The exhibition “He Conquered Both Time and Space...” organized by the Russian Museum in the halls of the Stroganov Palace is timed to the 225th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s birth. This is the first ever large-scale exhibition held in the Russian Museum to address the genius of Russian and world culture, whose anniversary will be an international event.

The exhibition presents an unprecedented number of exhibits – more than three hundred works of painting, sculpture, graphic, decorative, applied and folk arts exclusively from the collection of the Russian Museum. The museum rich depositories enable to characterize the oeuvre of the great writer most fully and diversely and to reconstruct the cultural and historical background, which witnessed the formation and heyday of Pushkin’s unique talent. The show is dedicated to the poet’s characters, contemporaries and descendants. The artistic material presented at the exhibition dates back to the 18th–20th centuries.

First of all, there are paintings – views of Pushkin’s St Petersburg, portraits of the poet’s contemporaries, images of his works’ characters. As a rule, a significant part of the exhibited works is stored in the depositories and shown rarely, including works by Vladimir Borovikovsky, Orest Kiprensky, Aleksander Orlowski, Andrei Martynov, Grigory Gagarin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Viktor Popkov, Evsei Moiseyenko and others. Of great value are portraits of Pushkin’s contemporaries: Alexei Olenin, Ivan Krylov, Gavrila Derzhavin and Vasily Zhukovsky. Among the graphic masterpieces on display at the exhibition are works by Karl and Alexander Brullov, Pyotr Sokolov, Joseph-Marie Charlemagne, Carl Hampeln, Vladimir Gau, Carl Beggrow and Alexandre Benois. The image of Pushkin always interested the most famous sculptors – both contemporaries and descendants; they often made sketches of monuments to be built. The poet’s iconography in sculpture is extensive and diverse. The exhibition presents Pushkin’s life-time sculptural portraits (by Ivan Vitali) and those of his friends: Karl Brullov, Alexei Olenin, Ivan Krylov and Nikolai Gogol. The great sculptors of the late 19th – early 20th centuries Paolo Troubetzkoy, Leonid Sherwood and Matvei Chizhov developed Pushkin’s iconography. The interest in his personality never ceased: excellent samples of Pushkin’s sculptural portrait were created by Sarra Lebedeva and Boris Korolyov for a competition for a monument to Pushkin in 1937. A well-known monument to the poet made by Mikhail Anikushin represents the inspired Pushkin (the poet greets guests at the entrance to the Russian Museum). Two models of the monument will be featured at the exhibition. A special part of the exhibition will acquaint visitors with painted, drawn and engraved illustrations to Pushkin’s works The Queen of Spades, The Bronze Horseman and Eugene Onegin.

A comprehensive and varied collection of the Russian Museum enables to interpret the Pushkin theme most fully and diversely. The exhibition presents a rich collection of decorative and applied arts: Kolokoltsov shawls, porcelain vases produced at the Imperial Porcelain Factory and small pieces from private factories, gilded bronze, furniture and beadwork. Folk art reflects the theme of Pushkin’s works in woodcarving, Dymkovo toys and Palekh lacquer painting.

The exhibition is held in The Stroganov Palace until January 25, 2025.

Age restriction: 0+

The exhibition is organized with support from Gazprom.