In Praise of Distancing

Culture determines the correct distance

The first result of the corona virus epidemic that has still not finished but has moved us apart from one another is increased social and psychological distancing. The situation demanded healthy, rational behaviour from us and an understanding that separation is more important than emotional closeness.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: We used to be constantly explaining – on an emotional level – that the museum should not receive an excessive amount of people because it will simply burst from their unlimited quantity… And now that is objectively clear. In culture, as in a person’s life, boundaries that cannot be crossed are important. So, after this experience, of not getting closer than 1½ metres, a slightly different world perhaps awaits us – one of separation and regulation, greater calculation instead of emotionality. The period of adaptation to more distant interactions will not be easy, but perhaps people will then become more responsible. After all, when you realize that you are on your own and that – no, not that no-one is going to help you, but that you cannot expect everyone to come running… We know from life that today’s policeman is not going to come running at the sound of a whistle, as a militiaman once would have. Many are sad. Many reckon that this is not heading towards a civilized society.

But feelings do overcome distancing. And culture knows how to live with distancing.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Culture can live quite readily with distancing, and just as readily overcome it. And, incidentally, the new technologies that we are in the habit of believing are ruining our life and leaching all that’s human out of us are the very thing that allow culture to overcome distancing. We need live interaction, of course, but it should not be too frequent or close in order that nothing becomes devalued. Going to the Hermitage every day and looking at Rembrandt is a thing some people wouldn’t tire of, but on the whole many might. And it would make it more difficult to appreciate Rembrandt. So, when it comes to distancing, we are conducting some sort of important experiment. Perhaps it’s a good one. Later on, everything will be clearer, but already at this point we can reflect on the human results of what has happened. Already it’s evident that that there will be more not so much order, but a certain estrangement that might allow us to respect each other more.

When it comes to distancing, we are conducting some sort of important experiment. Perhaps it’s a good one. All this might allow us to respect each other more.

Incidentally, a great painting does give a person the necessary distancing from some inner nervous strain, a bundle of confused thoughts and feelings.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, it does. Culture generally determines the right distance.

And it looks as if we are entering some new age, with new reference points. The post-pandemic world is dividing, Today it seems to many that it is more reassuring to live separately. “Our own” is becoming more important and necessary. National interests and law are proving more important than international ones. Sometimes it is indeed more important to go on the defensive.

Overt anti-globalism is emerging

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, quite distinctly. But while in the economic and political sphere or in health-care structure it is better to “isolate”, with culture that’s nevertheless not the case. Cultural bridges simply mustn’t be burnt. Because that is the best medicine against enmity.

People should not lose one another, or continents drift so far apart that they can’t come together again. Or else they come together in a sea battle. I don’t know how to accomplish that, but I know it needs to be done.

The distancing that we have acquired experimentally should be given cultural definition. If we are able to achieve that, we will cure ourselves of many things…

Conflict with Gaea

What have we been sick with, though, if we regard the pandemic from not only a medical point of view?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Recently, during an interesting discussion about the pandemic in Saudi Arabia, my attention was caught by a contribution from an American lady, who reckoned the pandemic was caused by too much closeness between humans and animals. We are getting too close to animals and doing so in a rough way – hunting, killing, cutting, eating. Well, and finally we reached a point at which the ever-present possibility that something will jump across from an animal to people has increased many times over. And all these coronaviruses – before COVID-19, we had bird flu and swine flu – are precisely that sort of jump across species.

At the European University, where we are opening up a new discipline called “Geo-philosophy”, we recently held a special discussion on the situation regarding our clashes with nature.

Taking a broader view, the pandemic is the result of nature’s resistance to us. We exploit it in a predatory manner, look upon it as consumers. It’s not simply a case of “don’t expect favours from nature” but constantly extorting something from it. Nature for us is the basis for service. We cut down trees, extract minerals, ruin the soil with ploughs and totally forget that nature is a powerful organism with which we need to establish mutual interaction. If we fail to do that, we get global warming and a pandemic in response. It’s all about disrupted balance.

We are living in a story that is closely bound up with the theme of nature. People are also a part of nature and also worthy of respect. Everything that natures gives us is a gift, a present, and not something we wanted and just took. We need to realize that to coexist with nature and with each other we need to give something. Life together – if we want it to end happily – is in any event some sort of exchange.

In just the same way as we are destroying the forests and disrupting ecosystems when we extract minerals, we are also disrupting the proper interaction between nations. Although, who knows what it should be like. Still, we are definitely disrupting it.

You and I were speaking about distancing between people – well we are failing to observe it with nature, too. In our present-day world, everything has ended up being close-packed – humans and animals, incorrect attitudes to nature, to culture. And societies that are more or less relatively equal, like in Europe, have proved too close-packed. High population density, established habits of constant interaction. And all sorts of contagions, not only biological, but also social (such as crime), do indeed spread when people live crowded together.

And just as a physiological jump takes place from too close and active contact between humans and animals, today socio-psychological jumps are also taking place. Isn’t the Middle Eastern hysteria connected with Islam and everything that we are accustomed to being outraged about [ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood are organizations banned in Russia – Editor’s note] jumping across to Europe and America?

And this worldwide war against monuments on racial grounds is also a jump across, by the way. It all bothered us less, it seems, when people were blowing up the statues of Buddha in Bamyan or hanging the director of the museum in Palmyra for nothing more than preserving cultural antiquities, but when the guilty parties are deemed to be Lincoln, Washington, Colbert, Voltaire, Spanish priests, and even Cervantes, that affects people more deeply…

On the war against monuments

The war against old historical symbols has taken on a fantastic scope.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Looking at this war, I feel the greatest affinity with the excellently formulated thought that Emmanuel Macron recently expressed in this very context, attacks on monuments: “The Republic will not erase a single trace or a single name from its history.”

Is the fact more important than the symbolism?

Mikhail Piotrovsky:  Yes, the fact is more important, Because history consist of facts. People’s names, the monuments to them are the basic stuff of history. While the interpretation, the assessment (of people and of monuments) comes under the heading “everything else”.

Why have things gone as far as an attack on Voltaire?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Well, supposedly he took money from a company that transported slaves, and a ship engaged in that trade was named after him. Poor Voltaire, of course. All of that has no relation to the essence of his place in history. Except perhaps that he always has a guilty smile. It was not for nothing that Catherine had Houdon’s statue [of him] that stood in the Hermitage moved further away from her, while Nicholas I later had it banished from the palace altogether, to the public library. Moving monuments out of the way was a distant foretaste of the future war against them.

It looks as if we are entering some new age, with new reference points. It seems to many that it is more reassuring to live separately. But culture should not be isolated, because that is the best medicine for hostility.

In France, Colbert is in disfavour for equally far-fetched reasons.

There have always been attempts to alter priorities and rewrite history, though.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes. but now we are encountering attempts to rewrite history on account of offended feelings.

History does not belong just to our contemporaries who are discontented with it, though. It belongs to everyone – the living and the dead, the contented and the discontented. That’s why monuments need to be protected. The ones to Columbus. And to the Spanish priests, And to Cervantes, who has had mud slung at him for no clear reason at all.

Twisting and reinterpreting history can end badly. We remember that from our own experience in this country. The way the monuments to Alexander II were destroyed in Moscow… While in Petersburg we had a special experience. The monument to Nicholas I on St Isaac’s Square, while all sorts of things were held against its subject (his “victory” over the Decembrists, the cholera riot, and the old joke about a fool chasing after a clever man, referring to Peter the Great’s monument ahead of him), was left completely untouched, although there was talk of destroying it. And the monument to Alexander III travelled from its square to various courtyards of the Russian Museum. That’s a very Petersburg tale.

Monuments should be preserved without fail. Even if some of them can no longer stand on main squares, such as Dzerzhinsky, for example. He should stand in the Muzeon (a splendid Muscovite invention, by the way, being a monument with a museum function). Saving and preserving a memory, a museum often has to remove it from its context. By the way, we have a Hermitage repository prepared in Staraya Derevnya for sculptures and urban structures that (sometimes justly) no longer please people. We were already prepared for it to receive the Peace Tower from Sennaya Square that had got on everyone’s nerves and in their way.

History and Hysteria

African Americans are rising up against the symbols embodied in monuments that seem to them now incorrect and racially degrading. But the struggle against colonialism and colonialists was the last piece of history that united the whole world with its values.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: The anti-colonial zeal was very useful to all of us in its time, but the colonies are long gone.

And it’s ridiculous to judge poor Voltaire for them, De Gaulle or those generals from the American South that have stood there for centuries. The attack on them is a pandemic jump of hysteria, in which everything begins to get reinterpreted through hysteria.

And the notorious ressentiment (Nietzsche’s term) makes itself felt. Rancour and irritation evoked by disappointment, by frustration. That is what drives those fighting against monuments. It is ressentiment that forms the basis for the present post-colonial syndrome, when we are all being forced to endlessly repent and apologize for the colonial past. Hatred even arises towards Orientalism, oriental studies, paintings about the East. You need to add to the repentance the inevitable celebrations if, for example, a native of one of the colonies is appointed director of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Having natives of the “former colonies” working in them is nothing unusual for Russian museums, but for the French it becomes an event, and in my opinion there is some sort of hysterical unnaturalness in that too.

The end of colonialism was both the result of the struggle against it and the result of the colonialists’ desire to leave.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: There’s a well-known saying that belongs to the famous Saudi Arabian oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani: “The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones.”

It’s roughly the same story with colonialism. It came to an end because the people in the colonies did not want it and nor did the colonizers themselves.

Colonial conquests that had their specific goals at some point achieved those goals or lost them. The colonies became no longer necessary to the centres of empire. And the raw materials that they took from them lost their importance. Oil was more important, but that wasn’t in the colonies at all. The whole of colonial history, like European slave-ownership, lost its economic legitimacy. And the colonizers’ civilizing mission exhausted itself.

I get the impression that the present-day outrage at the old monument to Lincoln – “Why is a black man kneeling before a white president?” – is driven not so much by a burgeoning sense of racial dignity as by an inferiority complex. One that is not even personal, but socio-psychological.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: If we think back to the first opponents of, say, French colonialism – the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, the philosopher Frantz Fanon, they were very highly educated and highly cultured people. What inferiority complex could they have had! Then, admittedly, there were people a little less sound… And now, yes, one senses an inferiority complex.

America is a developed country, with order, law, precise social mechanisms, with model routes for citizens of colour to go into jazz and business, yet in this sudden explosion of outrage at monuments one senses some failure to involve African Americans sufficiently in American culture?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Well, since the time of Marxism we have known about the importance of social mechanisms. Good social mechanisms also aid cultural assimilation, When it comes to the broad masses, though, to drawing them into culture, then an inferiority complex is all but inevitable. Because assimilating any culture is no easy matter. And when a broad mass of people arriving anywhere, be it America, say, or Russia, is not very keen to learn the language then that gives rise to the hysteria of an inferiority complex. Joining a large community always causes some sort of complex. Here the peculiarities of ethnic identity and membership of different social strata have their effect.

History does not belong just to our contemporaries discontent with it. It belongs to everyone. That’s why the monuments need to be protected. The ones to Columbus. To Voltaire, And to Cervantes, who has had mud slung at him for some reason.

And let’s not forget that people always want something more. The dissatisfaction that springs from that is extinguished, however, if you are entirely included in a culture and it is a part of you. Evidently in America, the inclusion of African Americans is not extensive for all that.

And although there have been Louis Armstrong and Michael Jackson, “quotas” for jobs for black people, a tendency in black life towards involvement in drug dealing has also existed and still does. Afro-American people with a fractured past – slavery in the 19th century – is a historical disjunction and disgrace (as too was serfdom, for example, somewhat less inhuman, but also shameful).

Mikhail Piotrovsky: But now, it seems, what is taking place with the once oppressed African Americans is something that Arnold Toynbee described with such a lack of political correctness, noting the tendency for yesterday’s oppressed to also oppress others. That’s not always the case, but it does happen…

So, I can only repeat what Macron said – don’t erase a single trace or a single name. You can say this or that about the heroes of days gone by, but you mustn’t lift your hand against the memory.

An Echo of the Civil War

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Generally speaking, though, what is taking place in the USA and in other countries is, of course, reverberations, an echo of Civil War. In France, for example, it resonates in the division into Pétainesque and non-Pétainesque France. With us in Russia the echo of the last war against Germany sometimes grows stronger. (It’s not for nothing that nowadays conversations about Poland, which was a part of Russia until the Civil War, have a sharper tone than those about Germany.)

I think that we should look more often at Salvador Dali’s great painting Premonition of Civil War. And reflect upon it. So as, God forbid, not to bring that back in some form or other.

Still we do not have a demonstrative war over monuments here.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: What about the three scandals over memorial plaques? The one to Mannerheim, solemnly unveiled is Saint Petersburg with a military guard in attendance and then smashed and bespattered so many times that it had to be removed to the History Museum in Tsarskoye Selo?

Prior to that, we held a large exhibition in the Hermitage about Mannerheim, not so much about the Finnish president as about the Guards officer, Russian military scout and a man who did not raise his hand against Saint Petersburg, and people got upset about it, albeit in a civilized way.

Or the smashed very beautiful crystal glass memorial plaque to Sakharov in Gus-Khrustalny?

Or the scandal over the memorial plaque on the site of the killing of Uritsky that we reinstalled after the restoration in the General Staff building. We were obliged to return it by the law of history, and the style of the plaque showed that it was no more than a monument of its era. We balanced things out. Next to the portrait of Uritsky we placed a big portrait of [his assassin] Kannegisser, told about him as a friend of Yesenin, a poet, officer cadet and one of the defenders of the Winter Palace. It all started with mild protests, people holding single placards, but it ended with heated ones, in Russian émigré circles, too, even from our friends. Affronted comments: “How dare you?! That man had blood on his hands!” But we are reinstating that part of our history in which very many people had blood on their hands.

I think that too is the bacilli, the viruses of civil war.

At such moments you understand clearly that as yet there can be no talk of reconciliation. And perhaps it is early to become reconciled. In France, for example, people won’t make up. And the load of the bacilli of civil war that such topics bear is impossible not to notice.

We are particularly exposed to it in the Hermitage because we are the former imperial residence and the custodians of the imperial memory. Oof, what we got when on the 100th anniversary of the arrest and execution of the emperor who never was, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, we put a portrait photograph of him on Instagram. It unleashed a wild argument and on the whole that disturbed us: the Hermitage’s Instagram isn’t [the radio station] Echo of Moscow after all – people visit it without animosity.

Still, culture should and can extinguish that. I used to laugh a little over talk that art is therapy,. but in the past few months, while working online, making contact with millions (in real-life we get 5 million visitors a year; online we have had 45 million), we became convinced yet again that culture and art do provide people with a sort of medicine. At the least a soothing influece, for sure.

Perhaps that too is part of our mission,something that ought to be thought about. As an antidote to everything that is born out of civil war.

A key question

What is the medicine for an inferiority complex, though?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Individuals and peoples are helped to avoid falling into an inferiority complex by the preservation of their national culture – at the most varied levels of assimilation. In the Russian Empire that worked splendidly at the level of the highest social strata. No other country had as many Georgians, Tatars and former Muslims among its elite. All our Bagrations, Kutaisovs, Kutuzovs, Yusupovs. Half the nobility had Tatar surnames. The English, incidentally, also accepted a few people from the colonies into the higher echelons, but not at home in England. While with us even the Emir of Bukhara was a senior Russian noble. Then a policy of excessive Russification spoilt all that a little. Still, Russia nonetheless managed it better than anyone. I know that as someone with Polish, Russian and Armenian blood in my veins.

In your family your father was a representative of the metropolitan culture?

Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, and my ancestors were imperial people, officers, Catholics from Poland who converted to Orthodoxy. My mother was from the Armenian intelligentsia. For me, Papa and Mama were people of a single culture, but that did require a certain adaptation of sorts on their part. There is a lot of that in Russia. In Russia even the Jews assimilate more, although they do not assimilate easily.

And they contribute incredible cultural leavening.

Mikhail Piotrovsky: But that comes as a result of the ability to combine assimilation with independence.