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A Museum Lesson: “The “Unknown” Turghenev”.

The museum-workers of the youth program department of the State M.A. Sholokhov Museum-Reserve completed a cycle of museum lessons for schoolchildren based on the materials of the exhibition “Once a Reminiscence of the Sweet, Remote Happenings Would Occur to You..”, which was presented by the State Memorial and Natural Museum-Reserve of I.S. Turghenev “Spasskoye-Lutovinovo” in the excursion and exhibition centre of “The People’s House”. In September, 2009, the classes were joined by 400 pupils of the Sholokhov school of Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, the secondary school named after M.I. Platov, the base school of the pedagogical college named after M.A. Sholokhov, the Saint-Mikhail-Archangel parochial school and other district schools of the Rostov region.

The museum lessons complete and broaden the school learning, so the aim of the lesson”The “Unknown” Turghenev” is to tell about the facts of the writer’s biography, which are not covered at school.

The schoolchildren discovered Turghenev for themselves as a playwright, a traveller and a hunter. They learned that Turghenev wrote fairy tales, and now we have got the tales of Charles Perrot translated by Ivan Sergheyevich. This fact has been little known so far.

At the exhibition the children independently found different objects of the previous epoch, and the exhibited coats of arms of the Turghenevs and Lutovinovs kins encouraged the schoolchildren to invent and draw the coats of arms of their families. Oral recreation of the family tree by each pupil developed into a competition: the children tried to name as many representatives of their families as they could.

The schoolchildren had got a unique opportunity to see a photocopy of “the Turghenevs’ house”, a setting place of the story “Mumu”, which is studied at literature lessons. The boys and girls were interested to examine a book of stories by Turghenev from the private library of queen Mariya Prusskaya, getting convinced once again that the writer’s work is widely known in the world.

The photocopies of the writers, poets, literary critics connected with the life and work of Turghenev, his relatives and friends helped to widen their outlook and learn about many new and interesting things. The exhibition rendered the spirit of the “epoch”, plunging the children into late XVIII-early XIX centuries and making the museum lesson a wonderful travelling in the world of literature.

O. Ushakova