l Vasil’evich Lomonosov. The bright blue and white painted façade is peeling and the building is time-worn, having seen numerous episodes of decline and restoration in its three-hundred year history. In its original form, the Kunstkamera was a remarkable scientific building, composed of extensive natural history collections housed in the west wing and a very fine library in the east. The central tower included an anatomy theatre, an elegant meeting room for the academicians, and Delisle’s multi-tiered astronomical observatory. Grand public dissections of elephants and other large fauna took place before fascinated audiences inside the anatomy theatre. The space of the anatomy theatre now houses various objects from Peter the Great’s peculiar collections, including teeth drawn by the Tsar himself and the famous monstrous births preserved and decorated by the Dutch anatomist Friedrich Ruysch. Originally intended to stand as momento mori and persuade superstitious Muscovites of the natural causes behind human deformities, the Ruysch exhibits now equally astonish and disconcert tourists and visitors who still come from far and wide to see them. The Kunstkamera is also home to some ageing but fascinating anthropological exhibits. Dummies dressed in ethnic costumes stand in the galleries above the anatomy theatre and look down on Peter’s monsters. Cabinets filled with costumes and utensils of nations from around the world populate a long series of dimly-lit halls. In a city focused on Europe these exhibits remind you of the incredible diversity of peoples and cultures which make up the Eurasian continent. Above the anatomy theatre, in the observatory, you can glimpse another world in one of Peter’s wonders, the Great Globe of Gottorp, a three-meter wide celestial globe, originally given to Peter as a present in 1717. It’s so big that Peter used to entertain diplomats and guests inside it, seating them on a circular bench around a table, as the heavens turned about their heads. Burnt in a fire and restored by the Soviets, the globe still impresses. Finally, in the heart of the Kunstkamera lies the Lomonosov museum, established in 1949 and dedicated to the first Russian to practice modern science, as professor of chemistry at the Academy of Sciences from 1745 until his death twenty years later. Lomonosov has long been eulogized for his great learning in Russia. Pushkin said “He founded our first university. To put it better, he was our first university.” The Soviets adored Lomonosov as the founder of science in Russia, without which scientific Marxism could not have flourished. The museum exhibits include a variety of instruments and artifacts from Lomonosov’s scientific career. The Kunstkamera, then, is a museum that literally encompasses the world. It’s a fascinating blend of old and new, of east and west, of opulence and decay. And it’s the perfect place to begin appreciating the diversity of roles that science has played in Russia’s remarkable history.
Oleg Neverov, ‘‘His Majesty’s Cabinet’ and Peter I’s Kuntskammer.’ in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. eds. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985): 54-61.
Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689-1725 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
Address: 3, University Embankment (Universitetskaia naberezhnaia 3), Vasilevskii Island, 199034 Saint Petersburg, Russia