SCO culture ministers visited Ilya Repin's Zdravnevo Museum-Estate
Vitebsk is celebrating Day of SCO National Cultures on July 12th, and on this occasion, distinguished guests have arrived in the city on the Dvina River. Among them are representatives of the SCO culture ministries and of diplomatic departments from Russia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Kazakhstan, Iran, and India. Secretary General of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation Zhang Ming has also come, and this has become his first official visit to Vitebsk.
After participating in the Dialogue of Culture: Factor of Unity of SCO Peoples round table discussion, the guests went to Zdravnevo. Ilya Repin's estate is a landmark place not only for the artistic history of Belarus: for many years, during the Slavianski Bazaar in Vitebsk International Festival of Arts, it hosts Belarusian-Russian open-air shows of young artists. Moreover, the museum-estate has been under the Union State patronage for many years, and – largely owing to this support – it is annually replenished with new exhibits, the collection of paintings by estate owner Ilya Repin and other artists of the 19th century Russian realist school is growing.
On these festival days, the estate hosts the Repin as Master and Artist exhibition dedicated to the 180th anniversary of the painter’s birth and the 160th anniversary of the birth of Tatiana Sukhotina-Tolstaya. The exposition numbers more than fifty pieces from the collections of Moscow’s Lev Tolstoy State Museum. Sketches on various topics, portraits of members of the Tolstoy family and their friends, as well as personal correspondence are dedicated to the creative and friendly relations of Ilya Repin and the eldest daughter of the writer, artist, memoirist Tatiana Tolstaya, as well as their lives.
The guests of the festival have got acquainted with the exhibition and the permanent exhibition, also discussing possible joint projects in a narrow format.
