Costume design

On the evening of May 30 1918, opera lovers in Petrograd gathered at the Mariinsky Theatre to attend the Russian premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Nightingale” (Le Rossignol/Solovei').[1] The audience dodged gunfire in the streets to make their way into this jewel box of Russia’s former Imperial Theatres, and what they witnessed on its stage that night was a painful reminder of their own collapsing social world: a satiric fairytale about a dying emperor, surrounded by fawning, buffoonish courtiers and an agitated populace. That Stravinsky’s emperor is saved, at the eleventh hour, by the healing power of art - metaphorized as the song of a nightingale - must have served only to underscore the destabilizing dread of their own recently deposed emperor’s uncertain future: imprisoned at the time of the opera’s Russian premiere, the Imperial family would be executed just six weeks later. It wasn’t merely an unfortunate play of resemblances that jarred. The highly experimental production, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and designed by Alexander Golovin, featuring an enormous cast which included the 14-year-old dancer Georgi Balanchivadze (George Balanchine), seemed to play deliberately on tensions between a fading past and an uncertain future, and between fiction and reality.

Much has been written about the famous architect Alexei Shchusev, whose career flourished both before the Russian Revolution and during the Soviet era. We have Shchusev's own memoirs as well as the remembrances of his family and friends, while the architect's versatile achievements have been well documented by scholars. However, his connections with the theatre and his work as a stage designer - such as on the 1926 Moscow Art Theatre production of "The Sisters Gerard" - are much less known.

The exhibition “Alexander Pushkin and Spain” has been timed to mark the Year of Russian Language and Literature in Spain and the Year of Spanish Language and Literature in Russia, held in the two countries in 2015-2016. Divided into two major sections, it explores respectively the plots and images in Pushkin’s art inspired by Spain, and the periods, and accompanying attitudes, in which Pushkin’s creative works were received by Spanish readers.

America in the eyes of the artists, actors and musicians of the Silver Age of Russian culture was an enigmatic and fabulously rich country - a country to go to on a tour or to earn money. Only a handful of such artists gradually came to view the New World as not just a source of income but also as a special cultural hub with distinct traditions and roots. One such was Leon Bakst, the Russian artist of international renown who spent the second half of his life in France.