This table was donated to the museum by Robert Rozhdestvensky’s first cousin once removed — Larisa Chuiko, a senior research officer at the Municipal Museum “Art of Omsk”. The table stood in the apartment of the poet’s relatives on his father’s side, Stanislav Petkevich, in Omsk, where they lived in 1937-1944.

The first Robert Rozhdestvensky’s childhood memories were about this very city.

The poet’s mother, Vera Rozhdestvenskaya, recalled how much Robert loved Omsk: “He learned to speak, read and write here, and some good people, especially those from the institute library, taught him to love reading, to love good and appropriate books. Since then, books have become his best friends and mentors. In Omsk, at the age of four he began to compose poems; at the age of five he learned to read and write in block letters from newspapers and began to write the poems down. He often recited them at matinees in the kindergarten. Before school he filled up the whole notebook with his poems, but it was lost during the war…”

One could say, Robert Rozhdestvensky’s journey as a poet started there. On July 12, 1941, the local newspaper “Omskaya Pravda” (Omsk Truth) published his first poem “Fascists will never be spared”:

The poet donated his first fee — about 9 rubles — to a military fund and then kept on writing poetry. Afterwards, most of his poems were turned into songs, such as the poem “Requiem”, written in the post-war years. People still remember, love and perform these songs.

The poet dedicated one of the poems, written in his adulthood, to Omsk, which later became a popular song and was performed by Edita Piekha: