Exhibition "Russian Switzerland" in the Geneva Museum "Swiss Abroad"

On December 16, 2014, the Swiss Switzerland International Museum (Musée des Suisses dans le Monde) will open the exhibition Russian Switzerland, initiated by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO. This project is dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries and is the final chord of the Russian Culture Season in Switzerland. For the first time on such an extensive artistic and documentary material it is shown how diverse and fruitful were the relations between powers that were so different in geography, state structure, and cultural foundations.

15 state museum and archival collections of Russia took part in the preparation of the exposition, which provided more than 300 works of painting, graphic arts, objects of decorative and applied art, vintage photographs, samples of rare historical printing and manuscripts from the late XVIII - early XX centuries, telling about the fate of our compatriots, living in Switzerland or traveling in this country.

Exhibitors:

State Hermitage Museum,
State Russian Museum,
All-Russian Museum Association "State Tretyakov Gallery",
State Historical Museum,
State Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin,
State Museum of Socio-Political History of Russia,
All-Russian Museum Association of Musical Culture named after M.I. Glinka
State Literary Museum
State Memorial Museum-Reserve P.I. Tchaikovsky,
Omsk State Museum of History and Local Lore,
Omsk Regional Museum of Fine Arts. M.A. Vrubel,
Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts, State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan,
State Archive of the Russian Federation,
St. Petersburg State University ",
The house-museum of V.V. Nabokov Faculty of Philology and Arts.

The exhibition, limited by the chronological framework of the anniversary, of course, could not, and did not set itself the task of reflecting the entire historical diversity of Russian-Swiss relations, which actually date back to the 15th century. However, even within two centuries (from the end of the 18th century to the 20th century), cultural and historical evidence is abundant. So, as a prologue, the exhibition addresses the background of Russian-Swiss relations: a trip to the mountain cantons of the future Russian emperor Paul I and his wife, a visit at the end of the "Napoleonic Wars " of Emperor Alexander I and the first attempts by Russian artists to display the characteristic Swiss mountain scenery.

The cognitive voyage of the historian and writer Nikolai Karamzin in the alpine republic resulted in the final “Letters of a Russian Traveler”. This remarkable literary opus (he is also the first guidebook) formed in Russian souls the idea of Switzerland as a country of freedom and beauty. For many of our compatriots, she became the embodiment of the dream of a “natural man” living in the lap of nature - a grandiose, but at the same time amazing peace. Here the famous works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky were thought and written. The peaks and valleys were also admired by artists - Sylvester Shchedrin, Ivan Shishkin, Fedor Matveev. One of the main sections of the exhibition is devoted to the image of Switzerland that developed at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries as an embodiment of paradise on earth.

Switzerland for Russians is also a higher education school in the person of Johann Pestalozzi and Frederic Cesar Lagarpe, a republican, but nevertheless the mentor of the Grand Dukes Alexander Pavlovich (future Tsar Alexander I) and Konstantin Pavlovich. It is also a refuge for opponents of the Russian monarchy - for Nikolai Turgenev and many of those who later followed the path of liberation from Russian autocracy. The social and political cataclysms that shook Europe in the last two centuries passed Switzerland, which could be likened to the “eye of a typhoon,” a small island of peace at the very epicenter of a tornado. There were a lot of people willing to get into this oasis: from the famous emigre dissidents and publishers of political literature Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev to the leaders of international anarchism - Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, from students and students of Zurich and Basel to the founders of the Bolshevik movement - Vladimir Lenin and his associates. Which, incidentally, in the spring of 1917 left Switzerland to get into revolutionary Russia. Switzerland as the crucible of reformist and revolutionary thought during the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries is another important topic of the exhibition.

A distant country, reliably protected from European storms by hills and mountain ranges, turned out to be the place where the most diverse Russian hopes, creative ideas and aspirations could come true. Here, composers Sergey Rakhmaninov and Igor Stravinsky, artists Vasily Kandinsky, Marianna Verevkina and Alexei Yavlensky sought peace and inspiration. Before, that is, before the revolution of 1917, poets and writers were here - Maximilian Voloshin, Andrei Bely, artists Alexander Benois, Zinaida Serebryakova and many others. So it would not be a special exaggeration to say, to paraphrase Thomas Mann, that for the Russians Switzerland has become a kind of magical mountain, where everything seemed in a different light and where everything was possible.

Vernissage December 16, 2014 at 17.00

Press conference December 16, 2014 at 12.00

The exhibition runs from December 16, 2014 to March 22, 2015 from 10.00 to 17.00 daily, except Monday.

Address: Switzerland, CH-1292, 18 Pregny-Gèneve, Chemin de l ’Impératrice, Musée des Suisses dans le Monde Château de Penthes

www.penthes.ch