The Other Pushkin
One of the central themes of Pushkin’s writing is the death of genius.
But the death of a poet is never accidental. Nobody knew this better than Pushkin himself. And though we may speculate on what Pushkin might have written, had he survived that duel, the poet himself famously said that he had already written everything he felt necessary.
We feel personally involved in this tragedy of Russian culture because our great-great-grandfather was the physician who didn’t manage to save the life of the fatally wounded poet. Like the Pushkinists, we have allowed ourselves to wonder what might have happened had there been a vial of penicillin in Doctor Arendt’s medical case… Imagine that our poet did miraculously survive, but having gone through clinical death he changed dramatically. So much so that he even abandoned literature, and, being as he was, a troublemaker, flâneur, dream interpreter, and, after all, the father of
Russian kitsch... he went on the lookout for other means of self-expression.
This exhibition is our attempt to view the world through the eyes of our great author, and express, through visual art, what was spoken or unspoken through the language of literature.
Maria and Natasha Arendt
