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“With Rifle and Lyre.Russian Literature and Hunting”

An opening ceremony of the intermuseum exhibition project “With Rifle and Lyre.Russian Literature and Hunting” took place on August 22, 2017, in the State A.S.Pushkin Museum. Among the displayed exhibits from 23 museums, reserves, literary and art collections, libraries and archives of the country there are objects from the collection of the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov.

The exhibition enabled the visitors to see the work of the writers through the prism of their personal hobbies and hunting colouring. Quite different authors converge in their habits and preferences: from Alexander Sumarokov and Gavriil Derzhavin to Viktor Astafyev and Alexander Vampilov.

The exhibition is based on contrasting between the two worlds: the world of wildlife and the world of man, their confrontation and merging. The structure of the exhibition is caused by the material specificity: abundance of literary works devoted to hunting, depiction of scenes of hunting in drawings, paintings, sculptures and in articles of arts and crafts; abundance of hunting weapons, hunting attributes and stuffed animals. This conditions a mixed principle of grouping the exhibits – according to the seasons of hunting and to the personalities.

At the exhibition the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov displayed the writer’s personal belongings – the clothes he was wearing at hunting (a warm coat, trousers, boots), a bird decoy, a decoy rubber duck, a box for storage of demountable rifles and their accessories, photographs, rare books and journals about hunting published early in the XX century, and other interesting exhibits. For M.A.Sholokhov the wildlife was a kind of a workshop with hunting and fishing being his favourite leisure.

All the speakers at the opening ceremony congratulated the colleagues on the important start – the first big intermuseum exhibition project of the Association of Literary Museums – and expressed their confidence in making other joint exhibitions.

An album-catalogue “With Rifle and Lyre.Russian Literature and Hunting” was published based on the materials of the exhibition. One of its sections is devoted to M.A.Sholokhov.

The exhibition will run until December 3, 2017, at the State A.S.Pushkin Museum (12/20, Prechistenka, Moscow).

Valery Yemelyanov