#4 - JRL 7275
The Guardian (UK)
August 2, 2003
Creative use of green space

In the countryside near Moscow, Robin Buss visits the idyllic estate that inspired a generation of Russian writers, designers, artists and craftsmen

'I am inclined to think that Abramtsevo is the best dacha in the world - almost ideal," the Russian painter Ilya Repin wrote to a friend in 1877, during one of his first visits to the estate near Moscow belonging to his friend the industrialist Savva Mamontov.

The following year, in a letter to the critic Vladimir Stasov, Repin described his life there: "I have been living with my entire family at the Mamontovs' for more than a month. Our life is very easy - the air is magical, there are all kinds of pleasures for body and soul." He goes on to say that they pass the time boating, playing quoits, riding, taking walks, hunting and picking mushrooms in this idyllic setting 60km north-east of Moscow. Now a museum, the estate was arguably, in Mamontov's day, the most significant artistic colony in the country.

It is still a good place to get a sense of the sources of Russian culture, a place where different influences meet, peasant design sits beside realist 19th-century art, and the artists combined their efforts to build and decorate the little onion-domed church. As well as Repin, Mamontov's guests included other painters, ceramic artists, set designers, writers and musicians; the novelist Ivan Turgenev had just visited when Repin was writing to Stasov, amusing the guests with his anecdotes. According to Natasha's Dance, Orlando Figes's recent cultural history of Russia, the origins of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes can be traced back to Mamontov's private opera at Abramtsevo and his passion for singing and theatre. Anton Chekhov was a visitor and based the manor house in The Cherry Orchard on the main house on the estate.

If you are not coming by car or coach, the journey begins, appropriately enough, at the Yaroslavl railway station in Moscow (metro: Komsomolskaya) - Mamontov was a railway magnate and this was his station, built for him by the architect Fedor Shekhtel and decorated by Viktor Vasnetsov.

Travelling by train in Russia is cheap, but not always easy. Information is hard to come by. Look on the board for trains to Alexandrov and Sergiyev Posad; but be careful, because not all of them stop at Abramtsevo (if you do get the wrong train, go on to Khotkovo, the next stop after Abramtsevo, and take the 155 bus back from outside the station). The rail journey takes about an hour. The view from the window and the people hawking newspapers and other goods through the carriages should help to take your mind off the hardness of the seats.

On arriving at Abramtsevo, you cross the line and set off along the path through the woods, which takes you in about 20 minutes to a main road. Turn left to follow the road for a short distance. The estate-museum is a cluster of wooden houses, for each of which you pay a separate fee (totalling less than £1). One of the houses contains a collection of wooden peasant artefacts; another is the studio of the painter and ceramic artist Mikhail Vrubel, who also designed a splendid tiled bench at a good viewpoint in a corner of the park.

The main house, a two-storey wooden dacha, originally belonged to the writer Sergei Aksakov, a friend of Nikolai Gogol. The red sitting-room has some books and manuscripts recalling in particular the occasion on which Gogol read part of the manuscript of Dead Souls to an audience here that included Aksakov and Turgenev. When Mamontov bought the house in 1870, he decided to make it the centre for the revival of peasant crafts, and set up a school for the inhabitants of the district. His wife, Elizaveta, was a keen follower of the Populists (or Narodniki), who believed in "going back to the people", and this movement, highly influential in 19th-century Russia, was the original impulse behind the Mamontovs' plans for Abramtsevo.

Then, in 1874, Mamontov happened to meet Ilya Repin, together with the painter Vasily Polenov and the sculptor Mark Antokolsky, at a cafe in Rome, and they began to talk about the need to create an authentically Russian school of art. Both Mamontov and Repin were genial types who enjoyed being surrounded by other creative people. As a result of their conversation, Mamontov had the idea of the Abramtsevo workshop, including a studio for Repin, which would bring together high art and folk art, painting, ceramics, woodworking and, eventually, stage design. Examples of this varied work are on display: a door carved by Elena Polenova and inspired by peasant woodworking, ceramics by Vrubel, Repin's portraits of Mamontov and his wife, and many of Repin's informal sketches that suggest the atmosphere of the colony in its heyday.

However, the most famous single work produced at Abramtsevo is no longer here, except in reproduction. The artist was Valentin Serov, a pupil of Repin's who first came to Abramtsevo in 1874 when he was nine. In 1887, he painted a portrait of Mamontov's daughter, Vera, sitting in the dining room of the main house, wearing a pink smock, with the sun streaming through the window behind her and her hands cupped round a peach; three other peaches are on the table at her side. Girl With Peaches, now in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow, made Serov's reputation. It is a painting of irresistible sweetness. An easel stands in the room with a print of the picture, to show how little has changed.

The main buildings at Abramtsevo are grouped round a lawn, not unlike an English village green (except that, this being Russia, you are not encouraged to walk on the grass). A short distance away is the little domed church, modelled on one in Nereditsy and built from 1882 onwards, to replace an earlier chapel that had been damaged in a flood. Repin, Vasnetsov and Polenov worked on frescoes for the interior and icons for the screen. Eventually, the Mamontovs were buried here, including Vera, who died at the age of 32.

"There is a splendid studio," Repin wrote to Stasov, "even though one doesn't feel like working indoors in the summer." Most of the artists in Mamontov's circle have left paintings of scenes in the park, several now in Moscow at the Tretyakov gallery: a bridge over one of the streams leading down to the river (Repin), a grove of oak trees (Vasnetsov), a pond near the river (Serov). Wandering around the grounds on a summer or autumn day, you can more or less identify the spots where these views were painted.