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Poetry in the Garden project
Tatiana Reshetnikova-Momdzhi
Annotation
Dedicated to Dmitriy Likhachev''''s work "the Poetry of Gardens"
Project author: Tatiana Reshetnikova-Momdzhi
Sculptures by Grigoriy Izrailevitch were used in the project
“Art is beautiful when it seems to be nature, nature is felicitous when art accentuates it unapparently”
J. Addison
Dmitriy Sergeevitch Likhachev is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a literary scholar, a cultural historian and public figure. He devoted about 20 years of his life to scientific study of the gardens and parks of Saint-Petersburg and its suburbs. The result of this work is a splendid collection called “the Poetry of Gardens” where for the first time views of Dmitriy Sergeevitch Likhachev (still relevant today) on both the influence of garden and park art on people and on the history and culture of Russia, its position in the world''''s history, are gathered.
“Garden art is not only a kind of synthesis of the arts, it experiences the action of philosophical, poetic, artistic, architectural ideas, but is also actively reflected in the versatile culture life, lives in works of poetry, prose, painting” – wrote Dmitriy Sergeevitch Likhachev in this book.
Speaking of gardens in the English informal style, he places special emphasis on romantic gardens: “Much could be written about the principles providing the basis for the arrangement of romantic gardens. Not only could, but should be written, as it is the romantic gardens that played a significant role in the development of Russian garden art on the one hand and of Russian poetry and literature on the other”.
“Everything in a romantic garden corresponded to the emotional experience of a personality, fused with the images of poetry, literary motifs, themes of travelling, remembering. Romantic gardens suppose that a visitor has a certain "romantic knowledge" background, so they live and play mostly for their "educated" visitors”.
The sculptural composition we propose invites viewers to follow the traditions of a romantic English garden of the late 17th - early 18th centuries and, casting care aside, to take a walk in the garden with a small book of verses by Pasternak or Akhmatova and lose themselves in a poetic world.
The composition represents a series of bronze portrait busts of Silver Age poets created by the artist Grigoriy Izrailevitch in 1990. The author of the portraits used to say "If it were possible, I would suspend them on invisible strings". Today, being fastened on metal rods, installed in the greenery of the romantic Mikhailovsky Garden, they are swaying in the wind like trees that are always open to the wind.