History : Exhibitions in Moscow

For the seventy-fifth year since the first Novgorod letter, found on 26 July 1951 in the Nerevsky dig. More than 1250 have been found since; among them the school exercises of the boy Onfim, with drawings that have no equal in medieval Europe. What the Vindolanda tablets are to Roman Britain, these are to medieval Rus — the writing of ordinary people, kept by wet ground. In the State Rooms, one month only.

For the three hundredth year since the death of Peter the Great: the inheritance of the first Russian emperor and his chief reforms. A short run — check the dates before setting out.

A century of the country’s largest photographic service, which shot the news on the day it happened. Shown in two spaces of the Historical Museum: the Resurrection Gate and the Artillery Yard.

Praskovya Kovalyova-Zhemchugova: daughter of a serf blacksmith, singer of the Sheremetev theatre, later the wife of Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev. Portraits of different years and things from her rooms; a summer show in the palace.

Tretyakov bought icons in the nineties, a few years before his death. Of this part of his collecting least is known. Sixty-odd panels of the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, many of them shown for the first time: the Novgorod «Predsta Tsaritsa» of the fifteenth century, the Igorevskaya Virgin of Tenderness from the beginning of the sixteenth, work of the tsars’ and the Stroganov masters, got together with the help of dealers and of men who knew old things. Apart from these it is told how the icons came into the rooms of the Gallery and how they travelled Europe in 1929–1932; second floor of the Engineering Building.

Fyodor Pryanishnikov, a Petersburg postal official, and Kozma Soldatyonkov, a Moscow merchant and Old Believer, were collecting Russian painting before the Tretyakovs began. Both collections went to the Rumyantsev Museum, and when that was broken up in the twenties they were scattered among the Tretyakov Gallery and fifty-four museums besides. They cannot be put together again. The hang follows the one made before the revolution by Nikolai Romanov, keeper of the Rumyantsev Museum, and a route through the permanent display leads to other things out of the same collections: Tropinin’s Lacemaker, Fedotov’s Breakfast of an Aristocrat, Kiprensky’s Readers of Newspapers in Naples — third floor of the Engineering Building.

Money in The Master and Margarita: ancient Judaea and Moscow of the 1920s–30s, set object against object. For Bulgakov’s 135th anniversary.

No separate ticket is asked for. Nor were rooms set aside: the route is laid through the permanent display in Lavrushinsky, and nothing was brought here for the occasion — the work has been done in the labels, where beside Savrasov's "The Rooks Have Returned" and Fedotov's "The Major's Courtship" it is now said out of whose hands the picture came into the gallery. The collections of Pryanishnikov and Soldatyonkov are shown whole next door, in the Engineering Building, where the ticket is paid for separately; here in Lavrushinsky only what entered the permanent display is left of them. Those pictures hang beside the ones Tretyakov bought himself.

The count is known as a historian, a publisher and a friend of Alexander III; here is shown the side scholars have hardly reached — Sheremetev the landowner and master of estates. Of them all, Kuskovo is the one he came to throughout his life. Painting, furniture, photographs and documents from the Ostankino and Kuskovo holdings; in the Swiss House.