545 paces to the Hermitage

I've been in St. Petersberg for the last couple of days. The city prides itself in being the most European city in Russia, and it is known by some as "the Venice of the north". I've been staying in the old city centre built when Peter the Great decided a couple hundred years ago new capital would be better than Moscow. Like Venice, St. Petersberg was built on a swamp, which allowed for many canals and rivers to be built into the urban landscape.

St. Petersberg is know for it's arts and culture, so I have found myself visiting museums and going to theatres. Another guy in the hostel and I decided to spend our first day visiting the Kunstkamer, the oldest museum in Russia. It seems that Peter I was interested in promoting anthropological study and sent people all over the world to collect cultural artifacts. The museum had a section for the main cultures from every continent including North America and a small section on Korea which both made me feel at home. The most interesting/disturbing section, however, was the famous one devoted to abnormality.

It seems that collecting "monsters" was a science of it's own in the 1700s. Peter bought a few prominent collections that included stuffed animals with or without birth defects. There were armadillos and crocodiles alongside tropical shells and two-headed calfs (Siamese twins). That isn't all the collection included, however; as most birth defects render a fetus unviable causing miscarriage. In other words, most "abnormalities" never exist in a living human or animal. In response to this obstacle, the scientists simple collected deformed fetuses in jars of formaldehyde. Seeing a human fetus in a jar is disturbing by itself, but there were almost a hundred of them (mostly human) and all of them were somehow abnormal. Some had too many or two few appendages. Some only had one eye or three. Some were Siamese twins. One was an underdeveloped twin. A particular panel display attempted to justify this science as progressive in that it dispelled myths about monsters and devils to common people in the 1700s. I can't help but wonder if that was just an excuse so that a few weird people could collect "freaks," as one of the displays labeled Giants, Midgets and Hunchbacks. I hope it was a bad English translation.

Yesterday, I visited a second museum, the Hermitage. Housed in the former Winter Palace of the Tsars, the Hermitage is an enormous museum. It seems that Catherine the Great was an art lover and bought huge collections from all over Europe during her reign. She had a special "hermitage" attached to the palace specifically to house these works of art. These days the entire palace and a second hermitage are all part of the Museum. Conveniently, my hostel is located an extremely short distance away.




Rather than try to see everything, I decided to pick a few areas to concentrate on and then skim through the rest. I waltzed through a couple of the remaining state rooms with their gilded columns, tapestries, plaster molding and then found my way to the 19th and 20th century French painters. I had just entered the second room, and who did I see sitting on a bench, but Paul who I had traveled with in Mongolia.

Paul is French, and took great pride in sharing the bits of knowledge he had about the painters on display. We saw a room full of Picasso, which confused me because I though Picasso was Spanish. Paul was quick to tell me that Picasso spent most of his time in France and was therefore essentially French.

I always enjoy looking at impressionist works, and was happy to recognize a few famous names I've heard of (Matisse, Monet). My favorite style, and there were only two painted this way, was created by dabbing paint in dots of colour. There were no brush strokes at all.



Paul decided he wanted to come to an evening recital I had bought a ticket for. So l sent him off with my ticket so that he could get a seat adjacent to mine. I headed back inside the Hermitage for the rest of the afternoon.

A great deal of time was spent in the Greek and Roman antiquity areas. I had never seen Roman statues and Greek urns before. I tried to imagine what it would take to turn a slab of solid marble into a naked form with delicate facial features and toned muscles. My favorites were the cupid type figures with wings and a Hercules wrestling a lion that was curiously smaller than him.



I met Paul for the evening concert. It was Mozart's Requiem performed with a poem by Puskin, a famous Russian poet. I had sang the Requiem before as part of a choir, but the added poetry was a new twist. There were two characters, A young guy playing Mozart and an old guy with a deep voice and a severe look. He was Salieri, a renowned composer in Vienna during the time Mozart arrived. As Mozart's music became more and most popular, Salieri drifted into obscurity. It's rumored that Salieri murdered Mozart out of jealousy.

I would love to tell you what the two actors were saying if I knew myself. What I can say about the music was that the orchestra was great, but I had hoped that the choir had been a bit bigger in proportion to the large number of instruments. It may have been a perfect balance had Paul and I been sitting in the centre in the hall. Being situated in the first row meant the choir was singing over us and not at us.

I said goodbye to Paul after a drink at a restaurant that turned out to be German owned. I still have plans to look him up when I am in Paris.

Today, I've been cleaning out my bag and planning the rest of my trip. I'll soon be out of Winter and able to get rid of a lot of things. I still have a lot of books from the train that I have to trade or mail home.

The only thing I did other than eat and plan was go to a Ballet. Just as going to the Circus was essential to Moscow, I felt like I couldn't leave St. Petersberg without seeing Ballet. The programme was Esmeralda by Puni. I can't find any biographical information about Puni, but I can tell you that the ballet was based roughly on Victor Hugo's _Notre-Dame de Paris_. The music was good although not overwhelmingly beautiful or solemn. The dancing, to my undiscerning eyes, was beautiful. I had the cheapest tickets in the theatre which put me in a box on the fifth and top level of seating. The ceiling was beautiful; I could almost touch it.

Tomorrow mornining I've got an early morning train to catch and I'll be on my way to Finland.