Literary Museum Research Articles

Periodicals beyond Hierarchies: Challenging Geopolitical and Social ‘Centres’ and ‘Peripheries’

This special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies emerges from the 10th International European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) conference and postgraduate workshop, held in September 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) in Budapest, Hungary, in collaboration with the Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum. Focused on the theme of ‘Periodicals beyond Hierarchies: Challenging Geopolitical and Social “Centres” and “Peripheries” through the Press’, the conference attracted scholars from diverse backgrounds who explored core–periphery tensions in various contexts. The essays included in this issue, stemming from selected presentations at the Budapest conference, offer an introduction to the spatial breadth and historical dimensions of the centre–periphery lens within periodical studies. Building upon theoretical foundations dating back to Raúl Prebisch’s recognition of core–periphery disparities in the 1920s, and subsequent critiques such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s identification of semi-peripheral regions, these essays critically engage with the evolving discourse surrounding core–periphery dynamics. Ultimately, this collection encourages a nuanced understanding of periodicals as cultural maps that survey the complexities of collaboration, competition, and conflict across diverse geographic landscapes. By doing so, it prompts critical interrogation of the centre–periphery model, questions its utility in enriching our understanding of periodical dynamics, and challenges preconceived notions of centrality and peripherality within periodical studies specifically, and cultural studies more generally.

How literary tourism changes the tourists’ “baggage”: a conceptual framework for the educational function of literary tourism

ABSTRACT This conceptual study aims to provide a framework for the educational function of literary tourism, a niche within cultural, heritage and media-related tourism, by focusing on the relationship between tourism and education. The conceptual framework, established through previous research on literary museums, literary festivals, and literary routes, demonstrates that literary tourism offers tourists experiential and transformative learning experiences. Literary tourism offerings not only influence tourists’ literary knowledge and practical skill levels but also provide awareness that can potentially transform their personal lives and alter perspectives. The gains individuals acquire through literary tourism highlight the necessity of emphasizing the educational function of literary tourism. This underscores the significance for literary sites, literary destinations, tour operators, educational institutions, and similar stakeholders to invest in promoting this educational function. The conceptual framework outlined in this study regarding the educational function of literary tourism can serve as a valuable reference point for literary tourism initiatives and research.

Representations of Gender in Estonian Graffiti and Street Art

The paper focuses on gender aspects in graffiti and street art as context- and communication-based cultural phenomena. The key issues tackled here are how gender aspects and gender-based communication are expressed in graffiti and the nature of the gendered aesthetics of street art. The analysis aims to identify gender clichés in graffiti, illustrating stereotypical views from a broader sociocultural perspective. The study also highlights the role of graffiti and street art in challenging gender stereotypes and bringing novel concepts to the fore. The paper combines studies on graffiti and street art with the gender studies approach and employs as a research method the contextualisation of graffiti and street art as ephemeral cultural phenomena from a viewer’s perspective. Graffiti works collected mainly in 2010–2020 and held in the online graffiti database of the Estonian Literary Museum constitute the sources of this paper.

일본의 문학관과 관광자원화 연구 : 기노사키문예관과 일본 기노사키 지역의 관광프로그램 연계 사례를 중심으로

일본의 문학관과 관광자원화 연구 : 기노사키문예관과 일본 기노사키 지역의 관광프로그램 연계 사례를 중심으로

«Слава слав тебе, жизнь моя горькая!»: жизненные и творческие перипетии судьбы новокрестьянского писателя П. И. Карпова

The research objective is to address the issue of the accuracy of biographical data regarding P. I. Karpov. The article discusses the stages in the life and creative path of the little-known writer of the neo-peasant direction, P. I. Karpov, with attention given to the features of the author's idiolect. An important aspect of this study is uncovering unreliable information about the writer, who is one of the enigmatic and contradictory figures in the 20th-century literature. P. I. Karpov's literary works were banned by censorship for 25 years, many of them were confiscated. The true extent of Karpov's work remains unknown to literary critics to this day. The scientific novelty of the research lies in introducing the reliable information about the life and works of P. I. Karpov for the first time, confirmed by documentary evidence, newspaper interviews with the writer's relatives, archived in the Literary Museum of the city of Kursk. The research revealed that P. I. Karpov largely mythologized his own biography, influenced by several non-literary factors that significantly impacted the writer's fate.

Periodikas avoti kā liecība par pirmo Latvijas sieviešu misionāru darbu

Mission work in the 19th century was one of the rare opportunities that gave women the possibility to respond to God’s call. The archive of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (ELCL) was destroyed in 1944, and its collection have been lost. Many missionary letters are in archives in Germany. However, evidence of the mission work of the first women has been preserved in printed sources published in the territory of Latvia. The article aims to review the printed sources in the territory of Latvia as evidence of the work of the first Latvian women missionaries, especially the work of Hildegard Prozell (1898–1909), Auguste Weetneek (1899–1910) and Anna Irbe (1924–1940), about whom there are significant testimonies both in Latvian and German languages – Rigasches Kirchenblatt, Misions-Flugblatt, Jaunākās Ziņas, Ārmisija and other sources. The National Library of Latvia, the ELCL library, and the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu are the main repositories for the sources used for this paper. The article analyses the content of these sources and the evidence of whether and how this missionary work left an impression on the society in the homeland. The first printed sources on the territory of Latvia about mission work in the 19th century are examined to provide the historical context. The study concludes that there is an expansive amount of information about Prozell, the first missionary from the territory of Latvia, and Irbe, the first ELCL missionary. They describe their service and trips to mission places, nature, geography, folk customs, etc. Also, these sources testify to the increase in support for mission work in the homeland. Missionaries who could be considered a minority, for example, Latvian women who went to serve through an unpopular mission society in Latvia, received much less or almost no attention from the printed press. This research enables discovering and preserving information about these women’s experiences at mission work, journeys, descriptions of nature and geography, folk customs and other important aspects. It not only contributes to and promotes understanding of the role of women in the mission work of the Latvian Church but also broadens the understanding of how this work affected society at home. Thus, this important cultural aspect is preserved and respected by researching and documenting periodical sources, supplementing and enriching Latvia’s national heritage.

Network of literary museums in Moscow: formation and present condition in the context of the historical and cultural process

The network of literary museums in Moscow is the largest in the country. The article examines the history of the formation and present condition of the network of literary museums in the capital in the context of the historical and cultural process. The chronological framework covers the period from the 19th century until now. This is due to the moment of the appearance in Moscow of the first proto-museum forms of literary museums, the first museums of this profile, as well as the formation and development of their network. Significant historical and cultural prerequisites for the emergence of museums of this profile are identified. The main periods in the history of the formation and development of the network of literary museums are considered in the context of the periodization of the history of museum affairs and the historical process in the country. Museums that also have characteristics of another profile, such as historical and literary, literary and artistic, and literary and local history, are also considered. The total number of literary museums in Moscow has been identified, including state, municipal, departmental, public, private and school. Museum-type institutions representing and popularizing literary heritage are shown. Museums of other profiles (music, art, local history and others) are indicated, the funds and exhibitions of which contain literary monuments and collections of rare books. A special place is occupied by book museums, which are not literary museums, but are close to them in that their collections also contain monuments of literature (including fiction). The total number of literary museums in the capital and their percentage in the museum network have been calculated.

Неизвестное письмо О. Мандельштама

The article publishes the newly discovered Osip Mandelstam’s letter to Eudoxia Nikitina (1923), which dropped out of sight of researchers and was not captured in studies of the poet’s biography or compilations of his editions. The subject line is the return of books previously borrowed from the addressee. The commentary to the letter contains information on Mandelstam’s literary relations with Nikitina, an analysis of certain features of the content of the text, and a clarification of some realities mentioned therein. The material is accompanied by the publication of the autographs (manuscripts) from the State Literary Museum’s collection (Moscow, Russia). The article reconstructs an unknown episode from Mandelstam’s life in Moscow in 1923 and his relations with Eudoxia Nikitina and Nikolai Aseyev.

Библиотека А.Н. Толстого как творческая лаборатория писателя: источники романа «Петр Первый»

The article examines the personal library of the writer A.N. Tolstoy as a unique source of the historical novel Peter the Great. Its significance lies in the fact that the writer formed it purposefully. He acquired books to prepare for the creation of works of art and, above all, the largest part of the book collection for the novel Peter the Great. For the first time, the study of the “Petrovsky collection” was undertaken due to Tolstoy’s method of working with sources. He carefully read it and made notes in the margins with blue, red, or a simple pencil to later use this material in a work of fiction. He highlighted not only historical realities (dates, events, descriptions of real persons) but also emphasized names and speech patterns, used characterization of the relationship of characters (for example, Peter and Anna Mons), interpretations of the actions of historical persons and psychological motivations indicated in the source (in particular, related to the beginning of the relationship between Peter and Catherine). The books stored in the book fund of the Vladimir Dahl Russian State Literary Museum, lists of literature from the writer’s archive at the Manuscript Department of IWL RAS, and notes indicating the book’s author and page, extracts from historical sources, as well as articles, interviews and statements in the periodical press give some idea of the composition of Tolstoy’s library.

Udmurt Folklore Material in the Folklore Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum and Its Collectors: A Brief Review

The digitisation and preservation of language and folklore sound collections are highly relevant issues for many archival institutions in the Russian Federation. The folklore archive of the Udmurt Institute of History, Language and Literature in Izhevsk has not been an exception to this. The first folklore and language recordings on analogue magnetic tapes appeared in the early 1960s. In subsequent years, local folklorists and linguists made numerous expeditions to survey all areas of Udmurtia and the neighbouring regions where the Udmurts lived. Estonian researchers also participated in the recording of the Udmurt language and folklore during expeditions both in Estonia and outside. The article covers the joint efforts of Estonian and Udmurt scholars in collecting Udmurt folklore and language materials, which are currently stored at the Estonian Folklore Archives.

Machine learning for document classification in an archive of the National Afrikaans Literary Museum and Research Centre


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jsasa.v56i1.10
 ISSN: 1012-2796
 ©SASA 2023
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Most archives were established before the digital age, where hardcopies of much smaller volumes were archived. In the information age, archives struggle to accommodate the large volumes of material produced. In addition, many archives, including in South Africa, had to contend with budget cuts that reduced the number of staff available. If digital material is not archived now, it creates the risk of gaps in the historical record in the future. In addition, with digital humanities gaining wider acceptance, large corpuses of digital material are needed, which archives could provide. This study’s aim was to investigate whether document classification using machine learning classifiers is feasible in a South African archive context, with a focus on the National Afrikaans Literary Museum and Research Centre (NALN). The researchers created and trained a document classification model and tested it for accuracy against human classifiers. It followed a basic linguistic approach to prepare specific text documents for text classification, in terms of Galloway and Roux’s (2019) six categories, namely articles, media reports, books, interviews, reviews, and dissertations and theses. The classification was done using two annotators, after which the annotated corpus was employed as training data for machine learning models. Following Rolan et al. (2018), Suominen (2019), and Connelly et al. (2020), Python libraries were used for document classifications. The researchers show that machine learning classifiers can accurately categorise documents into different types. If implemented, this means that archives can improve their collection efforts without spending more on salaries. One way of coping with the information explosion is to develop metadata generation tools, like machine learning and artificial intelligence. If metadata could be automatically generated, it would reduce the pressure on archival personnel by providing a way to handle larger volumes.

Features of the fight of the underground movement in the Northern Crimea (1941–1943)

The article examines the issues of the anti-fascist struggle in the Ak-Sheikhsky district of the Crimean ASSR during the Great Patriotic War and the assistance of patriots to the intelligence of the 51st Army of the 4th Ukrainian Front. The purpose of the article is to analyze the above-mentioned scientific problems on the basis of previously unpublished documents from the funds of the municipal archive of the Administration of the Razdolnensky district, the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea and the Yalta Historical and Literary Museum. The research methods used are source studies, historical and typological, retrospective, statistical and biographical methods.The author focuses on the problem of organizing the underground movement in the territory of the Akh-Sheikh region from the middle of 1942, on the role of A.A. Mikhailov, authorized by the Crimean Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in uniting disparate underground groups into an integral cohesive structure, analyzing the activities of the underground workers of the Ak-Sheikh region district, on the establishment of contacts by patriots of the Ak-Sheikh region with intelligence structures of the 51st Army of the 4th Ukrainian Front (late 1943 – early 1944).The study revealed previously unpublished materials on the activities of the underground movement on the territory of the Akh-Sheikhsky, the Larindorfsky, the Krasno-Perekopsky regions of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The contribution of the undergrounders to the common cause of the anti-fascist struggle, as well as the creation of conditions for the successful liberation of the Peninsula from the German-Romanian occupation in the spring of 1944 was noted.

Музейная метафизика

This review deals with the book by S. V. Klimenko, a well-known philologist, a staff member of the N. G. Chernyshevskiy Estate Museum. It shows the academic character of the book under review. The book is timed according to the periods of the author’s creative life, but at the same time the identified periods appear to be crucial for the history of the museum as they were linked to anniversaries of N. G. Chernyshevskiy or memorable dates in the history of the museum itself. The content of the book combines fascinating stories about the creation of new museum “products” and the definition of the essence and purpose of the profession of someone whose life is connected to a literary museum. A literary museum worker is presented in the book as a person for whom the literary studies of sources become not only a process inseparable from the museum work but also an object of academic research and exploration. Considerable attention is paid to the problems of museum work as the most important area of humanitarian knowledge. S. V. Klimenko is also concerned with the issues of personnel training and funding. An important point for the author of the book becomes the question of what materials a separate museum exhibition or a large exposition should be based on. S.V. Klimenko assigns great importance to the development of the concept of an exhibition or exposition in museum work. Discussions that accompany the emergence of any new “product” represent the birth of the concept, i.e. understanding of the principles of material selection, logic of its presentation and scientific commentary. The author of the book advocates the conceptual approach to the presentation of museum exhibits in showcases or on walls in an essentially rigorous way. S. V. Klimenko has succeeded not only in opening the world of the literary museum to the reader, but in showing its heartbeat in several dimensions, projected on the science, source studies, archives, education, working with the visitors, and the work of exhibition designers.

Luulesõrestik üle ookeani. Marie Underi ja Ivar Ivaski kirjavahetuse teemaanalüüsi poole

This article proposes to discuss the voluminous literary correspondence of the Estonian poets Marie Under (1883–1980) and Ivar Ivask (1927–1992), with a focus on its first year, 1957–1958. The whole correspondence comprises 550 letters, with an average length of 4000 (later 3000) words; it is held in the Cultural History Archive of the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu. Both Under and Ivask had been war refugees, with Under and her husband, poet Artur Adson, finding an exile home near Stockholm, Sweden; Ivask and his wife Astrīde, a well-known Latvian poet emigrated to America after some years spent in DP camps in Germany. Marie Under was already a renowned poet during the Siuru movement in the Estonian Republic, and became a symbol during the Second World War, continuing to publish and hold a large reading audience in exile. In addition to her own poetry, she was a versatile translator of poetry from several languages into Estonian. Ivask, two generations younger than Under, had begun writing in Germany, but continued to search for his linguistic and cultural identity for some time: his mother tongue was Latvian, and the language of his father was Estonian; German was spoken at home. At length and around the time of the beginning of his correspondence with Under, he decided that Estonian would be his poetic language. Since coming to the United States, Ivask completed a PhD in comparative literature and established himself as a scholar and critic in Germanic Studies. He became associated with the publication Books Abroad, later renamed under his editorship as World Literature Today. Under’s and Ivask’s letters are rife with exchanges about core values in poetry, art and worldview, stylistics and poetics, as well as practicalities of publication. After a brief introduction to theoretical approaches to the analysis of letters and correspondences, the article turns to a topical close reading of the letters from Under and Ivask’s first year: main foci included translations of the poetry of Karl Čaks, translation priorities, discussion of the aims and planned trajectory of a new cultural journal in Estonian named Mana (to which both contributed), perspectives on Ivask’s debut as a young poet, the future of Baltic literatures abroad, and the cultural politics in the exile communities over what attitude to take toward literary production from the homeland. The second part of the article applies methods of digital humanities toward an extensive study of the Under-Ivask correspondence as a linguistic dataset, aiming to arrive at a thematic analysis of the text as a whole. The methods enable the identification of key words, word frequencies and thematic clusters, while making the whole corpus digitally accessible to the scholarly reader. The article concludes with proposals for a further study of the Under-Ivask correspondence, using the methods of digital humanities.

Kirjažanrist Euroopa kultuuriloos ning kirjavahetuste avaldamisest ja uurimisest Eestis

The article deals with the emergence, development and blooming of the letter genre in European cultural history until the middle of the 20th century. The oldest letters that have survived to our time date from the 3rd-2nd centuries BC and are written in cuneiform. The first major heyday of the literary genre was in the time of ancient Rome, when both politicians and philosophers exchanged letters, but also several writers used the letter form in their works. The so-called canon of letter writing was formed in the Middle Ages, when the art of letter writing began to be taught at the universities. In the 17th century, letter writing manuals and private letters began to be published in books, and in the 18th century it was already very common. The growing popularity of communication by letters is also shown by the fact that in the middle of the 18th century, when English writer Samuel Richardson published three novels in the form of letters, the epistolary novel was born. In the epistolary novels, for the first time the world of feelings and thoughts of the characters was under observation. At the end of the 19th century, communication by letters increased drastically due to the wider spread of literacy throughout Europe. The writing of letters intensified during the First and Second World Wars, which is considered the last major blooming of the letter genre. This fact is also confirmed by studies on the development of the written communication tradition in Estonia. The article also provides a brief overview about the research and publication of private correspondences in Estonia. In the middle of the 20th century, the Estonian Literary Museum began to systematically deal with the autobiographical heritage (incl. letters) of those persons who had a prominent position in cultural history. In 1984, the serial publication Litteraria: eesti kirjandusloo allikmaterjale (Litteraria: Estonian Literary History Source Materials; since 2005 Litteraria: Estonian Cultural History Source Materials) was founded with the aim of making correspondences, but also various biographical notes, photographs, etc., available to the public. Litteraria has never been published regularly; nevertheless, by 2023 the series had published already twenty-eight issues, which are now also available online (https://www.kirmus.ee/et/teadus/e-litteraria). In 1998, Tuna: Ajalookultuuri ajakiri (The Past: Journal of Historical Culture) came out on the landscape of social science and humanities journals. The new journal included the rubric “Estonian Cultural History Archives”, which allowed the researchers to regularly publish archival sources with commentary four times a year. Over the years, several voluminous text-critical publications of correspondences have been published in parallel with the issues of Litteraria and Tuna, for example, “Akadeemia kirjades” (“Academy in letters”, Olesk 1997), “Minu lamp põleb” (“My lamp is on”, Annuk & Metste 2015), and “Kallid krantsid: Kirjad vangilaagritest ja asumiselt Siberis 1946–1954” (“Dear friends: Letters from prison camps and deportation sites in Siberia 1946–1954”, Kross 2021). The published correspondences have a different historical background, but the common feature of all the authors of the letters is their close connection with Estonian literature. Several historians, literary scholars, cultural historians, folklorists, and philosophers have used private correspondences as source material for their in-depth studies. The analysis of scientific articles of the last decades shows that letters are useful primarily as a source of information that helps to open the hidden aspects of some cultural-historical phenomenon or historical event, for example, the world wars. In addition, different aspects of epistolary practices are also analysed, such as the peculiarities of means of expression, communicativeness or intersubjectivity of letters, etc. Until the turn of the century, prominent creative figures in Estonian cultural history dominated among the authors of the letters used in the studies. In recent decades, a new trend has emerged which shows that researchers have begun to pay more attention to, for example, the love letters and war letters of ordinary people, as well as letters in which the writer shares with the addressee various information about joys and worries of everyday life.

Book Heritage in the Collection of the National Museum of the Komi Republic

The Scientific Library of the National Museum of the Komi Republic is one of the oldest libraries in the region. For more than 110 years of its history, a unique book collection has been formed, containing rare printed editions of the mid-18th - early 20th centuries from private collections of famous scientists, public figures, writers, teachers, as well as books and periodicals of scientific, educational and other government institutions of both the Komi region and Russia. The purpose of the article is to outline the main stages in the history of the Scientific Library of the National Museum of the Komi Republic collection, designed to identify and expose its unique rare editions for visitors.The first stage (1911-1919) is connected with the activities of the Ust-Sysolsk local historians and the Arkhangelsk Society for the Study of the Russian North, the second (1920-1930) was conducted by the Society for the Study of the Komi Territory. The third stage is limited by the period of the Great Patriotic War. Archaeographic expeditions for to collect handwritten books and early printed publications became significant for the fourth (1960s-1970s) period.In 2011, a new stage began in the life of the library, associated with the transfer of the book stock to the building of the Literary Museum named after I. Kuratov, one of the departments of the museum. When creating the space of the Literary Museum, a special place was assigned to the scientific library: the combination of the educational resource of the exposition and the scientific library with the reading room and book storage. Research activity is one of the main directions in the work of the library. Studies are actively carried out aimed at scientific and bibliographic description and examination of rare editions, identification, attribution and cataloging of book signs. Publications covering the results of researches become the concluding summing up both at the regional and Russian levels. The priority direction is a wide demonstration of their collections using computer technologies, which contributes to the expansion of opportunities for public access to rare book collections and allows expanding the list of visitors.

«Усадьба как образ бытия человека культуры: И.С. Шмелев, Б.К. Зайцев, С.А. Есенин и другие»: рецензия на книгу М.В. Скороходова

The review of the book by M.V. Skorokhodov “The manor in Russian literature of the late 19 — first third of the 20th century: An interdisciplinary approach” (Moscow, 2020) is presented. The review analyzes M.V. Skorokhodov’s attempt to describe and study the phenomenon of the Russian estate based on the works of S.A. Yesenin, N.A. Klyuev, I.S. Shmelev, B.K. Zaitsev, etc. To solve this problem, the author applies an interdisciplinary approach that allows to involve the terminological apparatus of art history and geography. For the first time, the author defined and formulated the mission of the literary museum.

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Life and Creations of Komi Republic Writers in the Best Biobibliographical Edition 2022

This review tells about the biobibliographic dictionary in 2 volumes “The writers of Komi Republic” from the 19th century to nowadays . This bulky book has been published jointly by the Institute of the Language, Literature and History of Komi Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Literary Museum of I.A. Kuratov and the National Library of Komi Republic. It received the diploma of the best bibliographic edition prepared by Russian libraries in 2022.

«Мы – содружество, мы – общество, но мы не школа…»: к столетию объединения «Серапионовы братья»

This article reviews the materials of a multi-author monograph dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the literary association “Serapion brothers”. This project has united researchers from Saratov, Moscow, St Petersburg, considered to be renowned experts in the history of Russian literature of the 1920–1930s. The research is based on the unique documents from the Serapion brothers’ legacy being introduced into the scientific circulation (K. Fedin, Vs. Ivanov, N. Tikhonov, V. Kaverin, I. Gruzdev). The documents are kept in the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), Literary Museum of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (The Pushkin House), National Library of Russia (Saint Petersburg), State Museum of K. A. Fedin (Saratov). Their interpretation allows to fill the factual gaps in the history of the association and in the biographies of its members, to define the system of creative and interpersonal relationships between them more precisely. The monograph’s intention is unified by the material itself, by the general methodological principles of working with archive materials, by the presence of several recurrent plots, appearing in different articles. Among them there is a plot, rather appropriate for the anniversary edition, about different anniversaries of Serapion brothers, discussions of Eurasianism, of the nature of genre, of the “red Pinkerton”. The issues of censorship and self-censorship, questions of text studies and principles of ego-documents’ publication hold a prominent place on the pages of the monograph. These questions are not only theoretical, they have a rather practical significance in preparing the full texts of K. A. Fedin’s diaries for publication, on which the creative team is working. The monograph itself manifests the implementation of the proclaimed principles, as it is supplemented by wide-ranging reference materials, which offer great opportunities of further research of the literary phenomenon of Serapion brothers.