The museum showed the tongue – Kommersant newspaper No. 236 (7437) of 12/20/2022

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts opened the exhibition “The Common Language”. More than 500 artifacts dating from different historical eras and geographic areas – from Ancient Babylon to the Soviet Union, are designed to convince that for thousands of years, states and people managed to find a common language, despite conflicts and wars. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

The desire of the Pushkin Museum to come up with a peaceful, unifying exhibition is much more understandable in our time. This is facilitated by its vast collection of world art, all the more important now that ties with many of the world’s museums have been cut. For the exhibition “The Common Language” the curators have attracted items from other Russian museums, archives, and private collections. The material, it would seem, is not the most spectacular – cuneiform tablets, papyri, birch bark letters, scrolls, contracts, orders, letters, books written in languages ​​understandable only to historians – but the curators were able to make them “sound”, and we allowed them to hear.

If we are talking about a speculative “universal language”, there was a biblical tradition about the Tower of Babel – a daring attempt to build a building to the skies, which angered God, who destroyed the pillar and doomed people to mutual misunderstanding – since then they have spoken in different languages. In Christianity, the parable is conceived as a condemnation of pride, in European art it appears as the Apocalypse, as in the painting “The Destruction of the Tower of Babel” by an unknown Dutch artist of the early 17th century. But on the one hand, it turned out to be important for the curators to supplement the plot with fragments of tiles and bricks with inscriptions in the Sumerian language (XXI century BC), which testify to a temple actually unfinished in Babylon, which served as the basis for the legend. And on the other hand, a selection of graphics by Boris Iofan: in addition to sketches of the Palace of Soviets, which was never built according to his project, designed to become the tallest building in the world, they show sketches of New York skyscrapers that turned out to be elements of a universal architectural language, both in Manhattan and on the Garden Ring .

The Italian Hall refers to another Old Testament image. There, artifacts that preserved inscriptions in living and dead languages ​​formed a semblance of Noah’s ark. Around this huge showcase are sculptural and pictorial portraits, ancient and new, whose characters seem to be looking at each other and at viewers studying a motley selection of antiquities. In the Ark, a fragment of the Iliad on ancient Greek papyrus is adjacent to an 18th-century prayer scroll in Armenian, an ancient Roman marble slab is adjacent to a slab from Ancient Iran, a cuneiform incantation from Assyria is adjacent to scribbles from the notebook of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich (oddly enough, before still undeciphered). All of them are created by people who, if they met and spoke, would not understand each other.

The motley crowd from the portraits surrounding the “ark” is impressive. In the context of the exhibition, these guests from the past are thought of as speakers of different languages. The most unexpected neighborhoods correspond to this: for example, antique and ancient Buddhist sculptures are mixed with portraits made by Soviet sculptors. The same is true in pictorial portraits: the gallery of characters of Lucas Cranach the Elder and other masters of the Northern Renaissance is continued by representatives of China and Iran – the commanders of the Manchu emperor Tsanlong (XVIII century), during which many new territories were conquered, including Tibet, as well as ceremonial portraits of members of the Shah’s family Qajar, Iranian ruler of the early 19th century. Representatives of the St. Petersburg nobility, painted at the end of the 18th century by the Frenchman Jean-Louis Voile, look towards their contemporary provincial merchants and ladies, but already the authorship of Russian serf artists – it may seem that foreigners are looking at each other.

The sections on travel, diplomacy and gifts are devoted to the fact that the difference between languages ​​and cultures is surmountable. Here, too, “linguistic” exhibits coexist with works of art: peace treaties are secured with precious offerings, rulers write ornate, decorated letters to each other, exchange letters and good wishes. Diplomatic service does not interfere with poetry classes, as in the case of Fyodor Tyutchev (the exhibition has autographs of his poems “Russia cannot be understood with the mind …” and “We cannot predict …”), and poetry classes are not interfered with by scientific expeditions: the poet Nikolai Gumilyov is represented not only books and drawings, but also a selection of photographs taken by him in Africa, as well as objects of ethnographic collections brought from there.

The mythological and the historical, the speculative and the real, the desired and the actual, came together in the “Common Language” in the most free way. But the idea that it is made up of different sounds, words, images and adverbs, and each is important, the exhibition conveys with amazing clarity.