Only Roerich can be better than the mountains
In Moscow, at the Roerich Museum, the exhibition “The Mountains are Calling” was opened, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Russian mountaineering.

There are too many legends and too many feats in mountaineering for it to become material for art. There is an excess of real dramas and no free air in which the artist’s imagination could build its designs. Thinking about a possible plot, you instantly come across a kind of deja vu: all this has already happened in life, but it’s only harsher and more complex. And even the famous film "Vertical", for all its cult status, contains a bit too much cranberries.
The exhibition “The Mountains Are Calling” presents laconic, like the story of an old climber, testimonies of those who actually were there and saw it all. Strictly speaking, the first Russian climber was Tsar Peter the Great, who, traveling in Germany in his youth, climbed the famous Brocken Mountain in the Harz on a dare and spent the night there, lighting a fire and either scaring away or luring local witches. Less anecdotal mountaineering began to develop thanks to the efforts of Russian geographers and topographers, and then aristocrats who were passionate about the sport that was becoming fashionable.
In the 30s, mountaineering began to acquire a mass, Osoaviakhim, so to speak, character - however, the highest achievements are associated with the ascents of People's Commissar of Justice Krylenko and Academician Gorbunov in the Pamirs and Tien Shan. However, in the exhibition described, history is presented in dotted lines. The main thing in the exhibition are paintings and photographs taken during the heyday of Soviet mountaineering, in the 50s and 60s. This is, for the most part, amateur creativity, and it is incorrect to judge its professional merits. But the exhibition has a non-trivial philosophical meaning.
The fact is that the mountains really are calling. Mountain climbing is difficult to explain logically; This activity is all the more attractive because it is completely irrational. Most of the climbers in the Soviet Union were intellectuals and technicians - the strongest schools of mountaineering were in Moscow at the Bauman School and in Leningrad engineering universities. And mountaineering can be considered a certain poetic outlet in the lifestyle that was characteristic of this segment of the population. The ascent can be interpreted as an ascetic happening, the authenticity of which is given by mortal risk. Theoretical physicists and rocket designers, distracted from their work for the benefit of world communism and the Soviet military-industrial complex, used extreme activities to find out for themselves the limits of human capabilities, primarily moral ones. Mountaineering, in its classic Soviet form, is not physical education, but a search for God, an interrogation of the soul about the world. And in this sense, the address for the exhibition - the Roerich Museum - was chosen surprisingly correctly.

MIKHAIL Kommersant-NOVIKOV

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 6 dated January 20, 2000, page 9

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