World Memory: Exhibition project “What is the war like?” opens in St. Petersburg
February 28 2011, the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House (St. Petersburg) is launching an exhibition project bearing the name “What is the war like?”
This project is dedicated to participants of the military confrontation between Finland and the USSR. In the Soviet Union the events which took place between 1939 and 1940 were called the Soviet-Finnish War, while the 1941–1944 campaign was considered to be a part of the Great Patriotic War against Germany and its allies. In Finland these events were given the names “Winter War” and “Continuation War”.
The highlight of the project is an exhibition called “Veterans. What is the war like?”. The exhibition brought by the Serlachius Museum from the town of Mänttä (Finland) has been recognized by the Russian and international experts as one of the best exhibition projects about the war.
The exhibition which has been designed as a total installation comes as a surprise both for Russian and European public. A created space has nothing to do with a traditional museum exposition. There are neither labels nor showcases. Visitor finds himself in an ordinary Finnish house, whose owners are a married couple – heroes of the project – Toivo and Lyyli – a generalized image of veterans which is based on recollections and first-hand accounts of veterans living in this small Finnish town, located 90 km away from Tampere.
The exhibition uses state-of-the-art media resources, and all components of this complex video and audio installation are called to visualize those fears, pain, hopes and disappointments the participants of those events had to face.
Each fragment of the exposition has been accompanied by voices of veterans, who share what was it like to fight and kill, be wounded and see your friends dying.
An emotional climax of the exhibition is created by unique materials – undelivered letters addressed to Soviet soldiers from their kith and kin, which were discovered by the Finnish on the site where the Russian division had been destroyed. It was long ago in the 1970s that Finish veterans translated these letters from the Russian language to Finnish, and later donated them to the museum as a sign of reconciliation.
The fact that this exposition has been put on show at the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House is not a pure coincidence. It was right here in this flat that Anna Akhmatova learnt that the World War II broke out. Within the project the memorial flat will add another dimension portraying “a tragic background of life” of Anna Akhmatova and her contemporaries who survived the war. The flat will showcase items of the pre-war and war life of Leningrad residents – a gas mask, instructions for anti-gas protection, while the radio in the shared kitchen will broadcast reportages from the Soviet-Finnish frontline.
The exhibition will also feature video recorded accounts of Russian veterans, “the lessons of history” intended for senior pupils and seminars for museum specialists and students.