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People and events:
becomes
music," Lermontov's contemporary, critic Vissarion Belinsky, wrote
about his legacy. Life was hard on him from the very first days: the death
of his mother, a forced separation from his father, weak health, complicated
relations with surrounding people. A man of contradictory nature: clever
and bitterly sarcastic, unsociable, conflicting and intolerable. A born
rebel, he hated the existing order and was obsessed with ideals of freedom
and justice. "The Death of a Poet", a verse that was Lermontov's
response to the death of the great Alexander Pushkin, won him an exile
to the Caucasus where, like Pushkin, he was killed in a duel at the age
of 26. Despite his premature death, he left behind a novel (The Hero of
Our Time), some 20 poems, about 400 verses, and several dramas… Lermontov
was grown up by his grandmother, a woman of a noble descent, at a family
estate at Tarkhany not far from Penza in central Russia. The beautiful
romance "I Am On My Lonely Way" composed to one of Lermontov's
verses by Yelizaveta Shashina, a great admirer of his talent, has had an
amazingly long life with some even regarding it as a folk song. Poet and
musician Nikolai Ogarev once remarked that Lermontov's verses are very
melodious, each of them being either a song or a symphony depending on
its size. Lermontov, too, felt the musicality of his lines and once joked
"I should write scores above the words". And he even composed
music to his "Cossack Lullaby", but regrettably, it was never
put into scores and hasn't survived. The well-known Russian singer, Metropolitan
Opera soloist, and a great lover of Lermontov's poetry, Vladimir Chernov,
has recently recorded a new CD called "Poetry in Music. Russian Classics",
which contains romances to lyrics by Lermontov. One of Lermontov's best
known verses, "The White Lonely Sail", which came to symbolize
a romantic-minded, rebellious and lonely hero, inspired Alexander Varlamov
to write music miniature that is still very popular today. So many of Lermontov's
verses gave rise to veritable music masterpieces. Not all of them were
published during the poet's lifetime. His poem "Demon" pierced
by freedom-loving sentiments was censured and banned for publishing. Yet,
it inspired composer Anton Rubinshtein to write an opera of the same title
(one of the latest versions is currently on at Moscow's Novaya Opera Theatre),
while painter Mikhail Vrubel, deeply impressed by the poem, created a whole
gallery of Demons. Sergey Rakhmaninov wrote a symphonic poem to Lermontov's
verse "Cliff", which was very much approved by Pyotr Tchaikovsky
who, enchanted by it, composed a choral miniature to the same verse. 
125th
birth anniversary of his wife Yelena Roerich, and the birth centennial
of their son - Svyatoslav Roerich. "People like the Roerichs are a
clot of thought, art, culture, and philosophy," said orientalist and
academician Yevgeny Primakov. "May be there hasn't been any such family
anywhere before. Speaking about philosophy, it can be described in terms
of harmony: harmony between man and nature, between Russia and India, between
the West and the East, between various confessions, religions and philosophies,
and finally, the Unity of the World." The Moscow International Roerich
Center, one of the organizers of the jubilee ceremonies, launched an exhibition
of lesser-known paintings by Nikolai Roerich, created in the 1930s, among
them "The Easter Procession", "The Birth of Mysteries",
"Buddha the Victor", as well as portraits from the "Saints"
series, all of them painted in the Kulu valley in India, where the Roerichs
settled in 1928. Some 200 
works
by Nikolai Roerich from both the Russian and Indian periods went on display
at the Moscow Museum of Oriental Art as part of the Power of Light exhibition.
There is no full catalog of his art legacy, which totals about 7 thousand
canvases. Another exhibition of his works is under way at the Roerichs'
Memorial Museum "Izvara" near St. Petersburg with more than 60
paintings on display. The Italian followers of Yelena Roerich's teaching
"Living Ethics" presented a research, "The Planetary Significance
of the Roerichs", at an international conference in the Moscow-based
Roerich Center. The center has put on an exhibition of late works by Svyatoslav
Roerich, "the other worlds" as he himself called them. They are
very bright and optimistic. "Let's hope that the clouds 
hanging
over the world will dissipate, that kindness will triumph, that the dark
forces obscuring the horizon will be washed away by kind thoughts,"
Svyatoslav Roerich said, opening his exhibition in Moscow back in 1987.
"We must believe in the power of thought, that thought creates everything.
That's why we will send kind thoughts to the whole mankind, and they will
help create a screen in which mankind will see its future." 
