The two temporary exhibitions in the branch of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in Malaga complement and contradict each other. Most of the rooms are dedicated to Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947), a character misticista that he tirelessly travelled through Mongolia, China, Central Asia and India, where he spent the last decades looking for physical remains of ancient times, bridges and similarities between cultures and signs of the universal harmony that ran in his copious work written and painted.
Malaga are exposed 74 canvases to paint, mostly landscapes of the Himalayas painted with loud colors, with a palette of fauvist. Roerich was a very famous in life and has passed into history, to a discreet immortality (in a room of immortality a little retranqueadas, where it receives few visitors), both for the Roerich Pact, an agreement on protection of cultural treasures that he proposed and the UN, and Unesco assumed, as by his extensive artistic work –dedicated to 2,000 canvases of the mountains of the Himalayas, but throughout his life he painted many thousands more – that celebrates the diversity of the world, the inner identity that unites all things, the relationship between the earthly realm and the cosmos. Roerich never was able to return to Russia, because the authorities denied the visa, surely recelando of his many contacts in the international politics and its discourse-the mystical and pantheistic, indigestible to dialectical materialism. He believed in higher forces, extraterrenales and invisible except for a few elected. To that miracle called “Shambhala”, and In search of Shambhala is titled your exhibition.
The other shows, in the much more confined Space as 3 of the museum of Malaga, is devoted to Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), who, having been able to escape from the USSR on at least two occasions he preferred to stay and share the fearful penalties of “his people”, of that he was considered the voice: “And if one day they seal my tortured mouth, / mouth to shout out a hundred million souls…”. He was a poet revered and a person of enormous charisma, presence impressive, according to many witnesses.
unlike the other exhibition, here are few works, but all master: for a start, a portrait of Akhmatova that he made Modigliani during a stay of the youth in Paris and who accompanied him always, as a reminder not only of their friendship but of the european culture of the russians had been isolated. Another, Nathan Altman, in style deco, who fixed the image of Akhmatova thin profile, weird, awesome. Another Veniamin Belkin, begun in 1924 and completed in 1941, as a painter and model they were friends and he was changing the play as it was by changing her physical appearance. A bust of Yliá Slonim that represents it in 1964 as a matron, with all the signs of dignity, and patience, and the imprint of the sentences. A portrait of his friend, the composer Lourié by Piotr Miturich, 1915, and that according to the director of the Russian museum, Yevgenia Petrova, might have signed, decades later, Andy Warhol. A portrait suprematist of Punin by Malevich… Complete the sample, some of the pictures and furniture of your home…
The exhibition will coincide with the reissue of one of the anthologies of his poems, The singing and the ash, by Monika Zgustová and Olvido García Valdés: the novelist Czech is in charge of the “first version” and the poet in Spanish, of round it out for the final version. This selection presents, among other successes, the highlight of the poems most important of the season second of his poetry, which is the best, the most dramatic; especially Requiem and Poem without a hero, whose verses after reciting them to circles of friends of all confidence, he burned carefully to leave no trace of the crime; and then come the poems less interesting of his youth, hedonistic, romantic, loving, self-absorbed and transferred of omens of a future dramatic indeed met: her first husband, Gumiliov, executed by order of Lenin, although immortal by his famous Giraffe (“…Are you Crying? Listen, very far away, on lake Chad / walks with the grace of a giraffe”); that to begin with. Then, the liquidation of their friend Mandelstam, and almost all the poets of his generation that could not go into exile. His second man, Nikolai Punin, and her son Liev Gumiliov, the imprisoned, the guy for 10 years, for no other reason than to be assured of the silence of the mother. Prohibition of publication or a verse, and civil death until after the death of Stalin, who controlled personally, and if you refrained from the murder was only for the calculation of your womanhood, and your fame would be too outrageous in its execution. The fatality, after breaking with Punin, and of being forced to share housing with him, his first wife, their daughter and several relatives –not just in terms more harmonious–. A continuation of the misery, the cold, the hunger, the deaths, the losses and deprivations. And despite all that…
… despite all of that, one of the amazing things of Akhmatova was his conviction without wavering in his own destiny and greatness colossal. So, when you visit The muse, at night, carrying his flute, the poet asks: “what was you that gave / Dante his Hell? / And he responds: I”.
it Is characteristic of this second period a poetic memory of the horror, the survival of love that could not culminate and meetings failed; the toast alone for the ghosts of the past: (“I Drink for the house torn / by pain of my life / loneliness in couple / and also here for you. / By the mouth that betrayed me, / from the cold mortal in the eyes, / because the world is harsh and brutal / and because it has not saved us-God”); the strong belief that the pain of its passage through the world has meaning, and between the stars are present and the souls of the dead; the relativization of the penalties themselves and their generation when placed in the context of a history of humanity catastrophic: (“And the city, torn of death / it was a Trojan old”); many verses about people that comes and goes, people who are waiting, evening tours, guests about to leave and not return…
The most famous piece of poetry of Akhmatova is the prologue to his poem Requiem, which unknowingly gives the reply to the question posed five years earlier by Adorno about the possibility, the sense or the honesty to write poetry after Auschwitz, or Auschwitz. In that prologue Akhmatova recalls the 17 months he spent waiting at the door of the jail of Leningrad to see their son, in a long queue of women; one day, one of those women, a wretched as she is, recognized her, and whispered asked: “And you can give account of this?”. She said: “I can”, and then the other smiled, or, to put it literally, “And then something like a smile appeared at what had been his face.”
The long poem Requiem, that “vast shroud”, as one of his own verse defines it, is the demonstration of that power, and concludes the story of the horror, so overwhelming, grandiose and ajmatoviana, imagining the day that the town will want to, maybe, pick up a statue. She gives your permission to do so, provided that this statue will not be put on any site, but precisely in front of the jail, and ends that speculation about the unlikely monument with accents indignant and vindictive, subtly appease them, and they become melancholy: “…here, where stood three hundred hours, / before bars, for me they were not opened. / Because I’m afraid to forget, in the peace of death, / the wheels of the sinister van, black / shock of the door that we hated both / and the howl of an old woman like a wounded animal. // That from the yertos eyelids of bronze / flow –and these are her tears— the melting snow, // which lulled by far the doves of the prison, / and fall silent ships from the Neva”.
