The Garden of Geniuses: the Magnificent Seven - a new international project dedicated to the most renowned writers in the world, has opened in Leo Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana memorial estate south of Moscow.
The festival, to run until September 7 will later be held in seven countries within seven years.
As part of this project, which aims to promote classical literature and the literary heritage to a mass audience, the seven best known writers in the world, namely Leo Tolstoy, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Victor Hugo and James Joyce, will be represented in seven days in seven countries every year, each day devoted to one of these authors.
The centerpiece of this year's event is Leo Tolstoy - one of Russia's greatest writers and thinkers, whose centennial death anniversary will be marked in November. And also because the whole idea of the garden of Geniuses festival belongs to Vladimir Tolstoy, the great-great-grandson of the celebrated novelist and the director of the Yasnaya Polyana memorial estate.
Right now it's a European project highlighting the tried-and-true classics of world literature, Vladimir Tolstoy told the Voice of Russia. "It all began five years ago with the Shakespeare-Goethe-Tolstoy project which brought together Stratford-on-Avon, Weimar and Yasnaya Polyana... We've held a variety of joint exhibitions and educational programs, specialist exchanges and conferences - in a word, our trilateral format cooperation was going and then we decided bring in Cervantes museums in Spain, Dante's in Italy, as well as those of Victor Hugo in France and James Joyce in Ireland...
Narrator: The "Russian" program opened with the showing of Sergei Solovyov's Anna Karenina film based on Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name, and recitals of excerpts from his epic novel War and Peace. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Hugo and Joyce will also have their share of attention in the form of a stage performance of Don Quixote, an Irish experimental musical based on Joyce's Ulysses and an extensive display of illustrations by contemporary European and Russian artists.
The festival is a source of great inspiration for its participants, with the deputy curator of the Dante Museum in Rome, Enrico Malato, saying the Magnificent Seven could serve an enduring symbol of historical values of "our Western civilization".
It is very likely, however, that the Magnificent Seven may eventually become a Magnificent Ten or even 20 as the organizers consider bringing in new names...
Please rate: