Russian Garden Gazette

The Walk of Fame is the ring of engraved stones that circles the Gagarin monument, and continues along the bank of Doan Brook: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Korolev and others, each with a name, dates, a field, and a small emblem. It was conceived from the start as a project meant to be continued. It is a record that grows.

Each year we add new names. In 2026 three cultural heroes will be added. Two of them are a family of distinguished virologists.

Marina Konstantinovna is best known for her work introducing polio vaccines and for the concept of beneficial human viruses, on which she based a method of non-specific protection against and treatment of viral and non-viral illness; she also discovered the oncolytic properties of enteroviruses.

“I am a scrappy fellow — I have many friends, half-friends and enemies,” Chumakov said of himself. Marina knew how to steer that energy where it needed to go: it was enough for her to propose a good idea and step aside; she was content to be the person behind the scenes directing the action. Her part in their shared success was no smaller than his. She was the intellectual leader, and he was the battering ram for the ideas.

The third is a wonderful, ironic, intelligent and deeply loved writer.

Sergei Dovlatov died in New York on 24 August 1990, in his forty-ninth year — one of the most widely read Russian writers of the second half of the twentieth century.

He wrote lightly about things that were not light: emigration, loneliness, Soviet reality, America, money, failure. Not one of them becomes a sermon or a complaint. The sentences are short. The joke is never explained.

In The Foreign Woman, the narrator’s Latin American neighbor Rafael delivers his admiration for Russians, having assembled his history from fragments that do not quite fit together. Russians, he explains, are rather like Poles, only they speak Yiddish; they took the millionaires’ money and gave it to the poor, so that now the millionaires work all day while the poor give orders and drink, which is only fair. And the October Revolution, he concludes, was led by a famous partisan named Tolstoy — who afterwards wrote The Gulag Archipelago.

Laconic, precise, funny and sad at once. Only he could do that.

Sergei Dovlatov, The Foreign Woman. Summarized here; the passage is quoted only in part.

Three very different lives. Science and literature. Discovery and irony. A small new chapter is about to be added to the Garden in stone.

I remember that in my student years typed sheets went around Moscow with anecdotes about our national treasure and other great Russian writers. They were attributed to Kharms. It turned out they had nothing to do with Kharms — except that, in the spirit of the Blue Notebook, the authors allowed themselves to poke fun at the greats, who had gone bronze from constant official praise.

The authors were Natalia Dobrokhotova and Vladimir Pyatnitsky — Pyatnitsky also drew the pictures and was the master of the paradoxical ending. The collection is known as Vesyolye rebyata, the Merry Fellows.

Seven years ago the Russian Cultural Garden honored Yuri Gagarin — the first human in space — at a gala dinner at the Great Lakes Science Center, held for the unveiling of the Gagarin monument in the Russian Cultural Garden. Cleveland Ballet performed under artistic director Gladisa Guadalupe. Dr. Kirsten M. Ellenbogen, President and CEO of the Science Center, gave the keynote.

Dr. Ellenbogen spoke about what Gagarin had done: he was not only the first person to circle the Earth in a spacecraft, he also overcame two of the most fundamental human fears — the fear of heights and the fear of enclosed space — and in doing so gave all of humanity reason to believe that no barrier, outward or inward, holds when there is a goal, a vision, and human courage and charm.

The following day, Sunday 25 August 2019, during One World Day, the monument to Yuri Gagarin was unveiled in the Russian Cultural Garden. The Parade of Flags came first, then the Naturalization Ceremony, and at half past two the statue was uncovered.

On 12 April 1961, Gagarin launched aboard Vostok and became the first person to orbit the Earth. The flight lasted one hour and forty-eight minutes. The Huntsville Times ran it across the front page: MAN ENTERS SPACE.

The bust was made by the sculptor Aleksei Leonov — no relation to the cosmonaut of the same name — and given by the International Charity Public Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World», founded by Ruslan Bairamov, which has placed Gagarin monuments in cities around the world. The pedestal was financed by the Russian community and the people of Cleveland, designed and built by Classic Memorials, and installed by Aurora Landscaping.

On the front, beneath his name and the date, are Gagarin’s own words: orbiting Earth in the spaceship, he saw how beautiful our planet is — and asked that people preserve and increase that beauty, not destroy it.

The Russian Cultural Garden returns to the Parade of Flags, this year carrying its new Garden banner. The route has changed: it starts at the Market Place opposite the Filipino Garden (#46) on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, runs north toward Centennial Peace Plaza, and ends at the Lithuanian Garden (#22).

The Stars of Summer — 7th Annual Laureates’ Concert. 30 August 2026, 1:00–5:00 p.m., Italian Cultural Garden, 990 East Blvd., Cleveland. Free to attend as part of One World Day.

This year’s Laureates’ Concert brings a new dimension to a tradition that began years ago with the grand piano in the Russian Garden: young laureates performing with a live symphony orchestra.

New names appear on the Walk of Fame. Old photographs return us to the Garden’s history. Literature refuses to let us take it too seriously. And ahead of us — One World Day.