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By DIANA BIRD
Rappahannock Newg Contributing Writer
In a churchyard in Irkutsk we saw graves of some of the Decembrist exiles and the monument to Grigori I -anovich Shelikhov, fur trader, adventurer and explorer who claimed Alaska for Russia in 1784. Near the church we attended a splendid concert in the house built Jtv' Prince Volkonskii in the 1830’s where his self-exiled wife and friends lived when they were all in Siberia. Sergie Volkonskii was implicated in the Decembrist attempt on the part of a group of aristocraticmilitary officers to unseat Tsar Nicholas I. His wife. Princess Maria, left a newborn son to follow him to Siberia where she was allowed to visit him periodically while he was imprisoned.
She and her fellow exiled friends brought their love of music and the arts to the frontier. The building was a wooden log house, roomy and tw'o stories tall with two halls on the second floor, one of which accommodated our party of nearly 100. An accomplished opera soprano, accompanied by a pianist and chamber group, sang a Verdi aria, and we listened to music, both vocal and instrumental by Mozart, Schubert, Glinka and other composers we were assured Maria Volkonskia admired.
On other occasions we were treated to folk music and dancing. I was moved to hear the classical works under the circumstances created for us, especially because of the struggles the Siberians are undergoing today to keep their society toi gether and their precarious livelihoods from sinking into poverty. I thought the performers were fortifying themselves with the heroism of those courageous men and women who 175 years before had endured the isolation and privations of Irkutsk long before there was a Trans-Siberian railway.
Since returning home I have heard from a visiting Russian ballet dancer that the arts are suffering from diminished government support and the depression. Theaters are threatened as are the prospects
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