Our Russian Journey Comes to An End

Tuesday, July 25th

After a thankfully long rest the night before and a somewhat slow start in the morning, we began our last full day in St. Petersburg (and in Russia) by departing for the Hermitage art museum.
Although we arrived at the Hermitage approximately five or ten minutes before it opened, the queue for entrance already stretched far down the sidewalk with different groups. Fortunately, once the doors opened, we made steady progress.

Our guides told us on the bus ride to the museum that “hermitage” was a French word meaning “place for a hermit” – nuns dwell in a convent; birds, in an aviary; hermits, in a hermitage. A hermitage would be a place where someone would go to be alone. This name may have been very apt in Catherine the Great’s time, when the collection was exclusively for herself and her close friends, but now it’s practically a misnomer. We fought swarms of Asian and European tourist groups with gibberish English on their clothing, and an assumed right of passage that apparently included dividing every surrounding group into confused fragments.
Unlike most of the American museums I’ve visited in my lifetime, which are freezing in order to better preserve their collection somehow, the inside of the Hermitage was rather uncomfortably warm. It may have been an understandable issue of getting air conditioning in a centuries-old building, but I can’t be certain.

The rooms were enormous, full of intricate plasterwork – much of which gilded with delicate gold leaf (sheets of gold thinner than a human hair) in the Rococo style seen in Versailles. In the first few halls, the ceilings were so high that the larger plasterworks on the ceilings and the tops of the walls were simply a painted façade, and it was difficult to tell the difference.

Even after hearing so many times how many millions of pieces the Hermitage has in its collection (nearly three, by the way), it was difficult for me to grasp its scale until we walked up one floor to view a collection (that of Western impressionists) in person. Renoir, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Picasso – some works that I’d never dreamed I’d see outside of replication, and some I’d never even heard of before (although after basking in them, I couldn’t imagine why not). According to our guide, it was fashionable among Russian nobles during that period to invite impressionist artists to their palaces to paint for them privately, which explains the extraordinary impressionist exhibit.
When one-on-one with these paintings, I began to see how the name “Hermitage” could still be accurate – I could get lost in each one and let the world pass me by, like falling in love for an instant over and over. Maybe it was just my taste, or perhaps my generation, but I seemed to connect more with the contemporary and/or expressive artwork than with any portrait of saints or nobility, no matter how masterfully executed.
The rooms flowed together dizzyingly. If I had to navigate the building myself, I knew I would be lost forever. I suddenly felt surges of gratitude towards our guide.
History flowed, too, in these halls – in overlapping layers spanning from the most ancient times to the present. By entering this museum and examining its contents we were, in essence, communicating with the dead. I was reminded of the movie “Russian Ark” – that Russian art-house film shot in one continuous take through the Hermitage, in which ghosts of the past interact with anyone who would listen.
We entered the 1812 room, a hall in which hung portraits commemorating all officers who participated in the war against Napoleon. In some places hung empty frames, with only a name and green backing – these portraits were among those damaged in the museum fire. Their names remain as a gesture of respect. I almost started to look for the name of Nikolay Rostov before remembering he was fictional.

The Hermitage consists of several buildings: the Winder Palace; the New, Old, and Small Hermitages; and the Hermitage Theater. The Winter Palace is the largest of the buildings, and is where we spent the most time; we also visited the Small Hermitage which, despite being small compared to the other museum buildings, is still expansive by nearly any other standard. We saw the ballroom. It was covered in gilt, plasterwork, marble, columns, crystal – it was as if we were inside an enormous Faberge egg. The ballroom’s star attractions were its mosaics and its peacock clock. The latter was a shining entourage of life-sized animatronic creatures – birds, squirrels, mushrooms, all of which were to move in a synchronized routine on every hour. The clock is amazingly still in working condition – however, it is now set to chime only once a week, to slow its wear.
Opposite the peacock clock was the mosaic floor-tile, copied from one in Greco-Roman ruins. A smaller version of the same mosaic is found on a nearby table, which was worked on simultaneously. The detail and fluid shading stunned me. I could relate possibly too well to their creators – as strong as my obsessive-compulsive tendencies are, I could easily imagine myself piecing together miniature pictures with bits of glass if locked in a room with a bunch of tile for several years.

As we exited the main part of the museum through an Egyptian exhibit, we were given about half an hour of free time in which we could visit the museum’s internet café and gift shops – of course, rounding everyone up after the half-hour proved to be a muddled task, as some (including myself) were still stuck in the line to pay. We headed outside in the Palace Square to the barely-organized chaos of group photo-taking (some of which partially included a man dressed as a buccaneer), and then boarded the busses once more to go to lunch.

After having our meals, we all split up into our groups and ventured out into St. Petersburg. Near the restaurant, was a church that our guide said was a “must” to visit. This church was Church of the Resurrection of Christ (or Church of the Spilled Blood). The entire interior of this Russian orthodox church was covered in mosaics. It took 12 years to apply it all to the massive space inside. The result was pure magnificence! We wound up our day in the market square adjacent to the church. Many of us spent our final rubles on last minute gifts and souvenirs from the stalls along the square.

The evening was a special one as it was our GYFHC dinner closing ceremony. We enjoyed our last Russian meal which was topped by the commemorative cake celebrating 50 years of People to People. We saved the best for last by having all students participate in the “web of friendship,” where we created a string “web” to symbolize the friendships we made and the ties that bound us all on this trip. We each gave a part of the string to someone special within the delegation. Once the heartfelt thoughts were expressed, we cut pieces of the string so we could give them to others to remember us and the last week and a half by. (Mary Eisenhower was by far the most popular recipient!) This journey has left us with so many memories, so many friends. And it will leave us changed forever.

-Written by Laura Webb & Veronica Agard