Michael Makin

1
Michael MakinSecular Pilgrimage in the New
Russia the Life and Meaning of the Literary
Museum

• PCA Annual Conference,San Antonio, Texas,8
  April 2004

2
Writers and Landscape coffee table themes for
the UK

• Thames andHudson, 1979
• Chapters include Sacred Places and Landscape
  as Art
• The publisher produced an equivalent for Ireland

3
Dove Cottage

• Cultural shrine for the whole family

4
Circuit Ronsard (Guide vert Châteaux de la
Loire)
5
The Dostoevsky Museum in Petersburg

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

6
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.
7
The question of memorialization, like the
question of memory, is a pressing and complex one
for contemporary Russia
Klyuev left the area for good in the early 1920s.
He was executed in Siberia in 1937. His burial
place is unknown.
Various forms of memorialization in Klyuevs
petit pays, where an annual symposium is devoted
to him.
8
The Klyuev museum contains various artifacts once
owned by the poet
9
Among the poets belongings on display is his
traveling samovar
10
Autograph in the Klyuev Museum, Vytegra

• ??????? ??????? ? ?????????? ????? ? ?????????
  ???????. ????? 1923
• To Mikhail Ruchev with best wishes for spring
  and a raspberry youthN. Klyuev 1923
• Note the highly stylised hand, and equally
  ornamental form of the inscription itself

11
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.
12
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.
13
Literary Museum professional/amateur

• A map of all of Klyuevs Petersburg addresses,
  displayed in his Vytegra museum the (meticulous)
  work of an amateur enthusiast.

14
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

15
Artifacts and their curators
That day, the curators outnumbered the visitors
to Klychkov
16
The Tsvetaeva museum at Bolshevo, outside of
Moscow

• At this house Tsvetaevas 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.

17
Memorialization and irony
Left montage outside the Bolshevo museum
above, street sign on (renamed) Tsvetaeva street,
with graffiti reading Metallica below
18
Some literary museums are major tourist
destinations
Above, Turgenev museum right above, Esenin
museum right, Tolstoi museum
19
But we should not forget the challenges of the
Russian road

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