"Georgian Palestine" by Svyatoslav Richter Automatic translate

On the occasion of the birthday of the great pianist, an exhibition dedicated to the years he spent in Georgia will open in the Svyatoslav Richter Memorial Apartment. Paintings and graphics, photographs, as well as unique documents tell about the tragic and at the same time happy, hungry and generous time, lived by Richter among unusually talented people who became the young pianist’s closest friends and witnesses to his first triumphs.

The exhibition will tell about the debut of Svyatoslav Richter in Tbilisi in the fall of 1943, about participation in the student alpiniad in the summer of 1944 in the mountains of the liberated Caucasus, about acquaintance and friendship with artists, bright figures of the Silver Age and the Georgian avant-garde (Elena Akhvlediani, Ketevan Magalashvili, Lado Gudiashvili as well as Vasily Shukhaev), spouses Boris and Valentina Kuftin, actress Nato Vachnadze, opera singer Nadezhda Kharadze and other representatives of the Georgian intelligentsia. The picture of touching friendship will be complemented by amateur photographs: they show portraits of friends, rest at a tourist center in Tsikhisjvari in the early 1950s, vernissages of exhibitions of works by Elena Akhvlediani on Bolshaya Bronnaya in Moscow (1973) and pastels by Svyatoslav Richter on Kiacheli Street in Tbilisi (1975). Recalling the "Georgian Palestinians", Richter wrote: “At the end of the forties, I had a wonderful life in Tbilisi. We were all very friendly: the Shukhaevs - Vasily Ivanovich and Vera Fyodorovna, the artists Elena Akhvlediani and Kato Magalashvili, Kuftin, Neigauz, Nina Dorliak and me. " Starting from the 1960s, the pianist came to Tbilisi less and less often, as he toured abroad for a long time, but he was impatiently awaited and jealous of Moscow and "abroad", as evidenced by numerous letters and postcards.

In addition to the paintings and graphic works of Elena Akhvlediani, Ketevan Magalashvili, Vasily Shukhaev and Lado Gudiashvili, the exhibition will also show Rezo Gabriadze’s sketches and puppets for the performances of the puppet theater. Rare archival documents deserve special attention: photographs, epistolary, comic man-made albums, unique editions with donations, memorial items that convey the feeling of deep, sincere and tender affection carried by Richter and his Georgian friends through 40 years of their long and thorny journey. Having become a world famous pianist and having seen the exhibition of Elena Akhvlediani in Paris, Richter wrote to his mutual friend, the famous theater critic Natela Urushadze: “I am infinitely happy that I saw this new heyday in Akhvlediani’s paintings. After all, I went through her "ups" and "downs" together with her. And in this sense, the periods in her art reflect the periods of my own life. " These words can be applied to all Tbilisi friends, with whom during the war years Richter shared loneliness and uncertainty, and later - illness, disappointment and deafening glory.

The exhibition will feature exhibits from the funds of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin, first of all, from the collection and archive of Svyatoslav Richter, as well as from the private collections of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Gelovani and Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Viktor Platonov.