ST. PETERSBURG — An elderly woman, trudging slowly up and down the dilapidated stairwell of a once-magnificent mansion, is the only remaining obstacle to the creation of this city’s newest literary museum. If the friends and admirers of the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky can find a way to buy the small space she still rents in what was once a communal flat within the palatial building, they hope to open a museum that will honor the writer who was forced out of the Soviet Union in 1972 and died in 1996 in New York City.
A Brodsky museum would join dozens of other small apartments, flats and houses that perpetuate the memory of St. Petersburg’s cultural luminaries, including Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Nabokov and Rimsky-Korsakov. For now, it remains in limbo, a few small rooms, rich in ornament and detail but hauntingly empty, awaiting resurrection as a site for the enviable yet disconcerting hero worship that Russians accord their favorite artists.
(Mikhail Panov) - Fyodor Dostoevsky by Mikhail Panov, taken on June 9, 1880 in Moscow.
Apartment museums are scattered across this city of canals and pastel-colored palaces, and there is persistent agitation to create more of them. Desperate to protect a historic structure that once housed an apartment used by the poet and author Mikhail Lermontov’s grandmother, activists in May agitated for a new Lermontov museum. Before former National Symphony Orchestra Director Mstislav Rostropovich died in 2007, he bought up rooms that were once lived in by the young Dmtiri Shostakovich. With his wife, the legendary soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Rostropovich created a Shostakovich museum, and tried to give it to the city of St. Petersburg. There is also a Modest Mussorgsky flat, filled with period furniture and memorabilia, also created by Rostropovich, which may someday be a museum.
Although these museums are mostly notional, they speak to the passion for memorialization in Russian society in which culture is often felt as a loss, artists as martyrs, literature as a living trauma. Unlike in the United States, where house museums struggle to find a niche in the cultural economy, the old-fashioned, low-tech, old-guard house or apartment museum is alive and well in this city of poets, painters and musicians. It serves many functions: a way to preserve old architecture, a reaction against vulgar commercial elites and the Putinization of Russia, and a bulwark against cultural amnesia. But the Russian house museum is also a shrine, and while many cultures create shrines to their icons, the small Russian museum has its own peculiar flavor and passion.
In the beginning, there was the Pushkin apartment, commemorating the brilliant poet who clashed with the czar, wrote masterpieces such as “Eugene Onegin” and “Boris Godunov,” and died at 37 in a shabby 1837 duel. Located near the city’s elegant central boulevard, the Nevsky Prospekt, the Pushkin apartment is one of almost 300 Pushkin memorials small and large (from modest plaques to full-sized estates) in Russia, according to a 1993 census. It is also a venerable prototype for many of St. Petersburg’s smaller, lesser-known apartment museums. Its layout, the dramatic spectacle of life and death it presents to the visitor, helped establish the basic Stations of the Cross for literary museum worship in St. Petersburg.
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