He looked at me and I couldn’t even tell it was a bit nippy outside because I was burning up inside.
And then he leaned in and kissed me and that picture perfect postcard instantly became a reality.
But now here I am back in my fantasy world, at The Hermitage Museum.
It’s the second largest museum in the world, behind the Louvre in Paris. It’s so beautiful and majestic and it’s mind boggling to believe it opened to the public way back in 1852.
And the second we step inside we’re greeted by some cats, which the museum official tells us have become part of the museum itself. Apparently that cats that live on the premise have become equally as famous as some of the da Vinci’s and Rembrandt’s which are housed inside.
We enter the museum hand in hand, deciding to forgo the assistance of a guide. The ability to explore and discover as things come to us seems much more exciting, but I would like to know where to start.
I pull out my phone and check a few review sites, quickly settling on the one from the English daily newspaper The Telegraph. As an art lover and admirer of visual things, just reading the page about The Hermitage gives me goose bumps.
The definitive guide to tackling the Hermitage
The State Rooms of the Winter Palace are dazzling and form a logical part of any visit to the Hermitage Museum. But the museum’s art collection, which is displayed in the same building complex, is harder to get to grips with. Highlights range from a unique collection of seventh-century BC Scythian gold to some of Picasso’s great Blue Period paintings, and include an astonishing collection of Rembrandts, great paintings by Titian, Giorgione and Leonardo, Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture of a crouching boy, and the best collection of English art in Continental Europe – including Gainsborough’s Woman in Blue – much of it acquired when Robert Walpole’s paintings were sold by his cash-strapped grandson. The museum is also exceptionally rich in Impressionist, post-Impressionist and modernist paintings including many works by Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard and Matisse.
The range of the collection
The art in the Hermitage represents, for the most part, the former imperial collection of the tsars, which began some 300 years ago when Peter the Great began acquiring pictures and artifacts. It was hugely augmented in the late 18th century by Catherine the Great who bought many of the key Renaissance paintings. Nicholas I opened the collection as a museum in 1852, but it only became a state museum, with access to all, after the 1917 revolution. During the Soviet era, some works were sold, but the collection was also strengthened as many more works were looted first from rich Russians and later from occupied Germany. Most of the Impressionist and modernist art was amassed after the Revolution and came principally from the collections of Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin – two great Russian patrons in the years running up to the First World War. These paintings, once on the top floor of the main museum, are now on display in the new galleries of the General Staff building, on the other side of Palace Square.
Getting your bearings
Of all the world’s major museums, the Hermitage is probably the most confusing to find your way around at first, with about 400 rooms spread over three floors of five interlinked buildings. Many are closed or used as offices, which creates confusions and dead ends, and there are literally miles of corridors. So the easiest way to get the hang of the collection is to visit floor by floor. Broadly speaking, you will then be able to tour the antiquities on the ground floor, then European paintings on the first and second. Whatever approach you take, however, you are bound to get lost at some point – it’s part of the fun.
Visiting tactics
There are often queues at the entrance both to get in and to buy a ticket. The latter queue can be avoided if you pay in advance on the museum website, though it is more expensive than the standard entrance ticket – $17.95 (£14) for one day or $22.95 (£18) for two days compared with £8 standard entrance. The two-day ticket is good value however, and would allow you to, for example, visit the collection in the General Staff building on a separate day. The ticket is valid for first use up to 180 days after purchase.
- The museum opens late (until 9pm) on Wednesdays: turn up from about 4pm onwards and it will be much less crowded than usual and you will still have plenty of time to visit.
- In late spring and summer visitor numbers are swollen by groups from cruise ships, so don’t rule out visiting in winter. There may be little daylight and it’s very cold, but there are very few tourists.
- If you can, make two (or even three) shorter visits rather than try to see everything in a marathon session. There is simply too much to take in during in one go.
- Beware of unofficial guides who hang around in the entrance halls or outside touting for business – it is doubtful whether they are well qualified or good value. If you want a private guide, arrange it through your tour operator or hotel.
- Official group tours are organized by the Excursion Bureau (or Tour Office), which is in the entrance, and can be bought from the main ticket offices. Tours – some general, some themed – last about two hours and cost (in addition to the admission fee) from 250 rubles (£3.50) per person in groups of up to 25 people. Tours of the jewelry collection and the Scythian gold rooms cost from 350 rubles (£4.75). Bookings can also be made by telephone on 007 812 571 8446.
- The main café and an Internet café are not far from the entrance on the ground floor and serve reasonably good snacks and drinks if you need a break during a long visit.
More information
The Hermitage website (hermitagemuseum.org) has high-quality virtual tours of some of the most famous rooms, a planning tool and a good selection of works viewable online.
How much?
The adult entrance fee is 600 rubles (£8) if bought directly from the ticket office. The museum is free on the first Thursday of every month, but expect far longer queues.
Opening hours
Daily, from 10.30am to 6pm (9pm on Wednesdays). Last admission one hour before closing time.
I have no idea who Nick Trend, the man who wrote this piece, is, but I love the fact that he has a section called “Visiting Tactics.”
It makes me feel like I’m about to enter a museum in the middle of the Cold War or something. Plus any museum that you need “tactics” to see, must have a lot of items inside.
And they do as I quickly learn they have the largest collection of paintings in the entire world.
The next few hours absolutely fly by as Artem and I look at, and discuss, pieces together at times and get totally separated at others.
Then again we’re never truly separated. In the moments when he’s not within my sight and I look for him, he just suddenly appears out of some corner or from behind a wall to ask me if everything is okay, to give me a hug, or a kiss.
It’s like he’s watching me from a far…protecting me…letting everyone know not to mess with me, not that I would expect that in a museum but then again this trip has had more than a few unexpected moments already.
“The museum closes soon,” he says as he takes my hand.
“I don’t want this to end,” I say.
“It doesn’t have to…ever,” he says with a long look into my eyes.
I nod. “Good,” I say. “Let’s see what else we can until it closes.”
We move towards a painting and I read the small note next to it that says it’s called Madonna Litta.
Most scholars attribute it to da Vinci, but there’s thought that one of his pupils such as Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or Marco d'Oggiono may have had a large hand themselves in completing it.
That knowledge, and the picture itself, puts two very strong thoughts immediately into my head.
Does it really matter who gets the credit, when you work as a team? As long as both artists, or all if there were more than two, enjoyed what they were doing and the collaboration then does the name matter?
Translation…would I take a man’s las
t name one day if we were to come together to start a family?
And the picture itself inspires the second though.
The painting shows a woman with a suckling baby. Scholars believe that before the moment that is depicted she’d just decided to finish breastfeeding but the child wasn’t ready so she continued.
Isn’t that what life’s all about? The beauty of the child and the connection to family. How that woman put her own thoughts, needs, and who knows what else aside as she gave that child what it wanted.
And what did that child want?
Nothing more than nourishment from its mother. To be held. To be loved. To experience that connection.
And for the first time in my life I feel a motherly instinct awaken in me.
“Everything okay?” Artem says.
“Yeah, sorry,” I say realizing I was so focused on the painting that I was zoning out. I had no idea what was going on in the world around me.
I squeeze his hand tighter, not exactly sure why.
“You were looking at it a long time. You were studying it very thoroughly. It was almost as if you saw yourself in it.”
He’s definitely perceptive and observant to say the least.
“That was intense,” I say. “Are those some sculptures I see just up around the corner?”
“Yes. Let’s go check them out.”
We make our way to the sculptures and with thoughts of motherhood, childbirth, and having a family of my own still swirling around in my head I see a very beautiful white sculpture of Italian artist Antonio Canova.
It’s the three daughters of Zeus. There are Euphrosyne, Aglaea, and Thalia in a work that is typical for the neoclassical era. The entire statue is carved from one whole piece of white marble and their skin is smooth as silk.
It’s absolutely beautiful and timeless, and titled “The Three Graces,” but there’s one line on the description that hits me the hardest.
Apparently the work “challenged the concepts of beauty and how women should be depicted.”
Times change, but in some ways they stay the same.
These days there is still a lot of challenges posed to the modern woman and how she wants to display her own beauty, both inner and outer. Women seem more free and more and more women are treating their bodies like the works of arts I’ve seen here today…I know I’m one with my tattoo and my desire to tan myself in the warm Miami sun.
And I think about how I’m from the West, but right now I’m in the East. I can see things from both perspectives and see how maybe, just maybe I can combine the best of both worlds to form a perfect future for myself.
The traditional ways that are still common in Russia and in some parts of Miami, with the glitz and glamour of South Beach and the modern woman who wants it all…a family and a career.
“You’re drifting away again,” I hear Artem say.
I instinctively, yet subconsciously, give his hand a squeeze again and pucker up.
We kiss.
“I’m drifting away in this fantasyland you’re providing me,” I say. “Thank you.”
A security guard approaches us and apparently after hearing us speaking in English says, “I’m sorry, but you and this fine lady must make your way to the exits now.”
“Fine lady?” Artem growls. I see his eyes change and his nostrils flare. “You need to find your own lady,” he says his upper body quickly inching towards the big security guard to the point he’s practically lunging at him.
I pull back on his hand, but I’m much, much too small to have any kind of effect…physically that is.
But Artem steps back closer to me, putting his arm around me, claiming me, as the man raises his palms in surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Please take your time,” he finishes before scurrying off.
“Now it’s my turn to ask,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“No.”
“No?”
“This fine lady? That’s no way to refer to living breathing beauty that is more beautiful than any of these timeless creations inside this museum. One day your picture and your sculpture will be here and people will pay to come from all around the world to see it, or it could be, but I won’t allow it. Because you are mine, for my eyes and your ears are for my words, just as mine are for you. He needs to find his own woman before he finds himself in a world of trouble when I step outside and show him another kind of white marble…my fists.”
“It’s okay. Let’s go,” I say and watch as Artem stares at that man until he’s completely out of view.
We leave the museum and Artem takes in a deep breath.
“I feel better now,” he says.
“The air out here by the river is so fresh,” I say. “It makes me feel better too,” I say taking in a deep breath.
“It has nothing to do with the river,” he says. “I don’t even notice it. All I smell is the sweet smell coming from your silky smooth skin,” he says.
I don’t know if the romanticism of the museum has gotten into him or what, but those words are too powerful to resist.
Not that I ever had a choice when he pulls me in and kisses me hard on the most romantic street in Saint Petersburg, the Palace Embankment which changes its name to the English Embankment just a few steps away.
And with an address of Palace Square number two it’s more than fitting that I feel like his queen, and he is my king.
CHAPTER 11
Alice
Part of the complex of buildings that houses the Hermitage Museum also houses the Winter Palace, which was from 1732 to 1917 the official residence of the Russian monarch.
And when Artem opens the door of a historical horse-drawn carriage that practically seemed to be waiting on us just in front of the Winter Palace I myself feel like a modern day monarch.
The horse-drawn carriage leads us across the Blagoveshchenskiy to Vasilyevsky Island, which serves as a large part of the city’s historic center. We get lost in a shot or two of vodka, holding hands as we walk down the beautifully lit streets when we’re not jumping on and off the quaint trams, and just generally enjoying life to its fullest.
The contrast between the brisk air that would be even colder were it not for the vodka, and the heat I’m used to in Miami, are striking.
Not to mention back home I’m often alone and here I’m with him. This possessive inked man with a bit of a jealous streak, or maybe more than a bit, and a possessive attitude that it barbaric and savage in ways, but also brutally honest and refreshing.
I feel like there’s no games here. Even I was guilty when I first met Artem. I was a bit sarcastic in my jokes and it just doesn’t translate. I chalk it up to learned societal behavior and am quickly learning I prefer this much more direct approach to life and relationships better.
“Hurry, we must get back on the horse,” Artem says.
“Because we fell off the wagon?” I ask.
“I don’t understand.”
I explain to Artem how I almost never drink and what “falling off the wagon” means. He gives me a genuine laugh and it’s the first time I’ve seen him act so…freely.
As we get back into the carriage I ask him about it.
He explains that in Russian culture you save your smiles and then when you deliver one it carries much more weight. He explains how they can always spot a foreigner because they’re smiling for no reason.
I laugh and think about the idea of being positive and how it can make others positive around you, but shelf the idea. No point in a deep conversation now, plus Artem seems very positive about us…and I’d like to see just how deep this relationship can go.
Tonight.
As we approach Blagoveshchenskiy Bridge I see Artem look at his watch.
“What’s going on?”
“This bridge is a drawing bridge. It opens at 1:25 in the morning so the river traffic can pass…and it stays open until 2:50 a.m. Then there’s a twenty-five minute period where it closes, allowing taxis coming across from
the city’s nightspots before it opens again at 3:15. And then it stays open again from 3:15 until 5:00 a.m.
“A drawing bridge? I’ve never seen one?”
“You are going to very soon. Either in front of us, which will be bad, or behind us, which will be good. It’s all about timing. And luck. And with you I always have luck on my side. Now kiss me for good luck,” he says.
I don’t have to be asked twice as I lean in and taste the alcohol on his lips, or is it mine. His warm breath is just as intoxicating as the alcohol we had as I hear the clack of the horseshoes pick up pace and I realize it’s going to be close.
Possessive Russian: An Older Man Younger Woman Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 79) Page 4
