World Travel Guide

City Guide  - Moscow  - Culture
Culture

The city's cultural history spans all the arts, and having been the capital for so long, much of the nation's artistic effort was concentrated here. Notable achievements include the long period of icon painting up to the time of Peter the Great. The most famous icon painter of the Russian Orthodox Church, Andrey Rublyov, had his workshop and was buried in the Spaso-Andronikovsky Monastyr (Monastery of the Saviour and Andronicus) in the eastern suburbs of the city. The nineteenth century brought painters such as Ilia Repin, whose realist works portrayed peasants and other ordinary people. The excitement of the constructivists' avant-garde work in the early twentieth century was dampened by Stalin's regime and, until recently, socialist realism has been the only publicly produced art.

The former Soviet Union took great pride in its cultural institutions, and these were often of the very highest calibre. A number of these are based in Moscow, notably the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera Company and the Moscow Circus. Advance tickets can be quite cheap, but those purchased from ticket touts on the evening of the performance are usually fairly expensive. Concert and theatre tickets may be purchased at the venues, from large hotels or at the IPS Theatre Box Office in the Metropol Hotel, Teatralny proezd 1/4 (tel: (095) 927 6000). Tickets for most performances range between Rb620-830.

Music: The Moscow Conservatory, Nikitskaya ulitsa 13 (tel: (095) 229 8183), is an important music school, as well as the venue for major concerts - premieres of works by Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shoshtakovich took place here. Pyotr Tchaikovsky taught at the Conservatory, but died before public concerts started in 1898. One of the students who he commended for his thesis project was none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff. Concerts take place in both the Great and Small Halls

The Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Triumphalaya ploshchad 4/30 (tel: (095) 299 3957), hosts a full programme of symphony and chamber concerts, as well as special festivals and performances of Russian national dance and organ and choral music.

Theatre: Moscow's pre-eminent theatre company is the MKHAT imeni Chekhova (Moscow Art Theatre named after Chekhov), Kamergersky pereulok 3 (tel: (095) 229 8760; website: www.theatre.ru/mhat/eindex.html), founded in 1898. It revolutionised drama in Europe, staging plays by Anton Chekhov and providing a venue for the method-acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky. No longer avant-garde, the theatre today continues the tradition of method-acting.

The Maly Teatr (Small Theatre), Teatralnaya ploshchad 1 (tel: (095) 923 2621), has a history of staging plays of political and social satire, notably during the nineteenth century. Some of Russia's most famous playwrights, including Nikolai Gogol, staged their first plays here. There are performances daily at 1900, although most are in Russian.

Dance: One of the world's most renowned ballet and opera companies - the Bolshoi - is based in Moscow from September to June (performances at 1900; weekend matinees). The company was formed in 1773 and began its rise to fame in 1918; Yuri Grigorovich, who directed the company for decades until 1995, raised the Bolshoi's status internationally, aided by some formidable dancers. The Bolshoi Theatre, Teatralnaya ploshchad 1 (tel: (095) 299 5325; website: www.bolshoi.ru), a grand neo-classical building that was constructed in 1824, is renowned for its size and the quality of the acoustics.

Film: The Moscow Film Festival takes place in July (website: www.filmfestivals.com/moscow/). English-language films can be seen at the Americom House of Cinema in the Radisson Slavjanskya Hotel (tel: (095) 941 8890), the Dome Theatre in the Moscow Renaissance Penta Hotel (tel: (095) 931 9000) and the Cinema Centre on Krasnaya Presnaya at Druzhinnikovskaya ulitsa 15 (tel: (095) 205 7306). Listings are in the Friday edition of The Moscow Times.

Sergei Eisenstein captured one of Moscow and Russia's harshest rulers in the films Ivan the Terrible I and II. The famous director also used the Kolisei cinema (now the Sovremennik Theatre) for his Proletcult worker's theatre.

Cultural events: The Great Moscow Circus no longer quite lives up to its reputation, but still provides good entertainment. There are performances Tuesday to Friday at 1900, and multiple performances at the weekend. The New Circus is at Vernadskovo prospekt 7 (tel: (095) 930 2815) and the Old Circus is at Tsvetnoi Bulvar 13 (tel: (095) 200 0668).

Literary Notes
Moscow has been home to many important writers and has often been the setting for their works. The houses where playwright Anton Chekhov and novelists Leo Tolstoy (ulitsa Leo Tolstoy) and Maxim Gorky (ulitsa Malaya Nikitskaya) spent part of their lives are all open to the public. Chekhov's play, The Seagull, premiered at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1898. Chekhov and the novelist/playwright Nikolai Gogol were both buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in the southwest of the city. Fyodor Dostoevsky was born and spent his early years in Moscow, returning to give a stirring speech (as did Ivan Turgenev) at the unveiling of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880 - it was the first public recognition of Russian national literature. Seen as the father of Russian national literature, the best-know works of Pushkin are Eugene Onegin (1825) and Boris Godunov (1824).

Boris Pasternak lived in the outskirts of Moscow (1939-60), among the artists and writers in Peredelinko. It was here that he wrote his sweeping romantic novel about the Russian Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (1969). Mikhail Bulgakov set parts of his novel, The Master and Margarita (1967), in the Central House of Writers restaurant, as well as at Patriarshiye Prudy (Patriarch's Ponds) where the novel begins. Mikhail Lermontov, the poet and novelist, studied at Moscow University and lived just off present-day Novy Arbat. The house of Ivan Turgenev's mother, where he stayed while in Moscow, can also be visited.

There is no shortage of works by Western novelists written during the Cold War - Moscow was a favourite setting for John Le Carré, and there is also the eponymous Gorky Park, (1981) written by Martin Cruz Smith.



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