ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO TOM THOMSON EXHIBIT TO OPEN AT THE HERMITAGE SEPTEMBER 10, 2004

The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is spearheading the first exhibition of a Canadian artist at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Hermitage is one of the most prestigious art museums in the world. An unprecedented exhibition of 60 works by renowned Canadian artist Tom Thomson will be sent by the AGO and the National Gallery of Canada to The State Hermitage Museum in the fall of 2004.

This first solo exhibition of Tom Thomson works outside of Canada will introduce Russian audiences to the passion of "the great Canadian landscape" as he defined it so masterfully.

The exhibition will be on display at the Hermitage from September 10th to November 8th, 2004. (Note: the dates in the Hermitage Magazine are incorrect)

The West Wind, 1916-17 Tom Thomson Oil on canvas 120.7 x 137.9 cm Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Gift of the Canadian Club of Toronto, 1926

MONTREAL CHAPTER
invites you to lunch and a lecture

THE RUSSIANS EMERGE

HEIDI HOLLINGER — PHOTOGRAPHER

The Volunteer Association of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Friends of the Hermitage

will hold a lunch and lecture
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
1379 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal

A Russian luncheon
in the Hall of Mirrors
12:00 noon
and
A Lecture
in the Maxwell Cummings Auditorium
with speaker
Heidi Hollinger, Photographer
1:45 p.m.
Ticket: $75 per person
Information: (514) 842-7436

Heidi Hollinger, in a photographic tour-de-force, has captured the spirit of the Russian people as they adjust to their new freedoms. Her sympathetic, evocative portraits reveal how some "emerging" Russians relish their new opportunities while others, rooted in the past, struggle to survive in their changing world. Heidi Hollinger, a native Montrealer, lived in Russia for nearly a decade and has published five photographic books in Canada, the United States and Russia. Her portraits of world leaders include sittings with Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Fidel Castro, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and the Dalai Lama. She contributes her work to major publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Time, Officiel and The Globe and Mail. Hollinger moved back to Montreal three years ago and has recently opened a photo studio on Sherbrooke St. in Westmount.

For more information please see:
www.heidihollinger.com.

TORONTO CHAPTER

THE 2004/2005 LECTURE SERIES

THE HERMITAGE, CATHERINE II and THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Neo-classical art history, philosophy and music at the Court of Catherine the Great

The Toronto Chapter is pleased to announce two new lecture series, entitled The Hermitage, Catherine II and the Age of Enlightenment, to be presented in the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2005. The lectures are both thought provoking and interesting and are designed to enhance the viewers' experience during the Catherine exhibition coming from the Hermitage Museum to the Art Gallery of Ontario in September 2005 (and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2006). We recommend that you reserve early.

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 7:00 p.m.	Dr. Kenneth R. Bartlett, Professor of History and Renaissance Studies, Director, Office of Teaching Advancement, University of Toronto	The Classical ideal from the Renaissance to the Eighteenth Century.
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004 7:00 p.m.	Dr. Kenneth R. Bartlett	The Age of Enlightenment.
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004 7:00 p.m.	Dr. Naimh O'Laoghaire, Director, University Art Centre	Neo-Classical Painting and the Court of Catherine II.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 7:00 p.m.	Dr. Peter Kaellgren, Curator of Decorative Arts, Dept. of Western Art and Culture, Royal Ontario Museum	Taste in the Age of Enlightenment.
Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 7:00 p.m.	David Wistow, M.A. Education, Officer, Department of European Art, Art Gallery of Ontario	Catherine the Great — A Passion for Building.
Tuesday, March lst, 2005 7:00 p.m.	Dr. Robert E. Johnson, Professor of History, and Past chairman, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto	Catherine II: Myth, Symbol, Ruler?
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 7:00 p.m.	Dr. Peter Kaellgren	Dinner Services at the Court of Catherine the Great.
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 7:00 p.m.	Rick Phillips, M. Music, Classical music educator, writer and broadcaster	Music at the Court of Catherine the Great.

All lectures will be at The Women's Art Association Gallery,
23 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto
Both series: members — $140.00 non-members — $160.00
2004 series: members — $75.00 non-members — $85.00
2005 series: members — $75.00 non-members — $85.00

Please make cheques payable to:
Canadian Friends of the Hermitage
50 Baldwin Street, Toronto ON M5T 1L4
Tel: (416) 979-0932 email toronto@hermitagemuseum.ca

The Canadian Friends of the Hermitage
and The Ottawa Symphony Orchestra
invite you to a
Russian Soirée

The 2004-05 Ottawa Symphony Orchestra (OSO) concert season opens on Monday, October 4, 2004 at 8:00 p.m. at the National Arts Centre with a tribute to St. Petersburg.

The OSO, led by Music Director David Currie, performs masterpieces by three Russian composers. The programme begins with excerpts from Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, and continues with Stravinsky's neoclassical Symphony in C and Shostakovich's incomparable Symphony No. 5.

The concert is under the patronage of Georgiy Mamedov, Ambassador of the Russian Federation.

Following the concert, guests are invited to A Russian Soirée, a fundraising reception in benefit of the OSO. (Tickets are $30.00). Guests at the reception will have the opportunity to meet Ambassador Mamedov and Conductor David Currie.

The St. Petersburg concert is being organized in partnership with the Canadian Friends of the Hermitage. Prior to the concert on September 9, the Friends will present a lecture on the life and times of Shostakovich, given by Professor Alan Gillmor.

This lecture is part of the Friends' six-part fall 2004 series (see lecture leaflet enclosed in the Hermitage Magazine).

The St. Petersburg concert is the first of the OSO's five-concert subscription series which includes such remarkable works as Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Webern's Symphony op. 21, and Anthony Payne's completion of Elgar's Symphony No. 3. The final concert is Berlioz's magnificent Requiem.

OSO subscription tickets are available from the OSO Ticket Manager by phone (613) 231-2561 or by fax (613) 231-3610. Tickets to the October 4 concert and reception will be available from the OSO Ticket Manager (by fax only), the National Arts Centre box office and Ticketmaster, two months before the concert.

The Friend's lectures will be held in Room 124, Leed's Residence, Carleton University. For a lecture series leaflet please contact: Canadian Friends of the Hermitage by phone (613) 236-1116 or by fax (613) 236-6570 or by e-mail: friends@hermitagemuseum.ca

TRAVELS BY RAIL IN EASTERN SIBERIA
A serialized adventure by Nancy Scarth

For those who travel for the pleasure of the journey, those who believe that getting there is as much fun as being there, Russia's Trans-Siberian Railway has long been an almost mythic experience. It is the longest continuous rail line on earth, each run clattering along in an epic journey of almost six thousand miles (or about ten thousand kilometers) over one third of the globe. For most of its history, the Trans-Siberian journey has been an experience of almost continuous movement, seven days or more of unabated train travel through the vast expanse of Russia. A great part of the pleasure of such a trip is simply sitting back and watching the land go by. However, most travellers on the Trans-Siberian find that interaction with other passengers, both Russians and tourists, is what makes the trip an unforgettable experience. Today, with far fewer travel restrictions, it is possible to use the rail journey as the core of a more varied tour. Travellers can enjoy stopovers in many of the Russian cities and towns along the route from the historic Volga port of Yaroslavl to Irkutsk and the scenic Lake Baikal Region.

We are privileged to have a wonderfully colourful travelogue from one of our founding members, who has travelled often to Russia and has been drawn back to Siberia many times.

Nancy's travelogue will be published in serial format in the next several Bulletins.

August 1998:

In 1995 during a month-long visit to Russia and Kirgezia, my husband, Lloyd and I participated in two homestay programmes; one of these was in Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia. Our hostess was Elvira Nikolaevna Yaskova, a 60 year old mathematics teacher at the Irkutsk Energy Institute (a university). We became such good friends during the six-day stay, that she invited me to come back to explore more of this ecologically and historically fascinating region. As a lover of trains, it seemed a great opportunity to travel on the world's longest railway, the Trans-Siberian, which crosses Russia from Moscow to Vladivostock on the Pacific, a distance of 9,289 km. My choice was to travel via the Pacific, thus seeing new territory, and I was able to fly at very reasonable cost to Seattle (Air Canada) and then with the Alaskan Airways weekly flight to Anchorage, Magadan and thence to Khabarovsk which is at km 8,521 on the Trans-Siberian Railway.Irkutsk is at km 5,185 so I would be travelling 3,336 km by train (about the distance from Ottawa to Edmonton), taking three days and two nights each way. The following is a diary of my trip.

Saturday, August 8 En route:

My overnight hotel stay in Seattle in the cheapest accommodation (Howard Johnson Motel) readies me for whatever Russia has to offer: shabby but clean interior, stained rug, dirty windows with missing caulking replaced with newspapers, some lights do not work, and neither does the air conditioner - I don't try the TV; sink stopper missing (I have my universal plug with me). I like the shower - it has old-fashioned controls! However, I sleep well in the comfortable bed, and the breakfast and shuttle service to the airport are good. As in Russia - plain cake with no icing.

Our Alaska Airways plane is a MD-80 140 passenger; very comfortable seating and the cabin well pressurized. We have to make an unscheduled landing in Sitka due to a medical emergency on board - an older businessman on his way to Vladivostock has had a seizure. By the time the medical personnel arrive on board he has recovered sufficiently to move to the stretcher himself. When we take off, I have a good look at the small landing strip built in the bay, and realize why our descent and take-off have been so precipitous. We are an hour late into Anchorage but later make up half that time.

Magadan, with one of the worst reputations of the Soviet GULAG, is a spectacular place to fly into as a tourist. As we cross over the surrounding mountains, the glacier-fed rivers and wide sandy/gravelly riverbeds make striking patterns as they descend into a wide fertile valley. This city's defence-based economy is now in limbo; there is a small but growing tourist industry, mainly American hunters (bear, big-horned sheep) and fishermen.

This air route is also patronized by lay workers of different religious groups: for instance a half dozen southern Baptists going to the Sakhalin Islands for two weeks to help at the Baptist Mission there and two Mormons returning to the US after two years in Vladivostock.

Sunday, August 9 Khabarovsk

We land at 20:00, having crossed the date line, and I am met by Lena Grobov, a friend of Elvira and a hydraulics engineer at the Ecological Institute. She is divorced and has raised 2 children alone. Her 29 year old daughter is a specialist nurse in endoscopy and is now going to study paediatrics; this will take her 6 years plus 2 years internship. She has a daughter about 6. Lena's son has just graduated from the polytechnical institute. Khabarovsk, a city of 600,00, is situated on the Amur River which flows NE from here to the Pacific Ocean. This major river is 4,300 km long, and west of Khabarovsk forms the boundary between China and Russia for most of its length. The weather is quite hot and muggy, with smog caused by forest fires to the north; the poor visibility along the lower reaches of the Amur has caused some interruption in the busy shipping traffic. We take a taxi - a new Japanese van - to the train station and put my larger bag in a locker. On the back of the locker door are 5 dials which you set for your personal combination. Then we continue to my hotel, the guest house of the local Economics Institute, which contains about 20 rooms and is used for conferences and "distinguished guests". Cost: $30 US plus $5 for breakfast - compare to $120 and up at the Intourist Hotel. The room and bath are comfortable and spacious and include amenities such as TV, an electric tea kettle and a small fridge. I ate a lot on the plane so pass on supper. Just have a Cup-of-Soup and some dried fruit - prunes of course! I will be early to bed as I did not sleep on the plane.

Monday August 10 Khabarovsk and train

Breakfast at 8:30 is out-of-this-world. Tamara, the guesthouse administrator, has a dacha and has brought two small cucumbers, a yellow sweet pepper, one each of yellow and red tomatoes, all arranged artistically on a plate with chives and dill; fried slices of kapochki (something like zuchinni), cheese slices, two kinds of bread, back bacon slices, blini (very thin pancakes), homemade red currant preserves, sour cream, mint tea, black tea. I save the bread, cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers to eat on the train.

Dachas cannot really be compared to western holiday homes. Certainly they provide city residents with a country place in fresh air and close to nature, but most importantly they provide a place for gardening and a base of operations for collecting mushrooms and wild berries. These are not just pastimes for Russians but are a means of survival during the lean years and a supplement to their winter diet during better times. (A recent report in The Ottawa Citizen states that 80% of the Russian potato crop is produced on small holdings.) People also pick mushrooms and berries for sale in the street markets of the cities. Russians are very knowledgeable about preserving techniques, food values and homeopathic remedies.

The dacha developments are located along the railway lines from the cities and are serviced by frequent local trains (electrishkas). The developments are generally laid out in a grid pattern of unpaved streets with each house set on a large wood-fenced lot. The buildings are privately owned and the design of the house is not only dependent on the taste and building skills of the owner, but also the limited material available at the time of construction. Small green-houses abound, many properties have sauna buildings, and all will have an earth closet of classic design at the foot of the garden. Electricity is supplied and there is water from a community well or tap. There may be chickens; other livestock such as geese, a goat or milk cow would belong to permanent residents. Some of the outlying villages will contain a mix of small farmsteads and old houses that have been rehabilitated into dachas.

The Economics Institute Building is the only one of a university complex that was completed before the money ran out after glasnost. Other buildings nearby are half finished and abandoned. Lena arrives at 9 and we take a bus downtown where we walk through the main square and extensive riverside park to the Amur. The banks here are sandy and high and the river is 2.6 km wide. Because of the light soil, high water table, and earthquake danger, construction in the city requires special techniques. I noticed quite a few sections of above ground insulated piping on the way in from the airport. We walk along the waterfront promenade and then down to the beach where many people are sunning in the sultry sunshine. Ice cream, soft drinks, music. I pick up a pebble from the shore for my collection.

We walk through the old section to the new multi-storied Intourist Hotel to pick up my train ticket which I bought in Canada @ $300 US one way. I expected a mark-up but was surprised at the extent: the price shown on the ticket was equivalent to $160 at the current exchange rate. For price comparisons: divide roubles by 6 for US$ and by 4 for Canadian dollars. (The currency crisis does not hit until near the end of my stay.) [Editor's note: currency and cost information is six years old]

Then we have quite a long walk up the main boulevard to the train station, stopping at the market on the way to buy supplies for the train. I keep to the shade and notice that some of the trees are drooping.

2 large containers of orange juice	25r
Chunk of cheese	10r.
4 bread rolls	.5r
Baggage check	10r

My train arrives on time and I am struck by the homey look of the white cafe curtains in all the windows. I am naturally anxious to check out my accommodation for the next few days - and my room mates in my tourist class compartment.

There are three classes of travel on a Trans-Siberian fast train. First or soft class has compartments (coupes) with two berths, is next to the restaurant car, and has drapes and carpets; there are usually only 2 cars like this on a 15-20 car train. Second or coupe class has 2 additional upper berths per compartment and third class has compartments open to the corridor, shorter bunks and a row of berths lengthwise along the car. Cars are considerably wider than in other countries, due to the wider gauge of the tracks. All compartments have a table under the window, storage over the corridor and under the lower bunks, reading lamps and various hooks and shelves. The berths are firm plastic and one is provided with a rollup mattress, pillow, blanket, and fresh sheets, pillowcase and towel. At each end of the car is a toilet with washbasin, bar soap, outlet for electric razor and a sign on the door, the Russian equivalent to: "Passengers will please refrain from Flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station ."

At the front end of each car are the quarters of the conductor or provodnik, who takes the tickets, opens the doors at the stops, sees that the large samovar has always a supply of boiling water, regularly cleans the car, compartments and bathrooms, provides bedding for new arrivals and generally supervises the welfare of his/her passengers to a degree dependent on individual personality.

My two room mates also get on in Khabarovsk: two male Japanese university students from Tokyo going on a tourist trip by train to Moscow and back by plane. Hero is studying engineering and Nari, medicine. Both speak a bit of English and no Russian. They are very pleasant and accommodating and we lose little time getting to know each other. My booklet of photographs of family, home, garden and our activities always helps bridge interlinguistic boundaries.

We have hardly gotten settled when we cross the Amur on the longest bridge on the line, completed in 1916 when the eastern, all Russian section of the railway was built. (The first line, completed in 1901, went part of the way through China). A second deck for cars is now being constructed. For the first few hours there are just miles of nothingness with a few willow- and alder- type trees as we pass through the low-lying Amur basin, whose poor drainage does not support any form of agriculture except in a few higher areas where there are small settlements and individuals scything hay.

Much of this region lies in the Jewish Autonomous Region, established by Stalin in 1934 as a "homeland" for Russian Jews. As we approach Birobidjan, the capital, we start to climb and limestone hills appear; these support a local cement industry.

Although only about 5% of the population of the Jewish Autonomous Region has Jewish ancestry, Hebrew is the official language of the region, signs are bilingual and Russia's only Hebrew language newspaper is printed here. The population of the capital is about 85,000 and its main street is Sholom-Aleikhema. The city is well known in rice-producing countries for the self-propelled rice combine harvesters manufactured here.

A mobile food cart comes regularly through the train and I buy a Red Bull American beer, 7%, 16 oz. for 12r, to go with my supper from the food I have with me. The warm and humid weather makes one want to drink rather than eat.

To be continued.........

BENEFIT GALA DINNER AND PERFORMANCE

THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM FOUNDATION OF CANADA INC.
and THE DIRECTOR OF THE HERMITAGE MUSEUM

WILL HOST

THE KIROV ORCHESTRA
under its fabled conductor Valery Gergiev

ROY THOMSON HALL — TORONTO
APRIL 21, 2005

The Foundation and Dr. Mikhail Piotrovski, Director of the Hermitage Museum, will host a Benefit Black Tie Gala Dinner and Performance of the Kirov Orchestra at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall on April 21, 2005.

This prestigious event will mark the beginning of a summer of activities leading to the opening of the Catherine the Great exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in September of 2005.

Under Valery Gergiev's dynamic leadership, the resident orchestra of the famed Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg continues to enjoy universal renown as one of today's most vibrant ensembles. Following a previous dazzling sold-out performance in Toronto, the Globe and Mail declared "It was the kind of performance one expects to hear once or twice in a lifetime".

Seats for the performance are the best in the house and the dinner prior to the concert will be an elegant affair.

The dinner is organized into 25 tables of 12 guests per table at a cost of $500.00 per person. A 2005 tax receipt for the donation portion of the cost ($250.00) will be issued by the Foundation. A number of tables are already sold so don't delay!

Cheques should be made out to The State Hermitage Museum Foundation of Canada Inc. and sent to P.O. Box 539, Station B, Ottawa, Ontario. K1P 5P6.

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