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@Barbican_City_of_London
Stunning sunlight Stunning sunlight
There’s something bleak about this empty Soviet er There’s something bleak about this empty Soviet era building beside Lake Sevan. Designed as a hotel for visitors to the lake this vast complex in Tsovagyugh, Armenia, remains unfinished. The lake also holds a place in literary history. It is where Osip Mandelstam found his voice again, before the same system silenced him. In 1930, Mandelstam, one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century spent a month by the lake with his wife, Nadezhda. His time in this tranquil spot helped him return to poetry after five years of silence. His book ‘Journey to Armenia’ features Sevan: The rose is cold in the snow; on Sevan, the snow is three arshins deep. A mountain fisherman has pulled out a painted, azure sleigh. The whiskered faces of well-fed trout perform police duty on the limestone bed. Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1891 and raised in St Petersburg, Mandelstam became one of the greatest poets of the Russian language. In November ‘33 he wrote a poem attacking Stalin and recited it privately. This was dangerous and someone in his literary circle denounced him and he was arrested in May ‘34. Exile swiftly followed to Cherdyn in the Urals. However that was not enough for the state apparatus and he was arrested again in 1938 for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, sentenced to five years in a so called corrective-labour camp, he was broken by the system and never made it to his next destination dying of typhoid fever on December 27, ‘38 in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Nadezhda memorised his poems to help keep them safe. Decades later, the Soviet state was investing in grand projects intended to improve people’s lives on the very spot where Mandelstam had dreamed. Looking at these empty rooms and the bleak sense of abandonment, it’s hard not to think about what the system chose to build, and who it chose to destroy. Architects Levon Khachatryan and Yuri Nalbandyan with Edward Tosunyan. Photo with thanks to @robthartfot.
This place!! Back a bit later to add more about th This place!! Back a bit later to add more about the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot, France

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