HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 177

The Hermitage Royal Museum, ca. 1900 (Library of Congress)

major works from Raphael, Rembrandt, Van
Dyck, Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo, Caravaggio,
and Rubens. The addition of the Schukin and
Morozov collections brought major impression-
ist and postimpressionist paintings by artists such
as Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and
Picasso to the museum. Karl FABERGÉ 's golden
eggs are also part of the museum's collections.
The museum also holds a special collection of
jewelry, ancient gold artifacts, as well as Russian
art. Dependent on Soviet-era cultural subsidies
that paid for growing additions to the collections,
many of which lay in package crates in the
museum's basements for lack of room to display,
the museum faced difficult financial choices in
the post-Soviet period. Recent agreements, espe-
cially with the Guggenheim Museum of New

York, to display parts of its collections in the var-
ious museum annexes that have sprouted in the
last decade are helping the museum to regain its
financial footing.

Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich
(1812-1870)
revolutionary theorist
Long considered the “father of Russian social-
ism,” Aleksandr Herzen was the illegitimate son
of a wealthy nobleman who left him a large for-
tune that supported his writing and journalistic
activities. Born in Moscow, Herzen was strongly
influenced by the example of the DECEMBRISTS ,
swearing with his young friend the poet Nikolai
Ogarev, to rid Russia of tyranny. He attended