Original subtitles

(WHISTLING WIND)

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC AND WHISTLING WIND)

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(TICKING NOISE)

(JINGLING AND TICKING NOISE)

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(JINGLING AND PEACOCK SOUND)

(Toni Servillo, in Italian) How did this fantastic city come about?

(Toni Servillo, in Italian) The vastest urban creation of the 18th century...

..arose here where there were only swamps surrounding the river Neva.

(Toni Servillo) There are 400 bridges in St. Petersburg,...

..and the Hermitage is the most important one.

(Toni Servillo) An imaginary bridge that has always connected Russia to Europe.

(Toni Servillo) The other bridges unite the 42 islands...

..that Peter the Great transformed into the capital of the Russian Empire,

..when he laid the first stone in 1703.

(Toni Servillo) Dostoevsky, who lived here, wrote in "Notes from the Underground"

..that St. Petersburg is "the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe...

..put into a magic lantern...

..that projects it, magnifying its details,...

..onto an enormous screen of space and waters.

For two centuries here, the Winter Palace was the Tsars' residence,...

..and the city became a crossroads of artists, architects, musicians and European intellectuals...

..summoned to construct the myth, the Venice of the North.

(Toni Servillo) For the biography of a city,...

..three centuries make up practically its infancy.

Yet St. Petersburg has been the protagonist of universal, tragic, and great events:...

..Russia's opening to the Western World,...

..the Bolshevik Revolution, and the heroic resistance during World War II,...

..when the city was called Leningrad.

Today, its architectural and artistic heritage is one of UNESCO's protected sites.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Among all its buildings...

..there is one above all that recounts the spirit of St. Petersburg.

It is the Hermitage!

A complex of buildings whose construction began in 1762,...

..only a few decades after the birth of the city.

An ark of beauty and harmony that has navigated through time and the entire world.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Museums are dizzying, they ward off death.

They are places where you must go out of your mind, said the architect Renzo Piano.

Inside the Hermitage it is easy to lose one's sense of time and space.

(MUSIC OF "BERCEUSE - FROM SADKO" BY LESLEY GARRETT)

(Toni Servillo) Attention to conservation is absolute,...

..as well as care of the envelope:...

..stuccos, paintings, and marbles,...

..centuries-old work of skilled artisans.

Every masterpiece illustrates the taste of the Romanovs,...

..the dynasty that lived in the Winter Palace from 1732 to March 15, 1917,...

..the day Nicholas II abdicated.

(Toni Servillo) Despite the murders, betrayals, and succession battles,...

..every ruler gave their personal contribution to the Empire's art collection.

(MUSIC OF "BERCEUSE - FROM SADKO" BY LESLEY GARRETT)

The Tsars, in acquiring Dutch, Flemish, Italian, French, and Spanish masterpieces,...

..created one of the world's most important collections.

The Hermitage has taught generations of Russians to think in a new way...

..about their era and their identity.

And, above all,...

..it demonstrated that when historical events obscure reason,...

..it is culture that keeps dialogue and exchanges open.

This is the place where politics became art.

(Toni Servillo) Everything, as we said, began with Peter Alexeyevich Romanov,...

..Tsar Peter the Great.

(STRIKE OF A BELL)

(Toni Servillo) His remains rest with those of his successors in the city's most ancient core:...

..the Romanov Chapel.

(Toni Servillo) Determined, cruel, a visionary, Peter I imagined a new capital on the sea.

The "Window on Europe" is a dream that he made real.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Orlando Figes, in English) According to the legend, on a misty spring morning in 1703,...

..Peter the Great was riding where the Neva river flows into the Baltic Sea.

(Orlando Figes) They were looking for a site to build a fortress against the Swedes.

But he paused, he saw the vista opening out to the sea, to the West.

And, as the myth goes, he said at that point, "Here shall be a town".

Let there be a town echoes the ordinance of God: let there be light.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) With the foundation of St. Petersburg, Peter changed Russia's destiny.

(WHISTLING WIND)

(Toni Servillo) But transforming barren, cold, uninhabitable swamps into the new capital...

..had a terrifying price:...

..more than 100,000 men died from accidents and fatigue.

(Toni Servillo) Cruel and gifted.

With this double soul,...

..Peter the Great reigned over an empire of more than 22 million square kilometres,...

..an enormous expanse that history and culture had left behind.

(Toni Servillo) It is he who began the process of modernization,...

..founding the first lay school, reforming the calendar,...

..introducing the French language, opening to Western fashions, tastes and customs.

(Toni Servillo) The Russian nobles moved to the new city...

..where Peter had summoned the best artists and architects of Europe.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Orlando Figes, in English) Once Peter decided to found his European capital of St. Petersburg,...

..they mobilized every possible resource, for that construction project:...

..and carpenters, and technicians, and engineers, and architects...

..were summoned from all over Russia and Europe...

..to work out how to build on this marshland.

(Orlando Figes) At first they couldn't do it because anything they built would sink.

(HAPPY MUSIC)

(Orlando Figes) There was no stone in the area,...

..they had to bring it from the surrounding territories of the Empire.

(Orlando Figes) So it was a vast project of almost utopian proportions.

(Orlando Figes) Petersburg was built more or less in 60 to 70 years...

..in one architectural style as one architectural ensemble.

(Orlando Figes) And that gave it a sense of unreality.

(HAPPY MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The Winter Palace for the Romanov dynasty...

..was the project that had to be equal to the Palace of Versailles.

(Toni Servillo) The architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli,...

..who had come to St. Petersburg as a child with his father, a Florentine sculptor,...

..designed a baroque and majestic work.

(Toni Servillo) It's 1730 when construction began,...

..and between restorations and enlargements it would last more than a century.

Today the Winter Palace is at the centre of the museum complex of the Hermitage.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The story of the Tsars' collection...

..starts with the embrace of "Jonathan and David" by Rembrandt,...

..the first painting acquired by Peter I in Amsterdam.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) Peter I made two voyages to Western Europe.

(Irina Sokolova) He went to Holland, where Dutch art made a very strong impression on him.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) And not just art, but also the life style.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) Peter ordered his right-hand men...

..to buy more than 200 paintings from the art market of western Europe.

(Irina Sokolova) Among these works the most famous is also the first Rembrandt to arrive in Russia,...

..a painting that is not very big:...

..the greeting between David and Jonathan.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) As for Peter I's tastes,...

..it is known that he preferred paintings...

..with an anecdotal subject.

He liked this "modus vivendi" of the Dutch...

..and their love of interior paintings.

(HAPPY MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) In Russian interiors, objects have a soul:...

..as in Vladimir Nabokov's house, now a museum,...

..very close to the Hermitage, where the writer lived as a youngster, until the 1917 revolution.

(Toni Servillo) Ancient land owners, generals,...

..and then ministers of the Tsar,...

..the Nabokov family fled Bolshevik Russia...

..and Vladimir would never return to St. Petersburg.

(Toni Servillo) In his books, written during his American exile,...

..he wrote about his adolescent years,

..described in detail that heart-rending, and unique domestic universe,...

..made of a thousand odds and ends.

(Toni Servillo) And he also recalled the visits to the Hermitage with his brothers,...

..being enchanted by the Egyptian sarcophagi, and the showcases of scarabs.

(Toni Servillo) At home, among the floral frescoes...

..was his first butterfly collection, a lifetime passion.

(Toni Servillo) And then, a magic lantern he played with as a boy.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) No exile from this immense land has ever stopped feeling Russian.

(Toni Servillo) On the contrary, this is a country that has allowed few foreigners to become Russian.

(Toni Servillo) A woman succeeded 37 years after the death of Peter the Great.

(Toni Servillo) She was German. Her name was Catherine II.

It was a series of fortunate coincidences that made Catherine II the Empress of Russia.

Her fate was to live far from the great courts,...

..in the boring Lutheran castle of her father, the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst,...

..in a modest German state in the eastern periphery of the Holy Roman Empire.

Her parents wanted a male, an heir,...

..but instead she was born.

They baptized her Sophia Augusta.

She was not beautiful, she had thin lips and a slightly prominent chin,...

but she was intelligent, brazen, and curious.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) When Catherine was chosen to be the bride of the future Tsar, Peter III,...

..she was just over 15.

(Toni Servillo) It was a marriage full of betrayals.

In her memoir, Catherine described her husband as an idiot, a drunkard, and a good for nothing.

(Toni Servillo) Peter III, in 1762, Emperor for only six months,...

..was forced to abdicate in favour of his wife.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

This is how Catherine's empire began,...

..with a triumphal entrance into the Winter Palace...

..escorted by troops of admiring soldiers.

Men, in addition to art, would be one of her great passions.

She battled all her life against palace conspiracies,...

..but her reign would transform Russia into a modern state.

The greatest European empire.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

And everything began right here at the Hermitage,...

..or, better yet, at a building she had made,...

..the Petit Ermitage, the little hermitage,...

..where she began to create her collection of art.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Denis Diderot became her advisor:...

..the philosopher and the empress.

(Toni Servillo) She had the power to give substance to his ideas,...

..in a country where everything, from education to economy to the laws,...

..was still to be constructed.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The philosopher's private library ended up in St. Petersburg, bought by Catherine.

(Toni Servillo) As did Voltaire's.

(WHISTLING WIND)

(Toni Servillo) The Empress improved education, balanced the State budget,...

..modernised the health system.

(Toni Servillo) But the reforms pertained only to the elite, not the common people.

(Toni Servillo) Serfdom remained identical.

(Toni Servillo) Her real revolution was in culture,...

..in acquiring entire European art collections from impoverished great families.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) Among these paintings there were many of Rembrandt's works.

(Irina Sokolova) She bought one of his greatest masterpieces, "The Return of the Prodigal Son".

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) A painting that at the Hermitage...

..was always surrounded by singular respect.

(in Russian) It is one of the "pièces de résistance" of this collection.

(Toni Servillo) The philosopher Friedrich Grimm,...

..the sophisticated Prince Dmitry Golitsyn,...

..and Denis Diderot...

..represented Catherine on the French, Dutch, German, and Italian art markets.

(Toni Servillo) In 1764 Catherine bought in Berlin the primary nucleus of the Hermitage:...

..the Gotzkovski Collection,...

.."stealing" it away from King Frederick II of Prussia.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) This collection was composed of works from diverse schools of painting.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) There are two excellent portraits of Frans Hals by Jan Steen,...

..but also many artists' works...

..from the beginning and middle of the 17th century.

(Toni Servillo) The Crozat Collection from France was one of the richest and famous in Europe.

(Toni Servillo) It was Diderot who made the deal.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) Giorgione's painting, "Judith",...

..comes from the Crozat Collection, that was at the time attributed to Raphael.

(Irina Sokolova, in Russian) However, in regard to Raphael, from the Crozat came the "Holy Family",...

..also called the "Madonna with Beardless Joseph".

(Toni Servillo) With the acquisition of entire collections,...

..hundreds of masterpieces entered the Hermitage,...

..from Guido Reni to Van Dyck,...

..from Tiepolo to Rubens,...

..from Raphael to Poussin.

(Toni Servillo) Paintings like trophies of war that affirmed the rise of the Russian Empire.

(Toni Servillo) But all of them through legitimate commerce.

(FAINT VOICES)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Now it was Europe that looked to Catherine's court:...

..writers, painters,...

..philosophers, scientists, sculptors, musicians, and dancers:...

..culture was alive in St. Petersburg.

(Toni Servillo) And the Empress asked Giacomo Quarenghi, her favourite architect,...

..to build a theatre.

(MUSIC OF "SZENE DER SCHWÄNE-SCHWANENSEE - ADAPTATION")

(Orlando Figes) Ballet was performed there, opera was performed there, theatre was performed there.

We have to bear in mind that theatre in the 18th century was really the preserve of the nobility,...

..who held opera, and ballet, and concerts, and theatre, in their private theatres...

..where the actors, dancers, and singers were all serfs.

(Orlando Figes) The ball was a mainstay of the season,...

..and this was a sphere in which women predominated.

(Orlando Figes) The Europeanisation of Russian society in St. Petersburg is also the feminisation.

(Orlando Figes) Women are brought out of the hiding in which they were kept in the old days,...

..and were really now the hostesses of this world.

(Orlando Figes) And many of them took a great interest in the arts.

(MUSIC OF "SZENE DER SCHWÄNE-SCHWANENSEE - ADAPTATION")

(Toni Servillo) Catherine lived in desire, and adored giving in to temptations.

(Toni Servillo) But, above all, she was seduced by beauty.

(Toni Servillo) This is what happened when she saw Raphael's Vatican loggias reproduced in a print.

(Toni Servillo) She had never seen the real thing,...

..but ordered Quarenghi to design the same space in the Hermitage.

(Toni Servillo) Meanwhile, 5000 kilometres from St. Petersburg,...

..in Rome a team of artists copied Raphael's masterpiece centimetre by centimetre.

(MUSIC OF "SZENE DER SCHWÄNE-SCHWANENSEE - ADAPTATION")

(Toni Servillo) "It is not a love for art, but voracity."

(Toni Servillo) "I am not a gourmet, I am a glutton. For love, too."

(Toni Servillo) This is what Catherine wrote about herself.

(Toni Servillo) The men of the Empress: historians count 21.

(Toni Servillo) At the foot of her monument, is the most important one: Prince Grigory Potemkin,...

..who she perhaps married secretly.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) It is Potemkin that organized for her a long voyage towards Crimea.

(Toni Servillo) Her following comprised 3000 people.

(Toni Servillo) For the first time, the Empress traveled through the countryside,...

..the steppes, and the rocky landscapes of her vast empire,...

..from North to South, until she reached the coast of the Black Sea.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) This love affair is recounted at the Hermitage in passionate letters...

..and by two paintings that Catherine and Potemkin commissioned to Joshua Reynolds,...

..the most famous English painter of the 1700s.

(Toni Servillo) Their love is fed by dreams and ambitions:...

..and so in "Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents",...

..highlights Catherine's, and her newly born empire's, desire for power.

(Toni Servillo) In "The Continence of Scipio",...

..Potemkin's qualities as a general, and a politician are exalted.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) And if anyone of you is asking themselves if the battleship of the 1905 revolt,...

..shown in Sergei Eisenstein's film,...

..owes its name to him: well, yes it does.

(Toni Servillo) It is Potemkin himself,...

..madly loved by Catherine, to whom she writes,...

.."There is nothing in my body that does not reach out to you."

"Thank you for yesterday's enjoyment."

"My little Grisha nourished me, and quenched my thirst, but not with wine."

(Toni Servillo) Catherine died at 67 after 34 years of reign.

("VOI SAPETE CH'IO V'AMO" PERFORMED BY ENSEMBLE KÔ & ZIYA TABASSIAN)

(Toni Servillo) It is during the empire of Alexander I, the Tsarina's favourite grandchild,...

..that the Hermitage collection acquired a few fundamental paintings.

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) Before 1812,...

..very strong friendly relations were created with France.

Thanks to this, it was possible to get in contact with the director of the Louvre, Vivant Denon,...

..and through him acquire on the Paris market some paintings of the Giustiniani collection,...

..and among them, Caravaggio's "The Lute Player".

It is the only work by Caravaggio at the Hermitage.

Not long ago, its restoration was finished, and we can finally see it in all its splendor.

Now the notes the lute player has before him are legible.

It is taken from the famous madrigal of one of Caravaggio's contemporaries, Jacques Arcadelt:...

.."You know I love you...".

("DO NOT SING MY BEAUTY" BY RACHMANINOV)

(Toni Servillo) Meanwhile, in Europe,...

Napoleon, now the French Emperor,...

..shifted his dreams of conquest towards Russia:...

..in 1812 he marched with 700,000 men towards the empire of Alexander I.

(Evgeniy Anisimov, in Russian) Here in Russia you say that when uninvited guests turn up,...

..it's a good Russian custom to accompany them home.

(in Russian) Take them back to their home.

(in Russian) Meaning, to Paris, to Berlin.

("DO NOT SING MY BEAUTY" BY RACHMANINOV PERFORMED BY ANASTASIYA SNYATOVSKAYA)

(Orlando Figes) Russia had come to Europe as conquerors...

..and now suddenly Russia,...

..which had been underestimated perhaps, for a hundred years before,...

..is seen as a potential threat.

No one had thought that the Russians could defeat Napoleon.

("DO NOT SING MY BEAUTY" BY RACHMANINOV PERFORMED BY ANASTASIYA SNYATOVSKAYA)

(Toni Servillo) As a final gesture after the victory against Napoleon,...

..Alexander bought Giuseppina Bonaparte's collection,...

..which included some masterpieces by Antonio Canova.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The statues of this sculptor who reinterpreted the Classical world...

..are gathered together in the "Gallery of the history of antique painting".

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Servillo) Here are "The Three Graces" commissioned directly to Canova by Napoleon's ex-wife,...

..and then "Cupid and Psyche".

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Art and power: indissoluble after the victory over Napoleon.

(TRIUMPHAL MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The column in the Winter Palace square is dedicated to Alexander's triumph,...

..a triumph that became legend, and found a place in the Hermitage in the Military Gallery.

Since its founding, St. Petersburg has never been invaded by a foreign army.

(Toni Servillo) Charles of Sweden didn't succeed.

(Toni Servillo) Napoleon arrived in Moscow, but never marched towards the Winter Palace,...

..and the Nazi troops were stopped after besieging the city at length.

(Toni Servillo) In the Military Gallery of the Hermitage...

..hang 332 portraits of the generals who faced Napoleon.

(Toni Servillo) In "War and Peace" Lev Tolstoy wrote the epic of that victory,...

..and the anti-hero of those battles, Field-marshal Mikhail Kutuzov,...

..old, lazy, and a procrastinator: the antithesis of Napoleon.

(Servillo) An English artist was summoned to paint portraits of all the heroes of the Russian army.

Imagine an atelier

where he painted one after the other in an enormous studio.

It is a story full of pathos, and in Russia they love pathos.

Among the portraits there is also one of Sergei Grigorevich Volkonsky,...

..the only general that had sympathized with the Decembrists,...

..a group of aristocrats, officers, and artists connected to secret societies.

The first signal of intolerance for czarism starts off here, from St. Petersburg.

(Orlando Figes) So the war against Napoleon was a moment of revelation,...

..for the Russian officers, above all, nobles,...

..many of them owning hundreds of serfs.

When they came to Paris and other cities,...

..they were effectively being turned by the war into Jacobins.

They wanted to bring back to Russia the ideals of liberation,...

.."Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité."

(Orlando Figes) But when they arrived back in Russia they were deeply disappointed,...

..and it was clear that there was going to be no reform as there had been in Europe.

(Evgeniy Anisimov, in Russian) This is how a sense of guilt...

..about the populace arose.

The point was: "We are so fortunate, so rich, instead, the populace near us suffers".

(Evgeniy Anisimov) This became the cause of the revolution that was organized by the intellectuals.

Most historians believe that it was not just a revolt,...

..but an idea of revolution.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) But the Decembrist movement had a short life.

(Toni Servillo) On December 14, 1825, the new Tsar Nicholas I...

..easily suppressed the attempted insurrection.

(Toni Servillo) Russia would have to wait almost a century for a real revolution.

(Toni Servillo) However, it's clear by now that the new cultured and well-off society...

..had opened its eyes to the injustice in their country:...

..there was a humanity that lived without freedom or rights, and at the service of the gentry.

(Toni Servillo) It's a growing awareness, and the poets are the ones who express it.

(Toni Servillo) Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the most beloved one by liberal circles,...

..is exiled many times by the Tsar.

His poetry dances in a way that is difficult to translate.

It rhymes, it's witty,...

..it's everything that you want in your national poet.

It's easy to remember,...

..so every schoolchild today can probably recite some Pushkin.

(Orlando Figes) Pushkin is popular in his lifetime,...

..but like all great poets who die early, particularly if they die in a romantic duel,...

..it's his death that makes him such a cult figure in 19th century Russia.

(Toni Servillo) Passionate, a great lover of women,...

..Pushkin on February 8, 1837,...

..ate his last meal in a cafe on the Nevsky Prospect.

(Toni Servillo) Awaiting him was the challenge to a duel with Georges D'Anthès.

(Toni Servillo) Pushkin suspected that he was the secret lover...

..of his beautiful wife Natalia Goncharova,...

..who had also been courted by the Tsar.

(Toni Servillo) He was seriously wounded during the duel,...

..and died two days later on the sofa in his studio, at the age of 37.

(Toni Servillo) A fate similar to that of one of the characters in his most famous work,...

.."Eugene Onegin".

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Russian writers in the 1800s considered him a maestro:...

..Fyodor Dostoevsky, half a century later,...

..wrote that Pushkin was the beginning of the self-awareness of the populace,...

..a century after the creation of the empire of Peter,...

..who chose to look towards Europe.

(Toni Servillo) Forgetting, however, to engage his people in this socio-cultural revolution.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Since those years the architecture of St. Petersburg...

..has remained almost unchanged.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) In 1844,...

..the Tsar forbade constructing buildings taller than the Peter and Paul Cathedral,

..a ban that still exists today for the historical heart of the city.

(Toni Servillo) Along with two young roofers,...

..we climb up on the roof of one of the city's highest buildings...

..to lose ourselves in the huge northern sky that looks like a fire burning in the night.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Emotions and dangerous relations:...

..like Pushkin's passions, so far from the playful love in the Hermitage collection,...

..portrayed only a few decades before by the French Rococo artists:...

..like "Jupiter and Io" by François Lemoyne, a seduction in the mists,...

..or the "Stolen Kiss" by Fragonard,...

..the moment when two lovers seek refuge from indiscreet eyes.

(Toni Servillo) All this was so far from the concerns of the 1800s, the new century.

(Toni Servillo) Very far, like the Hall of Gold that Nicholas I...

..had built for his daughter Maria Alexandrovna...

..after the terrible fire that in 1837 almost destroyed the Winter Palace.

"There is nothing more beautiful than the Nevsky Prospect,..."

"..at least in Petersburg, it is everything for the city...",...

..wrote Nicholas Vasilievich Gogol, arriving here in 1829, not yet twenty.

The long avenue that cuts through the city is more than 4 kilometers.

(Mikhailovsky, in Russian) We don't have the habit of meeting in the piazzas to interact with others.

(Semyon Mikhailovsky) Nevsky Prospect is the main street.

(Semyon Mikhailovsky) Here we find the complex of elegant buildings, among which the Winter Palace,...

..but at the same time here are the areas of the city where marginalized people live, the poor.

So, the poor and the rich. This conflict is ever present in St. Petersburg.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Woman, in English) The Nevsky Prospect was always the main street.

(Woman, in English) It was the first street of the city.

Most political events, cultural events and social events took place directly on the Nevsky Prospect.

(Toni Servillo) Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod. And the hero of Russia.

He had stopped the invaders from the North almost 5 centuries before St. Petersburg rose up.

(Toni Servillo) In the 1930s, the director Sergei Eisenstein...

..recounted his life in a cinematographic masterpiece.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The Nevsky Prospect is dedicated to him.

(Toni Servillo) But there is little of the heroic in the humanity that the young Gogol,...

..observed around 1830 walking on the long avenue,...

..night and day,...

..in a city that seemed a phantasmagorical theatrical setting.

(Toni Servillo) An artificial and premeditated place.

(Toni Servillo) That's how Gogol put it.

(Toni Servillo) "Stranger than anything are the cases that happen on Nevsky Prospect.

"Oh, do not believe this Nevsky Prospect."

"I always wrap myself ever so tightly in my cape when I pass by here..."

"..and I absolutely force myself not to look at those walking towards me."

"All is deceit, all is a dream all is anything but what it seems."

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) "It deceives at all hours of the day this Nevsky Prospect,..."

"..but especially when night falls here,..."

"..like a dense mass,..."

"..separating one from another the tops of the houses' white façades,..."

"..when the entire city is transformed into rumbles and glare..."

"..and myriads of carriages pour out of the bridges..."

"..and the outriders yell and leap on their horses..."

"..and the devil himself is abroad,..."

"..kindling the street-lamps only to show everything in a false light."

(Toni Servillo) So, the great Russian literature was born in the first part of the 1800s.

(Toni Servillo) It developed in an immobile nation, where the autocracy protected only itself.

(Toni Servillo) While the European revolutions opened to reforms,...

..Tsar Nicholas I wanted nothing to do with it.

(Toni Servillo) Half of his people still lived in slavery, but he looked elsewhere.

(Toni Servillo) Yet, he continued to promote art.

(Orlando Figes) His tastes were probably best reflected by two paintings,...

..first, Horace Vernet's famous painting of the invalids...

..presenting themselves to Napoleon at the court of the Tuileries,...

..which is regimented in its lines of soldiers,...

..something which would appeal to Nicholas I,...

..and then the more sentimental slightly kitsch picture...

..by Friedrich on the sailing ship,...

..with its kitschy image of two people on a boat,...

..and the misty pink horizon ahead of them.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

It is Nicholas I who thought about the problem of how to arrange the works in the collection.

(Toni Servillo) And to show them to the public.

(Toni Servillo) And so, on February 5, 1852, after 10 years of work,...

..the New Hermitage was opened to the astonished gaze of the Petersburg population.

(Toni Servillo) One entered by a portico supported by 10 gigantic granite statues of Atlantis...

..made by the sculptor Alexander Ivanovich Terebenev.

(Toni Servillo) To create the New Hermitage, Nicholas I summoned the German, Leo Von Klenze,...

..who had designed the Munich picture gallery.

(Toni Servillo) Nicholas I, so hostile to the winds of revolution,...

..did instead welcome the idea of a modern museum,...

..where art is no longer only for the imperial family:...

..4552 works,...

..collected over a century and a half,...

..were exhibited in the Imperial Museum of the Hermitage,...

..as had happened a bit more than 60 years before at the Louvre.

(Mikhail Piotrovsky, in English) Making that open museum it was very important...

..because the Tsars had been so proud to show to their guests...

..sand then they began to show to other people in general.

Not exactly to every person, at the beginning it was a restricted attendance,...

..but not just opened to that: what we have done, in a way for the nation.

So opening the Hermitage by Nicholas I,...

..I think he was, imperialistic in thinking,...

..it was the beginning of the global Hermitage, and the global museum.

(Toni Servillo) Among the works with which Nicholas I enriched the collection,...

..are those of Jan Gossaert, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

(Toni Servillo) But the biggest acquisition came from Venice,...

..from the Palace of the Barbarigo family on the Grand Canal.

(Toni Servillo) It had a famous picture gallery...

..with more than 100 paintings by Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, Giovanni Bellini,...

..and, above all, Titian.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Among the 5 paintings by Titian that came to the Hermitage...

..are the "The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine"...

..and the "Repentant Mary Magdalene".

(Irina Artemieva) The "Repentant Mary Magdalene" is one of the most celebrated works of Titian.

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) At the Hermitage we find the most famous version of this painting,...

..which exists in many variations.

(Irina Artemieva) But the one here comes from Titian's house,...

..where it had remained after the artist's death.

They say that Titian loved that painting so much that,...

..according to the legend, at the point of death, he wanted to hold it in his hands.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Russian culture, during the reigning years of Nicholas I...

..and his successor Alexander II,...

..wanted to find its own roots.

(Toni Servillo) In St. Petersburg, a group of 5 composers,...

..Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,...

..Balakirev, Cui, and Borodin,...

..were inspired by the idea of an authentically Russian music,...

..a new world nostalgic for the ancient melodies and legends.

(Toni Servillo) They considered themselves sons of Mikhail Glinka,...

..father of the national music.

(Toni Servillo) They sought the profound expression of the forgotten people...

..and that Slavic heritage that for the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky...

..is simply the Russian soul.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

The poet Apollon Nikolayevich Maykov...

..summed up the Russian soul like this:...

.."It is the love of the people for the people".

He writes: "The Russians are able to withstand anything for love."

"The love of the people: so, our Constitution!".

Dostoevsky, who had begun to write about the suffering of the marginalized,...

..for Virginia Wolff is the essence of all this.

"For Dostoevsky", writes Virginia,...

"..it is all the same to him if you are noble or simple,..."

"..a tramp or a great lady."

"Whoever you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid,..."

"..this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff: the soul."

"The soul is not restrained by barriers."

"It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others".

(Toni Servillo) As a young man, Dostoevsky lived in this house in St. Petersburg.

(Toni Servillo) Now it's a museum.

(Toni Servillo) He became involved in a Socialist circle...

..during the reign of Nicholas I, and was arrested and condemned to death.

(Toni Servillo) The sentence was commuted into exile in Siberia.

(Toni Servillo) When he returned, he lived again in this big house,...

..he had chosen because it was far from the Tsar's court.

(Toni Servillo) He wanted to live real life, close to the world of the marginalized:...

..delinquents, alcoholics, and gamblers,...

..the protagonists of his novels.

(Sergeij Kibalnik, in Russian) At the center of his interest were the dramas of simple people,...

..the dramas of people unprotected...

..by the golden parachute of Petersburg during that era.

For them life in St. Petersburg had completely different consequences.

(Toni Servillo) On a wall of the studio...

..there is still a reproduction of Raphael's "Sistine Madonna",...

..that Dostoevsky cites both in "Crime and Punishment," and "Demons".

(Toni Servillo) On February 18, 1881, he was sitting at his desk.

(Toni Servillo) He was writing the sequel to "The Brothers Karamazov". His pen fell to the floor.

He bent over to pick it up, but the effort caused a respiratory crisis to his already sick body.

(Toni Servillo) In "The Idiot" he had written:...

.."He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period,..."

"..an enormous wealth of time."

(Toni Servillo) "At that moment nothing is more painful than the incessant thought:..."

"..'What should I do if I were not to die, if I were to return to life again?'"

"'An eternity of days, and all mine!'"

"'I would turn every minute into an age,...'"

"'..nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for...'."

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Aleksandr Sokurov, in Russian) The Russian soul is distinguished by a certain ingenuity,...

..an eternal youth of the soul and a capacity to trust and believe.

(Sokurov, in Russian) Believe even in the people one should not trust, but still one must believe.

But it is an absolutely certain fact that the Russian soul does exist.

Once I doubted that, but not any more, I don't doubt it.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Unlike his father, Alexander II tackled a series of reforms.

(Toni Servillo) Perhaps it was late, but now Russia was facing decades of rapid changes.

(Toni Servillo) Meanwhile, masterpieces continued arriving at the Hermitage:...

..between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s,...

..arrived two "Madonna and Child" by Leonardo da Vinci...

..and the "Conestabile Madonna" by Raphael Sanzio.

(ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) The "Conestabile Madonna" is one of Raphael's first paintings,...

..one of his youthful works painted...

..under the evident influence of Perugino.

We know that initially Raphael painted the Madonna...

..holding a pomegranate, not a book.

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) After he changed it...

..into the Madonna reading, the Madonna with a book.

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) The "Madonna Litta" at the time was very famous,...

..we know that there are many copies of it...

..made by the school of Leonardo da Vinci.

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) The "Benoit Madonna" dates from 1478.

(Irina Artemieva, in Russian) It is a painting that expresses...

..the period of Leonardo's youth very well...

..because this is a young girl Madonna painted,...

..and you clearly see it, based on the looks of a real model.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) All this life at court, always the same, between art and privileges,...

..does not register the sentiment of rebellion against Czarism,...

..when in the last years of the 1800s many different groups converged:...

..there are anarchists, nihilists, populists,...

..and the first organizations that preach using violence.

(Toni Servillo) Among the latter is "People's Will",

..in which the militants want the Tsar dead.

At any cost.

The afternoon of March 13, 1881, Tsar Alexander II was in his carriage,...

..escorted by his cavalry hussars.

In his twenty years of ruling, he had finally abolished serfdom...

..and established other reforms.

But for some time, things had not remained motionless.

For five times he had survived assassination attempts,...

..but that afternoon in March history changed.

(Toni Servillo) A first bomb stopped the carriage but didn't hit it.

(Toni Servillo) A second bomb exploded.

Alexander died along with his assassin, a young man soldiering in a revolutionary group:...

..against the Tsar rule, land and power to the people.

("ROMEO AND JULIET - DANCE OF THE KNIGHT" BY PROKOFIEV)

(Toni Servillo) On the site of the attack,...

..Alexander III ordered the construction of the Church of the Saviour on Blood.

(Toni Servillo) We are almost at the end of the Romanov empire,...

..by now unable to carry forward the reforms necessary to the country.

("ROMEO AND JULIET - DANCE OF THE KNIGHT" BY PROKOFIEV)

(Toni Servillo) Finally, serfdom had been abolished:...

..that meant 52 million free men.

And there were no plans.

Despite industrial growth, living conditions were disastrous...

..due to constant wars.

(Toni Servillo) A first revolt in 1905 was put down:...

..it was Bloody Sunday on 22 January.

(Toni Servillo) The Imperial Guards charged a workers' demonstration...

..and killed hundreds or perhaps thousands.

The precise number wouldn't ever be known.

(Toni Servillo) In 1902, Lenin, in exile for 17 years, had written:...

.."Give us a revolutionary organization, and we'll turn all Russia upside-down".

(Toni Servillo) Almost a prophecy:...

..in 1917, after months of strikes for bread and salaries,...

..the revolt became revolution...

..and on the night of 25 October, the Bolsheviks conquered the Winter Palace:...

..it is the end of the Russian monarchy.

(Orlando Figes) Once the Bolsheviks have established themselves in power,...

..they moved to Moscow.

(Orlando Figes) And Petrograd itself has the feeling of an abandoned capital.

And Petersburg,...

..Leningrad as it's called after 1924,...

..is a place held in some suspicion by the Soviet leaders.

Because it still remains a city with a European oriented intelligentsia...

..with proud traditions of its own,...

..it's still got tremendous symbolic importance.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) But in the days following the revolution,...

..everything in St. Petersburg was still in movement.

(Toni Servillo) At the Kschessinska Palace,...

..Lenin, back in Russia from exile, organized his study.

(Toni Servillo) He gave his first speeches from this balcony.

(Toni Servillo) And perhaps it was here, while planning the new world, that he said to Trotsky:...

.."You know, after the persecutions, the exile, after being an outlaw,..."

"..when power arrives, it's dizzying".

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Tsar Nicholas II, a man of the old world, was forced to abdicate.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The night of July 17, 1918, in the Ipatiev House,...

..in a wood near Yekaterinburg,...

..he was arrested along with his wife Alexandra Fedorovna,...

..his daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia,...

..and his son Alexei, who had hemophilia.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

With the excuse of an unexpected departure, they were awakened by Commandant Yurovsky,...

..who had them in custody.

(Toni Servillo) Taken to the ground floor, they were put in two rows, as if for a photograph.

(Toni Servillo) In reality, it was an execution.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The fury of the revolution spared no one,...

..not even the Tsar's physician, the cook, the lady-in-waiting,...

..the valet, and the Grand Duchesses' two dogs.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) They were all shot,...

..bayoneted, and buried in the forest.

(Toni Servillo) Some of the remains will be disinterred only in 1978.

(Toni Servillo) Today they rest together with the other Tsars...

..in the Peter and Paul Cathedral, canonized as martyrs.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) And the Hermitage?

(Toni Servillo) Private property was abolished by the Bolsheviks...

..and the Winter Palace became a National Museum.

(Toni Servillo) The damages were limited as the Bolshevik leaders defended this heritage...

..from the first attempts at sacking by the revolutionaries...

..who saw art only as bargaining chips.

Indeed, after a short time,...

..the collection was even enriched with works confiscated from the nobles.

(Toni Servillo) However, the sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky risked disappearing:...

..a work of immense value made of more than a ton and a half of silver.

The idea was that it must be melted...

..because the government was confiscating all the treasures of the church...

and melting gold and silver for their purposes to develop industry and so on.

But culture must be untouchable,...

..you can't touch cultural heritage even for very good purposes.

You got it and you take it to the next generation.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

In 1917, from the day after the revolution,...

..in St. Petersburg and in Moscow there was confusion and disorder in all the sectors of life.

The reorganization of culture was immediately the objective of the new powers that be.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Family,...

..religion,...

..and the old bourgeois orders were the obstacles to destroy.

Thinking was done about the construction of new ethics, and new aesthetics.

(Toni Servillo) In 1923, Trotsky published his book "Literature and Revolution"...

..where he wrote that art is not the field where the Party should be commanding.

(Toni Servillo) But very soon things changed,...

..and the poets were the first victims of the new Soviet course.

(Toni Servillo) That's what happened to Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide.

And to Osip Mandelstam, who died in a gulag.

(Toni Servillo) And to Sergei Yesenin in 1925 when, only 30,...

..he hung himself on a heating pipe in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in St. Petersburg.

Before doing it, he wrote:...

.."Farewell, my good friend, farewell."

"In my heart, forever, you'll stay."

"May the fated parting foretell that again we'll meet up someday."

"Let no words, no handshakes ensue."

"No saddened brows in remorse."

To die, in this life, is not new,..."

"..and living's no newer, of course."

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC AND WHISTLING WIND)

(Tatiana Ponomareva, in English) Yesenin's death symbolized the end of the illusions.

(Ponomareva) Yesenin was one of those people who did not really actively support the revolution,...

..but on the other hand he never expressed any opposition to it.

Yesenin was very popular.

Yesenin was the poet that everyone knew by heart.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Orlando Figes) The Russian Revolution takes place...

..right in the middle of a fantastically rich cultural renaissance in Russia.

(Orlando Figes) Many artists embraced the revolution as a natural political ally...

..of their own political experimentations to build a world that was based on different values.

But once the Bolsheviks began to think about culture more instrumentally,...

there's a change of values.

(Toni Servillo) The poet Anna Akmatova...

..survived the revolution and Stalin's long rule.

(Toni Servillo) From that extraordinary literary season, she was the last to go.

(Toni Servillo) She died in 1966.

(Toni Servillo) Protected by a garden, her house in St. Petersburg is now a museum.

(Tatiana Ponomareva, in English) Anna Akmatova's place in the culture of Petersburg...

..is very important, and it grows and keeps growing.

She is now more popular, and more widely read than she was,...

..even in the Perestroika years when her work was published.

(Tatiana Ponomareva) And the very intensity of her poetic language, the sincerity,...

..it's incomparable, I think, with any other Russian poet of the 20th century.

(Toni Servillo) Grey eyes, tall and thin,...

..with a strange Picasso-like nose,...

..Akmatova was never arrested,...

..but the regime completely isolated her.

(Toni Servillo) Her first husband was executed in 1921,...

..the second died in a gulag like her friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam.

(Toni Servillo) Her son Lev spent fourteen years in prisons and in the camps.

(Toni Servillo) Like thousands of other women, Anna spent hours in a queue at the Kresty prison,...

..hoping to get news about her son.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) Akmatova's statue was placed right in front of that prison.

(Toni Servillo) What we're hearing is her voice reading the verses of "Requiem".

(ANNA AKMATOVA READS THE VERSE OF "REQUIEM" IN RUSSIAN)

(Toni Servillo) "And if ever in this country they decide to erect a monument to me,..."

"..I consent to that honor, under these conditions,..."

"..that it stand neither by the sea where I was born,..."

"..but here, where I stood for three hundred hours,..."

"..and where they never unbolted the doors for me."

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The Hermitage, in the years when Russia became the Soviet Union,...

..between the 1920s and 1930s,...

..went through one of the most dramatic chapters of its story.

(Toni Servillo) The country must grow economically and accelerate industrialization.

Funds were needed.

(Toni Servillo) A commission set up by Stalin decided the fate of the imperial collections.

(Toni Servillo) Thousands of works were sold: 250 are absolute masterpieces.

(Semyon Mikhailovsky) In the 1930s, the works were transported from one museum to another.

(Semyon Mikhailovsky) Many were subdivided for provincial museums...

..because the country was big and the aim was to educate the populace...

..about art and construct new museums.

But there was also the tendency to sell the art because the State needed money...

..and it seemed possible to sell these works of art at a good price in the West,...

..especially in America,...

..so as to obtain money to buy tractors and support the regime.

(Toni Servillo) Today at the National Gallery in Washington...

..we find some of the masterpieces that for centuries were the pride of the Tsars.

(Toni Servillo) "St. George and the Dragon," and "The Alba Madonna" by Raphael,...

.."The Annunciation" by van Eyck "The Adoration of the Magi" by Botticelli,...

..and the Golitsyn triptych by Perugino.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) It was the wealthy American banker Andrew Mellon who bought them from Stalin.

(Toni Servillo) In 1936 Mellon gave them to the Government...

..and today they are the most important nucleus of the National Gallery.

(Servillo) During those same years, in Washington a part of the Tsar's library is bought,...

..today kept in the Library of Congress.

(Harold M. Leich, in English) The Library of Congress between 1931 and 1933...

..bought approximately 2,800 books...

..from the imperial palaces sold in blocks in the West.

(Harold M. Leich) So it's an amazing collection, it's a mixed collection.

(Harold M. Leich) The overwhelming majority of the books...

..were owned by the last two Tsars,...

..Alexander III and Nicholas II,...

..and members of their family.

(Toni Servillo) The most dramatic chapter in the history of St. Petersburg and the Hermitage...

..began June 22, 1941.

(Toni Servillo) Adolf Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union...

..and launched Operation Barbarossa.

(Toni Servillo) An enormous front, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

(Toni Servillo) St. Petersburg, at the time called Leningrad,...

..faced a siege that lasted until the beginning of 1944.

In these 900 days,...

..the population was reduced from four million people to two and a half million,...

..decimated by battles, hunger, and disease.

(Tatiana Ponomareva) It's hard to speak about the siege of Leningrad...

..because to most people who were born in this city it is still very personal.

In every Petersburg family there is some story of losses and death during the siege of Leningrad.

(Tatiana Ponomareva) And for the culture,...

..that too of course was a tragic period because many of the cultural figures...

..didn't survive the siege either, they died of hunger.

(Toni Servillo) In these two and a half years of the siege,...

..thoughts is given to how to save the artworks in the Hermitage,...

..loaded onto special trains and taken to safety in the Urals.

In the Winter Palace, the personnel resisted as well as they could against the German heavy artillery,...

..that gutted ceilings, walls and windows.

(Servillo) In the cellars, thousands of citizens took refuge from the aerial bombings.

(Aleksandr Sokurov, in Russian) The inhabitants of Leningrad during the siege...

..were perfectly aware of the fact that the Hermitage existed to be preserved.

And it is here, within these walls, that people died:...

..hundreds of people, workers of the Hermitage, died here.

From hunger or frozen to death.

This city, this museum, have such value, a terrible value,...

..as no other city...

..and no other museum on Earth has.

Well... I even remember the last moment, the very last, 27 January 1944.

My mum came home from work in the evening.

She took me by the hand and we...

we... I can't even say it...

(Nina Baklashova) We ran to see the fireworks.

So, exactly 75 years ago, we saw the first fireworks in Leningrad.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) One year later, in 1945, the Hermitage reopened.

(Toni Servillo) In 1948, from the State Museum of Western Art in Moscow...

..arrived an extraordinary collection of European paintings.

Today it is on exhibit in a separate branch at the General Staff and Ministries Building...

..facing the Winter Palace.

(Toni Servillo) There are Matisse, Gauguin, Renoir,...

..Monet, Cezanne, and Picasso.

(Toni Servillo) Behind this collection is the story of two Russian collectors,...

..Ivan Morozov, and Sergei Shchukin.

(Toni Servillo) Enamored with the French avant-garde,...

..they had bought these masterpieces before the revolution.

Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov...

..belonged to two extremely rich and prosperous Muscovite merchant families.

(Doronchenkov, in English) Both of them assembled extensive collections of modern French painting...

..with almost the same list of artists,...

..but the impression was extremely different.

(Ilia Doronchenkov) For Morozov loved art which is harmonious...

..and which reminds the viewer not of the revolutionary side of contemporary art.

Shchukin collected mostly radical art.

(Ilia Doronchenkov) He started with the Impressionists, by 1904,...

..he changed his taste, and switched to Gauguin and Cézanne.

(Ilia Doronchenkov) And later, since 1906,...

..he started to collect Matisse...

..and in 2 years he became his most reliable patron in the world,...

..acquiring his most controversial works.

(Ilia Doronchenkov) The most indicative commission for Matisse...

..were two panels "Dance" and "Music".

(Ilia Doronchenkov) Shchukin...

..wanted Matisse to produce the most primitive and radical works of painting...

..that ever existed.

(Toni Servillo) In the first revolution, in 1905, Shchukin had lost a son.

(Servillo) Immediately after, he lost his lovely wife Lydia and another son, who committed suicide.

(Toni Servillo) In avant-garde art he found a response to the dramatic events of his life.

(Toni Servillo) In 1908 he opened his palace in Moscow to the public...

..in order to make the new European artists known.

(Toni Servillo) But while he implemented his revolution with art,...

..history was preparing another one.

(Toni Servillo) So, in 1917 his paintings became the property of the populace...

..and were divided among various museums.

(Toni Servillo) Shchukin fled to Paris where he died in 1936.

(Toni Servillo) Today, in putting together part of his collection,...

..the Hermitage celebrates his inheritance and his vision.

(Toni Servillo) Today, the Hermitage is one of the biggest museums in the world.

(Toni Servillo) There are more than three million pieces in its collection,...

..and only 3% is on exhibit.

(Toni Servillo) There are numerous archival collections at the Staraya Derevna Centre.

(Toni Servillo) In the future, it will host more than a million works of art.

(BANGS)

(Toni Servillo) Of the nine departments in the building,...

..the most important is, without a doubt, restoration,...

..where Hermitage experts are working on a fresco from Raphael's school.

(Vladimir Dobrovolsky, in Russian) In the city of Panjakent, in what is now Tajikistan,...

..there are frescoes found by archaeologists.

(Vladimir Dobrovolsky) Here, Egyptian sarcophagi...

..are being restored,...

..and we can say that the restorers,...

..like archaeologists, are very special people.

(Vladimir Dobrovolsky) A special characteristic of the Hermitage restoration school...

..is that every restorer is both a painter and a scientist.

And in the union of these things, being a scientist, painter and restorer, is the uniqueness.

(Toni Servillo) Archaeological research is the other soul of the Hermitage.

(Toni Servillo) It developed especially in the Soviet era...

..when art was suffocated by the necessity for propaganda...

..and the refusal of everything that came from the West.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) During this period the Hermitage initiated important digs...

..and brought to light the Scythian civilization.

(Toni Servillo) The Museum avoided immobility...

..and maintained a leading role in world culture.

(Toni Servillo) Archaeology became the driving force, for the construction of a new collection.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(Mikhail Piotrovsky) In a way the Scythians became a symbol of the Hermitage,...

..the sculpture, the relief of a stag from a Scythian tomb.

(Piotrovsky) There is an old story about how Scythians had been fighting the Persians, Darius.

(Mikhail Piotrovsky) Darius came to the Scythian steppes:...

..they retreated and retreated, retreated and retreated,...

..until the Persians found themselves in the middle of the steppes,...

..very far from their own country.

Then Scythians turned back and destroyed the army of Darius.

This was how Russia, which is not Scythia, but a big country,...

..was fighting wars every century.

It was what they did in the war with the Poles,...

..in the war with the Swedes, in the war with the French, and in the war with the Germans.

Always the same story, retreating and then fighting back.

(Toni Servillo) The Scythian civilization was the lifelong object of study...

..for Mikhail Piotrovsky's father,...

..Boris Borisovic, historian, archaeologist,

..and director of the Hermitage for 26 years.

(Toni Servillo) His digs in Armenia and in southern Caucasus...

..let the world know about the ancient and forgotten Urartu civilization.

(Mikhail Piotrovsky) Archaeology gives us the Greek and Roman heritage,...

..the nomadic heritage of Scythians,...

..the heritage of Mesopotamia, and a little bit of connection to Chinese heritage.

(Mikhail Piotrovsky) So that is why we are, as I said, open to all cultures.

(Piotrovsky) I call the Hermitage "the encyclopedia of world art written in the Russian language",...

..because this is our architecture, Russian architecture, Russian history, all together,...

..so in this manner it's given back to the world as a special example of a cultural institution,...

..which is for me the best example of what Russia is.

(Toni Servillo) Through the art in the Hermitage, Russia has returned to meeting the world,...

..opening branches in other countries,...

..sharing the culture and research programmes,...

..as with the Gallerie d'Italia.

(Gabriele Finaldi, in Italian) The Hermitage can be considered a bridge for culture,...

..a bridge between countries, a bridge even among peoples.

(Gabriele Finaldi) I believe this is an element that is found within its own nature,...

..within its DNA.

(Gabriele Finaldi) But it's an element that has been developed, specifically in last few decades,...

..by Professor Petrovsky who wanted that...

Russia, at times risked being isolated, politically and geographically...

He wanted that the Hermitage to always be an institution open to collaboration,...

..open to showing the different cultures of the world.

I think the Hermitage has played a very, very important role,...

..and it will continue to play it in the future.

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

"There are strange nooks in Petersburg."

"It seems as though the same sun as shines for all Petersburg people doesn't peep into those spots,..."

"..but some other different new one and it throws a different light on everything."

"In these corners,..."

"quite unlike the life that is surging round us,..."

"..but such as perhaps exists in some unknown realm, not among us,..."

"..in our serious, over-serious, time."

"Well, that life is a mixture of something purely fantastic."

"In these corners live strange people..."

"..dreamers."

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Aleksandr Sokurov, in Russian) This place has a colossal power of attraction for me. It is a marvel.

What else do we have? The State can fall, the army can be defeated, but Russian culture remains.

(Aleksandr Sokurov) We will stay afloat and continue to live,...

..no matter what happens.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

(Toni Servillo) The director Alexander Sokurov is also one of St. Petersburg's dreamers.

(Toni Servillo) And in his masterly film he recounted the Hermitage...

..as an ark navigating the ocean of history.

(Aleksandr Sokurov, in Russian) According to the Scriptures, in the ark everything was gathered...

..that was believed to be valuable for life and the soul.

(Aleksandr Sokurov) There were love, tolerance, patience and courage.

(Aleksandr Sokurov) All chosen in the right way for conserving life.

We have always given value, we still give value, and we will increasingly give it to making art,...

more than anything else.

(Sokurov) The Hermitage is like the concentration of everything that we have suffered,...

..everything that has been conserved and paid for, paid for correctly, with money, to tell the truth.

(Aleksandr Sokurov) There is nothing here that has been stolen or taken by force.

(Aleksandr Sokurov) In this sense, it is truly one of the most pure museums.

(Aleksandr Sokurov) For me the Hermitage is one of the purest places in the world.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

"Sir?"

"Sir?"

"What a shame you're not here with me."

"You would've understood everything."

"Look,..."

"..the sea is all around us."

"We'll have to sail,..."

"..forever."

"And live... forever."

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(THE MAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEERFUL MUSIC)

(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEE