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On-line Exhibitions:
Imperial Coins & Medals
Yale Russian Chorus
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CELEBRATING
A GREAT CITY
Yale salutes St. Petersburg in 2003
This
October, Yale University is joining the city of St. Petersburg in
the celebration of its 300th anniversary and its remarkable literary,
artistic, and musical heritage with a three-day international conference,
exhibitions at the Beinecke and Sterling Memorial Libraries, and
a concert by the Yale Russian Chorus.
The
conference, entitled St. Petersburg: 300 Years, will take
place on October 23-25, 2003. Scholars from around the world will
convene in sessions devoted to the visual arts in the time of Peter
the Great and after, to St. Petersburg as the capital of Russia
(which it was between 1712 and 1918), to St. Petersburg as a theme
in Russian literature, and to the flowering of culture in the city.
Participants will include speakers from the State Hermitage Museum and
the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg,
from the All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow,
the Moscow State University, as well as several European and American
universities. Other institutions represented at the symposium will
include the State Museum-Park Tsarskoye Selo, and the
National Library of Russia. The Yale Russian Chorus concert, which
marks the group's 50th anniversary, will take place on Saturday,
October 25, at Yale's Woolsey Hall.
In
conjunction with the St. Petersburg celebration, Tatjana Lorkovic,
curator of Yale's Slavic
and East European Collections, and Fred Musto, curator of the
Map Collection,
will present an exhibition drawn from Yale's rich collection of
maps, coins, and medals at Sterling Memorial Library. At the Beinecke
Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Vincent Giroud, curator
of modern books and manuscripts, will mount an exhibition of books,
manuscripts, prints, and photographs documenting the role of St.
Petersburg as a cultural, artistic, and literary center from its
founding through the Second World War.
While
the theme of the Beinecke exhibition, mirroring the strength of
the library's collections, will be St. Petersburg seen through the
eyes of non-Russian travelers, the show will also include Russian
artifacts of extraordinary interest. The library's renowned Romanov
albums, for instance, will be on display, as will the recently acquired
manuscript of Anna Akhmatova's Poema bez geroja (Poem Without
a Hero), a work of the writer's later years describing the Stalinist
era. Though her poetry was suppressed by the Soviet government,
Akhmatova faithfully remained Petersburg's unwavering voice. The
Beinecke Library will publish a fully illustrated catalog of its
exhibition, entitled St. Petersburg: Portrait of a Great City.
The Beinecke exhibition will continue through December 2003.
Construction
of St. Petersburg, now the second largest city in Russia, began
under Peter the Great in 1703. Renamed Petrograd in 1914, it became
Leningrad upon the death of Lenin in 1924. In 1991, Leningrad became
St. Petersburg again. A center of culture and education, the city
is home to the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, the Winter Palace,
the Alexander Nevsky monastery, the Academy of Sciences, and several
prominent libraries and universities. St. Petersburg, designed by
Peter the Great to be his window onto Europe, lies in northwest
Russia on the Gulf of Finland at the mouth of the Neva River. This
"Northern Venice," combining its Russian heritage with
a distinctly European outlook, is one of the great cities of Europe.
For
more information, please contact Una Belau at beinecke.conferences
or 203.432.2956.
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