REVIEW --- Books: A Russian's Renaissance

“Evocations of Italy

 

By Pavel Pavlovich Muratov

 

Northwestern, 912 pages, $140

 

One of the most melancholy cultural histories is that of the short-lived Russian Renaissance. Beginning in approximately 1890, it was intended as a humanist revival and a cultural regeneration in a world rendered barren by industry and technology. Later named the Russian Silver Age, the movement was called "our Renaissance" by its participants. Alas, after a brief 30 years, the Bolsheviks strangled the infant renaissance in its cradle. What might have been if this movement had lasted?

 

The writers and artists who named their movement the Russian Renaissance did so under the spell of Italy. Almost every pre-1917 Russian artist and intellectual, regardless of means, took a Grand Tour to the land of Sandro Botticelli and Dante Alighieri. They were encouraged by Pavel Pavlovich Muratov, a Russian art historian and prolific essayist. "Evocations of Italy" (1911-16), his beautifully produced three-volume guide to Italian art, history and geography, became the most eloquent Russian expression of love for the Italian Renaissance.

 

Nothing in Muratov's youth predicted his passion for art. He was born in 1881, the son of a military doctor. He was sent to the cadet corps and fought in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Shortly thereafter, he left the military to pursue his true love, Italian culture. By 1908 he had met and married Evgenia Paganuzzi, a Russian-Italian dancer, and together with her embarked on his first tour of Italian cities. So began the travels that are depicted in "Evocations."

 

Muratov traverses miles of road and centuries of culture. The three volumes that constitute "Evocations" are extraordinarily difficult to categorize. They are at once memoirs, guidebooks and essays on art. Muratov read the works of those who had traveled on the Italian Grand Tour before him: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee. "Evocations" is, in part, a tribute to all of them.

 

Readers accompany Muratov as he explores museums and chapels, squares and passageways in Italian cities both large and small. Every description is poetic. Wandering the "maze" of streets in Venice takes patience, he tells us: "Proceeding like the knight in a game of chess, you chart a course of right angles." This is an apt description of Muratov's writing style. He briefly comments on the works of Giovanni Bellini and Tintoretto, but then pauses to examine at length the work of the 18th-century artist Pietro Longhi. In Longhi's paintings, Muratov is fascinated by the Venetian culture of the mask: an expression of the city's "gloomy opulence." Masked Venetians are like "fantastic and sinister night birds," and include, Muratov speculates, an occasional nun seeking pleasure.

 

Florence and its surroundings move Muratov profoundly, especially because this region best expresses the 15th-century Renaissance, or Quattrocento, in which he senses "the beating of a great heart pulsing with pure and noble blood." The culmination of this period is the art of Botticelli, a humanist painter who hauntingly depicted a "lost" heaven, and who proposed a "new mankind, doomed to live beneath an indifferent sky on a ravaged earth strewn with the fragments of shattered beliefs." This sensibility undergirds the mournful mood of his "Birth of Venus" (ca. 1485), which Muratov declares "the most beautiful painting on earth." Muratov pays similar homage to Dante, asking us to climb the steep Florentine stairs leading to the basilica of San Miniato, from which we can gaze at the city on which Dante had "wagered his stern and gentle soul."

 

The volumes are not all art and culture -- Muratov happily includes long digressions on the life and adventures of the 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova and the less well-known but no less remarkable Christina Alexandra, the Swedish queen who left her throne in the mid-17th century to seek a life of sensual and intellectual pleasure in Rome.

 

This may seem like a whirlwind of impressions, but Muratov's volumes have a slow and deliberate pace, one meant to contrast with the noise and speed of his own time. Readers' senses are engaged as Muratov pauses in one place or another, such as in the Campagna on the outskirts of Rome. There, on the banks of the Almone, he finds the Bosco Sacro, a "sacred grove" composed of "several ancient holm pines arranged in a perfect circle" around what must once have been a pagan altar. He invites readers to stretch out on the ground next to him: "Lying in the shade of the Sacred Wood, you begin to notice the faint smell of soil, newly sprouted grass, evergreens. . . . Nature is filled with the anticipation of spring. . . . And yet, a sudden sorrow takes hold of you. Why can this moment not last forever?"

 

The translation of "Evocations" into English by Lena Lencek is done flawlessly, and the thick paper on which the text is printed has a luxurious density. Only one unfortunate choice mars the whole -- the original reproductions of artwork that appear in the original Russian editions are replaced by lovely but abstract images (at left) by Gideon Bosker designed to evoke the text. The reader thus misses the ability to see what Muratov painstakingly describes.

 

In the final pages of the third volume, World War I breaks into the narrative. Muratov is in Venice, listening to newsboys announce the assassination of the Austrian archduke. By the time Volume 3 was published, war had begun. Muratov abandoned art and returned to the army, and then, after the 1917 Revolution, devoted his skills to famine relief. For his service, Muratov only garnered suspicion: He was arrested and imprisoned. He fled the Soviet Union for good in 1922.

 

As an exile in Italy, Muratov continued his endeavors to keep the Russian-Italian connection alive and sought to reconnect the scattered Russian Renaissance. He organized events and conferences, and Russians attended his cultural soirees in Rome on Tuesdays. The exiled Russian writer Nina Berberova ecstatically recalled touring Rome with Muratov as her guide: "He loved Italy and taught me to love it." Despite Muratov's efforts, the Russian Renaissance withered, and Russia's connection to Italian culture dissipated. Muratov died a forgotten man in 1950. The republication of "Evocations" is a long-overdue tribute to the brief brilliance of Russia's cultural revival, a rediscovery of something that should never have been lost.

 

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Ms. Siljak is a professor of humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: A Russian's Renaissance. Siljak, Ana.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Aug 2026: C12.