“In the Museum” is one of a series of paintings by Elena Rufova dedicated to the personality and music of P.I. Tchaikovsky.
The images and content of this picture are associated with the first eight years of the composer's life in the city of Votkinsk. The house where the Tchaikovsky family lived has been preserved, today it is a museum. He was born in Votkinsk and lived for eight years, here he first heard his music, it tormented and haunted. "Spare me from her," he pleaded. Rufova does not realistically depict the interior of the rooms of the house. In her painting
we see the silhouettes of people and objects in abstract space: the Wirth piano, on which Petya Tchaikovsky, mother Alexandra Andreevna, sister Zinaida, learned to play, illuminated by the warm light of a lamp: they seem to
fill the world of his childhood, the life of a "glass child" with the "air" of love, tenderness..
In the hall with mirrors from the shafts of the orchestra, Petya Tchaikovsky heard the music of Mozart for the first time, romances that his mother sang, quartets and trios performed by the plant's engineers and his father, who played the flute. From the terrace of the house, he listened to the songs of the fishermen on the Votkinsky pond, watched the ceremony of decorating a birch, the song “There was a birch in the field” (the rite was preserved
in Votkinsk before the Soviet era). Pyotr Ilyich used it in the finale of the 4th symphony.
Elena Rufova creates her dramatic, tense,
expressive symphony of complex color. In the center of the composition there are mirrors in which we, the audience, can somehow be reflected, the artist depicted contemporaries descending and ascending at the same time. They go from the unknown distant to the unknown close to anyone.
The composition of the picture is absolutely individual. Each of its fragments is an opportunity to see and explain the content of the picture in its own way. The name of the picture is not accidental. The museum is a place where we can immerse ourselves in a bygone era of culture and history, analyze its spiritual connection with modernity. The artist feels this connection as something inexplicable, mystical, like music, painting, creativity themselves.
