What Will I Remember (along Nikolay Rubtsov’s places)

The exhibition presents 60 photographs, books, postcards and magazines from the private collection and the museum library. The photographs were taken by Marina and Andrey Koshelevs. They live in the Zelenogradsky district of Moscow. The husband and wife have a passion for photography, music and literary and they are admirers of the Rubtsov’s poetry for many years. Marina became interested in the creative work of Nikolai Rubtsov after her aunt, who lived in the neighboring house with the poet, had given her a book titled “Green Flowers”. And Marina and Andrey started to make their “photo suites” for love of Nikolai Rubtsov’s verse and his native places.

Nikolay Mikhailovich Rubtsov is one of the most mysterious representatives of the Russian poetry. Born in the Archangelsk region, he spent his childhood in the Children’s Home of the Nikolskoye settlement in the Totma district. The Vologda region became his second Motherland; it left an imprint on the poet’s soul and gave him the main subjects for future works. Nikolay Rubtsov spent the last years of his life in Vologda.

The poetry of Rubtsov is simple in its style and subjects; it is mainly connected with the Vologda region. His verses are ingenious and close to colloquialisms and so everybody likes and understands them. The Russian North, the village, the nature, “ancient Russian originality” are in the centre of his poetry.

It is already the second exhibition in the museum about creative work of Nikolai Rubtsov. The display “The Soul Keeps” was opened in 2009. It presented books, photographs, and personal things of the poet from the private collection of Sergey Alexandrovich Dmitriev.

The exhibition “What Will I Remember?” is not just a collection of good photographs and lines of Rubtsov’s poems. These are places where this poetry was born, people somehow or other connected with him, the world which reflected his life. The display will be surely interesting both for admirers of Nikolai Rubtsov’s oeuvres and other visitors of the museum.

I.A. Gostinshchikova, research officer of the Exposition and Exhibition Department