First result is not yet complete, but obviously we rolled away from each other pandemic coronavirus – increased social and psychological distance. The situation demanded sensible, rational behavior, and understanding that the distance is more important than emotional closeness.
Michael Piotrovsky: We all time – on an emotional level explained that the Museum should not accept people beyond measure, because he just burst from the infinite number… And now it’s clear objective. In culture as in human life, important limits beyond which it cannot go. So after this experience – closer than 1.5 meters is not appropriate – we may be a bit of a different world – a separation, the regulation, the calculation is more personal. And the period of adaptation to more distantsirovaniya communication will not be easy. But maybe then people will become more responsible. After all, when you realize you’re alone and you not that no one will help, but you can’t expect everyone to come running… We know from life that a COP now is not relying on the whistle, as once the policeman. Many sad. Many believe that this is not the way in the direction of civilization.
But feeling is overcome distance. And culture is able to live with the distance.
Michael Piotrovsky: Culture could easily live with the distance. And equally easy to overcome. And by the way, means that we tend to think that they are ruining our lives and wash us from all that is human, then just allow the culture to win the race. We need a live chat, but not too frequent and close, so nothing is worthless.. If in the Hermitage every day to go and see a Rembrandt, then someone is not boring, but, in General, many people may and pall. And Rembrandt harder it will begin to be perceived. So the distance we go through some important experiment. Can be and good. Then everything will be clearer, but we can already think about the human results of what happened. And it is clear that there will be more not that order, but a certain distancing, which may allow us more respect for each other.
by the Way, great picture indeed gives a person the necessary distance from some inner-hassle, tangle tangled emotions and thoughts.
Michael Piotrovsky: Yes, it does. Culture generally defines the correct distance.
And we seem to find ourselves in a new time – with the new guidelines. The world after a pandemic is split. Today, many people think that safer to live separately. More important and more necessary it becomes “their”. National interest and international right are more important. And sometimes, indeed, more important to defend.
there was a marked anti-globalism.
Michael Piotrovsky: Yes, absolutely clear. But if the economic and political sphere or the unit health is better “insulated”, that culture did not. Cultural bridges, not to burn. Because it is the best cure for hatred.
People should not lose each other, and the continents drifted all that distance, to then not connect. Or connect for the sea battle. Don’t know how to do it. But I know that it should be done.
the Distance acquired by us by experience, must obtain a cultural definition. If we manage to do that, many are cured.
What we still hurt, if you look at the pandemic not only from a medical point of view?
Michael Piotrovsky: Recently, during an interesting discussion about the pandemic in Saudi Arabia, I was interested in the speech of one American lady who believes that a pandemic is born is too high for the proximity of man and animal. We are too close to the animals, and in rough shape – hunt, kill, cut, eat. Well, finally got to a stage where you always existing the possibility of jumping over something with an animal on person – repeatedly increased. And all of these coronaviruses – to Kovida-19 there were avian, and swine flu is just the jump, jump.
And at the European University, where opening a new direction “Geophilosophy” we recently just specifically discussed the situation of our quarrel with nature.
By and large, the pandemic is the result of the confrontation of nature to us. We ruthlessly exterminate, treat her consumer. There is not just “wait for favors from nature,” and constantly of it extract. Nature is for us – the basis for services. We chop trees, swing minerals, plows ruin the soil and completely forget that nature is a powerful organism with which it is necessary to build mutual communication. Do not build it, we get in response to global warming, and pandemic. It’s all unbalanced.
We live in history, which is closely related to the theme of nature. A part of nature, and also worthy of respect. Everything nature gives us is a gift, a gift, and not what we wanted and took it. And we need to understand that to coexist with it and with each other we need something to give. Life together if we want all ended well – it’s like some kind of exchange.
just as we destroy forests, extracting minerals, broken ecological system, we disturb the correct interaction of Nations. But who knows how it should be. But we definitely break.
We talked about the distance between people, so by nature we do not stand. In our present world, everything was close – the man and the animal, improper Relosenia with nature, with culture. And society more or less relatively equal, as a European, is too close. Crowded, entrenched habits of continuous communication. And all sorts of infection, not only biological but also social (e.g., crime), actually distributed in camp life.
And just how is physiological jump from too close and active contact with animals, so today happen and jumps socio-psychological. Is the middle East hysteria associated with Islam and all the things we used to rebel ( ISIS, Muslim brotherhood – all these organizations are banned in Russia. – Approx. ed.), jumps in Europe and America.
this world war monuments on the grounds of race, too, by the way jump. All of us it seems to be less worried when you blew up the Buddha statues in Bamiyan or hung, Director of the Museum in Palmyra not for anything else, and for the preservation of cultural antiquities. But when the guilty are Lincoln, Washington, Colbert, Voltaire, Spanish priests, and even Cervantes, is already stronger than the hurt.
the War with the old historical characters got some fantastic scope.
Michael Piotrovsky: Me in my view of this war is the closest well-formulated thought of Emmanuel Macron, the newly uttered them just in connection with the attack on the monuments: “the Republic will not erase from their history no trace and no name.”
Fact more important than symbols?
Mikhail Piotrovsky: Yes, the fact is more important. Because history consists of facts. The names of the people, the monuments of them is the outline of the story. And interpretation, evaluation (both people and monuments) – “everything else.”
Why it comes to attacks on Voltaire?
Michael Piotrovsky: Well, he allegedly received money from companies that dealt with slaves and a ship engaged in these shipments was called by his name. Poor Voltaire, of course, this is all irrelevant to the fact of his presence in history. Except that his grin is always to blame. No wonder standing in the Hermitage sculpture Houdon Catherine sent myself to hell, and Nicholas I then generally put out of the Palace to the public library. Moving monuments is a distant presage of the war with them.
In France, for equally spurious reasons is objectionable Colbert.
But attempts to change priorities and to rewrite history has always been.
Michael Piotrovsky: Yes, but now we are faced with attempts to rewrite history because of the insult to the feelings.
But history is not just dissatisfied with it to our contemporaries. It belongs to all. And the living and the dead, and happy, and unhappy. That is why we must protect the monuments. And Columbus. And ��spanski priests. And Cervantes, I do not understand why dragged through the mud.
Twisting perestanovki story can end badly. We remember it for his own domestic experience. In Moscow destroyed the monuments to Alexander II… But in St. Petersburg was a special experience. Monument to Nicholas I on St. Isaac’s square, so that only not remembering his hero (and the “victory” of the Decembrists, and plague rebellion, and the old joke “a Fool catches up smart”, keeping in mind standing in front of Peter), no finger touch, although there was talk about “destroy”. And the monument to Alexander III, in traveling from the area in different courts of the Russian Museum, remain. This is a very St. Petersburg history.
Monuments need to save sure. Even if some of them can no longer stand in the main squares, like Dzerzhinsky, he should stand in his project (by the way, the perfect Moscow invention, which is a monument to function as a Museum). The Museum, saving and preserving the memory, you often have to take it out of context. Incidentally, we had intended for the sculpture and urban structures that (sometimes rightly) start to not like people, the Hermitage storage facility in Staraya Derevnya. And was ready to take down the Tower of peace Sennaya square with all of the annoying and hindering.
African-Americans are rebelling against is depicted in the monuments of the characters, apparently they are now incorrect and racially demeaning. But the fight against colonialism and the colonialists was the last value that unites the world history.
Michael Piotrovsky: anti-colonial pathos in his time were all of us very useful. But colonies already long gone.
And it is ridiculous to judge them for poor Voltaire, De Gaulle or these century standing South American generals? Attempting – hopping pandemic hysteria. In which everything starts to peretolchina through the hysteria.
And the famous impact (category Nietzsche) resentment. Anger caused by frustration, failure. This live fighters monuments. It is based on the ressentiment of the present post-colonial syndrome, when all of us are forced to endlessly repent and apologize for the colonial past. There is even the hatred of Orientalism to Orientalism, to painting on the East. To repent we must add the indispensable delight, if, for example, the Museum’s Director Ke Branly in Paris appoint a native of one of the colonies. Russian museums the work of the natives of the “former colonies” and for the French here becomes an event, and, in my opinion, this too has some hysterical artificiality.
the End of colonialism is the result of the struggle with him, and the result of the desire of the colonists to leave.
Michael Piotrovsky: There is a famous expression belonging to the famousthe oil Minister of Saudi Arabia Ahmed Zaki Yamani: the stone age didn’t end because ran out of stones.
About the same and colonialism. It ended because people in the colonies didn’t want it, and the colonizers.
the Colonial conquests that have their specific purpose, at some point these goals reached or lost them. The colony has become unnecessary metropolises. And raw materials exported from them, lost the meaning was more important than oil, were not in the colonies. And the whole colonial history, as once European slavery lost its economic correctness. And civilizational mission of colonizers settled.
the feeling that in modern indignation of the old monument to Lincoln, “Why the Negro is on his knees in front of the white President?” is triggered not so much created a sense of racial dignity, how much of an inferiority complex. Not even personal – social-psychological.
Michael Piotrovsky: If you remember the first fighters, for example, French colonialism, the poet Leopold Senghor, the philosopher Frantz Fanon, it was the people of the highest education and the highest culture! What really is the inferiority complex! But then, however, people were a little bit thinner… And now, Yes, a sense of inferiority complex.
America is a country with order, law, a clear social mechanisms, with an illustrative passages for blacks in jazz and business. But suddenly break out in outrage at the monuments is a sense of nedostatochnosty of African Americans in American culture?
Michael Piotrovsky: Well, we have since Marxism know about the importance of social mechanisms. Good social mechanisms help cultural assimilation. But when it comes to the masses, their involvement in culture, the inferiority complex is almost inevitable. Because to master any culture is not easy. And when the masses come, for example, at least in America, even in Russia, does not really want to learn the language, then the hysteria is born of an inferiority complex. Joining the great community always causes some complex. Here effect and peculiarities of national identity, and belonging to different social strata.
Well, let’s not forget that people always want something more. However, born from that frustration disappears if you are fully integrated in the culture, and it’s your part. Apparently, in America, the inclusion of African-Americans is still small.
And even was Louis Armstrong and Michael Jackson, “quota” of jobs for blacks, but an inclined plane of Negro life in the direction of involvement in drug trafficking also were there. African Americans people with a broken history – slavery in the XIX century – historical dislocation and shame (like serfdom, for example, somewhat less inhuman but also shameful).
Michael Piotrovsky: But now, with the once oppressed African-Americans, it seems, is that so politically incorrect described Arnold Toynbee noticed a tendency of yesterday’s oppressed also oppress others. This is not always the case, but it happens.
So I can only repeat after the Makron is not to erase any trace and no name. To talk about the heroes of days gone by can way and that, but to raise a hand to memory is not.
Michael Piotrovsky: But everything that is happening in the United States and in other countries is, of course, the echoes echoes of the Civil war. In France, for example, it sounds in the separation of petrovskuyu and neptunovskim France. We in Russia sometimes becomes stronger than the echo of the last war with Germany (no Wonder we now talk about Poland, the former before the Civil war, part of Russia sound sharper than about Germany).
I Think we should often look to the great Salvador Dali’s painting “Premonition of Civil war”. And think about it. To her, God forbid, in some form, not to revive.
But we have no demonstration of the war with the monuments?
Michael Piotrovsky: And three of the scandal with plaques? Mannerheim solemnly opened in St. Petersburg in the presence of a military guard, and then as many times split and sling mud, I had to remove it in the Historical Museum in Tsarskoye Selo?
We at the Hermitage before it was doing a big exhibition about Mannerheim, not so much as about the Finnish President, as as officer in the guards, the Russian spy and the man raised his hand to Petersburg, and it was indignant, but in a civilized manner.
A broken crystal and very beautiful plaque Sakharov in Gus-Khrustalny?
As the scandal around the us restored after repairs to the Main headquarters of a memorial plaque on the site of the assassination of Uritsky. We were obliged to restore it by law, the history, and the direction of the Board said that it is only a monument to the era. We are all trimmed, next to a portrait of Uritsky was placed a large portrait of Kannegisser, describing him as a friend Yesenin, poet, cadet and one of the last defenders of the Winter Palace. It all started with light protests with single posters and ended a turbulent and in the environment of Russian emigration, and even our friends. With such affront “how dare you?! This man has blood on his hands!”. But we restored that part of our history, which hands in blood were very many.
I think that this Bacillus, viruses of the civil war.
At such moments you understand clearly that reconciliation is not out of the question. And can be used to reconcile. In France, for example, do not reconcile��me. But the loading of these subjects consist of civil war impossible not to notice.
We are in the Hermitage goes especially because we Imperial residence and the Imperial keepers of memory. Oh that was when we in Instagram in the day of the century the arrest and execution placed the portrait – a photograph of the failed Emperor, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. A wild debate broke out and we were worried: the Hermitage “Instagram” still not “Echo of Moscow”, these people go without hate.
However, all this should and can extinguish culture. I slightly laughed at the conversations that art is therapy. And in recent months, while we work online, communicating with millions (in reality to us in the coming year 5 million visitors, and online it’s 45), once again convinced that culture and art give people a kind of medicine. At least soothing for sure.
And maybe this too is our mission, which is to think. As on antidote to all that is born in the civil war.
what is the cure for inferiority complex?
Michael Piotrovsky: Not to fall into the inferiority complex people and peoples helps preserve their national culture at different levels of assimilation. In the Russian Empire is perfectly turned out in higher social strata. Many Georgians, Tatars, ex-Muslims into the elite was not in any other country. All our Bagrations, Kutaisov, Kutuzov, Yusupov, the Tatar names of half the nobility. The British, by the way, too a little taking people from the colonies in the higher layers, but not in England. And we have even the Emir of Bukhara was the highest of the Russian nobility. Then the policy of Russification is too strong it’s all a bit messed up. But Russia is still get the best. I know that as a person with Polish, Russian and Armenian blood.
Dad you have a family was representative of the culture of the metropolis?
Michael Piotrovsky: Yeah, great grandfathers was an Imperial people, officers, Catholics from Poland who converted to Orthodoxy. Mother – of Armenian intellectuals. For me father and mother were people of a common culture, but it is still demanded from them a certain this development. In Russia this much. In Russia, even the Jews assimiliate more, although they are difficult assimilyatsiya.
And bear incredible cultural ferment.
Michael Piotrovsky: But it is just the result of the ability to combine assimilation with independence.
