get to emerging from that regime, the less one wants to part with it. That’s bad, because what’s convenient is not always beneficial. You can’t live life contact-free. As for the Hermitage, the visiting process will become more structured, perhaps. You won’t buy your ticket at the ticket office, won’t queue up anymore, and that’s a serious change in the atmosphere. Later, of course, that will all come back, but living in a world governed by rules – you yourself understand… After all, a visit to a museum is a complex of impressions, a whole event, part of which is queuing up. The queue for a museum has a distinctive character. It’s full of a specific sort of people, in the grip of anticipation… In general, a queue to see art is an optimistic sight.

– That very queue has always been a puzzle to me. What do all those people need? Reproductions have attained perfection. Do you really need to look at Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son in a crowd of other spectators?

– For a start, it will be possible to speak about the perfection of reproductions only in a couple of decades, when they work out how to recreate literally every craquelure [crack in the paints] and those layers of painting that are only visible in X-rays. But even then, people will go to museums. First of all, there is the mysterious “energy of the real thing” that visitors talk about – although, by the way, they are not always able to tell the real thing from a copy. Secondly, there is the actual atmosphere of the museum. In the Hermitage that’s very significant, as it’s magnificent in itself. There is the context it gives. We once exhibited the whole of Matisse in the General Staff building – you’d think that if you have come to see Matisse, then do that! But people are interested specifically in the Hermitage Matisse or Rembrandt. The Hermitage is a museum within a museum.

“Destroying predecessors is a family affair.”

– I have a question for you as an Arabist. Many people now, following [Yulia] Latynina’s lead, are remembering that Christianity gravely damaged the pre-Christian world, demolished the culture of Antiquity. Did Islam seriously damage the pre-Islamic East?

– That’s precisely my field: absolutely not, since Islam was an organic continuation of the pre-Islamic East, born out of that soup. In the texts, in the calligraphy, in the architecture, the columns of Palmyra, there is a concentration of Arab culture, and Islam, the Arabian recension of monotheism, absorbed all of that and carried it forth into the world. One of the most important things in Islam is the Arabic language and calligraphy. Yet, you know, any ideology arising within a people will destroy its predecessors. That’s a normal process. Incidentally, the young Islam was quite tolerant in that sense – it was only at a mature age that it began chopping the noses off sphinxes. Christianity, however, even in its early years would draw crosses on the foreheads of Greek and Roman statues. In its iconoclasm, though, Islam, by the way, accords with both Judaism and Byzantium: the depiction of the deity is an immense temptation. From there it is a mere step to idol-worship. That began to express itself in specific deeds, however, only after three centuries or so. When today’s Islamic fanatics destroy the statues in Palmyra there is a subtle aspect to it: that is their heritage. They are settling scores with what is their own. That is a fairly natural thing: “I have changed; I have become better; I do not wish to see my past.” That’s how Christianity dealt with the Ancient World and paganism, Protestantism with the Middle Ages. That’s how the Bolsheviks destroyed their predecessors. It’s the law of kinship. I’ll go further – that what continuity is. You’ll come back with “Art belongs to everyone and they don’t have the right to destroy it”, but that is a debatable issue that can lead to thorny tangles. Heritage belongs to the heirs. It’s common property. But what about ownership of a work of art – who does it belong to, humanity or the collector? If you inherited the culture of your forebears, you also sense a right to destroy it, because that heritage is hindering you from moving on. Such things have happened. We went through that after the revolution. Can we interfere in the life of another country, if it is destroying monuments? That’s controversial. That’s culture, you see, such an attractive thing and seemingly indisputable, but take a closer look and there’s conflict every step of the way.

– Continuing the Islamic theme: will today’s Europe stand up to the pressure of Islam? Many people already see it falling victim to expansion.

– You see, it’s a continuation of the Crusades. There were Crusades to the East, now the East is moving in the opposite direction. In history a long-delayed echo is a usual thing. Back then European ragamuffins arrived in the wealthy Middle East, supposedly to recapture the Holy Sepulchre, but actually to plunder and in passing also to massacre Jews and fight in the Byzantine Empire. The result was the formation of a peculiar European culture, infused and in many ways fertilized by the East: by its luxury, its refinement and its crafts. At first those Crusaders did not take the East seriously, and it needed Saladin to appear in order to defend the Muslim identity. Well, and Europe today is obliged to defend its own identity – cultural, above all, of course. To defend itself intellectually, and not through police measures. France, I think, will definitely cope. Austria too. as for the rest, we’ll see… but that’s what history is made up of, after all, isn’t it? Expansion and defence. In the States exactly the same sort of cultural conflict is underway right now.

– You consider it cultural, all the same? Many see it as a revolt by “riff-raff” against respectable working people and average citizens.

– Well, you know, in earlier times they would have said that it’s a class conflict that has taken on an ethnic form. Back then, everything was reduced to the class struggle. Today everyone regards it as a religious conflict that sometimes takes on the guise of class. I believe that it is precisely a cultural conflict, certainly not a racial one as there are roughly equal numbers of blacks and whites on each side. The proof of the cultural nature, the clash of world views behind this conflict that is constantly smouldering is the destruction from time to time of the statues of Confederate generals that we are all witness to. In general, I am inclined to believe that culture – which determines lifestyle among other things – is at the bottom of all confrontations. Europe in that sense is no exception. Some reckon that life is about how much you’ve earned and that you need to work from morning to night or else speculate; others reckon that life is measured by how much you have understood or felt, and that you should not be working, but saving your soul. In some countries – Italy, say – you are supposed to be the same as your father, in others better than your father. Modernists and traditionalists are always feuding with each other and always get along together. If they stop feuding history will end. If they stop getting along, too.

– You mean that in the States we are observing the traditional clash between a democratic modernist South and an aristocratic North…

– One might put it that way, because the Civil War did not eliminate that contradiction. War generally does not eliminate anything. That’s the way people are made. Civil wars do not remove conflicts. They are means for a country to modify itself. If you like, it was precisely after overcoming segregation that America became great. I could tell a person experiencing an insoluble internal conflict the same thing: perhaps it’s a means of developing to greatness.

– We know that knowing English disciplines one’s thinking, that learning French makes it more aesthetic, but what about Arabic?

– On the one hand, mathematicality, an algebraic sense that puts a fairly useful template in you head. On the other hand, also a certain aestheticism, refinement, luxury.

– And should the office of a ruler have the trappings of luxury? Or be democratic, like the papacy nowadays?

– It depends on which rulers. In Russia it definitely needs to have some luxury – that’s the scale, that’s the tradition… anyway, sitting in the Hermitage, it would be ridiculous to inveigh against luxury.

“The Provisional Government was the most intellectual.”

– I simply must ask a favourite question, especially as you work in the very place where one of the main events of Russian history took place. Antonov-Ovseyenko came in and said: “Provisionals. Your time is over!” What is your attitude now to October 1917 that seriously altered the status of the Hermitage?

– We held a whole exhibition about that event, trying to get the walls themselves to speak – they know best of all what happened. The Provisional Government – which was, incidentally, the most intellectual government Russia has ever had – had by that point long since left the Winter Palace and gone their separate ways. Only the remnants of it were sitting in the Malachite Room and then the White Dining-Room. In effect, what got taken by storm was the military hospital that was housed in the Winter Palace at that time. On Kerensky’s orders, all the double-headed eagles had already been beheaded. Indeed, as you know, there wasn’t really any storm. Since the Bolsheviks looked to the French Revolution for their aesthetics, though, there had to be a storm, followed by the terror. Eisenstein staged a completely made-up scene. Then when Jean Renoir filmed La Marseillaise, when he was shooting the storming of the Tuileries, he took his lead from Eisenstein. We repaid our debt to the French, as it were. But if we are taking a non-aesthetic view… Well, of course, when people call it a coup, that’s an understatement. It was a revolution, a real, classic one that completely overturned society, a decisive event for the 20th century. Admittedly, within our walls prior to that there had been at least one event that caused an upheaval in Russia: it was here, in the hall of the State Council, that serfdom was abolished in 1861.

– And what’s there now – where Ovseyenko went in?

– Nothing extraordinary, a display hall, part of the Russian department. The only unique thing is an enormous clock that was stopped forever showing the time of the revolution, 10 in the evening or so. But then we had a clock-mender’s workshop, because I have a fond idea that all the timepieces in the Hermitage should be running, including the museum exhibits. And on 25 October 2017, I personally wound up the clock in the White Dining-Room.

– And time began moving.

– Let’s say, it moved on.

“Petrograd itself drove the government out to Moscow.”

– When a Leningrader came to power in the country, many people, myself included, hoped that Petersburg would be given back some of the functions of a capital. It was, after all, conceived as a capital, and the transfer of that role to Moscow took us back to the Asiatic historical model. Even now, it can’t be said that that process has begun: how do you view the matter?

– The return is underway – the headquarters of the navy, the Constitutional Court – but, strangely enough, when they started to come back, you somehow feel an inner resistance to it, and the city is resisting too. As a Petersburg chauvinist, I am sure that the city itself will decide its fate. It wanted to appear in the marshes and Alexei Mikhailovich, who began its construction, and later Peter only carried out its will. It forced Napoleon in 1812 to direct all his forces against Moscow and not against Wittgenstein’s corps that was covering Petersburg, although taking Petersburg would, you might think, have been easier for Napoleon. And a century later, it wasn’t the government that left Petrograd and moved to Moscow, it was Petrograd that drove it out to Moscow, saving itself, and only in that way did it save its historical appearance. It’s dreadful to think what would have happened to Petersburg – it would have been worse than happened to Moscow. As for the status of a capital: it is a capital anyway, it continues to produce constellations of talents and in that sense the Sobchak contingent is far from the last. No other city in modern Russian history has had such a skein of tragedies. If you take the Second World War, then the three cities that have become a symbol of great tragedies are Leningrad, Dresden and Hiroshima; if it’s the post-war repressions then there’s the “Leningrad Affair”. If it’s the hounding of writers, we have Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, for dissident culture there’s Brodsky. The city, as it were, gives a contour, a shape, an aesthetic dimension to everything that takes place in Russian history. It’s not for nothing that the Russian Revolution, the events of October 1917, happened so theatrically, and so bloodlessly, in contrast to the ones in Moscow. To live in Petersburg means to retain it: both spiritually and purely physically. Don’t put all that down to actual Petersburg chauvinism, because the best books about Petersburg were written by people who weren’t Petersburgers by any means – Gogol, Bely… But that goes to show once again that any inhabitant of Russia who comes here achieves their maximum.

– If you had to choose an adjective – cultural, spiritual, criminal – what kind of capital is it?

– Northern. The Russian eagle has two heads. The Russian state has two capitals. They reflect its two faces.

“Maniacs distinguish an original from a copy.”

– You have been the head of the country’s main museum for 28 years: isn’t it exhausting?

– If it gets exhausting, I’ll leave. I am absolutely free in that sense. And, of course, in the corridors of the Hermitage, there are plenty of people ready to become my successors. That does not mean that I am sitting and thinking of a successor, but I am prepared to give way to one.

– But you don’t have the mindset that “without Piotrovsky there’s no Hermitage”?

– The Hermitage itself chooses who will be in charge of it: it rejects and discards a great many. As does Petersburg, essentially. I would put it differently: if there’s no Hermitage, there’ll be no Piotrovsky. Incidentally, Russia itself also chooses who is suited to it at a given moment.

– Why are you pro-Putin? What does the status of an authorized representative bring you?

– Because Putin is the only leader of Russia in many years that has a perfect command of a foreign language. And because he is our man, and we need to help our own.

– A traditional question: what was the most difficult decision that you have had to take in your post as director?

– Probably the decision to bring back [Rembrandt’s] Danaë. The painting was under restoration for 12 years and could have stayed there another 12, but at some point it was necessary to say “Enough!”

– Can you give any explanation for why that maniac threw acid on it?

– It’s hard to explain the actions of a maniac, but there is a strange pattern: for some reason they most often attack Rembrandt and Dürer. The colour of gold, Rembrandt’s above all, is reckoned to particularly trigger them. It both fascinates and infuriates them. Note that they never attack copies, only originals. It follows that there must be something specific to an original after all.

–  I must ask you about the main discussion in Russian literature – Rozanov versus Merezhkovsky, the Mother Sow. Remember, Rozanov said that Falconet’s prancing horse had degenerated into Troubezkoy’s hippopotamus-like horse. Which Russia do you feel closer to?

– You see, Troubezkoy’s statue is completely inaccurate, almost provocative, yet it does express something profound and precise. It seems to me that it’s time at last to grasp that Russia includes both things – Peter’s dancing, flying horse and Alexander III’s horse “that will, of course, never dance to any kind of music.” Alexander also had his own greatness – we in the Hermitage particularly understand that. He actively bought up paintings, although his tastes were more in keeping with the French Salon… Admittedly, I cannot agree with one of his ideas – about the country having just two allies, the army and the navy. Russia has one more ally – culture. It is absolutely reliable. It’s a shame that it wasn’t me who said that, but Sokurov. Russia is neither the one or the other, it is everything together, and there is one answer to the eternal question “What’s is it like?”: it is, what it is, the way it needs to be at the present moment. And it is really drawn by a troika – Peter’s swift steed, Alexander’s solid fat mount and Catherine’s horse, which I can’t picture as there are no equestrian statues of her. Still, Catherine is the third and most engaging image of Russia, a woman who conversed with Voltaire, a writer, and she enormously expanded Peter’s window to Europe. Just breaking through was not enough. The granting of freedom to the nobility in itself was a tremendous step.

– Does Russia need a minister of culture?

– Without state support, culture will not survive, full stop. Culture has three sources of subsistence, since the state should not have a monopoly either: the authorities, its own earnings and benefactors. As I understand it, your ideal form of government is… well, of course, an enlightened monarchy. And it needs to be enlightened rather better, the way Zhukovsky did with the Tsesarevich [the future Alexander II]. The task of Russian culture is to become a collective Zhukovsky. Only it shouldn’t take on the role of censor. Zhukovsky ought not to have changed Pushkin’s lines to “To where it unsubdued and towering stands/ Higher than Napoleon’s Column.” “Alexander’s Column” was better. On the other hand, that did get it printed.