Border-fluid

We were desperate to get in. We’d been hanging around since 8am, queuing since 9, and couldn’t wait for the doors to open. We weren’t even the most keen. That honour went to the squat man in the orange coat who made a ludicrous cut across to the front of one queue as both were slowly walking up to the doors. In the event he saved a grand total of sixty seconds before we were all swallowed up in the vastness of the Hermitage. 

This imposing turquoise, white, and gold palace, the scene of great drama in 1917, when the Bolsheviks stormed it, and the repository of the second largest art collection in the world, is one of Russia’s most famous buildings. Like St Basils, or the Kremlin, the Winter Palace is synonymous with Russia itself.  

But now questions of authenticity and tourism, after that meal at Duo, were nagging at me. Had we been seeing Russia inside the Hermitage? 

Michelangelo's Crouching Boy

My memories, both the particular and the general consist of almost nothing that could be described as Russian. There are over three million pieces of art in the gallery. We saw the ancient carved art of the Near East; sculptors from Italy, and untold numbers of European painters, Flemish, French, Spanish and so on; masters, third-raters, and all those in between.

At one point it was overwhelming. Row upon row of oil paintings bore down on us from every conceivable angle as, four hours in, we searched in vain for the staircase that lead to the cafe. They appeared in our peripheral vision and it is almost impossible not to engage with them to some degree. So it was heartening to read John Berger, on the plane home, write ‘Visitors to art museums are often overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and by what they take to be their own culpable inability to concentrate on more than a few of these works. In fact such a reaction is altogether reasonable.’ 

I discovered, on coming back, that many of my friends had experienced similar things. More than one said they made a habit of going to the National Gallery and spending half an hour before one painting, another that they toured only four or five rooms. But what’s the National Gallery – and the question of profusion of art – got to do with whether the Hermitage is an authentically Russian experience?

The similarity between the two galleries in this aspect is instructive of a culture that is more globalised than localised. The world art gallery is a phenomenon in its own right, with its own peculiar history. Emperors, and aristocrats more generally, across Europe have always been more border-fluid than those they ruled, more happy to see themselves as European even as they whipped their subjects up into nation worship to sustain their own political and moral authority. 

The Hermitage is part of this tradition. It’s about sharing in the status, acknowledged across the world, conferred by the possession and display of high art and classical artefacts. It is Russia as seen in the mirror, both how it wants to appear to itself and to the outside world. Here Russia is saying things about its wealth, power, and place at the global table. This is how something can be European and Russian at the same time because those concepts have never been mutually exclusive for the creators or maintainers of the Hermitage.

So we were seeing Russia – but by seeing through Russian eyes: how Russians had conceived, built, and decorated the place where the artworks were to reside; what kind of works they – from Catherine the Great to modern Russia, via the Soviets – thought valuable and worthwhile. 

I realised too, that the passage of time – and political, social, and technological developments – have taken such border-fluidity and the mixing of cultures from the clutches of the aristocracy. Catherine the Great and Vitaly shared this: a willingness to look beyond their own borders for objects or experiences that they can understand as both foreign and Russian. Just as to see Catherine’s art was to see Russia because one saw through her eyes – so Duo’s food was to put yourself in the place of young Saint Petersburgers like Vitaly. Doing what he and his friends did, seeing what they saw, eating what they ate: that was experiencing Russia as some Russians actually lived.