All language subtitles for Hermitage The Power of Art.eng

(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."

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(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

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(THE MAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

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(THE WOMAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN)

(CHEE