Creative space 'Word Catchers'

About museum

The State Literary Museum '20th Century', with the support of the Committee for Culture of Saint Petersburg, has opened a new exhibition venue. The museum occupies an area of about 500 sq. m on the second floor of the Grand Gostiny Dvor.

The new space was symbolically opened in the museum's 30th anniversary year; the museum began its history with the memorial apartment of the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko. The new exhibition of the Literary Museum '20th Century' covers the period of the formation of Russian/Soviet literature in the first third of the 20th century in Petersburg–Petrograd–Leningrad.

At the heart of the creative territory is the museum exhibition 'Word Catchers', which presents the names of famous 20th-century writers whose work is connected to the artistic culture of Petersburg. The exhibition's protagonists include Leonid Andreyev, Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Yevgeny Schwartz, Alexander Grin and Samuil Marshak, Maxim Gorky and Daniil Kharms, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (Teffi), Nikolai Zabolotsky and Velimir Khlebnikov.

Also located here is a permanent literary exhibition timed to the 120th anniversary of the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky. It is based on the story of Zabolotsky's life in the Writers' House on the Griboedov Canal, house 9, as well as on the plot of the memoir essay 'The Story of My Imprisonment', published in Russia in 1988. Little-known pages of the author's biography and personal items that belonged to the poet from the collections of the Literary Museum '20th Century' are on display.