Exhibitions: Anna Akhmatova's Memorial Apartment and Joseph Brodsky. Still Life, with an audio guide

About exhibition

Visitors can take a tour of the Fountain House, visiting the museum's two exhibitions accompanied by an audio guide that immerses them in the atmosphere of a bygone era. The exhibition 'Anna Akhmatova's Memorial Apartment' tells of the Soviet period of Russian history, when members of the Silver Age intelligentsia had to preserve their world and their identity under a totalitarian state. The exhibition is divided into a memorial section, which restored the Punin–Akhmatova apartment to its 1920s–1940s appearance, and a literary section governed by a special logic — sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of eternity), following Akhmatova's poetic formula: 'I remember everything at the same time...'. The exhibition 'Joseph Brodsky. Still Life' tells the story of the life and work of the greatest Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century. Joseph Brodsky did not live in the Fountain House, yet the largest collection of his belongings was formed here. The exhibition includes several hundred items that made up the furnishings of Brodsky's apartments in Leningrad (the famous 'one-and-a-half rooms') and in the USA. The conceptual basis of the exhibition is the poem 'Still Life' (1971), in which the author formulated his attitude to the problems of posthumous existence ('non-being') and the material world (the objects surrounding him). Furniture, typewriters, clothing, keepsakes, and books are assembled into a huge still life that invites individual interpretation by the visitor.