The State Hermitage Museum: Information

Stereoscope
Publication of a tale by A.P. Ivanov with commentaries and appendices. Compiled by L.I. Davydova
The State Hermitage and the Ars Publishing House
St Petersburg, 2003

February 2002 marked the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Imperial Museum in St Petersburg for which the special building of the New Hermitage was built according to plans drawn up by the Bavarian architect Leo von Klenze. Many generations of Petersburg residents have come here and the museum became a part of their life, a part of Petersburg culture. It entered their consciousness from childhood and was taken to be a symbol of the city just as the Bronze Horseman or the Alexandrine Column. And even in literature the New Hermitage took on the status of an independent character.

A confirmation of this may be seen in the ‘twilight tale’ of Alexander Ivanov, Stereoscope , which was first published in 1909 and has now been re-published especially for the jubilee of the New Hermitage The stereoscope returns the main character to the past, 30 years before, to the time of his childhood and precisely to the day shown on the stereoscope photograph – 21 April 1877. On that day an anonymous photographer took a picture of the hall of Olympian Zeus, which is where our main character finds himself. He wanders through the rooms of the Hermitage and we follow him into the museum’s past where everything appears as in life, all is authentic and almost palpable. And it is so seductive to become a participant in this history, to walk through exhibitions in the Section of Antiquities of the Imperial Museum at the end of the 1870’s and compare it all with descriptions we find in the publications of bygone years...

Stereoscope Publication of a tale by A.P. Ivanov with commentaries and appendices.
Compiled by L.I. Davydova