eng.1september.ru; a corny piece posted years ago, thanks to SPL; perhaps indirectly pertinent to the abandonment, expressed by the Trump administration, of the INF treaty.

A Russian Dream in Washington:
The Hillwood Museum

You and your companion enter the two-story foyer, and your eyes are seized by imposing portraits of Russian rulers – Nicholas I, Nicholas II, and Catherine the Great in full state regalia. On a commode, you both admire two striking nineteenth-century Imperial Porcelain Factory vases, resplendent in their golden background and adorned with brightly colored pigeons, turning the most ordinary of birds into special creatures.

Entranced, you begin to wander through the richly furnished rooms, the priceless Russian objets d’art continuing to appear before you, as if descending from heaven.

You both know you cannot possibly remember all the treasures that you see, but some will never escape your collective memory: over twenty porcelain pieces of the famous Orlov Service Catherine the Great commissioned for her then-favorite, the Count Grigorii; the Boyar Wedding Feast (1883) by Konstantin Makovskii, a canvas evocative of Russia’s unique past; and an early 18th century portable iconostasis, a jewel of religious art, evidently commissioned by an Old Believer.

Then there are the famous Fabergé eggs, including the Catherine the Great Easter Egg, by workmaster Henrik Wigströman, and the twelve-paneled Monogram Easter Egg, a gift from Nicholas II and Alexandra to his mother, Maria Fedorovna. You look at an elegant, understated Fabergй leaf-shaped box of gold, bloodstone, and diamonds and you share thoughts on his statement that “I am less interested in an expensive object, if its high cost is only because many diamonds and pearls have been planted on it.”

Each of you wants to spend hours admiring every object, but an unquenchable desire to discover new ones drives you on. There is no strict order to how the treasures are arranged, and this makes you even more curious. As delight follows delight through a dozen rooms, you reach a display area with colorful icons and richly embroidered Russian liturgical vestments.

The icons reflect images that have existed in Russian religious art since medieval times, and many of them are copies. But they are striking nevertheless, enriching a room with vivid hues where a monumental, diamond-studded chalice from Catherine the Great’s reign demands most of your attention.

Where are you? Are you awake or asleep? Could you be dreaming dreams like Sokurov’s film “Russian Ark,” the director’s hallucinatory peregrinations inside the Hermitage?

Wake Up!

No, no, wake up, you are in the real world, if indeed such a term can be used to describe Washington, D.C. You are in the U.S. capital’s leafy northwest region, a residential neighborhood a 30-minute’s drive from the center of the city. Your location is the interior of the Georgian-style mansion, designed in 1926, that was the residence of the enormously rich cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the later years of her life. It is known, today, as the Hillwood Museum.

The mansion is located in a 25-acre paradise with gardens, meticulous lawns, and charming waterworks, a recreation of the American country house tradition. Mrs. Post’s American-style palace was “created by wealthy Americans between 1880 and 1930” who “commissioned large houses for escape and relaxation on relatively limited tracts of land near major urban centers.” (These words are taken from Hillwood’s elucidating website, gratefully used in writing this article).

In the late 1930s, Mrs. Post, always fascinated by Europe, spent 18 months in the Soviet Union with her then-husband, Joseph Davies, the American ambassador en poste in Moscow at that time (1937-38). Long interested in art, and armed with sharp eye, she began to collect Russian objects.

In Russia, she wrote, she was able “to see and enjoy the Russian love of color in all forms of art. …The Russian genius in the use of stimulating color is a spiritual quality related to the land itself.” Soon, “she found herself scouring Stalin’s warehouses on hands and knees,” says Frederick J. Fisher, Executive Director of the Hillwood Museum. “The revolutionary government already had sold off much of its confiscated gold, silver and artworks to raise hard currency. But [Mrs. Post] spotted treasures in the remains. ‘She made piles every day,” recalled daughter Dina Merrill Hartley. ‘The prices were so amazingly low [because] they really didn’t know what they had.’”

Among Mrs. Post’s contacts in the Soviet Union was Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Chairman of the Council of Ministers Viacheslav Molotov who, as Davies points out in his Mission to Moscow, had established “very chic perfume shops and cosmetic beauty parlors” in Stalin’s harsh proletarian state. Vases that can be seen as one goes out of the hall leading into the Russian porcelain room were gifts of Madame Zhemchuzhina to the wife of the American ambassador.

After her stay in the U.S.S.R., Mrs. Post collected Russian art for the rest of her life. On her death in 1957, Hillwood was bequeathed to the public as a museum – a “museum,” however, which still very much remains Mrs. Post’s residence, for she is there in spirit, “like a whiff of perfume with staying power,” in the words of journalist Gary Tischler.

Hillwood’s collection now contains some 18,000 items, with some 60 percent of them on display – along with paintings and porcelain, there are works in glass, textiles, and metal.

Guided by the model of its ever-collecting founder, Hillwood continues to acquire rare Russian items. In 2000, to cite one of many examples, it obtained the Avinoff-Shoumatoff book collection that includes important and hard-to-find volumes on pre-revolutionary Russian religious art, decorative arts, archeology, and art history.

It will not disappoint cosmopolitan Russophiles to learn that a large number of the items at Hillwood are not Russian. Mrs. Post obtained many 18th and 19th century objects made in other countries, including France (especially) and England. Much of the elegant furniture in her residence comes from these two nations, as well as from other places in Europe. Perhaps most famous among these is a 1770 mechanical roll-top desk made in the French tradition with more than 40 drawers and pigeonholes, pop-up candlesticks, shades and snuffers. It may have been meant for Marie Antoinette before she married the soon-to-be Louis XVI of France.

The Empress and the Heiress

The crown jewel among these European treasures, however, is Hillwood’s collection of Russian decorative art, the largest of its kind outside of Russia. Hillwood would not be Hillwood without its Fabergй eggs and portraits of the tsars (and its icons). Mrs. Post was fully aware of this, and her desire to show Russia’s importance in European culture links her to the tsarina one first encounters on canvass upon entering Hillwood – Catherine the Great.

These strong-willed women had much in common. True, they lived in different centuries and in different countries. But they both were entranced by beauty, in the sense expressed by La Fontaine in his memorable verses:

“Ф douce Voluptй, sans qui, dиs notre enfance,
Le vivre et le mourir nous deviendraient йgaux.”
(“Without sweet enrapture, from our infancy on,
Our living and dying would be one and the same.”)

A love of art, both Russian and French, is what brings Catherine the Great and Merriweather Post the closest together, but other aspects of their lives were similar. Both represented royalty – different kinds of royalty, to be sure, but royalty nevertheless.

Catherine was an eighteenth-century German princess. Mrs. Post was twentieth-century democratic America’s version of a princess, a person who in her youth had “more than double the clothes, shoes and stuff than any girl no matter how rich should have at seventeen,” her father (the man who gave us Corn Flakes) wrote about his only darling daughter before a 1904 European trip. (The second floor at Hillwood, which contains some of Mrs. Post’s personal sartorial accoutrements, reflects her very haute-couture inclinations).

Both Catherine and Mrs. Post, feminists before their time (while retaining their exquisite feminine tastes), did not let devotion to one man become the determining factor of their lives. Mrs. Post was married and divorced four times, and Catherine’s many love affairs reflect her well-known penchant for masculine diversity. Both women evidently felt men could share their interest in beauty, but Catherine and Merriweather were not ready to sacrifice the latter for the former.

The aristocratic mores of these two princesses, perhaps amoral and libertine to some, may offend our modern bourgeois sensibilities. But it is undeniable that the Empress’s and the heiress’s life-long devotion to the sublime have earned them a special place in the pantheon of esthetes who, to some extent accidentally, have made it possible for us to enrich our lives through art…

The Dream Continues

Wait! Your Hillwood Russian dreams are yet not over. As you are about to exit the Post mansion, you hear Russian voices: one of the many volunteer guides at Hillwood, originally from Russia, is speaking to a visitor from her native land in their common tongue. You then step outside, en plein air, refreshed by the greenery, flowers, and quietude around you (visits to Hillwood are by appointment only and there is a limit to the number of visitors admitted per day). You think of the verses of Baudelaire:

“…tout n’est qu’ordre et beautй,
Luxe, calme et voluptй.”

Strolling unhurried about the refreshing Hillwood grounds, you come upon a dacha – yes, a dacha: are you really in a city associated with the White House, not Russian huts? Inside that quaint one-room log structure (built in 1969), appears another miracle: a temporary exhibit of ceramics by the Hungarian-born Eva Zeisel, who directed a glass and porcelain manufacturer for the Soviet Union before World War II. Her work, though intensely modern, has a softness and gentility reminiscent of the 18th century porcelains in the main building.

You do not want to leave, but it is time to go. It is five o’clock, and Hillwood is closing. You will miss sipping afternoon tea at Hillwood’s welcoming and civilized cafй, where the polished manners of waiters match those of their long departed Russian imperial confreres.

Your minds are full of beauty, you both are in a daze. But you cannot help but wonder: Should the Russian objects at Hillwood have remained in Russia? Is that where they truly belong? You ask yourselves the question, and cannot find an answer.

But in your hearts, while holding hands, you think with gratitude of Merriweather Post, of her Hillwood Museum and – above all – of Russia itself.

By John Brown

 John Brown was Cultural Attachй at the American Embassy in Moscow, 1998-2001. He compiles a near-daily “Public Diplomacy Press Review,” available free by requesting it at http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbrown_main