by Olga BORISOVA, journalist

The Bakhrushin Theater Museum in Moscow has been in for two red-letter days: late in 2009 it marked its 115th birth anniversary, and early in 2010, the 145th birthday of its founder, Alexei Bakhrushin (1865-1929). These two events were commemorated by an exhibition devoted to this "theatrical Versailles in the Zatsepa district" and featuring priceless archival documents and manuscripts as well as objects d'art and other rarities, some of them for the first time.

Now, do you love the theater the way I do, with all your heart and soul, with all that élan and frenzy proper to ardent youth, passionate and avid for what is refined?.. Is it not the centerpiece of all the charms, fascinations and seductions of the fine arts?.. Oh, go to the theater, go there! Go and live and die in it, if you can..."* This ebullient outburst from Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), the Russian critic and man of letters, is quite in place and might be welcome to Alexei Bakhrushin, an industrialist and member of the Moscow City Duma (Council), who was one of the founders and heads of the Russian Theatrical Society. A passionate admirer of the stage art, Bakhrushin gathered a big collection of related items. On October 29, 1894, he opened it to the public at large. This day became the birthday of a unique museum, the world's first theater museum, and now this country's third largest in the number of exhibits, 1.5 mln in all, after the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the State Museum of History in Moscow.**

In 1896 Bakhrushin had a mansion built in the early English Gothic style; standing in Zatsep Street, it is one of Moscow's architectural landmarks. This mansion is still ornate with stained lancet glass windows proper to this style. The same is true of the host's study and the entrance-hall livened up with carved wood panels. As it was a century ago, this hall houses two showcases: one has exhibits dealing with the foundation of the museum and its first years, while the other tells about its founder and his family. This was a home mansion of Bakhrushin and his collection. Soon after, it came to be known as a "theatrical Versailles". In 1913 Bakhrushin donated his mansion and art collection to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

The Bakhrushin Museum has eight daughter branches in Moscow. One is in a wooden house built in the 1820s on Malaya Ordynka Street with a lush garden close by; it is in this old-style homey house that the great playwright of the latter half of the 19th century, Alexander Ostrovsky, was born (today, a museum dedicated in 1984). Another is in a mansion put up in 1773 where Maria Yermolova, a great tragic actress of the early 20th century, lived for forty years (now also a museum opened in 1986). We might as well mention yet another museum—a memorial apartment of Galina Ulanova, the world-famous ballet-dancer of the mid-20th century, in the high-rise apartment house on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment (opened in 2004).

* See: V. Belinsky, "Literary Reveries", Molva weekly, 1834. -Ed.

** See: V. Yegorov, "Treasure-House of Russian History", Science in Russia, No. 5, 2004. -Ed.

The Bakhrushin museums display a great variety of memorabilia—portraits and sketches painted by eminent artists; documents, photos and personal paraphernalia of famous actors, composers and stage directors, and many other theater-related items (books, video tapes, films and the like). The Russian theater has deep roots in folklore and folk rituals, and in popular shows. Back in the dim and distant past, as early as the 10th and 11th centuries, such popular shows and festivals produced the first professional actors, the merry Andrews or mountebanks, greatly popular with the public for seven centuries. This country's first theatrical was staged on October 17, 1672, in the summer palace of the "most pacific" tsar, Alexei Mikhailovich, at Preobrazhensko-ye (today this village is within Moscow city limits). The author of this stage production based on biblical motifs and titled Artaxerxes' Action (Artaxerxes I, King of Persia, 464-424 B.C.) was Johann Gotfried Gregori, a Lutheran Church pastor from the "German sloboda, or settlement", a district populated by Germans and other aliens resident in Moscow.

Such shows gained popularity—so much so that many enthusiastic performers appeared in many cities and towns. One such troupe surfaced in Yaroslavl, too, under Feodor Volkov, a man of versatile parts—actor, dramatist, stage producer, artist and architect, all in one. At first his company acted in French plays in his translation and then, in 1751, he staged a Russian tragedy, Khorev, written by a native author, Alexander Sumarokov.

Soon after, the reigning empress, Elizabeth (Yelizaveta Petrovna), got wind of the Yaroslavl company of actors, and she had them come to St. Petersburg. This was not a random decision or whimsy—in those days the theater swayed the minds of the enlightened Russian public. Sumarokov continued as head of the company whose actors played in pieces of his own composition. Incidentally, in 1900 the Bakhrushin collection got a welcome addition, a charter granted by the nobility to the actors Grigori and Feodor Volkovs. Its text survived only in fragments. However, in the 1990s it was reconstructed by Dr. Lyudmila Starikova, an art appreciation expert (Institute of Art Criticism, Moscow).

Volkov and his fellows were the heart and soul of the St. Petersburg theater, with actor Yakov Shumsky being one of its leading lights. This is what Denis Fonvizin (von Wiesen), an eminent playwright of the day, had to say in one of his letters, "I have just seen Shumsky here who sent me rolling in the aisles quite out of season..." Acting in the role of the old woman Yeremeyevna in the Fonvizin comedy Young Oaf (first staged in 1782), Shumsky won plaudits as a top performer.

A typically Russian phenomenon, the companies of serf actors, gained ground countrywide late in the 18th and early in the 19th centuries. One of the best theaters of serfs was at Ostankino (a Moscow suburb then) set up by Count Nikolai Sheremetev and remarkable for its excellent orchestra, grand costumes and talented actors. Praskovya Kovaleva (stage name, Zhemchugova) was the prima of the Ostankino theater; a prodigal songstress and performer, she lived a vivid, though a short life. She won the heart of the young count and became his wife, but died of consumption in 1803 at age 35.

Now back to our "theatrical Versailles" museum. First we come upon sketches of costumes for the Sheremetyev theater made by Marianne Kirzinger, a French artist, in 1785 as well as pictorial images of actors who were famous late in the 18th and early in the 19th centuries, such as Feodor Volkov, Yakov Shumsky (copies of the works of Anton Losenko, 18th cent.) and Nymphodora Semenova in the role of Sibyl of Delphi in the opera Vesta of the Italian composer Gaspare Spontini, as portrayed by the Russian painter Orest Kiprensky in 1820 (the great poet Alexander Pushkin* described her sister, Yekaterina, as "the sole tsarina of the tragic stage"). Also in this gallery is Mikhail Shchepkin (artist, Alexei Dobrovolsky, 1839), one of the fathers of the Russian school of actors. Next comes the wonderful portrait of Kovaleva-Zhemchugova by the brush of Nikolai Argunov—her image radiates a touch of nobleness and spirituality.

The Russian theater had its heyday in the 19th century, and so did Russian letters in what was described as the Golden Age of Russian literature. Realism and new schools of production entered the stage. In 1823, 1824 and 1825 the magnificent edifices of the Bolshoi and Maly Theaters (architect, Osip Bove) rose in Moscow; two new theaters, the Alexandrine (Carl Rossi) and the Mikhai-lovsky (Alexander Bryullov), added to the beauty of St. Petersburg and are now among its spectacular architectural sights. These theaters were the first to stage Alexander Griboyedov, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turge-nev**, Anton Chekhov*** and Leo Tolstoy.

We might as well add that the first decades of the 19th century saw the birth of Russian classical music, with Mikhail Glinka as its progenitor. In 1836 his opera Life for the Tsar was presented to the public. Deeply Russian in its form and substance, it glorified the feat of an obscure Russian peasant, Ivan Susanin, who saved the young Mikhail Romanov, a noble who became the first Russian tsar of the Romanov dynasty**** soon after, from inevitable depth at the hands of the Poles. The plot was suggested by the romantic poet Vassily Zhukovsky. Next followed another opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), after

* See: V. Nepomnyashchy, "The Pushkin Phenomenon Through the Obvious", Science in Russia, No. 3, 1999. -Ed.

** See: G. Medyntseva, "Ivan Turgenev's Two Homelands", Science in Russia, No. 2, 2009. -Ed.

*** See: V. Vasilyev, "In Time All My Works Shall See the  Light" (A. Chekhov); Yu. Balabanova, "Seven Years in Melikhovo"; "Life Portraitist", Science in Russia, No. 1, 2010. -Ed.

**** See: O. Bazanova, "Cradle of the Romanov House". Science in Russia, No. 2, 2008-Ed.

the Pushkin poem of the same name, the composer's creative pinnacle. Displayed in our exposition were sketches of the stage scenery used in the maiden performances (artist, Andrei Roller).

Bakhrushin was an ardent ballet fan. Guests could see a true parade of dancing pulchritude in the images of premier ballerinas, such as Yevdokia Istomina, a Russian Terpsichore, as Pushkin lauded her; her contemporary, Maria Taglioni, an Italian ballet dancer who made European tours in the 1820s and 1830s; Tamara Karsavina of the Diaghilev Ballet*... The world-famous Anna Pavlova was also there, in the exposition—a ballerina who in 1910 set up a company of her own that made guest appearances in many countries. Also on display were personal belongings of the great ballet-dancers, old playbills, sketches of costumes and scenery made by artists affiliated with the World of Art**, an association of such eminent painters as Alexander Benoit, Lev Bakst, Mikhail Dobu-zhinsky and Alexander Golovin; it was established in St. Petersburg in 1898 to 1900.

In many ways the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries meant a sea change: it was a hard and contradictory time for Russian culture marked by strife among sundry creative trends. It was at that hectic age, in 1898, that the Moscow Art Theater staged its maiden performance, the drama piece Tsar Feodor Ioannovich after Alexei Tolstoy's drama of the same name. This theater was founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the great stage producers and reformers, whose creative effort has greatly impacted the world stage art.

The Moscow Art Theater is intimately associated with Anton Chekhov and his plays that had their first nights there (Seagull, 1898; Uncle Vanya, 1899; Three Sisters, 1901; The Cherry Orchard, 1904)... Maxim Gorky, then a budding author, had two of his plays staged there (Philistines and Lower Depths, 1902). Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko opened up new avenues for the performing arts, they revolutionized the theater and acting. A novel type actor showed up. Theater performers rallied under one common idea and creative method; enhanced by light, sound and scenary, their mastery merged into a single striking image.

Vsevolod Meyerhold, a star stage producer, began his creative biography at the Moscow Art Theater in 1898. However, in 1902 he left his alma mater to head an itinerant troupe of young like-minded actors identifying themselves as a New Drama Company. In his creative search-ings and stage trials so much admired by Stanislavsky, the young experimentalist devoted great attention to harlequin pantomimes and Russian buffoonery shows, he taught actors to develop a sure command of the body language the way circus performers do. All these experiments

* Diaghilev Ballet-a company founded in 1911 by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), a Russian ballet producer and choreographer. Active up until his death in 1929, it had a huge success abroad, especially in France and Britain. -Ed.

** Its members prioritized the aesthetic principle and ideals of the arts of the past. Stressing an actor's self-identify, they let their contemporaries rediscover the beauty of medieval architecture and old icon-painting, of the classical St. Petersburg and its suburban palaces, thus taking a fresh look at the nation's cultural heritage.—Ed.

opened up new vistas for the performing arts and enriched their palette. Thus the Russian theater avant-garde, a bright phenomenon of world culture, was born.

The flower of pictorial arts worked for the theater. The Bakhrushin museum keeps quite a number of such masterpieces: sketches of scenery and curtains for the works of the composer Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov—his operas A Tsar's Bride (Mikhail Vrubel, 1899) and The Tale of the Invisible Town of Kitezh (Appolinary Vasnetsov, 1907); for the ballet Scheherazade (Valentin Serov, 1910); for Modest Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov (Konstantin Yon, 1913)... The playbill of Innokenty Annensky's drama Thamyras the Kitharoidos* (Alexander Ekster, 1916) is also there.

Many items were put on display for the first time. These include sketches of dresses for the Sheremetev theater and a Kovaleva-Zhemchugova portrait. Guests could also see the drawing-book (sketches and studies for performances staged in 1912, 1913 and 1914) of Boris Anisfeld, the leading artist of the World of Arts Association, among the latest acquisitions of the museum as well as a unique collection of articles adorned with precious metals. This is the fan of the actress Maria Yermolova bedizened with gold and nacre and presented by her admirers on the 25th jubilee of her staging career; also, the goblet of the great tragic actor Ivan Moskvin, the gold ring of the mother of the famous singer Feodor Shalyapin, among other memorabilia.

A separate section of the vernissage dealt with the philanthropic activities of the Bakhrushins. This family of industrialists made munificent gifts to the Moscow public, such as a hospital, the first maternity home, asylums for invalids and orphans, theater-houses, dwelling houses with pay-free flats, churches and a number of remarkable collections, some of them kept at the State Museum of History. Displayed in the Bakhrushin exposition were other memorial items like images of the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist (put up at Zaraisk, a town south of Moscow, in 1901 to 1904 to Architect Konstantin Bykovsky's design), a family album in verses dated anno 1881, with Alexei Bakhrushin's photograph on the title page, alongside his letters, photos of his relatives and other mementos. Quite a few exhibits told about the history of the Bakhrushin Museum and its prospects, among them he blueprints of a cultural educational compound that will comprise the main edifice, repository, exhibition pavilions and a theater-and-concert hall.

Bakhrushin's study is next to the memorial exhibition. Standing in the middle is a semicircular desk with an easel showing the host's portrait drawn in crayons (artist, Ilya Grinman, 1907). The presence effect is accentuated by other memorabilia—the collector's personal things and the

* Thamyras the Kitharoidos-a Thracian poet who challenged the Muses in a cithara contest and was punished by blindness for such arrogance.—Tr.

album in which the visiting celebrities signed their names. Here and there are pictorial canvases, photos, old-style opera-glasses, dancing-slippers and pumps along with other rarities collected by the museum's founder: in time Bakhrushin the collector turned into a professional historian of the theater.

The great opera singer Feodor Shalyapin (1873-1938) is featured separately. It was Alexei Bakhrushin who started collecting materials on the singer's life and work. The exhibits included every kind of Shalyapin keepsakes—portraits, photographs, costumes and his sculptural self-portrait. Guests could hear his living voice, recordings of his best parts, say, in Boris Godunov (Modest Musorgsky's opera of the same name) and in Faust (as Mephistopheles, in the opera of Charles Gounod).

The museum's stock is truly unique and inexhaustible. It includes cinearchives with singular documentary films of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. These are the sequences on Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and on the Moscow Art Theater: the boat trip of its company down the Dnieper in Kiev in 1912 arranged by Kievan fans, its guest appearance in Tbilisi in 1925; Nemirovich-Danchenko's visit to the United States in 1928; Stanislavsky's funeral in 1938. These and other rarities have now been recorded on a video tape.

The Bakhrushin Museum arranges regular exhibitions and guided tours as well as soirees, lectures and interviews with well-known actors. It is active in research, too. Its workers make it a practice to appear at international forums with reports and communications. One such get-together was a conference held in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 2008 under the motto "Capture the Spirit of a Performance: Problems of Preserving the Nonmaterial Heritage"; and another one, held the same year in Glasgow, Scotland, taking up the subject of Hamlet in all its bearings—performances, translations and politics.

The museum's editorial and publishing department has brought out quite a few specialist and popular science editions, including the well-illuminated books 110 Masterpieces of the Bakhrushin Museum; F.G. Volkov and the 18th-century Theater, Meyerhold, the Love Space; Theatrical Moscow in Photographs.

In 1987 the Bakhrushin Museum established a restoration department employing ten restoration masters who bring back to life paintings in oils and tempera, drawings, playbills as well as articles of furniture and fabric. Used in this work are rehabilitation and conservation methods devised by the nation's leading centers, the State Research Museum of Restoration among them.*

* See: O. Firsova, L. Shestopalova, "Saving Masterpieces", Science in Russia, No. 1, 2008. -Ed.