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Moscow and the shadow of a blind man's cane By Ariel Hirschfeld Tags: Ilya Repin, Israel News  It's difficult to talk about Moscow. The standard pleasantries that begin with "Paris is..." or "San Francisco is..." don't work here. The place is so vast that even the word "city" does not exactly suit it. I was there recently, and I can't even begin to understand what I saw. I came to it filled with Russian literature, Russian music and, above all, a cornucopia of images that were spilled onto it in the past generation. Here and there a few famous sights cropped up, of course, and here and there a few snippets from stories or poems echoed. I went to see a few monasteries and well-known sites, but it was impossible to grasp them. Snippets of the city's "images" - Red Square, the Kremlin and so forth - snippets of the conventional concepts about streets, squares and buildings, are swept along in it like empty shells on a prodigious, gray, wave that covers everything as far as the horizon. What one finds in Russian literature, including the modern variety, does not touch its nature. This city is a tectonic movement of gray matter whose force is not measured in the relationships and concepts that emanate from human life. On the scale of side street, apartment building, supermarket or newspaper kiosk it is a city like any other. But when you penetrate its broader arteries, the streets linking quarters or leading to and from the centers and try to move, by vehicle or on foot, within its vast urban body, you are instantly deprived of every familiar human dimension. I was no more than a transient guest. But I have been a transient guest in other cities, too. In Moscow I was rejected, as if there was a total disconnect between city and human being. It is only for lack of another word that I call it a city. The vastness of the streets and the insignificance of those who walk them transcend the boundary beyond which there is no contact between them. The city just doesn't see you. From within the encasement of my minute perspective I looked at it, taut and curious, like one who has come to the site of an active volcano. The quintessential thing is its residential buildings, the place of its inhabitants. The Israeli notion of the "shikun" - tenement-like housing projects - does not begin to describe this thing. "Desert" is also not a fitting image. Neither is wasteland, or sea. Maybe the innards of a computer, if you imagine it on a scale of 100 x 100 kilometers, will begin to approach this manifestation. And I saw some of the people who live in this thing. They know how live in it. They know how to outwit even it. Advertisement But within the city, within well-preserved capsules of theaters, libraries and houses, Russian culture thrives, untouched by this sprawling grayness. It lives its gargantuan life, fraught with selfhood and with looks filled with respect and curiosity at the past. There was not one conversation I attended in which Pushkin was not mentioned. Amid that culture, what was completely new for me was Russian painting, some of whose masterpieces are on display in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Although I was familiar, from books, with the major painters in the Russian tradition, it is impossible to understand much from the printed documentation, still less to experience the uniqueness of Russian painting. The art of painting does not truly lend itself to photographic reproduction, particularly in the many cases in which the language of the medium - the brushstrokes in the paint, and the paint touching the light - coalesces into forms and objects, and a life story throbs within them. To see a painting is to see at reality. Music and books transcend places and languages; paintings must be visited, just like places. The encounter with Russian painting showed that it contained no less selfhood than the Russian novel or Russian music, and even if only a few of the paintings were of the stature of the giants of literature and music, those few are so riveting and so powerful that they alter the picture of European art in its movement from the 19th to the 20th century, a movement usually depicted as radiating from the Parisian-Viennese center. I will touch on only one painting, which has acquired iconic status in the memory of Russian art, a painting that no one who has been to the Tretyakov Gallery can forget: "Religious Procession in the Province of Kursk" (painted 1880-1883). In books it looks like a somewhat banal canvas of a mass of people, part of a "generic" world of ways of life and customs deriving from national love, in the European Romantic style. Only a magnifying glass can reveal its chief greatness, which is in the details. In the gallery it is large but not huge (1.75 x 2.80 meters), and made for close-up, one-on-one viewing. Above all, it is terrible and heartbreaking. Like the number of times I came to it during this visit to Moscow, I will reiterate: heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking. On a dusty dirt road, beneath an unsheltering sky, next to a hill studded with stumps of recently chopped-down trees, a procession slowly passes. In a decorated portable tabernacle, borne on peasants' shoulders, is a sacred image surrounded by burning candles. Pious women carry a reliquary holding the remains of a saint. Another woman, grandiose physically and metaphorically, holds a sacred tome. A palanquin and pennants emerge from the dust-clouded distance: peasants and property owners, priests, soldiers, cripples and beggars. In the midst of this mass are a few horsemen. Some are part of the procession, others are there to keep order. One raises his whip to lash at the people around him. Most of the foreground of the painting is bare ground, in the middle of which is the shadow cast by a blind man's cane that shows him and his lame companion the way. The shadow's straight diagonal is the direction of the procession and the line that holds the entire painting. But the fact that this line is the line of vision of a blind man, added to the fact that the line is a shadow, imbues the entire work with another voice, grave and mysterious, of knowing and unknowing and the forces that carry human beings and a people on the way." It was impossible not to think that this shadow line leads also to present-day Moscow.... There is no way to reach this plane of description and insight through photography or literature. This is the language of painting at its best and most complex. The paint application technique is very close to that of the Impressionists. Repin was acquainted with the Impressionists first-hand from his time in Paris and was deeply influenced by them, but he was not an Impressionist. This is symbolic realism overlaid with the technique of Impressionism, which endows it with a very powerful sensual immediacy. The brutal light, the heat, the dust, the absolute, pure quotidianness of the gaze are what place the "people" in the painting within the world. It is not by chance that Leo Tolstoy, upon hearing about this painting, visited Repin's studio (thus initiating the friendship that produced Repin's portrait of Tolstoy). Repin has created a painting comparable to a Tolstoyan novel. Rembrandtesque depth in painting people, their characters and facial expressions, joined to a bold, almost wicked interest in the material details, the objects, and a sharp nose for the urge to power and for relations between people, as individuals and as groups; and above it all a gaping heart that sees with terrible cruelty both folly and searing misery, and also something else for which there is no word but only a representation, and only the art of painting can enfold it. Anyone who stands before this painting will know with certainty that every brushstroke in it safeguards a terrible compassion. And there is not a painting like this anywhere in the world. Bookmark to del.icio.us   A man of peace Vatican defends wartime pope Pius XII against charge he turned blind eye to Holocaust. Feminine features An Iranian motor company unveils plans to design cars specifically tailored to women.

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