Vitebsk

The painting came to mind before I consciously remembered it. I was standing on the hill above the Western Dvina River, looking out over Vitebsk’s spread of wooden houses and church domes on a pale summer morning, and something about the light — diffuse, northern, slightly out of focus at the edges — made the scene feel familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately place. Then I remembered: Over Vitebsk. Chagall’s lover flying above his hometown, the city recognisable beneath her, the green and the blue and the grey. He painted it from memory after leaving for Paris, and the memory was accurate. The city does have that quality — something hovering, slightly untethered from the ordinary laws of matter.

Marc Chagall was born here in 1887 and left for good in his early twenties, but Vitebsk refused to let him go. The Chagall House-Museum — the modest timber house in the lower city where he was born and raised — is a careful reconstruction (the original was destroyed in the war) that manages to evoke the life of the Jewish Vitebsk he remembered rather than the Soviet city that replaced it. His bedroom, the cramped kitchen, the yard that appears in several paintings: these spaces are small and specific and explain something about the scale of his canvases, how the intimate domestic scene opens into the cosmological. The associated art museum nearby holds not originals but very good reproductions and lithographs, and an excellent exhibition on his relationship with the city and its legacy.

Vitebsk has a second and less-advertised distinction: it is a significant city in the history of the Russian avant-garde. After the revolution, Chagall returned to found an art school here, and when he left — with characteristic difficulty — he was replaced as director by Kazimir Malevich, who turned the school into a hotbed of Suprematist theory. El Lissitzky came to teach; the walls of the city were painted with geometric propaganda murals that have since been lost. A small exhibition at the art museum covers this period, and walking through Vitebsk afterwards with that knowledge gives the city a different kind of depth — layers of radical modernism buried under the Stalinist reconstruction.

The city itself is pleasant in a provincial Belarusian way — wide central streets, a handful of nineteenth-century buildings, good parks along the river, a lively covered market that smells of smoked fish and dill and fresh bread. Every July it hosts the Slavyansky Bazaar, an enormous post-Soviet pop music festival that fills the city and the outdoor amphitheatre by the river with crowds from across the former Soviet states. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, come in July. If not — come in May or September and have the river embankment largely to yourself.

When to go: May and September offer Vitebsk without the festival crowds and with the best light on the river. July brings the Slavyansky Bazaar — an experience unlike anything else in the country if you want to understand post-Soviet popular culture in concentrated, exuberant form.