2026-09-30 · Telegram (in Russian), t.me/iliathoughts/686

Abramtsevo

Today it reads rather strangely. All around is souvenir "Russianness," Khokhloma, little towers, tours about olden times in 19th-century costumes. It feels as if you come to see how people once lived in a beautiful 19th-century estate.

But Abramtsevo was the opposite. In the time of Savva Mamontov, Repin, Vasnetsov, Polenov, Serov, Vrubel and Korovin came here. They did not preserve the past. They tried to invent a new language of art, architecture, theater, furniture, ceramics. In essence it was a creative campus of the late 19th century.

The main house, workshops, theater, stables, garden, greenhouses with the peaches that Serov painted the girl with, ponds, a working farm. People there did not just visit, they lived together: worked, argued, built, staged plays, made things in the workshop.

Much was later lost in the Soviet period. The greenhouses were taken apart, the farm buildings are gone, the ponds have grown shallow. Some great objects remain, but Abramtsevo itself is no longer what it was.

A place where the future was once created is now mostly shown as the past.

Yet its spirit could be restored in a completely different way than by reconstructing the 19th century. Bring back the greenhouses and the garden. Make the workshops work again and invite contemporary artists and architects. Not play-act the Mamontov circle, but try to repeat the principle of Mamontov itself. Something similar is being done today by the MIRA center and Dmitry Razumov in Suzdal.