28th April 1984 - Leningrad: Museum and Ballet

Saturday 28^th April.  I woke up early, before sunrise. The train was still going, which was reassuring, and going fast. I looked out the window – snow on the ground. No wonder it was a wee bit chilly. I watched the sun come up – a red ball, an orange ball, a yellow ball – over countryside with towns much the same as anywhere else in Russia. No more snow on the ground, but it was green! Green fields, not green trees. We did pass industrial complexes as well.

   We arrived in Leningrad at about 8am. The Moscow Station is one of the oldest in Russia (or Leningrad) and is an exact copy of the Leningrad Station in Moscow.

  We got on board our buses and waited. Then we drove along the main drag of Leningrad, Nevsky Prospekt. At the end, the golden spire of the Admiralty shone in the sunlight like a gold spire shining in the light of the sun.

   The buildings in Leningrad are big and beautiful though some need repairing and a bit of renovation here or there wouldn’t go astray either. We passed Dvorcovaja Place which has another name. This is where the Hermitage/Winter Palace is, and there were a lot of people dressed in blue or red tracksuits and some red-draped floats a-gathering for their May Day Procession rehearsal.

   We drove over the Neva River into Vasiljevskij Island [Vasilevskiy Island]. This has another name too but that’s the name I have on the map. On this island is the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel, finished in 1978 overlooking the Gulf of Finland and near a whole lot of condominiums. Room 8071 was it. We had breakfast at 9.30 in the restaurant overlooking the bay. Some egg flan stuff which was all right, with the Mullins and John Basely. [This hotel currently has 1200 comfortable European furnished guest rooms. It’s one of the biggest hotels in Saint Petersburg.]

  Then for the city tour with the local guide Luba. Leningrad is infested with 4.8 million burghers graders and covers 606km. It consists of forty-two islands and sixty-five rivers and canals, with three hundred bridges (in the whole region there are over 5000 bridges). There are forty-six museums and two hundred and seventy-five memorials to the man himself [dah, Lenin].

  We saw the Peter and Paul Fortress, outside the walls of which the locals stand up sunbaking on the bank of the Neva.

A postcard I bought in Leningrad.

  I am not sure of everything we saw because I had my eyes shut for some of the time. We got out at St. Isaac’s – great. [But we didn’t go inside.]

   We went back to the hotel for lunch – I had bread and borsch but didn’t stay for the main course as I went upstairs to rest.

   At 2.45 we left for the tour for the (National) Russian Museum, which is an art gallery of Russian art. The building is one of those impressive old ones they have in Leningrad. It houses more than 300,000 pieces, examples, of old Russian art and handicrafts, paintings and sculpture, drawings and decorative and applied art.

   Luba showed us the paintings – not all nine thousand, of course – but paintings significant in the history of Russian art and by the most famous Russian painters.

   For many centuries, the only Russian painting done was purely religious in subject matter and use – the icons. Some of these are superb. After reforms to reshape feudal Russia in the early eighteenth century, Russian artists started to paint in more realistic genres – particularly portraiture. But the early portraits still showed an icon-like quality.

 We saw many beautiful canvases, and some of the paint on them wasn’t too bad either. In a painting, ‘Frina [Phryne] and the Festival of Aphrodite’, you feel as if you could reach out and put your hand around one fellow’s arm. Very realistic. A big picture, (This painting is probably by Karl Briullov [his most famous painting is probably Last Day at Pompeii], or Fiodor Bruni. Unfortunately it is not in the book I bought later in the Berioska shop on the Russian Museum paintings.)

  It certainly is a very interesting place to visit.

   Back to the hotel for dinner at six. In Leningrad, as in Moscow and probably everywhere else in the USSR, they are making ready for May Day, with lots of red banners and flags, with some light blue; big paintings of such Marxists as Lenin and such Leninists as Marx, and Engels and whoever else. The banners they drape over the front of buildings, several storeys long. They have flags in special holders on front of buildings, on street posts, and along bridges – two or three together. Signs saying “MAY, PEACE, LABOUR” in any order.

  For dinner we had some paté, crumbed veal with mash, Pepsi Cola and a cream horn.

   We then went to the Academic Maly Theatre of opera and ballet, which is on the same square as the Russian Museum. Tonight’s performance – “Czar Boris” by Prokofiev. [I have kept the ticket, for some unknown reason, in whatever iteration wallet I've had for 30 years. See the scan below.] Inside the building is an oval-shaped auditorium; you know, you’ve seen the sort before. The ceiling has a fresco and there are ornamentations all over the place. On the first floor are a series of high-ceilinged rooms where they sell drinks, ice cream and cakes. Some of the rooms have tables and chairs; beautifully carved wooden panels; displays of balletalia – photographs, newspaper cuttings, stage designs, that sort of thing. 

Ticket to "Czar Boris", back and front, recently laminated for the second time.

  The ballet is about Boris Godenov-or-however-you-spell-it and is probably the same story as the opera. It starts off with a couple of priest-types carrying a large bell (which has a capacity of one Boris) and four or five other characters with smaller bells suspended from the ceiling. There are soldiers or Cossacks, and a tiny ballerina dressed in white who represents the 9 or 12 year old boy [Ivan the Terrible’s son and Boris Godunov’s brother-in-law Dmitri] that Boris had killed so that he would go mad by the haunting memory. Also, a tall mysterious priestish bloke with a black costume and beard [“the Evil Monk”]. And also a lot of ballerinas, of course. Unfortunately I couldn’t keep my eyes open to watch it, but I listened to the music which was great. [The ballet seems to be based on the play by Pushkin and the opera by Mussorgsky.]

  After the show, which wasn’t really very long, we went back to the hotel. I went for a wander down to the shore of the bay to watch the sunset. This was just after ten o’clock, mind you, which seems very strange.

  During the course of the day, I bought at the Berioska Shop the previously mentioned book on paintings at the Russian Museum and also a book on the Environs of Leningrad. (8.90 roubles).

Recent postcard from St Petersburg.