If you weren't lucky enough to visit Jacqueline Kennedy's apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue, now you can visit it in the heart of Moscow, which saw the opening of "The Lady and the Poet" exhibition on Thursday.
The exhibition highlights the special friendship between the Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky, a prominent Soviet poet in the 1960's and Jacqueline Kennedy – Onassis, the most elegant and renowned former first lady in the US history.
The poet met the first lady during a UN conference commemorating the late President John Kennedy, during which Voznesensky recited a poem he wrote for this occasion. Since then, Jacqueline became fond of his poems, while he admired her personality. He even dedicated some of his poems to "the Lady" and gave her the "Butterfly of Nabokov" designed by him, a gift that had become the symbol of their friendship.
To celebrate this unique bond between a prominent Soviet poet and a famous figure like the US "First Lady", several architects have redesigned a hall in the Voznesensky Center in Moscow and transformed it into a replica of Jacqueline Kennedy's New York apartment, which was visited many times by the poet. The architects in charge recruited furniture designers to make identical furniture to that of Jacqueline's, and with the same 1960's American spirit.
In the "replica apartment", everything was organized just like in the original one, including the family pictures, Jacqueline's picture with the poet, and pictures from the Kennedy family visits to the Soviet Union.
There, in that corner of the Voznesensky Center, the "Kennedy apartment" looks like a time machine that takes visitors back in history and geography, from a building in the heart of Moscow to an apartment in the heart of New York.
The exhibition also features many details about the precious friendship between 'the Lady and the Poet'. In a message to the visitors, the exhibition's curators emphasized the need not to give any other explanation for the "friendship" between Kennedy and Voznesensky and assured that the relationship between them was a "friendship" in the literal sense of the word, and did not evolve to anything further.
