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Empire Complex: Arrangements in the Russian Ethnographic Museum, 1910 Roland Cvetkovski Perhaps that is what museums are good for. Like philosophy, they are an avenue that conducts us outside ourselves. Hilde S. Hein If self-reflection marks the first step toward wisdom, then self-knowledge could certainly pass for the achievement of wisdom. Nikolai M. Mogilianskii, ethnographer and head of the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg from 1910 to 1918, must have had something similar in mind when he wrote about the purpose of museums for Russia. All their exhibits, he wrote, taught man to address as well as to cherish the everyday objects that surrounded him and that he usually paid no attention to. But museums did not simply restore the dignity of the object; they achieved much more. To Mogilianskii they even articulated an overall human idea, because they “inspire a broader public to societal selfknowledge , to conscious love for their environs, for their little provincial home, for their fatherland and finally [stretching] to a worldwide feeling of humanity.”1 Such a deep impact on mankind might be surprising on this scale, but one is certainly amazed to hear what actually caused it: Dmitrii A. Klements, renowned ethnographer, colleague, and predecessor of Mogilianskii as head of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, had already proclaimed that what humanity needed most and what defined a 1 N.M. Mogilianskii, “Oblastnoi ili mestnyi muzei, kak tip kul’turnago uchrezhdeniia” [Regional or local museums as a kind of cultural institution], Zhivaia Starina 25, no. 4 (1916): 303–326, quotation from 307. 212 Roland Cvetkovski museum was “factual knowledge.” Arranged and composed in a “systematic collection,” this knowledge materialized in the objects, which, conversely , as endowed with the capacity to tell about this knowledge, were not dead but actually “vital things.”2 Mogilianskii absolutely agreed with this argument; he himself had insisted that the museum had to be regarded as a “vibrant laboratory.”3 True, the universal as well as moral context in which both men placed the museum was largely due to the high pedagogical standards they deemed an important part of their professional mission. It was only in the last years of the nineteenth century that Russia experienced major momentum in institutionalizing permanent ethnographic displays, and by establishing the Russian Ethnographic Museum’s collection, Mogilianskii— and even more so, Klements—played a significant role in the process. Apart from a few provincial establishments such as in Kharkov’, Arkhangel ’sk, Tbilisi, or Irkutsk,4 the two most important ethnographic museums could be found in the capital. First was the museum of the Academy of Sciences Muzei po Antropologii i Etnografii, founded in 1879, which was Peter I’s former curiosity cabinet, the Kunstkamera. Even though this institution collected objects from all over the world, the addition “predominantly of Russia” was not deleted from its official name until 1903. Second was the ethnographic section of the Russian Museum, which here will be referred to as the Russian Ethnographic Museum. It was founded in 1895, officially came into being in 1902, and focused on the presentation of primarily Slavic tribes of the Russian Empire.5 2 D.A. Klements, Mestnye muzei i ikh znachenie v provintsial’noi zhizni [Local museums and their meaning for provincial life] (Irkutsk: Tip. K.I. Vitkovskoi, 1893), 2 and 9. 3 Mogilianskii, “Oblastnoi ili mestnyi muzei,” 318. 4 In the field of natural history, the Russian province experienced its first boom in the founding of museums as early as the 1870s. The first was established in Iaroslavl’ in 1865. See N.N. Pozdniakov, “Politekhnicheskii muzei i ego nauchno-prosvetitel’nye deiatel’nosti 1872–1917 gg.” [The polytechnical museum and its scientific-educational activities, 1872–1917], in Istoriia muzeinogo dela v SSSR. Sbornik statei [History of museum affairs in the USSR. An anthology], no. 1 (Moscow: Goskul’tprosvetizdat, 1957), 129–158; D.A. Ravikovich, “Iz istorii organizatsii sibirskikh muzeev v XIX v.” [From the history of the organization of the Siberian museums in the nineteenth century], in Istoriia muzeinogo dela, no. 1, 159–191, here 165. 5 For a brief introduction, see A.M. Razgon, “Etnograficheskie muzei v Rossii (1861– 1917)” [Ethnographic museums in Russia, 1861–1917], in Ocherki istorii muzeinogo dela v Rossi [Outline of the history of museum affairs in Russia], no. 3 (Moscow: Goskul’tprosvetizdat, 1961), 231–268; Isabella I. Changuina, “Les musées ethnographiques en Russie,” Ethnologie française 26, no. 4 (1996): 599–610; T.V. Staniukovich, [18.118.120.204] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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