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About the museum history

The idea of ​​creating a literary museum in Kharkiv arose back in 1932, when it was actually the center of great cultural changes. The Museum of Literature was opened on December 13, 1932 in the premises of the Shevchenko Research Institute (the building on the former Radnarkomivska Street (now Zhon Myronosyts) has not survived). But mass repressions of Ukrainian writers began, so the existence of a literary museum became inappropriate.

Already after World War II, the Kharkiv branch of the Writers' Union of Ukraine persistently raised the issue of creating a literary museum in Kharkiv. In the late 1980s, another letter from the Writers' Union on this topic signed by A. Pererva and R. Polonsky, fortunately, fell into the hands of an employee of the historical museum, Iryna Grigorenko (Shumylina). Thanks to her persistent efforts, in 1988 the Kharkiv Literary Museum was finally established. It was located in the former estate of 1894, which belonged to the artist Georgy Shtorkh (and was designed by him), and during Soviet times a closed party hotel operated here. Iryna Grigorenko became the first head of the museum.

Founded: 04/20/1988 by the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 105; 07/12/1988 by the Order of the Kharkiv Regional Council No. 305.

The museum staff immediately began working on the theme of the 1920s - an era of strong cultural processes that ended with the repression of artists and the banning of their works. Despite all the prohibitions and repressions, that time left behind books, manuscripts, photographs, and magazines. Some of them were in one or two copies. Thanks to successful search work, these copies ended up in the museum’s collection. Today, the most valuable museum exhibits date back to the 1910s and 1930s. Therefore, the museum’s first major exhibition, “Ukrainian Golgotha,” was dedicated to the memory of writers who were killed in the 1930s. Opened in 1991, the exhibition became an event in the cultural life of Ukraine. The Kharkiv Literary Museum was the first in Ukraine to show the era of the Shot Renaissance on a large scale. Since then, the theme of the 1920s has been central to the museum.

Since the early 1990s, the museum has been creating an environment of independent pro-Ukrainian culture. The artist Valer Bondar worked here (who was often visited by his artist friends), philology students from the poetry group “Chervona Fira” (Serhiy Zhadan, Ihor Pylypchuk, Rostyslav Melnykiv), young people from the Union of Ukrainian Youth, elders from the Rukh and the Writers’ Union held their events. The theater-studio “Arabesque” was founded here, headed by Svitlana Oleshko. Today, materials from that period (manuscripts and samizdat) have already become museum objects.

By creating the “Palimpsesty” exhibition (the history of the resistance movement of the 1960s–80s) in 2008, the museum formed a collection of materials from the sixties.

Since 2003, the museum has had a branch – the Hnat Khotkevych Memorial Room-Museum in the village of Vysoky, created in 1995 thanks to the petitions of the writer’s daughter Halyna Khotkevych and public figure Petro Cheremsky.

The first interactive exhibitions appeared in the museum in 1996, the first educational games instead of excursions – in 2008, the first participatory exhibitions and events – in 2014.

In 2022, the museum was supposed to reconstruct the building – to build a modern museum infrastructure according to the project of Oleg Drozdov, but the full-scale military invasion of Russia into Ukraine got in the way.

Despite the war, the museum does not stop its activities and continues to actively promote Slobozhansk culture in Ukraine and abroad.