Museums of Russia: "We will keep in mind these years... The Hermitage Chronicle of War and Victory" Exhibition in St. Petersburg

"We will keep in mind these years... The Hermitage chronicle of war and victory" exhibition, telling about the Museum’s life during the years of the Great Patriotic War, opened at the Hermitage Theatre’s foyer (State Hermitage, St. Petersburg).

A line from a poem by S. Y. Marshak "Let There be light", written in 1945, became a core for the name of the exhibition. The drawings, photographs and documents (160 items total) tell about the early days of the war and the museum’s evacuation, the employees’ life in Leningrad and Sverdlovsk, their daily work in order to preserve the Hermitage collection, about scientific, lecturing and exposition work and about a returning the collections home after the victory and the State Hermitage’s reopening.

At the cold abandoned museum the scientific meetings and exhibitions were held, the scientific works were going on and a library kept working.

How the museum used to live in the besieged Leningrad can be seen through the works of the artists A.V. Kaplun, V. Kuchumov and S. Mikhailov. The drawings of an artist V. V. Milyutina, who daily went to the Hermitage from the Vyborg Side, with the bags of sand on the floor and with broken glass, reconstruct the scene of deserted halls.

Impressive evidence of the military life of the Hermitage are at the pictures that were taken by Komsomolskaya Pravda’s photojournalist B. P. Kudoyarov — "The Hermitage’s Pavilion Hall," "The Hermitage Staff Employees are On-duty on the Winter Palace’s Roof", and others.

The personal belongings of the Hermitage fellows are the items of great interest, as well as construction, utility and restoration tools that were used during the war and on restoring of the museum. They were found in attic and basement floors of the museum building during the restoration work.

A number of exhibits of the museum tell about the life in the evacuation. Research works by the Hermitage members, as well as the pieces of art and the books that were received between 1942-1944 and have become a part of the museum's collection, are an integral part of the exhibition.

The vast majority of the damaged pieces of culture and art in the postwar years had been restored. But several exhibits still keep wounds received during the Great Patriotic War. Among them, the sculpture "La Esmeralda" by the Italian sculptor Antonio Rossetti, a marble vase, created by an unknown Italian master of the XVIII century, and others. The monuments and fragments of building structures of the museum halls that were damaged in bombardments are being shown for the first time.

Included in the final section of the exhibition photographs, documents, books tell viewers about the long-awaited victory, the returning collections to home and the opening of the Hermitage.