“VERA KOMISSARZHEVSKAYA’S VIRTUAL MUSEUM”
Donatella Gavrilovich designed and coordineted the International project “Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s Virtual Museum (1864-1910)” in collaboration with the IT team of St. Petersburg State University ITMO (Russia), directed by Artem Smolin. This project was funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research for winning the competition in 2014, concerning the application of new technologies to the Cultural Intagible Heritage. In 2015 the University of Lorraine (France) joined our team. The Open Data content (documents, photos ecc.) was provided by the Saint-Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music and ‘A.A. Bakhrushin’ State Central Theatre Museum in Moscow. In 2016 we pubblished the Virtual Museum: http://verakomina.ifmo.ru
The actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya was an exceptional protagonist of the Russian theatre between the end of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century. She aroused admiration and scandal on the occasion of her debut at the Imperial Theatre in 1896 due to spontaneous and natural acting. She expressed the need to deal with the issues of the modern woman and claimed she did not to understand the characters of Ophelia or Juliet. In 1904, Komissarzhevskaya founded the Dramatic Theatre in Saint Petersburg to try a new form of acting. Her search was a source of inspiration for the Russian directors and actors of the twentieth century. She fought against the Tsarist regime in defence of the victims of the pogroms and the failed 1905 Revolution and embrace socialism. This is why the Russian people nicknamed her “Joan of Arc” . Her thoughts have reached us through the hundreds of letters she wrote to the greatest writers, artists, musicians and stage directors. Yulia Rybakova, Russian scholar who collaborated in our project, discovered them during the Soviet era. In these letters the actress talks about her private and artistic life and feelings, but she also reflects on the problems of the existence, on the fate of humanity, on the faith in God. In some of these Komissarzhevskaya describes the beauty of nature and she feels to be an integral part of it. She observes the immensity of the starry sky and in her letters she does not only write about the feeling produced by this vision, but also of how it reminds her of Galileo's studies. She had a deep and broad knowledge of Western and Russian scientific, philosophical and literary tradition. The actress interacted with writers such as Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov, discussing about their dramatic works. She also discussed with great directors such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Evreinov about the expressive forms of acting, the set-up problems of the theatrical performances and production rights. So, the concept of the “Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s Virtual Museum (1864-1910)” is to represent the milestones of life, creativity and social activities of this great and talented actress in an emotional and minimalistic structure. The development of this theatre-virtual museum was based on its own unique methodology developed specifically for this interdisciplinary project. Based on the analysis of the collected materials, the portal structure was realized as follows:

• Biography: a description of events that occurred to Vera Komissarzhevskaya presented in chronological order, backed up with multimedia materials (photos, texts, audios). Based on the historical events and on the documents collected for the virtual museum project, it was decided to divide the timeline of Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s life into seven key periods.
• Social Environment: an interactive graph displaying the people who had relations with the actress.
• Map of tours: an interactive map allowing the virtual visitors to click and open links to the places where the actress lived and acted.
• Gallery: links to the photos of the actress.
• In memoria: materials produced in memory of the actress and gathered after her death.
• Bibliography: books, publications, diploma papers, dedicated to the personality of the actress.

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