#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The exhibition, timed to the anniversary of the outstanding Norilsk journalist, Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation, Honorary Citizen of Norilsk Gunar Kroders, will open at the Norilsk Museum on January 23. The exposition will feature materials from the museum’s funds.
On the occasion of the anniversary of the city’s culture chronicler, the museum invites you to recall the name, fate and publications of Gunar Kroders. The author of many articles about Norilsk, especially about the cultural life of the city, winner of numerous professional competitions, a member of the Journalists Union, the Gornyak newspaper editor, for many years collaborated with the local newspaper Zapolyarnaya Pravda.
Gunnar Kroders was born in Riga into a family of people of high art: his father Robert Kroders was a publicist and theater critic, his mother was an actress. At the age of 15, in 1941, Gunar and his family were expelled from their native Latvia and ended up in the Ust-Yenisey region of Siberia, and a year later – in the Khatanga region, where at the end of 1942 his mother died of hunger. The father died in Riga in 1956, where he returned after serving an 8-year sentence under Article 58. The elder brother Olgert left for Latvia in 1955, when he received an official certificate stating that the Kroders ‘were released from the special resettlement on the basis of the LSSR’s Ministry of Internal Affairs’s conclusion dated July 27, 1955’.
And Gunar stayed in Taimyr, at first he was a staff correspondent for the Khatanga region, then he worked in Dudinka, after which, in 1966, he moved to Norilsk. He devoted 33 years of his life to this city and left an invaluable contribution to journalism and a deep imprint on history.
In the anniversary exhibition, the museum will present items from Gunar Kroders’s personal complex, as well as show an outstanding multifaceted personality on the one hand – as an enthusiastic collector. Broadly educated, man of impeccable artistic taste, intellectual, esthete Gunar Kroders – this is how his friends and colleagues knew him. Norilsk people also considered an extraordinary personality in his texts. And also a music lover and a convinced romantic. Kroders devoted his whole life to three main things for him – journalism, music and his muse.
The Norilsk Museum also invites visitors to the reading room of the scientific library. The exposition contains a collection of records from the personal fund of the journalist, 1276 copies, which Kroders collected during his life, and today is kept by the museum. Music about life, creativity and love. Some of the records are available for independent listening on the player. There is an opportunity to read a binder of the author’s newspaper publications right there.
With the exposition from the personal fund of Gunar Kroders, the Norilsk Museum opens a cycle of exhibition projects this year – Museum Calendar. In the space of the scientific library of the museum, rare museum collections, thematic and personal collections from the funds of the Norilsk Museum will be widely presented.
Text: Maria Sokolova, Photo: Norilsk Museum
