Description of the attraction
The private museum, located in St. Petersburg at 32 Kamennoostrovsky Prospect, acquaints guests of the museum with a huge collection of phonographs and gramophones. The museum collection allows you to see the history of an invention, without which it is difficult to imagine the life of a modern person today - an invention that allows you to record and reproduce sound. The phonograph was independently created by the American inventor Thomas Edison and the French poet and inventor Charles Cros (who he called the “gramophone”) back in 1877. Sound was then recorded on a brass cylinder wrapped in tin foil.
Ten years later, in 1887, having carefully studied the invention of Charles Cros, the engineer-inventor, German Emil Berliner, proposed to record and reproduce sound not on cylinders, but on discs. Thanks to a different principle of recording, the gramophone, in contrast to the phonograph, made it possible to reduce distortions by tens of times during sound recording and reproduction. In addition, the sound when played by a gramophone was already 16 times louder in the first models, which, along with the ease of replicating gramophone records, ensured the superiority and victory of the gramophone over the phonograph. The first disc in history was zinc, then ebonite was used for some time, and later - natural shellac resin.
The founder of the museum and the owner of the collection is the Honored Artist of Russia, a former circus artist who worked in training and clowning, was a student of Y. V. Nikulin - Deryabkin Vladimir Ignatievich. It all started with a gramophone, which Vladimir Deryabkin bought more than thirty years ago for his clown act, in which the bears took part. Subsequently, during his touring activities, Vladimir Ignatievich was looking for exhibits for his collection, which turned into the first private Russian museum of gramophones and phonographs. His endeavors culminated in a splendid collection of over three hundred examples of splendid craftsmanship and design from renowned workshops of the past. And these are not just devices for producing sound - great masters stand behind each exhibit, each is decorated in the style of his time with intricate wood carving, embossing, painting, and reliefs. Each exhibit in the museum, thanks to the care of the collector, works as it did many decades ago. Each device has its own story. The owner of the museum personally talks about how this or that “pearl” of the collection was born and how it came into his hands.
In the Deryabkin Museum there are quite a few original copies, for example, one of the most popular exhibits among visitors - "Grammovar" - a comic symbiosis of a samovar and a gramophone. But the most unexpected surprise of the museum is Vladimir Deryabkin himself - multifaceted, wayward, eccentric - Vladimir Ignatievich writes songs and stories, Evgeni Plushenko skated to his song "Rossiyushka", Joseph Kobzon sings his "Spell".
The collection of Vladimir Ignatievich consists, however, not only of gramophones and phonographs. These are records, and old photographs, and musical instruments, and unusual household items that surprise with the elegance of their performance.
Deryabkin, driven by the passion of a collector, constantly replenishes and expands the collection, his sphere of interests is growing more and more, which only benefits the museum, in which new amazing exhibits are constantly appearing. This is how antique furniture, music boxes, household items and interior items appear in the collection. Former visitors, having found some kind of antiquity, bring it to the Deryabkin Museum, helping to increase the collection. The owner and collector promises to open a samovar collection for display soon.
The museum hosts thematic musical and literary meetings, where the exhibits come to life and you can listen to music recorded in the century before last.
