The Journey by Sergio Pitol

Author:Sergio Pitol
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: General, Arts & Literature, Travelers & Explorers, Diaries & Journals, Letters & Correspondence, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Asia, Essays & Correspondence, Classics, Russia, Biographies & Memoirs, Authors, Literary, Literature & Fiction, Travel
ISBN: 9781941920190
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2015-07-19T23:00:00+00:00

11 Pitol mistakenly attributes the opera to Donizetti in the Spanish text.—Trans.

25 MAY

I left Prague with a bit of a cold. When I wake up, the first thing I do is take an analgesic and repeat the dose throughout the day, depending on how I feel. Last night and this morning I caught a cold and I realized that rhinitis has gotten the better of me. What spasms! My nostrils are stopped up, making it difficult to breathe, a howl-inducing migraine. I ate breakfast and walked to the Hermitage. I went up to the Picasso and Matisse rooms, to start the tour from there. These works were acquired before the revolution to dress the walls of the palace salons built by industrialists and financiers of the time; the newly fledged, extremely rich, educated and with very broad interests, unprejudiced toward the avant-garde, possibly advised by professors of aesthetics, connoisseurs of contemporary trends. And they accepted them effortlessly, indeed, happily. Dance and Music are housed here, immense in size; each of these great paintings could cover the largest wall of a salon. All of the other paintings, dozens, are also of high quality. They horrified the French, and in general the European, bourgeoisie, produced by wild beasts for the amusement of wild beasts. In the center of an exhibition hall stood a magnificent bronze by Donatello. This space was responsible for housing a sample of the new generation: Matisse, Bonnard, the pointillists. People were crossing the room quickly, their eyes half-closed to keep their gaze from pausing on such monstrosities. A critic who walked through the hall wrote an article for a major newspaper with the headline: “Donatello among the wild beasts,” and the young painters were happy and took the name: Wild Beasts (fauves). The Russian aristocracy loathed these objects viscerally, even more than the French bourgeoisie. It was the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their former serfs, the new wealthy class, who felt comfortable surrounded by the form and color of beasts in their surroundings, which explains why many of the best Picassos and Matisses are still in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were an integral part of the art nouveau villas of Russian magnates. I stayed a good while in these rooms and then meandered slowly past the others, almost without seeing the paintings due to a new migraine attack. I finally found Zurbarán’s Childhood of the Virgin, which I knew only by photograph, but which in my previous visits was always traveling, and there I was revived…At lunchtime, I told a female employee of the Writers’ Union, who accompanied me at meals and to shows, about my previous visit to the museum, framed by privileged conditions: it must have been in 1980 or 1981. A delegation from Mexico had arrived in Leningrad: Juan José Bremer, Rafael Tovar, Carmen Beatriz López Portillo, and Fernando Gamboa, and from Moscow, Ambassador Rogelio Martínez Aguilar, Elzvieta, his wife, and some officials from our diplomatic mission, including myself, to inaugurate a monumental exhibition of Orozco the following day.

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