Historical Sketches. Kharkiv in the 19th Century

Moments from the life of the nobility and the social atmosphere of the time are recreated by the interiors of a nobleman’s drawing room, a bank office and a literary club.

Military and civil service, an integral part of a nobleman’s life at the time, are shown through an official’s uniform, cavalry epaulettes, a shako and military awards. Orders, medals and crosses tell of the military valour of the time, including the events of the Patriotic War of 1812. Many postcards and reproductions of famous paintings show the Battle of Borodino, in which the Kharkiv Dragoon, Okhtyrka, Izium and Sumy Hussar regiments took part.

The working life and the beginning of Kharkiv’s rise as a major industrial centre are shown through materials on the development of rail transport and on the creation and work of the largest enterprises: the Kharkiv Locomotive Plant, the Helferich-Sade and Melgose agricultural machinery plant, the Bergenheim tile factory, and the confectionery factories of G. Borman and D. Kramskyi.

The opening of Kharkiv University in 1805 and the productive work of local scientists, shown in the exhibition through personal belongings and documents of prominent Kharkiv scholars, and the activity of the city’s intelligentsia gave an impulse to the city’s rapid growth and its transformation into one of the centres of scientific and cultural life in Ukraine, a centre of the Ukrainian national and cultural revival.

Visitors can see memorial items of I. I. Mechnikov, V. P. Vorobiov, V. Ya. Danylevskyi, L. L. Hirshman, M. F. Sumtsov, H. F. Kvitka-Osnovianenko, P. A. Hrabovskyi and many others.

The exhibition is adorned by paintings by our countrymen S. I. Vasylkivskyi, P. O. Levchenko and O. I. Voloshynov, and a work by I. Yu. Repin — a portrait of the Kharkiv historian D. I. Bahaliy.

Of great interest are materials by well-known Kharkiv photographers: O. M. Ivanytskyi, A. Fedetskyi, M. Ovchinnikov and A. Scassi.