There is a chance about our honor!

Museum projects in Russian regions: from idea to implementation

Few people will be enthusiastic about Russia's state policy regarding museum life. Even regarding the heatedly discussed problem of “museum and church” today, the official authorities (the same Ministry of Culture) prefer to remain silent and do not show a clear position. All more or less interesting projects in the field of culture (including biennales and large exhibitions) are financed with sponsorship money. At best, the state helps museums survive, but not live a full, interesting life.

In this regard, the work of private foundations that support innovative museum projects is of great importance. Alternative or additional government museum design programs are a chance to create, overcoming the typical racial routine. The main thing is to take advantage of this chance. One of the best examples is the activities of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation, carried out in several areas of museum design. The first is the organization of the “Changing Museum in a Changing World” competition. The competition allows you to monitor and encourage non-trivial ideas for organizing museum affairs, as well as step by step (with the help of the expert community, inviting museum employees from different cities and regions of Russia to communicate in seminars) to lead successful topics to a full-fledged result. The second direction is grant support for the illustrious professional community - employees of the State Hermitage. Finally, the third direction is the implementation of the “First Publication” publishing program, as a result of which unique topics in cultural history are identified. Their research (the result of which is a large book) is accompanied by parallel programs, including exhibitions.

Recently I had the opportunity to get acquainted in detail with two areas of the foundation’s activities: “A Changing Museum in a Changing World” and “First Publication”.

At the end of May, the award ceremony for the winners of the VII competition “Changing Museum in a Changing World” took place in the Pushkin Nature Reserve in the Pskov Region. On June 4, as part of the “First Publication” program, an expedition took place to the Kenozersky National Park, where in the St. Nicholas Chapel of the village of Ust-Pocha the “heaven” restored at the Academician Grabar Center was installed - painted lampshades of the last quarter of the 19th century. Both expeditions helped to correct the prevailing idea among the capital’s residents that the museum in the provinces is a sleepy kingdom.

Let's start in order. The winners of the grant competition “A Changing Museum in a Changing World” were twenty-two projects, conceived in museums of various profiles, located from Krasnodar to Vladivostok. The most creatively active and professionally successful region is Udmurtia. In the foundation's competition, Udmurtia museums win a record number of times, a dozen. This year, the Udmurts were the only winners in the “Author” nomination with the projects “Druzhina” (about the professional culture and ethics of archaeological excavations) and “New Wave” (a study of the state of the museum network in Udmurtia in order to consolidate the museum community of the republic).

In terms of the total number of winners, the category “Museum Exhibition Technologies” is in the lead. The nine selected projects promise to reformat the retrograde museum image according to today’s fashionable principles of interactivity and multimedia. The members of the jury and the expert council place particular hopes on the project “Museum on Roller Skates”, compiled by Olga Tyukavkina, an employee of the Nakhodka Museum and Exhibition Center. The project is addressed primarily to children. They will be able to cut through the museum space on roller skates and playfully study the history of the wheel in human culture from Egypt, antiquity to the inventions of Leonardo and to modern high technologies.

The outsiders included the nomination “Partnership museum projects” (only one project was selected, with the characteristic title “Inherited!”, from the Primorsky Museum named after V. Arsenyev; it is dedicated to the places where Chekhov stayed in Vladivostok) and the nomination “Museum and Tourism Technologies” (again the name of Chekhov became a salvation; the Melikhovo Museum, which won in it with the project “Melikhovo (stop on demand)”, proposes to create a new tourist route in the Chekhov district of the Moscow region). In principle, the resulting alignment with nominations is clear. It is much more tempting today to come up with swashbuckling museum attractions in the name of quick, spectacular returns than to painstakingly repair broken connections with public institutions, administrations of various calibers and museum partners.

Here's another fly in the ointment. The “Changing Museum” competition is being held for the seventh time. Let's be honest, not all winners implement projects worthy of their own applications. Moreover, there are only a few truly well-executed programs. By the way, they are encouraged at the finals of the award ceremony for the winners of the competition. This year there are four best implemented projects: “Museum of Kolomna marshmallow”, “Come to our light” - a Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk) program of creative workshops for older people, “Bright childhood” - a program of the “Lights of Moscow” museum for working with children with intellectual disabilities, “Museum Mail” is a project of the Mikhailovskoye Museum-Reserve for the rehabilitation of the culture of writing and the epistolary genre.

It is quite logical that the parting words of this year’s winners from Natalia Samoilenko, Deputy General Director of the V. Potanin Foundation, and Alexey Lebedev, Chairman of the Expert Council of the competition, were: “You have won. So the hardest part is ahead of you.”

No way, we are scribblers!

Who will forget Kharms’s legendary anecdote about Zhukovsky and Pushkin and the exclamation that became (according to Kharms) the reason for the mutual love of the two geniuses of Russian poetry? Jokes aside, the project dedicated to the culture of writing in the genre of mail “Museum Mail” (directed by Tatyana Yeshina) is seriously significant in the matter of new communication between the museum and the viewer. The project became the winner in 2008. Today, in the village of Bugrovo of the Pushkin Nature Reserve, not far from the operating mill, an amazing post office has been opened. It resembles a small cabinet of curiosities: an old interior, tables with crystal inkwells, feathers, daguerreotypes in the windows, intricate postage stamps, paper samples... A friendly lady in the clothes of a 19th century postal worker invites each visitor to write a letter in the old style, guided by examples of epistolary genre of the Golden Alexander Age. Then a letter with a special cancellation of the reserve and a local stamp can be sent anywhere in the world (partner of the FSUE Russian Post project). This attractive part of the project has an equally important continuation. The Museum Mail program turned out to be extremely communicative and creatively active. In 2009 (the year of the 210th anniversary of A.S. Pushkin), Mikhailovskoye organized an All-Russian competition for the best letter addressed to the poet and his friends. High school students from different cities sometimes demonstrated miracles of epistolary culture. Suffice it to say that the winner, a ninth-grader from Pyatigorsk Vladislav Tantsura, having written a message to Pushkin under the pseudonym of the provincial Pyatigorsk writer Vladimir Makeev, so accurately described the real context of Pushkin’s biography, including the visit to Pyatigorsk, and so fell into the writing style of the era that the jury members were puzzled a real search for Makeev’s name in academic reference books on Pushkin studies.

In Mikhailovsky itself, the exhibition is built on a principle similar to the depiction of Pushkin’s fate in Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s cartoons: life is woven into lines and stanzas of noisy, rustling texts. From them both the image of the poet and the realities of the time are drawn. Even stands with copies of Pushkin’s letters and drawings install the space of the recreated Pushkin house as a kind of hypertext.

The museum workers of Pushkinogorye are also able to connect everyone with a kind word thanks to the “Letters of Gratitude... to everyone you care about” campaign. Museum of Communications named after. A.S. Popova in St. Petersburg collected letters to mentors and teachers, invented before the last bell in schools in St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Pskov regions, and Pushkinogorye. This is an homage to Pushkin’s poems, created in the year of the Lyceum anniversary: ​​“To the mentors who guarded our youth, // With honor to all, both dead and living, // Raising a grateful cup to our lips, // Without remembering evil, we will repay for good.” There were more than two thousand messages. They were brought to Mikhailovskoye. On June 5, at the All-Russian Pushkin Festival, they were loaded onto a hot air balloon and sent in a balloon basket by balloon mail.

So, the space of the Mikhailovskoye Nature Reserve was largely bound by the power of words. A good experience in identifying the “genius loci” of Pushkin Mountains!

Heaven projection

Today it is customary to talk a lot and viscously about the compatibility of the Church and the Museum, about which of them is more important and what needs to be placed under protectorate in the first place. The natural national park Kenozerye, located in the southwest of the Arkhangelsk region, solves this problem calmly and successfully, as witnessed by the participants of the second expedition of the V. Potanin Foundation, dedicated to the completion of the project “Heaven and the surroundings of Kenozerye”, which took place within the framework of the “First Publication” program.

Unlike the “Changing Museum in a Changing World” program, “First Publication” is aimed at creating conditions for a multi-level study of a large-scale museum problem. According to program director Irina Ostarkova, “the book is the center of the plot.” A tome book with publications of images of all the surviving chapels and paintings of Kenozerye, which became a work of printing art (by artist Evgeny Korneev), was published in the winter. At the same time, at the Scientific and Restoration Center named after Academician I.E. Grabar opened a large-scale exhibition of works of sacred art of Kenozerie introduced into scientific circulation, including icons, worship crosses, utensils and a wonder of the world - painted ceilings of chapels, assembled from wooden radial edges in the shape of a flat pyramid (see "Vremya Novostey" on February 3 ) . The exhibition testified that the project has turned into a truly global study, in which various participants are involved, including the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation and a private foundation - the Humanitarian Project of Ivan Polyakov, which supported the restoration of the “heaven” of the St. Nicholas Chapel in the village of Ust- Pocha, who during the current expedition returned to their “heavenly” place in the temple interior.

An academic presentation of the project took place in Moscow. To understand the specifics of the unique Kenozero museum without the usual museum paraphernalia, it was necessary to travel near Arkhangelsk. The area of ​​the national park is about 140 hectares. What do we see upon arrival? The magical beauty of Kenozero, which embraces the entire space with its water area, whimsically arranging the territory with the help of lakhta bays. On land there are forests and groves. The terrain is rugged, each landscape is the theme of a new pictorial masterpiece. We also see villages that sometimes cannot be reached by land. In the red place there is a chapel with a ploughshare-covered dome and a belfry tower. Above the lake and the villages there was a fantastic sky, every half hour, obeying the whims of the cyclones, it presented us with an unprecedented and indescribable light extravaganza. The landscapes lived in continuous sparkle. Pillars of light cut through the black-velvet clouds, the sun gilding the foliage was unexpectedly replaced by downpour and hail, at the end of which the consolation was a double rainbow that hooked the entire lake horizon with a yoke. Actually, this incomparable Kenozero sky was supposedly projected onto the sacred painted “heaven” with Christ, the Mother of God, angels and saints in the lake chapels. Chapels, like nature, villages, and the sky, are part of the museum. However, this is a museum outside the usual museum context. The chapels serve as houses of worship. They are opened to local residents and travelers by guardians living in nearby villages. In most cases, the age is respectable. Each chapel has its own keeper. One of the oldest is the earthly custodian of the St. Nicholas Chapel in the large village of Vershinino, Pelageya Nikolaevna Nozhkina, daughter of Nikolai Filippovich Nozhkin, the last resident of the village who did not survive the removal of the St. Nicholas Chapel he kept on Mamonov Island to the Malye Korely reserve in the 1970s. Continuity of custodians is a problem today. However, there are devotees. Among them is a young resident of the village of Ust-Pocha and an employee of the Kenozero park, Marina Guseva, who gave us the name of an original painter - the author of several “heaven” Kenozero chapels of the late 19th century, Fyodor Zakharov Ioka. As the keeper of the chapel of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Ust-Pocha, Marina Guseva discovered the name of the master on one of the edges of the tent sky. It is this “sky” that has now been returned after restoration.

In addition to the “heaven”, there are iconostases inside the chapels. In very modest chapels there are individual icons on the table. And be sure to have covenants - homespun towels, scarves, belts with embroidered images of saints or a cross. These offerings are placed next to the icons as a sign of prayer and gratitude. Several times a year (usually on a chapel holiday - the day of remembrance of the saint to whom the chapel is dedicated) divine services with a priest are provided in the chapels.

Actually, to preserve, restore and educate - these are, perhaps, the three main concepts that are considered specifically “museum” work in Kenozerye. No other museumification is required here. The chapels were built by the world of northern peasants who did not know state and landlord oppression, and this life still does not tolerate any nomenklatura. At the end of the trip, we were shown the huge temple ensemble of the Pochezersky parish of the village of Filippovskaya. It consists of several churches and a bell tower, connected by passages. Director of the Kenozersky National Park Elena Shatkovskaya believes that upon completion of the restoration, a museum exhibition dedicated to the history of the ensemble can be made in the passages, and the churches are intended for worship. No contradictions. Just as there is no contradiction in the fact that the restored “heaven” of Ust-Pocha came home, and did not settle in the archives of the center of Grabar, where they, albeit in more perfect conditions, would lie in storage rooms turned to the walls “until better times.” When there was a celebration of the return and consecration of the Ust-Pochin skies, the entire peasant world gathered, both old and young (entire classes of children came from neighboring villages). And at the moment of consecration, many had tears in their eyes. It's so true.

Sergey KHACHATUROV, Pushkinogorye - Bugrovo - Mikhailovskoye - Plesetsk - Kenozerye - Vershinino - Ust-Pocha - Moscow