Found in a Drawer

This year, for the first time, the International Day of Personality Museums will be celebrated on April 5th. Five museums in Riga – the Rainis and Aspazija House, the Aleksandrs Čaks Museum, the Romans Suta and Aleksandra Beļcova Museum, the Ojārs Vācietis Museum, and the Jānis Akuraters Museum – invite you to the event-journey “Found in a Drawer”.

In museums dedicated to creative personalities, you have the opportunity not only to learn about their work but also to explore their private spaces, which may not have been accessible to the wider public during their lifetime. Some of the discoveries, hidden or lost facts and items, can be learned about on a journey through the five museums – “Found in a Drawer”.

The journey will begin at 11:00 AM at the Rainis and Aspazija House (Baznīcas Street 30), where the story “Aspazija's Mother's Newly Discovered Photograph” will be presented.

Since 2023, an exhibition at the Rainis and Aspazija House features a previously unexhibited photograph of Aspazija's mother, Margrieta Rozenberga, which had been stored for a long time until the identity of the woman in the photograph was confirmed through habitological expertise. The museum will share the story of Aspazija's relationship with her mother and how the newly discovered photo made its way into the museum's exhibition.

The journey will then lead to the Aleksandrs Čaks Museum (Lāčplēša Street 48-8), where you can learn about a lost poetry collection by Čaks.

In 1943, under the guise of a passionate and forbidden love, Aleksandrs Čaks created a collection of poems titled “Heavenly Gift”, dedicated to Milda Grīnfelda. Every Wednesday at six in the evening, they met, and Čaks gifted Milda poems reflecting their love. During Čaks's lifetime, the collection “Heavenly Gift” was never published. During the war, the manuscript disappeared, and it was only rediscovered in the 1970s.

The poetry collection “Heavenly Gift” was first published in 1980 and reissued in 2014.

The journey continues at the Romans Suta and Aleksandra Beļcova Museum (Elizabetes Street 57a-26). The story there is – “A Provocation for Modernists or the First Performance in Latvia”.

In the book of Latvian art history, there is an intriguing chapter titled “the Kasparsoniade”. In 1920, the first exhibition of the Riga Artists' Group of modernists (including R. Suta and A. Beļcova) took place, which was a major event in the cultural life of the society and caused a sharp generational conflict of views. As a provocation to the young modernists, an exhibition by an unknown artist, Reinholds Kasparsons, was organized. Currently, in the museum, you can see side by side the poster of the Riga Artists' Group exhibition, likely created by R. Suta, and the poster of the scandalous Reinholds Kasparsons exhibition.

After visiting the Romans Suta and Aleksandra Beļcova Museum, the excursion (via public bus) will take you to Torņakalns. The journey continues at the Ojārs Vācietis Museum (Ojārs Vācietis Street 19), where the story “About Ojārs Vācietis and the Guests from the Corner House” will be shared.

In March 1967, Solzhenitsyn wrote an open letter to the delegates of the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers, calling for the abolition of censorship. As far as is known, the only poet in Latvia who received this was Ojārs Vācietis. He gave this letter, along with the manuscripts of two of his poems (“Častuškas on the Margins of the Journal ‘Karogs’” and “Līgo by the Paduna”), to Vizma Belševica, at whose home the letter and the manuscripts were found during a search in 1972.

Some time later, Ojārs Vācietis received a call from an employee of the Corner House, who announced they would be visiting. They demanded that Ojārs be home alone. Without witnesses. However, Ojārs Vācietis's wife, Ludmila Azarova, entered the house through the kitchen door and overheard the conversation. The KGB demanded that O. Vācietis write an explanation about the letter (necessarily in one copy). The poet wrote it in two and gave one to L. Azarova for safekeeping. The museum preserves the draft of O. Vācietis's explanation with corrections.

The journey concludes with the story ““Personal and Intimate” – Akuraters’s Unpublished Diary” at the Jānis Akuraters Museum (Ojārs Vācietis Street 6a).

From time to time, Jānis Akuraters wrote a diary. Some of them have been preserved, including one titled “Personal and Intimate”. Written in the 1930s, it contains reflections and testimonies about the grand glorification of leadership.

With this journey-event, five museums in Riga invite you to celebrate the International Day of Personality Museums for the first time. The goal of the Personality Museums Day is to draw public attention to personality museums as outstanding repositories of knowledge about the creative contributions of personalities, their lifestyles, living spaces, and the values they represent through various museum offerings.

In May 2024, in Caprese Michelangelo, Italy, a decision was made at the European Personality Museums Conference to promote international cooperation, and one of the events would be to celebrate the International Day of Personality Museums on the first Saturday of April each year. Latvian personality museums have responded to this initiative, encouraged by the Italian National Association of Personality Museums “Houses of Memory”, and are now implementing it in collaboration with ICOM (the International Council of Museums), ICOM DEMHIST (the International Committee for Historic House Museums), and ICOM ICLCM (the International Committee for Literary and Composer Museums).

Ticket price: 11.00 EUR

Registration for the journey: rainis.maja@mma.gov.lv, phone: 67272643, 29254193

The event will be photographed. Photos and videos will be published online and used for museum publicity purposes.