Odessa Literary Museum

The Odessa Literary Museum was founded in 1977 by a resolution of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine. The Gagarin Palace, an architectural monument designed by architect Ludwig Otton, was erected for the museum. The founder and first director of the Literary Museum was the writer and bibliophile Nikita Brigin.

The peculiarity of the museum was that it was created from scratch. At the same time there were forming funds, establishing contacts with writers or their heirs, writing the structure and thematic-exposition plan, working on the creation of the exposition; The artistic decision of the exhibition is the result of the joint work of the scientific team and the team of designers, headed by Honored Worker of Arts of Ukraine, monumental artist Anatoliy Gaydamak. In 1984, the Odessa Literary Museum was opened.

The exposition of the museum, located in 21 rooms, in the enfilade of the second floor and four halls of the first, is unique. It contains three variants of directions, traditional for literary museums – the memorial component, the museum of book and Odessa printing, as well as the history of the development of literature in Odessa and Odessa literature.

Each hall of the museum, except for the exhibits itself – books, manuscripts, magazines, personal belongings of writers, household items, writing utensils of the era – gives a characteristic of one or two decades of the XIX – XX centuries. Each of the halls is original but organically linked to the previous and the next.

The design decisions of each literary era are far from the frontal ones, rather resembling exquisite theatrical scenery. They enable the visitor to discover erudition, liveliness of the imagination, the ability to read not only texts but also clues to artistic decision, peculiar characteristics of a particular decade or that writer.

The creators of the museum considered their purpose to fill as much as possible the cultural lacunae that had been artificially created by the ideological policies of the Soviet era. Due to this, the exhibition is generally not outdated, despite the fact that more than thirty years have passed since the museum was opened. Even after Ukraine’s declaration of independence, the exposition was supplemented by previously banned names.

There was an opportunity to make changes in the halls dedicated to the literature of the 1870-1890s, 1910s, 1917-1920s, partly rethought hall dedicated to the literature of Bulgaria, supplemented with materials from the occupation of Odessa, the halls of WWII.

The museum presents more than 300 writers’ names in one way or another related to Odessa – from IP Kotlyarevsky, OS Pushkin, Adam Mickiewicz to Henry Bell, George Simenon, BL Pasternak. Along with the great creators of literature – MV Gogol, LM Tolstim, MM Kotsyubinsky, Lesya Ukrainka, Shol-Aleichem, AP Chekhov, IA Bunin, IY Frank, A A. Akhmatova, IE Babel, IA Ilf, EP Petrov, VP Kataev, MG Kulish, numerous authors of the so-called “second row” who played an important role in formation of national culture. Not forgetting the folklore, from which, in fact, begins the literature of the city: “And to live well in Odessa …”.

Successful continuation of the main exposition of the Odessa Literary Museum, corresponding to its uniqueness, was an open-air exposition – the “Garden of Sculptures” with the adjacent “Odessa Courtyard”. The idea and embodiment of this exposition belongs to Leonid Liptugа.

It presents contemporary humorous sculptural compositions on literary themes, as well as ancient Scythian and Polovtsian sculptures; the interior of the Odessa courtyard was reconstructed, without which the literary Odessa would not be complete.