The Kunstkammer

A few days ago I went with Aurelie and Charlotte to the Kunstkammer, about 10 minutes walk from my apartment. Housed in a striking green and white building on the Neva embankment, with a large central tower topped with a bronze model of the solar system (I'll try to take a photo to post), this was the first museum in Russia and was founded by Peter the Great himself in 1710. Today it's home to three museums: the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Lomonosov Museum, and finally the original Kunstkammer (German for "art chamber" although it is most certainly not that!); this most interesting section holds Peter the Great's personal collection of preserved 'monsters' - misshapen babies in jars, two-headed cows, and other examples of nature gone frightfully wrong. We'd heard a great deal about this unique Petersburg display and were eager to get there, so we blitzed through the Anthropology Museum part and soon arrived at the darkened hall that used to be the old anatomy theatre.

There they were, row after row of illuminated glass jars containing preserved human fetii and stillborn infants displaying a wide range of shocking abnormalities: missing or extra limbs, harelip, bloated skulls, cyclopsism, severely conjoined twins, a child born completely covered in long hair. Their natural colours totally drained by nearly three hundred years in embalming fluids, they were an almost translucent albino white, like cave creatures. Others had been injected with chemicals to recreate the original colour of the skin and tissues (I remember one of those babies had a bright blue staring eye). The whole display was really quite ghastly, especially as even those with the most hideously disfiguring birth defects were still unmistakeably human.

Despite knowing exactly what we were in for at the Kunstkammer, it was still shocking. Charlotte had left quite quickly and I felt a little ill myself, but at the same time I found myself strangely fascinated by the stunning range of abnormalities. There was also a lot of explanatory signage (in English for once!) explaining about birth defects and the study of biological deformities, called teratology (from the Greek word teratos meaning monster). I felt like I actually learned something, which was appropriate because education was the primary objective of Peter the Great when he decided to open the museum. By putting his collection of abnormalities on display for the general public, Peter hoped to dispel the widely-believed superstitions that such deformities were caused by black magic or the evil eye (this was a time when science and modern medicine had just recently been imported into Russia from the West). Of course, getting people to willingly come view such a gruesome display proved a problem, so Peter decreed that free vodka and wine be given out to visitors of the museum as encouragement! Unfortunately they haven't kept up that particular tradition...

Also on display in the Kunstkammer was an interesting collection of Peter the Great's personal things. He was a truly remarkable man, a giant (as his oversized clothes on display showed, he was nearly 7 feet tall!) full of restless energy and always on the move. He was extremely curious of all things, an enthusiastic learner in a mind-boggling array of subjects in which he always took a very hands-on approach, apparent by the variety of personal objects on display: ship-building tools, ordinary (though gigantic) working clothes, an iron bar he forged with his own hands, cartographical equipment, medical instruments, and a large box of teeth that he extracted himself! Apparently Peter's nobles had to be very quiet at court if they ever had a toothache, in case the Tsar got wind of it and enthusiastically volunteered his services, which no-one could politely refuse!

Although it was interesting, it was sure a relief to leave that chamber of horrors behind. It must have made quite an impression on me because I had awful Kunstkammer-inspired nightmares two days later! Ugh...