Exhibition "AT GUESTS AT BRENINGS". Memorials of the House of Trainings

The name of Arnold Ivanovich Brening is well known to many old-timers of Kazan, historians and local historians of our republic. By profession, Arnold Ivanovich Brening was a pharmacist, the owner of the oldest and most famous pharmacy in the city - at the intersection of Universitetskaya and Bolshaya Prolomnaya streets. Now it is Bauman Street, and the pharmacy is still working here.

Arnold Ivanovich Brening was born on June 6, 1879 in a family belonging to the “color of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia” of Kazan. He graduated with a gold medal from the natural sciences department of the Physics and Mathematics Department of the Imperial Kazan University with his fellow student and comrade Alexander Yerminingeldovich Arbuzov and established himself as a talented scientist and chemist.

Arnold Ivanovich in Kbinet

A great passion and creative need for A.I. Brening was photography. In this, he achieved excellent results, as in all matters that he had to deal with. After graduating from the university, in 1904-1905, Arnold Brening served in the Far East, where he began to take photographs.

Upon arrival at the request of his mother, Arnold first becomes the manager, and after her death in 1916, the owner of the Staroprolomnaya pharmacy. The motto of Arnold Ivanovich was the words: “Have everything in stock so that not a single client leaves without the right medicine!” While working as a pharmacist, he does not forget the camera: every weekend, and sometimes on other days, when the opportunity arises, he imprints life in photographic plates in all its diversity.

The trainings were very friendly with the Likhachevs, especially with the sons of Andrei Fedorovich, founder of the funds of the Kazan City Museum. Therefore, on the photographic plates of Arnold Brening there are unique pictures of the Likhachev family.

The fate of the pharmacist and photographer Brening repeated the tragic fate of thousands of people - the terrible years of the civil war, the ruin of the house and his own business, his return to his hometown, where in fatal 1937 he was shot by false denunciation…

The exhibition presents a unique collection of genuine household items belonging to Arnold Brening and his family - furniture, pharmacy cabinets, toys, clothes, a camera, photographs, paintings, caskets, dishes. The items that once made up the decoration of the house, which surrounded members of the large Brening family, were preserved by descendants and today made up a unique exhibition that immerses the viewer in the era of the turn of the XIX - XX centuries.

Opening hours of the Gallery of Modern Art of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts:

VT, SR, Fri, Sat, Sun: from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., ticket office (entrance) from 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.;
Thurs: from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., ticket office (entrance) from 10 a.m. to 7.30 p.m.
Mon: day off.
The last Tuesday of the month is a sanitary day.

Phones for information: 8 (843) 238 43 27; 8 (843) 236 69 31

Website of the Pushkin Museum of RT: www.izo-museum.ru