For more than 10 years the first Sunday in October has been celebrated as Student Day in the Hermitage Theatre. According to to tradition the event is opened by Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky.

On 2 October the Hermitage Theatre was full to capacity. More than 400 students arrived from various institutions of higher learning around the city, although the hall is supposed to accommodate no more than 250.

Each year the staff of the Youth Center prepare for the event by choosing a unifying theme that is especially important both for the museum and for the city at large. The General Staff building is one of the hotly debated and polemical issues in city life and prompts debate not only among architects and other specialists, but also among a broader public of persons who are concerned about the fate and the future of the this great museum. The General Staff is a unique building which was constructed to plans by the architect Rossi at the beginning of the 19th century and was handed over to the State Hermitage at the end of the 1990’s in dilapidated condition. At the start of the 21st century the World Bank announced an international competition for the project of reconstructing the eastern wing of the building. The Petersburg architectural firm Studia 44 won the tender. One of its directors, Oleg Yavein, was invited to the Hermitage Theatre to acquaint the students with the project. Blueprints and models of the future museum complex were projected on a screen. At present the project elicits arguments and objections, and for this reason the students were especially interested in what Oleg Yavein had to say.

Student Day gives young people of the city the chance to get to know more about the activity of the Hermitage Student Club. This season students can join any of more than 15 sections, including the especially forever popular Petersburg Club, Artist and Poet, Painting Genres, and Artists’ Ateliers, and also the new sections History of Costume, Creative Photography, and Middle Ages Workshop.

New programs at the Youth Center include Cinema Education in the Hermitage and Topical Art. They were explained by State Hermitage educational staff V.Ya. Snegovskaya, coordinator of the work of the Student Club, and also by section leaders. Several of these little presentations met with such enthusiasm that at the end of the day around 100 people had enrolled for them instead of the usual 20 or 30. Evgeny Cherlenok, leader of the sections on the Petersburg Club and Archeology got the most attention.

After the presentations in the Hermitage Theatre, the students visited the General Staff building and looked in on the halls open for visitors, as well as the auditoriums, lecture halls, computer room and exhibition hall of the Youth Center.

Poster

Sophia Kudryavtseva, Head of Department Hermitage Youth Center, delivers a talk

Oleg Yaveyn, leader of the project team, delivers a talk

At the Hermitage Theater

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