Det mångbottnade personmuseet : En studie av Gorkijmuseet i Moskva

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to study and analyse the Gorky Museum in Moscow, a house museum dedicated to the writer Maxim Gorky. The work explores the socio-political and cultural background for the museum, as well as what is conveyed there today, and how the museum approaches problems that house museums generally struggle with. The empirical part of the study is based on the fieldwork that the author conducted at the Gorky Museum during one month in the autumn of 2016, during which open and participant observation of the daily work at the museum was carried out. Attentive observations and systematic notes from guided tours constitute the basis for the description of the material and immaterial features of the museum. For the chapter on the historical and cultural context concerning the Gorky Museum, literary sources were used. The results of the study imply that there existed an authorised heritage discourse (AHD) in the Soviet Union that was directly governed by the authorities, that museums in the Soviet Union were politicised in a much more open manner than in the West, and that the young Soviet state needed to form a national identity for which Maxim Gorky and his literature came in handy. Further, they show that what is conveyed at the museum is something more than just Gorky himself, and that the complex relationship between Gorky and the house changes the impression that the visitors to the museum experience. Lastly, they demonstrate that the Gorky Museum is not exempt from dealing with questions regarding authenticity, representativeness, stereotypization and ”genius loci”, i. e. a sense of the lingering presence of the person commemorated. The conclusions to be drawn from this are that the complexity of the Gorky Museum lie in the fact that a collision between different values can be discerned at the museum, that a disharmony between Gorky and the house itself can be perceived, and that there exists more than one ”genius loci” at the Gorky House. This is a two-year master’s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.