A composer’s banishment
In the Russian town of Klin, the statue of Petr Tchaikovsky erected for the composer’s centenary of death is being removed. What could have led to this strange decision?
The city of Klin, an hour’s train ride from Moscow, is an old Russian town whose founding date, exactly 700 years ago, is merely the date of its earliest mention in the records. It is one of many such: like most of the others it has a church (all but destroyed by the Soviets) and a brewery. It is its sole resident of worldwide renown that puts it on the map.
The composer Petr Tchaikovsky was not born in Klin, but in the late 1880’s, looking for a quiet retreat at the peak of his fame, he lived there for the last few years of his life. Little remains of his first two residences — the houses at the nearby Maidanovo and Frolovskoye having been destroyed in the Soviet times. His third home in the city — where he lived just before death — was preserved by his brother Modest, and is now the Tchaikovsky Museum.
Tchaikovsky is, it is fair to say, one of the most well-known composers of all time, mostly thanks to ‘The Nutcracker’ and ‘Swan Lake’. But his worldwide fame pales in comparison with his iconic status in the Soviet Union and now Russia, where he was turned into a real symbol of Russian-ness. When the TV stations went down during the crises of 1991 and 1993 it was Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that was shown, on a loop, on every channel.
The centenary of his death in 1993 approached as the town of Klin still had no statue of its most famous resident. Statues and sculptures were big in the USSR, with Lenins adorning every town. In the late 80’s, a competition was speedily held for a Tchaikovsky, to be put in front of the house where he lived his last years.
The winner was a sculptor called Khristofor Gevorkyan. Having arrived to Moscow from Yerevan in 1935, he was a graduate of the prestigious Surikov institute. A lifelong devotee to the most absolute, canonical realism, he was renowned among his close colleagues for being able to capture a likeness, a form that made his sculptures instantly recognisable and life-like. But he lacked one other talent: the ability to make connections.
‘I was always a one-man team’ he once said to me. ‘I was never any good at self-promotion and advancement’. Yet, he was a professor and eventually became a People’s artist of the Russian Federation, one of the highest honours for a sculptor. But in the early 90’s, talent was not enough; winning a competition was not enough either: the ability to navigate the post-Soviet political turmoil and finding money to realise one’s projects became key.
Gevorkyan eventually managed it, after a truly titanic struggle, in 1995. So desperate was he to see his Tchaikovsky, a work he nurtured for close to a decade (I remember seeing dozens of studies in his workshop), in its rightful place that he waived nearly all of the fee for that work. He also had to accept a change of location: the museum decided they wanted a ‘sitting down’ sculpture and so the statue was unveiled — two years late — in the main city square. This turned out to have been a blessing in hindsight, with the grand 19th century buildings surrounding it providing the ideal setting.
However, 22 years later (and just two years after Gevorkyan’s death), the authorities have decided to take the statue down and move it to the park at Maidanovo. Whilst connected to the composer, the proposed location has no surviving buildings from his time and is ill-suited for a statue designed to adorn a city square. It will mean that visitors to the city, most of whom are attracted there by the name of Tchaikovsky, are unlikely to see it. It seems that Khristophor Gevorkyan was thwarted in the end.
It is of little benefit to speculate why this decision was taken. Perhaps the author, in the process of having fought for close to ten years to realise the work of his life, stepped on some toes. Perhaps other, better connected local sculptors saw their chance to seize a prime spot from one who was dead and was not ethnically Russian. Local governments in Russia move in mysterious ways, and have fully mastered the art of spin. ‘We need a true symbol of Klin on our main square, and that is not Tchaikovsky’ declared the mayor, Alyona Sokolskaya. It is a truly bizarre statement for a number of reasons.
The conductor Vladimir Fedoseev described this as a tragedy. ‘What is happening’ he said ‘is a tragedy for the city, for musicians and for lovers of music around the world’. It is difficult to disagree.
PS: In 2006, a second statue of Tchaikovsky was opened near the museum, by the sculptor Rozhnikov. However, his image of the great composer is sitting on a bench and is more ‘informal’. The more ‘traditional’ sculpture of Gevorkyan will be replaced by a shield commemorating the 700th anniversary of Klin, also the work of Rozhnikov.
PPS: If interested, please sign a petition opposing the move.