September of TSU’s 145th anniversary year will be remembered by Tomsk residents and guests for numerous bright events.  And yet, the festival of art and reading "TOM" had a special place among them. It was organized by the Siberian branch of the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and Tomsk State University with the support of the FESCO Transportation Group. The lecture dedicated to the values and meanings in the development of regional culture was one of the opening events. TSU Rector Eduard Galazhinskiy and Director of the Pushkin Museum Elizaveta Likhacheva took part. This edition of the blog is dedicated to the main ideas presented during that discussion, as well as the topics that arose after the festival.

– Professor Galazhinskiy, many participants of the anniversary events held at TSU note the extraordinary scale and content of the TOM festival. Why did this particular event become the core of the ten-day celebration in September?

– Dealing with text and meaning is extremely important for us. This is the basis of all university life, the key to knowledge as such. Without it, human development and the formation of our values are impossible. That is why TSU, along with Pushkin Museum, has initiated and is holding this festival for the second year. We were very glad to welcome Elizaveta Likhacheva and the heads of all branches of this museum here. We are also grateful to more than 20 publishers who came to Tomsk. Over 60 events were planned and carried out; two tonnes of books were brought in, including exclusive editions that are very difficult to find anywhere. The festival is conceptually open to the city. Last year, about 5,000 people took part. This time we had almost twice as many. It is important for us to involve local communities and the city in our cultural and educational events on the one hand, and students who would plunge into this depth of meaning and learn to work with large texts, on the other. The latter need to learn to think and create texts independently.

There is no more powerful tool a person can use than ability to think and speak. This is what we teach at the university, and this is why dealing with texts and books is strategically important for us. We will now promote this mission along with the Pushkin Museum. To do this, we will offer new interesting formats for such promotion. By complementing each other, we will be able to create spaces that would attract youth for deep intellectual and moral work. The basis of our cooperation with the Pushkin Museum is our equally serious attitude towards reading and books, which Elizaveta Likhacheva spoke about during the opening of our festival.

Elizaveta Likhacheva:

– Friends, as an art critic, I deal with fine art. But a book helps you to become acquainted with any system, including a visual system. First you receive information, then you start reading. Why is it so important for us to support the book festival? The modern world is paradoxical. For a long time, we were all convinced that in 30 years there would be no theaters, no cinema, only television. Ten to fifteen years ago, you would hear fr om serious people that the world would soon abandon paper books entirely, and that all text information would be converted into electronic form and placed in information systems. It would be easier to index; it would be much more accessible. But suddenly it became clear that books remain not only relevant for people, but that their circulation was growing! And it is the most incredible and diverse literature. Books about art have almost always been published on paper and almost never in electronic form, because any electronic device distorts colors. Accordingly, all art critics prefer books on paper. Everything turned out to be quite simple. And it is very important that the method of obtaining information fr om a paper book, as Gutenberg invented it 500 years ago, has not yet changed. [...] I know people under 20 who cannot read.

They are literate, but they cannot extract information fr om books. But most of the information accumulated by humanity is still in books, including books about science and art. Today's interdisciplinary event, when a museum institution considers it necessary, one way or another, to invest in a book festival, is something that we will support and develop. I hope that the Tomsk book festival will become one of the most important in the country and, at least, in all of Siberia. And even more people will come and buy up books, of which there will be even more.

(Fr om the transcript of the speech)

– In your opinion, why is Tomsk State University of such interest to current and potential partners in organizing such major cultural and educational events as the festival of art and reading TOM?

– First of all, because of its rich 145-year cultural and educational history, mission and principles of its existence, or better yet, being. This is exactly what I told the guests of the festival on its opening day. As we, representatives of the Tomsk university community, know, Tomsk State University is a special institution, at the very least because it was originally created according to the classical Humboldtian model. It received the status of Russian Imperial University and for many years was the only higher educational institution in the vast territory from the Urals to the Far East and from the Northern Ocean to Tashkent. It was truly a mega-project to draw new human and natural resources into the ecosystem and culture of the Russian Empire. That is why it was built on such a large scale, fulfilling, in addition to the educational and scientific mission, also the most important cultural mission. In particular, our university has always been responsible for the creation and development of local cultural communities. For example, the first rector of the Imperial Tomsk University, physicist and violinist Nikolai Gezehus, organized a music class at the university and also sang with students in the university choir. Together with his wife, he founded the city society of music fans. Today, our Endowment Fund finances the training of musicians with higher education in order to maintain this area, since the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation does not give us target figures for recruitment to budget places.

We opened a gallery of patrons who contributed personal funds to the opening and development of the university. A culture of giving has always been important to us. It seems to me that we are interesting to others precisely because “TSU is a WHOLE world,” including culture and art, not just the world of science and education.

– What is the most important issue for Tomsk State University today?

– Today the environment is very competitive. We see how dynamically other universities are developing and compare ourselves with the world's leading universities. In dealing with our roots, we found out that we have three important basic foundations: classicism, fundamentality and openness. Classicism is the priority of everything connected with Man. This is the formation of our values, life world, and communications. This is what has always been and will be at our university. Fundamentality is about the depth and breadth of knowledge and thinking. A classical university is not so much about a profession, but about the foundations that encourage people to study all their life based on values, and thanks to which they want to learn and develop themselves. Openness is an ecosystem, an impact on communities. On these three foundations we structure our work in the sociocultural space. Under each block of our priorities, a system of activities and events that support them has been developed. Concerts, exhibitions, and art festivals are needed to shape personality. Today we have more than 50 artistic groups.

Now in the public discourse there is a discussion about how to build the patriotic education of young people, how to work with civic position and values. We are in favor of approaching it through artistic images and working with emotions, and not through direct instructions. On September 1, a concert for first-year students took place, in which the students themselves participated. The script was built on the TSU’s 145-year history and its connection with the history of the country. One of the culminating moments of this concert was the girl reading a letter to her father at the front. Everyone literally had a lump in their throat. At the same time there were guys from Lugansk who came to us as part of the “University Exchange” project. They were crying bitterly, and our students were nearby. In my opinion, when we “catch people” with important and necessary emotional things through artistic images, this is the formation of their values and a complex multidimensional life world in a university environment. What could be more important for a classical university today?

– You said above that systems of activities have been developed under each block of priorities. Could you give specific examples of such events?

- Yes, of course. For example,  now, along with our partners, we are creating a satellite branch of the Pushkin Museum in the TSU Research Library. Publishers can donate their books to this branch to make them available to students and citizens of Tomsk. We have lifetime editions of great books. The TSU Research Library is not just a repository of books, but a kind of mega-laboratory and scientific center, conducting scientific research. Any student can access original and rare publications and historical materials. The Citizen Science project is underway at TSU. It includes competitions in which participants identify and digitize Siberian newspapers of the 19th century.

We pay special attention to the university museums. We invite special partners to develop the concept of TSU museums, their place in the university structure, locations, and so on. We analyzed the campus area from the point of view of maximum preservation of historical places. The Museum of Archeology is the largest museum at TSU and one of the largest university museums in the country. It houses about 300,000 artifacts. Our task is to ensure that the unique collections that the first professors, trustees and patrons began to collect are organically integrated into the university space and receive further development. We made some of the exhibitions open so that students are constantly surrounded by art spaces, enriching their own cultural experience and developing their own creativity. And we even consider our Botanical Garden as a kind of museum. This year, the Botanical Garden and the Endowment Fund have made a wonderful gift to the university: a rose garden in the Versailles style, with more than 200 rose bushes of 50 varieties of roses.

Many of our events go beyond Tomsk venues. In particular, some time ago, in the Italian courtyard of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, we, along with our partners, held two discussions between scientists and artists.

Why are we doing this? When discussing, for example, climate change, scientists take objectivist positions. We are slowly advancing knowledge through research and experiments: we take water samples from swamps and rivers, samples of peat, soil, etc. And artists, through artistic images and creative intuition, grasp those issues and prospects that are often not yet visible to scientists. Writers and artists anticipate the future that scientists are trying to find in their research. And when these two optics are combined in one subject field, a deeper picture is seen that clarifies reality and the future for both scientists and artists. We support art residencies and laboratories that involve interaction between scientists and artists. And it is not about playing around with contemporary art, but trying to understand what is happening by working with images and “vague” knowledge. And through scientific perception this paves some additional paths and new opportunities.

We help various communities develop. The TSU Research Library has done a lot of work analyzing its communities. There were more than fifty of them. Surely, we cannot support all the communities that are important to us at once. Therefore, we have built a certain hierarchy of working with them. And we are rebuilding our spaces to suit this. In this vein, the TOM Festival is also part of the ideology and systematic work carried out by the university. This is not a random event, but an organic element of our ecosystem in the logic of its value and openness, the formation of connections between existing and new communities. Thus, we purposefully form not only scientific and technological ecosystems, but also sociocultural and civil ones. This is wh ere new projects are born.

– Among the many tasks for the development of the sociocultural environment that TSU sets itself, which one is the most pressing at the moment?

– This task is to understand how, along with the Pushkin Museum, we can, in the logic of complementarity and mutual reinforcement, build truly systematic work to develop this sociocultural environment. And, judging by Elizaveta Stanislavna’s speech at the opening of the TOM Festival, we understand this task in the same way, which means it will be successfully completed.

– Elizaveta Likhacheva:

– I listened to Eduard Galazhinskiy and suddenly realized that the Pushkin Museum is a museum at Moscow University. The museum was created by Ivan Tsvetaev. He was a professor at Moscow University who was the first to realize that Moscow lacked a place wh ere art history could be studied. The peculiarity of art history education is that you need to look at monuments. But at the beginning of the 20th century it was not possible for everyone. There were simply no planes, and to get to Rome you had to travel a very long way. And even much later, when the planes were already there, Viktor Lazarev, a teacher at the Department of Arts at Moscow University, told students that the first time you go to Italy you must take a train, because in Vienna, wh ere the train arrives at 6 o’clock in the morning, and leaves only at 8 o'clock in the evening, they will have the whole day to go to the Museum of Art and see Bruegel. This story of traveling to Europe to interact with monuments gave rise to a rather curious phenomenon of European life. It consisted in the fact that in different European cities, having their own ancient and other art collections, first gypsotheque museums and then pinacotheque museums began to appear, intended primarily for the education of students. According to this principle, for example, the Gypsotheque and Pinakotheque of Munich were created, which later turned into full-fledged collections of sculpture. And one of the outstanding ancient monuments is kept there — the portico of the temple of Athena Pronaia, which is included in all textbooks on art history. So Tsvetaev created something similar in Moscow. It was a university museum with all the ensuing consequences. The educational function inherited in the DNA of the museum has always existed under all directors with the exception of the period when the museum building housed a museum of gifts to Stalin.

Tsvetaev ordered casts of sculptures fr om Italian workshops. I was able to visit some of them wh ere casts are still made. If we talk about museum patrons and fundraising, then Tsvetaev had no equal. But there were, of course, other prominent people. As a result, the Museum of Fine Arts of Moscow University was built entirely with raised funds. Moscow merchant houses chipped in. The museum eventually turned into a kind of reproach to the authorities, despite the fact that the Emperor himself came to its opening in Moscow on May 31, 1912. Quite quickly, the Tsvetaev’s Museum became a museum of originals. The collection of Vladimir Golenishchev, one of the most famous Egyptologists of the first half of the 20th century and the most outstanding Russian Egyptologist, was transferred here. In the courtyard of the museum in Cairo there are busts of archaeologists who, more than others, served to educate and tell stories about the history of Ancient Egypt. And the only Russian archaeologist represented there is Golenishchev. Golenishchev's collection may not be the largest, but it is one of the best in the world. It is incredibly well chosen, of a very high level without any “litter”. The Egyptian Hall of the Museum was specially built for the collection. It was planned as early as the construction stage of the museum. That was how the collection immediately changed the direction of the museum’s development.

The educational plaster library, wh ere students had to go to get an idea of the scale of, for example, Michelangelo’s sculptures, was turned into a museum in which not only copies, but also originals were exhibited. And when Rumyantsev’s Museum was disbanded and turned into the Lenin Library, the first collections of paintings also ended up there. And 10 years after its opening, Tsvetaev’s Museum became a Museum of Fine Arts in the full sense, possessing a large collection of originals. At the same time, the collection of casts was still the most important part of the museum. The museum survived the war in an absolutely amazing way. Michelangelo's David, for example, was never evacuated.

The Museum of Gifts to Stalin was opened in 1949 and worked, as you might guess, until 1953. At this time, all collections were removed from the museum building to the foundations' buildings/archives. And this was the only period when the museum lost its educational function. But in 1953 it again turned into the Museum of Fine Arts, which in 1937 received the name of Pushkin. This was another very strange story, why did Tsvetaev’s Museum of Fine Arts of Alexander III suddenly become the “A. S. Pushkin Museum” [...] Perhaps it can be explained by the following. In 1937 the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death was celebrated, and it gave rise to a real Pushkin-mania in the country. Pushkin was published in gigantic editions, and everything in the USSR began to be named after Pushkin. Thus, the name of the great Russian poet unexpectedly entered the DNA of the Museum of Fine Arts.

The Pushkin Museum's connection with the university is a family connection. Moscow State University is the main supplier of personnel for the museum, and we do not plan to change it. The Department of Arts of Moscow State University is our main department. At the same time, we are, of course, open to everyone, and we work with a large number of people from different specialties. A couple of years ago, we opened branches in the regions. And it would be strange to demand from residents of Tomsk or Nizhny Novgorod that they need to be graduates of Moscow State University. But if we are talking about scientific work, then it is always a university tradition, which is extremely important for me personally, because I graduated from university at a relatively adult age. I was 30 years old when I entered there. And I did it consciously. And for our museum, cooperation with any educational institution is also extremely important. And we are trying to develop this tradition.

(From the transcript of the speech)

 To be continued