Michael Makin“Secular Pilgrimage in the New Russia: the Life and Meaning of the Literary Museum”

PCA Annual Conference,San Antonio, Texas,

8 April 2004

Writers and Landscape – coffee table themes for the UK Thames and

Hudson, 1979 Chapters include

“Sacred Places” and “Landscape as Art”

The publisher produced an equivalent for Ireland

Dove Cottage

Cultural shrine for the whole family

Circuit Ronsard (Guide vert – Châteaux de la

Loire)

The Dostoevsky Museum in Petersburg

Left, the desk at which the author died; right, copy of the author’s certificate of (first) marriage. That event is itself the object of an entire museum in Novokuznetsk (Kemerovo oblast’ ).

The Museum of Nikolai Klyuev, 1884-1937, is located in Vytegra, at the southern end of Lake Onega, present-day Vologda oblast’

Klyuev was born and grew up near the southern end of Lake Onega in northern Russia, in the area around the small town of Vytegra.

The question of memorialization, like the question of memory, is a pressing and complex one for contemporary Russia

Various forms of memorialization in Klyuev’s petit pays, where an annual symposium is devoted to him.

Klyuev left the area for good in the early 1920s. He was executed in Siberia in 1937. His burial place is unknown.

The Klyuev museum contains various artifacts once owned by

the poet

Among the poet’s belongings on display is his traveling samovar

Autograph in the Klyuev Museum, Vytegra

Михаилу Ручьеву с пожеланием весны и малиновой юностиН. Клюев 1923

To Mikhail Ruch’ev with best wishes for spring and a raspberry youthN. Klyuev 1923

Note the highly stylised hand, and equally ornamental form of the inscription itself

The local museum organizes the annual Klyuev symposium, attended by scholars from round the country and beyond. At

first, these events were politically difficult. Now they present financial challenges because of lack of funds.

Local publications have also been devoted to the poet. Some are for the visitor, some for the scholarly reader. The brochure prepared in the early 1980s for the very first Klyuev symposium (top right) was never distributed. The Museum Director, Tamara Makarova, was told to pulp it because the biographical note concluded with the line “his life broke off tragically in 1937”.

Literary Museum – professional/amateur

A map of all of Klyuev’s Petersburg addresses, displayed in his Vytegra museum; the (meticulous) work of an amateur enthusiast.

The Klychkov Museum, Taldom, Moscow oblast’

On a hot day in July 2002, the author of the paper was the only visitor to the house where the “new-peasant poet” Klychkov grew up

Artifacts and their curators

That day, the curators outnumbered the visitors to

Klychkov

The Tsvetaeva museum at Bol’shevo, outside of Moscow

At this house Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter were arrested in 1939. She never saw either again. Another Tsvetaeva museum is located in Elabuga, Tatarstan, where she committed suicide after her evacuation from Moscow in 1941.

Memorialization and irony

Left – montage outside the Bol’shevo museum; above, street sign on

(renamed) Tsvetaeva street, with graffiti reading “Metallica” below

Some literary museums are major tourist destinations…

Above, Turgenev museum; right above, Esenin museum; right,

Tolstoi museum

But we should not forget the challenges of the Russian road…

The road from Vytegra to Kargopol’ (Archangel oblast’ ), October, 2002