Things to see and do Semeï

The museum dedicated to Abay Ibrahim Kunanbayouli (1845-1904), a poet born in the village of Karaoul, on the outskirts of Semey, when the town was still called Semipalatinsk, retraces the major stages in the life of the man considered to be the Kazakh man of letters par excellence. Having studied in Semipalatinsk, he took all his lessons in Russian, which later enabled him to translate numerous works by the great Russian poets and novelists, making them accessible to Kazakhs. As a member of the pantheon of great national figures, his museum is logically well-stocked, and visitors will be able to explore the rooms and corridors devoted to Abaï's childhood, his influences and his literary work, to familiarize themselves with a little-known author who has never been translated in France. Genealogy, writings, fellow travelers and family are presented in detail, then linked to the poems. There are also numerous drawings evoking the themes of Abaï's stories and poems in a pictorial way. Above all, however, it is Abaï's morality speeches that remain highly prized by Kazakhs to this day, whether in teaching, child-rearing or, more broadly, in everyday life. The tour ends with a small reproduction of a ^19th-century Kazakh interior, complete with bed, armchair, desk and cupboards. Unfortunately, there's no translation of the commentaries, which are all in Russian or Kazakh. Ask for the guided tour to fully appreciate the visit.

Set back from the main square, the museum can be spotted by the relief sculpture of the great writer wearing a beard, on the modern part of the building; it is next to the small log house that Lieutenant Dostoyevsky occupied between 1854 and 1859. It stands out enough from the surrounding architecture to be noticed. On the right is a statue of Dostoyevsky in uniform, chatting with Shokan Valikhanov, Kazakh ethnologist and historian, a contemporary of the Russian writer and considered the father of modern Kazakh historiography. The two men met in Omsk, and struck up a close friendship that lasted despite Dostoyevsky's exile.

The museum, housed in a beautiful setting with walls decorated with large pages of Dostoyevsky's handwriting, displays mainly period photographs and a number of books that marked, influenced or inspired the Russian author, just like Hugo, Byron or Balzac. Semey is also featured, with a historical model of the city and black-and-white photographs of its main monuments. In the center, a space evokes the world of the Gulag. Here, visitors can linger over drawings by Korsakova and Tolkacheva, depicting prisoners' faces with intensity.

The visit concludes with a tour of Dostoyevsky's home, which consists of an entrance hall adjacent to a small bedroom, a living room and a study. Period furniture has been arranged to recreate Dostoyevsky's everyday world during the five years he spent at Semey.

The Semey Museum of Fine Arts, opened in 1985 thanks to a donation from a wealthy Russian patron, featured 500 paintings from Russia and Europe. After a quarter-century of expansion, the museum has become one of the largest in Kazakhstan, and certainly one of the most interesting, with over 3,000 paintings, sculptures and other works of art collected in Kazakhstan, Russia, Italy and France. All date from the ^16th and ^17th centuries. A real godsend for art lovers in a country with relatively few museums of this kind!

Soberly named "Stronger than Death", this monument was erected on August 29, 2001 on Polkovnichy Island, just south of the city, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the closure of the nuclear test site, but also the date on which the first Soviet atomic bomb exploded. A thirty-meter-high black marble column, hollowed out to evoke a nuclear mushroom cloud, towers over a statue of a woman trying to protect her child. The monument is now mostly visited by newlyweds, who choose to have their photo taken there rather than in front of the statue of Abay! Nearly 500 nuclear tests were carried out by the Soviets in the Semipalatinsk quadrangle, on the Kurchatov site. The latter can only be visited with special authorization and radiation protection equipment.

In 2009, the United Nations chose August 29 as the "International Day against Nuclear Tests". This choice was made at Kazakhstan's suggestion, which is no doubt why the dates of July 16 (the first American atomic test, in 1945, in the New Mexico desert) or February 13 (the first French atomic test, in the Sahara) were not chosen. These three nations alone carried out 97% of the 2,404 nuclear tests that took place worldwide on that date: 210 for France, 980 for the Soviets and 1,110 for the Americans.