Return to the estate. Mouranovo and the Tutchevs

The photographic archive of Fyodor Tyutchev’s country estate at Muranovo is comprised of over three thousand items collected and preserved by one family over the last hundred years. This exhibition, part of a comprehensive museum project entitled ‘Return to the Country Estate’, was awarded a grant at the 5th museum project competition held by the V. Potanin Charitable Foundation: ‘Changing Museum in a Changing World’, sponsored by the Russian Federation Culture Ministry and organised by the Culture Managers’ Association. In a sense both the project and its realisation as an exhibit represent a unique attempt to present the Russian country house to the modern public as an artistic reality that has now been returned to us.

Photographic portraits of celebrated Russian poet, philosopher, diplomat and statesman Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev by G. Denier (1864) and I. Robillard (1862) are central to the exhibition. The poet’s descendants (above all, his grandson Fyodor Ivanovich junior) take such a serious interest in photography and artistic composition that many of these photographs will become genuine works of art.

Other splendid works include a study by A. R. Artemyev (1890) of the Tyutchev family on an island in the lake at Muranovo that has now sunk underwater; a photograph in which Ivan Fyodorovich and Olga Nikolayevna Tyutchev gaze back at us from the park steps (early 20th c.); shadowy images of a couple in love — Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev the younger and Olga Dmitrievna Defabr; and photographs of Yekaterina Ivanovna Tyutcheva and the poet’s great-grandson’s nanny on a footpath in Muranovo park, their figures retreating ever further into the distance...

Great Russian poet Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev’s son and grandson, Ivan Fyodorovich and Nikolai Ivanovich Tyutchev, have made particularly commendable efforts to preserve Muranovo. Moreover, Nikolai Tyutchev had a historic role to play during troubled, tragic years for Russia, preserving the family estate and transforming it into a superb museum. In this hypostasis — as founder of a museum, museum curator, master of ceremonies of the Imperial court, last elected head of the English Club and distinguished collector — Nikolai Ivanovich Tyutchev was photographed by a leading photographer of the second half of the 20th century, Vladimir Molchanov. Three psychological portraits of the poet’s grandson by Molchanov are included in the exhibition. This year marks two sad anniversaries — one hundred years have passed since the death of Ivan Fyodorovich, sixty years since that of Nikolai Ivanovich. The exhibition is dedicated to these two outstanding figures.

Vladimir Patsyukov,
«Return to the Country Estate» project administrator