“We are trying to reimburse Chaliapin for what he had to suffer,” says museum director Zinaida Getman.
Across the Neva River, in a dense and shabbier part of town, the Dostoevsky apartment contains a theater and an exhibition space devoted to the author’s life and literary accomplishments — part of an effort to make the museum a cultural center with relevance to young audiences. Like many apartment museums, the exhibition isn’t so much about genuine artifacts connected to the author — the museum’s director, Vera Biron, laments that “we don’t have many original items” — but serves as a set of prompts to the guided tour. Labels in English give little context for what’s on display — photographs, reproductions of important documents, a copy of the death mask. Instead, guides walk the visitor through a polished recitation of the author’s career, his arrest, the infamous fake execution he survived before exile, his travels in Europe and his literary success. The objects are used more like illustrations in a text rather than genuine treasures.
(Mikhail Panov) - Fyodor Dostoevsky by Mikhail Panov, taken on June 9, 1880 in Moscow.
But death returns as the focus when visitors encounter the author’s study, with its orderly desk, small bookcase, an icon in the corner by the window and a large table clock, with its hands stopped at the hour of Dostoevsky’s death.
Although many of the small apartment museums in Russia seem perpetually empty, Biron has struggled to make the Dostoevsky apartment a center for the perpetual and perfervid enthusiasm for the author that animates Russians. But she is frustrated by insufficient funding, a theater in disrepair and the occasional leak from nearby apartments — a hazard common to many museums in buildings that are still primarily residential.
“Drunkards live in the house,” says one Dostoevsky museum curator. There’s something apt about the fact that the museum shares space in a building still inhabited by the flawed humanity that the author wrote about, and the view from a corner window takes in both a sex shop and a church. But like many apartment museums in St. Petersburg, the Dostoevsky museum suffers from being a part of the residential landscape.
That is the main obstacle to opening the Shostakovich museum, according to Larisa Chirkova, who manages the space. The museum was conceived by Rostropovich to honor his friend and the Soviet Union’s greatest composer, who wrote two concertos for the gifted cellist who once was a fixture in Washington. In 2002, Rostropovich heard that the communal residents of the apartment in which Shostakovich lived as a young man might be willing to sell. After long negotiations, he managed to acquire all but two bedrooms, the kitchen and some service space, which remain in private hands. The apartment is filled with memorabilia, reproductions of musical manuscripts, a piano and a reproduction of a 1936 newspaper article, “Muddle Instead of Music,” which opened Stalin’s devastating attack on Shostakovich’s modernist musical inclinations.
But despite an effort in 2006 to transfer ownership of the apartment to the city of St. Petersburg and open it to the public, new regulations that would require it to have an entrance separate from the residential spaces have stalled the process.
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