Download or read book The Madonnas of Leningrad written by Debra Dean and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unforgettable story of love, survival and the power of imagination in the most tragic circumstances. Elegant and poetic.” —Isabel Allende, New York Times bestselling author of Zorro The ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . . “Extraordinary. . . . Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers . . . illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment.” —Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker “A poignant tale.” —Booklist, starred review “Dean writes with passion and compelling drama.” —People “Rare is the novel that creates that blissful forgot-you-were-reading experience . . . but that is precisely what Debra Dean has achieved with her image-rich book.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer “Poetic.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “[A] heartfelt debut.” —New York Times Book Review “Remarkable”— NPR, Nancy Pearl Book Review

Download or read book Catherine the Greatest written by Swetlana Datsenko and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Manifesta 10 written by Kasper König and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published on the occasion of Manifesta 10, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg, Russia, this illustrated volume collects artworks, concepts, and essays that invite the reader to explore the possibilities of contemporary art in deeply historical settings. For the first time, Manifesta is hosted by a museum, uniting the State Heritage Museum's 250th anniversary and Manifesta's twentieth anniversary as a nomadic biennial. This book, which is structured like a classic catologue, reflects the intuitive and playful nature of Kasper Konig's exhibition. Contemporary art stands alongside the historical and cultural heritage of the Hermitage, and many projects create a unique homage to it and to the city of St. Petersburg. New works claim their place in ways that are often subtle and surprising, inviting viewers and readers to grapple with the endless ways in which contemporary art questions, complements, or even dovetails with tradition.

Download or read book The Collections of the Romanovs written by James Christen Steward and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Collections of the Romanovs celebrates the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg by exploring the role of the Romanov dynasty as collectors of fine and decorative arts. The book investigates in particular the historic role of St. Petersburg as Russia's window to the West, and features the great masterworks of Western European art collected and prized by Romanov tsars, from Peter the Great (who ruled from 1721-25) to the last of the dynasty, Nicholas II (who ruled from 1874-1918). Included are masterpieces of painting, drawing, printmaking, porcelain, silver, and tapestry over one hundred works in all, drawn exclusively from the extraordinary collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Hermitage Cats written by Nikolay Gol and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-05 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication is aimed at animal-lovers in general and especially those who are fond of cats. The book gives a wide-ranging and detailed presentation of the "feline" exhibits in the Hermitage: Ancient Egyptian bronze, mediaeval European painting, Chinese and Japanese graphic art, Russian lubok prints of the 18th to 20th centuries, cats in the form of fans, toys and much more. The book also contains a unique account of the history of the real-life Hermitage cats that have been employed in the service of the museum for over 260 years.

Download or read book The Splendor of St Petersburg written by Thierry Morel and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented tour of the most stunning and architecturally significant palatial homes of Russia's nobility, many not previously photographed and inaccessible to visitors. This luxurious presentation takes the reader on a breathtaking tour through the most magnificent mansions in St. Petersburg, Russia, built by the prerevolutionary aristocracy. Palaces of St. Petersburg reflects the unparalleled access and meticulous research of the authors, showcasing private residences that are unsurpassed in their historical importance and artistic grandeur. From the world-renowned Yusupov Palace, where Count Yusupov, famous for killing Rasputin, carried out his courtly duties, to the Polovtsov Palace, its unassuming facade concealing one of the most spectacular interiors of St. Petersburg, these residences have been an integral part of Russian history. This volume gives readers a glimpse into the interiors of these family homes with their sweeping marble staircases and grand rooms with elaborate parquet floors, intricate moldings, and mosaic details, enriched with sculptures and tapestries. All-new photography--as well as archival images showing the rooms and art collections as they existed in the day--celebrate the enduring beauty and exquisite restorations of these masterpieces, which reflect a lost way of life.

Download or read book Treasures of the Hermitage Museum written by Five Mile Press Staff and published by Five Mile Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrates one of the world's finest art collections, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia that boasts masterpieces by da Vinci and Monet as well as many uniquely Russian items, such as glorious Faberge pieces. This book features four 96-piece jigsaws.

Download or read book The Girl from the Hermitage written by Molly Gartland and published by Eye & Lightning Books. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galina was born into a world of horrors. So why does she mourn its passing? SHORTLISTED: Impress Prize LONGLISTED: Bath Novel Award LONGLISTED: Grindstone Novel Award It is December 1941, and eight-year-old Galina and her friend Vera are caught in the siege of Leningrad, eating soup made of wallpaper, with the occasional luxury of a dead rat. Galina's artist father Mikhail has been kept away from the front to help save the treasures of the Hermitage. Its cellars could now provide a safe haven, provided Mikhail can navigate the perils of a portrait commission from one of Stalin's colonels. Nearly forty years later, Galina herself is a teacher at the Leningrad Art Institute. What ought to be a celebratory weekend at her forest dacha turns sour when she makes an unwelcome discovery. The painting she embarks upon that day will hold a grim significance for the rest of her life, as the old Soviet Union makes way for the new Russia and Galina's familiar world changes out of all recognition. Warm, wise and utterly enthralling, Molly Gartland's debut novel guides us from the old communist world, with its obvious terrors and its more surprising comforts, into the glitz and bling of 21st-century St Petersburg. Galina's story is at once a compelling page-turner and an insightful meditation on ageing and nostalgia. 'A beautifully written book that takes you right into the characters' world. Highly recommended' LUCINDA HAWKSLEY

Download or read book Great Art Treasures of the Hermitage Museum St Petersburg Western European art Russian art and culture written by Gosudarstvennyĭ Ėrmitazh (Russia) and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 1994 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Leningrad written by Anna Reid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation. Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic moment in the twentieth century, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists on both sides. They reveal the Nazis' deliberate decision to starve Leningrad into surrender and Hitler's messianic miscalculation, the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet war leadership, the horrors experienced by soldiers on the front lines, and, above all, the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the relentless search for food and water; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism- and at the same time, extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the Germans capture the city? Why didn't it collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, Leningrad gives voice to the dead and will rival Anthony Beevor's classic Stalingrad in its impact.

Download or read book History of Russian Costume from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Century written by T. S. Aleshina and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 1977 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book St Petersburg written by Dmitriĭ Olegovich Shvidkovskiĭ and published by Abbeville Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before becoming a city, St. Petersburg was a utopian vision in the mind of its founder, Peter the Great. Conceived by him as Russia's "window to the West," it evolved into a remarkably harmonious assemblage of baroque, rococo, neoclassical, and art nouveau buildings that reflect his taste and that of his successors, including Anna I, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Paul I. Crisscrossed by rivers and canals, this "Venice of the North," as Goethe dubbed it, is of unique beauty. Never before has that beauty been captured as eloquently as on the pages of this sumptuous volume. From the stately mansions lining the fabled Nevsky Prospekt to the magnificent palaces of the tsars on the outskirts of the city, including Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, Oranienbaum, Gatchina, and Pavlovsk, photographer Alexander Orloff's portrait of St. Petersburg does full justice to the vision of its founder and namesake. The text, by art historian Dmitri Shvidkovsky, chronicles the history of the city's planning and construction from Peter the Great's time to the reign of the last tsar, Nicholas II. Anyone who has ever visited--or dreamed of visiting--the city of "white nights" will find St. Petersburg irresistible.

Download or read book Living Pictures written by Polina Barskova and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poignant collection of short pieces about the author's hometown, St. Petersburg, Russia, and the siege of Leningrad that combines memoir, history, and fiction. Living Pictures refers to the parlor game of tableaux vivants, in which people dress up in costume to bring scenes from history back to life. It’s a game about survival, in a sense, and what it means to be a survivor is the question that Polina Barskova explores in the scintillating literary amalgam of Living Pictures. Barskova, one of the most admired and controversial figures in a new generation of Russian writers, first made her name as a poet; she is also known as a scholar of the catastrophic siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Living Pictures, Barskova writes with caustic humor and wild invention about traumas past and present, historical and autobiographical, exploring how we cope with experiences that defy comprehension. She writes about her relationships with her adoptive father and her birth father; about sex, wanted and unwanted; about the death of a lover; about Turner and Picasso; and, in the final piece, she mines the historical record in a chamber drama about two lovers sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the siege of Leningrad who slowly, operatically, hopelessly, stage their own deaths. Living Pictures introduces a startlingly daring and original new voice from world literature.

Download or read book Art of Memories written by Vincent Antonin Lépinay and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the home of Catherine the Great’s private art collection, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum became the largest museum in the Soviet Union and, since the collapse of the USSR, one of the most active museums in the world. The Hermitage is a global model for the collection and preservation of fine art, deeply shaped by its need to protect itself and its holdings from the world beyond its gates. In Art of Memories, Vincent Antonin Lépinay documents the Hermitage’s curatorial practices in an innovative consideration of the museum as a cultural laboratory. Lépinay analyzes the tensions between the museum as a space of exploration of the collections and as a culture heavily invested in self-protection from the outside world. During a time when traveling abroad was rare, a generation of art historians produced a culture of confined scholarship premised on their proximity to the holdings of a museum enclave. As the Hermitage has become increasingly present on the world museum scene, its culture of secrecy and orality has endured. Lépinay analyzes the ethos of Hermitage curators and scholars over the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet museum cultures, considering the mobility of art, documentation of the collection, and the transformation of expertise. Based on Lépinay’s extraordinary access to the Hermitage and the scholars who work there, Art of Memories opens the door of one of the world’s great museums to reveal how art history is made. It is an essential study for readers interested in the role that outside forces play in culture, organizations, and the production of knowledge.

Download or read book Dutch and Flemish Paintings from the Hermitage written by Gosudarstvennyĭ Ėrmitazh (Russia) and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 1988 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 26, 1988 to June 5, 1988, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, from Jul. 9, 1988, to Sept. 18, 1988./ Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-134).

Download or read book Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea written by David Braund and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a landmark study combining key specialists around the region with well-established international scholars, from a wide range of disciplines.

Download or read book Master Paintings from the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum Leningrad written by National Gallery of Art (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: