Russia Museum Displays Stomach-Churning Exhibit in Quest for Solvency : Culture: St. Petersburg’s Kunstkammer is attracting viewers with a macabre collection of pickled human remains--some of them over 300 years old.

The angelic child’s head, lacking a cranium but wreathed in an antique lace jabot, floats rosily in a large glass jar.

It could be a mask. As your gorge rises, you want it desperately to be a mask. But the curators maintain it is ever so real, as the veins curling from it like red seaweed attest.

It is not only real, it is more than 300 years old. Together with a macabre collection of jars of pickled hands, feet and deformed babies, it helps make up possibly the most stomach-turning museum exhibit in the world.

“Disgusting,” acknowledged Engel Karpeyev, the scholarly director of part of St. Petersburg’s Kunstkammer, known officially as the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

Disgusting, but fascinating. The Kunstkammer’s “Anatomical Rarities” exhibit, which formally reopened this month after being largely hidden in storage for more than 15 years, combines the goggling horror of a carnival sideshow with the educational value of a medical textbook.

It is back again due mainly to the pitiful financial state of most Russian cultural institutions, including the Kunstkammer, the country’s oldest museum. Founded in 1714 by Peter the Great as a collection of oddities of the type common in Europe at the time--Kunstkammer means chamber of art , and refers to artfully done curiosities--the museum holds one of the world’s great collections of ethnographic exhibits, about 1 million items in all.

But the government support that helped keep it great has dwindled, said museum director Alexander Mylnikov. Although the Kunstkammer accommodates some 1 million visitors a year, he said, its state budget is less than $70,000, allowing employees salaries of only about $20 per month.

Museum officials are hoping to find Western partners to help fund educational videos, souvenirs and other possible moneymakers. Meantime, they are pushing to set up profitable exhibits--like the “Anatomical Rarities.”

They are somewhat defensive about the ghoulish display, but “Deformities, whether we like it or not, have always attracted attention, ever since ancient times,” said Anna Radzyun, the exhibit’s curator.

And it is hard to argue with the bottom line: Visitors happily pay an extra 1,000 rubles to see the bottled horrors, compared with a general admission price of only 300 rubles.

The exhibit evokes bug-eyed stares from visitors, and its contents are better left undescribed for breakfast-table readers. Suffice it to say it includes jars holding a wide variety of Siamese twins as well as monsters--a single-eyed “Cyclops,” a two-faced deformity known as a “Janus” after the two-visaged Roman god and a “mermaid” with a fleshy tail instead of legs.

For 18th-Century viewers, the deformed babies served an educational purpose. Peter the Great, determined to spread European-style enlightenment among his people, “wanted to show that mutations happened not from the devil but from nature,” Mylnikov said. “It was a fight against superstition.”

These days, the frightening denizens of the jars serve an additional purpose, Radzyun said, noting: “In our time, I think it’s necessary to show deformities because you can’t close your eyes to the fact that our ruined ecology has become a menace, and people should see what it can lead to.”

The collection, which she said totals about 1,100 jars, including those not displayed, is in two parts: 200 jars hold abnormalities brought in by Russians over the years; another 900--with the beautifully preserved hands, heads and other body parts--contain the work of Frederik Ruysch, a brilliant 17th-Century Dutch anatomist.

His works give the exhibit added educational value, Radzyun said, because they “reflect a certain historical stage of a breakthrough in human knowledge”--the boom in the study of anatomy as medieval taboos gave way to the thirst for knowledge of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Ruysch was one of the greatest of anatomists and a master embalmer who worked mainly with children because dissection was only allowed for those who had not yet been baptized. In preserving body parts for his own small museum, he developed a method of injecting colored wax into veins, so that skin remained a more or less normal color, lips and cheeks rosy.

“He wanted the exhibits to look natural and pleasant, he didn’t want to frighten people,” Radzyun said. “That’s why he also put lace on the exhibits, to camouflage the places where they were cut off from the body.”

Peter saw Ruysch’s museum on a visit to Amsterdam in 1697, and ended up buying the entire collection 20 years later. It has been kept in the Kunstkammer since 1728.

It was damaged by a fire and repairs later in the 18th Century. But the most striking aspect of its history is that the collection survived the World War II siege of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known for much of the Soviet period. It was ministered to by devoted museum workers who managed to obtain alcohol and formaldehyde for the jars’ preservative fluid even as starvation and bombing attacks threatened. “People were emaciated but they did their duty and changed the liquid,” Radzyun said.

These days, the collection is more threatened by the simple financial crunch. Radzyun said the jars’ fluid would not need to be changed so often--about once a year--if the museum could afford to buy jars that would seal better.

The “Anatomical Rarities” can do little more to earn their own keep because they are too delicate to be transported the long distances needed for display abroad.

Visitors taken by the exhibit can obtain a brochure guaranteed to keep their memories fresh.

“Inside one of the glass vessels, we notice a child’s hand dressed in a delicate lace sleeve, pink fingers bent in a most delicate manner,” it reads. “Another jar contains a small fetus--a tiny cambric-capped homunculus resting in a cozy nest woven of veins and arteries looking so bright, as if they were filled with blood.”

Times staff writer Goldberg was recently on assignment in St. Petersburg.