World City Guide

Culture

The city’s cultural history spans all the arts and, having been the capital for so long, much of the nation’s cultural 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 19th 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 20th 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 can 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/US$20 and Rb830/US$27.

Moscow Out (website: www.moscowout.ru) is an excellent source of listings and information (in several languages, including English) on cultural events in the capital.

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. Arbat-Opera, Arbat ulitsa 35 (tel: (095) 248 0987), is one of the newest music theatres in Moscow and, although it is small, is ideal for chamber operas of Pergolezzi, Rimsky Korsakov, Pulenc and the like.

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: http://art.theatre.ru), 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 19th century. Some of Russia’s most famous playwrights, including Nikolai Gogol, staged their first plays here. There are performances daily at 1900, although most of these are in Russian. The Taganka Drama and Comedy Theatre, Zemlyanoy val (tel: (095) 915 1015), has an excellent reputation, earned through its staging of modern classics such as Doctor Zhivago and Master and Margarita.

Dance: One of the world’s most renowned ballet and opera companies, the Bolshoi, is based in Moscow, from September to June (performances are daily at 1900 and weekend matinees). The company, formed in 1773, 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. If, for some reason, tickets for the Bolshoi are unavailable, visitors should try the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre (known as the Stasic) on Bol Dmitrovka ulitsa 17 (tel: (095) 229 2835) – Moscow’s ‘second Bolshoi’. Founded in 1940, the auditorium is small but the stagings are of a high quality – the Swan Lake is reputed to rival that of the Bolshoi.

Film: The Moscow Film Festival takes place in July (website: www.film www.festivals.com/moscow). English-language films can be seen at the American House of Cinema, located in the Radisson Slavjanskya Hotel (tel: (095) 941 8890), the Dome Theatre, located in the Moscow Renaissance Penta Hotel (tel: (095) 931 9000), and the International Cinema Centre, on Krasnaya Presnaya, Druzhinnikovskaya ulitsa 15 (tel: (095) 205 7306). The International Cinema Centre also screens arthouse movies and houses the Cinema Museum (tel: (095) 255 9057), which screens documentaries, retrospectives and silent movies. Listings for movies 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 (1945 and 1958 respectively). 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, as well as multiple performances at the weekend. The New Circus is located at Vernadskovo prospekt 7 (tel: (095) 930 2815), and the Old Circus at Tsvetnoi bulvar 13 (tel: (095) 200 0668). The Muscovites make good use of the white nights, which happen during summer, with the annual White Nights Festival – a celebration of music, theatre, street events and fireworks. Winter is no less fun, with the Russian Winter Festival from over Christmas and New Year. Moscow comes alive with troika rides and traditional folk customs. More sombre annual events include the poetry readings at the Pushkin Monument, celebrating his birthday on 6 June.

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 (Leo Tolstoy ulitsa) and Maxim Gorky (Malaya Nikitskaya ulitsa) spent part of their lives, are all open to the public. Philosopher, moral thinker, nobleman, writer of realism and intellectual giant, Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born on his family estate, south of Moscow. In many of his works, Tolstoy illustrates life in the capital, particularly in War and Peace (1865-69), considered one of the greatest novels ever written, in which he describes the burning of Moscow during the Napoleonic wars.

Chekhov’s play, The Seagull (1896), 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 (see Key Attractions). 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 (1957). Mikhail Bulgakov set parts of his novel, The Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s, first published posthumously in 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. More recently, Victor Pelevin, who penned The Clay Machine Gun (1996), has been compared to Martin Amis.

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