The Kunstkamera

According to the Lonely Planet guide, there are four places a visitor must see Petersburg: the Hermitage, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, the Church of the Spilled Blood, and the Peter and Paul Fortress. Until yesterday I had seen all but the Anthropology museum, better known as the 'Kunstkamera' (German for ‘art chamber’). It's famous for two things: 1) being Russia’s first museum (Peter founded it in 1714) and 2) permanantly displaying (Gaga and anybody else who is squimish, skip this and the next paragraph) Peter's collection of deformed, hundred-plus-year-old fetuses, hearts, legs, and heads, which can be found floating in jars on the third floor. Peter thought up the exhibition as a way to educate his ‘unenlightened’ subjects, to convince them that birth deformities were not caused by spells, the devil, etc, but by “internal damage as well as fear and the beliefs of the mother during pregnancy.” A step in the right direction.

There they are––skins white, rubbery and loose in suspended decay. Their tiny eyelids opened just a crack so you can see the lifeless, unblinking eyes inside. Two headed fetuses, cyclopses, fetuses with ‘Janus-syndrome’ (two faces), brain hemorrhages bulging here and there, and one whose entire face just fans out around a square inch where the eyes, nose and mouth are horribly condensed.

I thought it would be cool. I’m gross, they’re gross––bingo, perfect, where do I sign. But it bothered me that they were infants, and even more that they were just floating there, completely intact. A dissected body is just a body, an incredible machine that's been opened for investigation. But when you simply undress the thing and leave it completely intact, its a freakshow, a grave insult. Even if all none were killed for the exhibition (I’ll take their word), they still lived momentary, tragic lives and deserve to be buried, not floating naked in jars for eternity. Call me old fashioned.