Moscow museums · Literature
Literature · since 1928
The Dostoevsky Museum
The Dostoevsky Museum-Flat
The first Dostoevsky museum in the world, opened in 1928, and the only place bound up with his childhood: here he was born and lived his first sixteen years, while his father served as physician to the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. The hospital beyond the window is not a background but a circumstance: the boy grew up among poverty and sickness, and half his books grow from here. In Doughty Street one sees where Dickens wrote; here one sees where a writer was made, which is a different question and a rarer exhibit. The collection is small and few family things survive, and that should be known in advance; the value here is the place itself.
Minimum route
45 minutes – 1 hour
Founded
1928
Ticket
from ₽500
What to see
The flat of a physician of the Mariinsky Hospital, recreated from the recollections of the writer’s brother. A few genuine possessions of the family. The view from the window onto the hospital yard, which Dostoevsky saw as a child.
Minimum route — 45 minutes – 1 hour for the essentials
An hour.
- 35 minutesthe flat: the rooms in order, from the hall to the nursery.
- 15 minutesthe hospital yard and Gilardi’s front: this is part of the subject, not the way to it.
Reference
About the museum
Dostoevsky was born here in 1821 and lived here until 1837. The museum opened in 1928 — the first museum to the writer anywhere. Now a department of the Dal State Museum of the History of Russian Literature.
The building
The north wing of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, built in 1803–1806 by Giovanni Gilardi and Andrei Mikhailov. The hospital is still working.
Good to know
The furnishing is a recreation and genuine objects are few. It is worth coming for those who have read Dostoevsky: without that, a physician’s flat says little.
What to read
Joseph Frank, “Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time” — the standard life in one volume; the first hundred pages are about these rooms and this yard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
ISBN 9780691155999
Getting in
How to get there
Metro Dostoevskaya or Novoslobodskaya, seven minutes on foot. The museum is in a wing of the Mariinsky Hospital; the entrance is from the yard.
Opening times
Check the hours on the site of the Dal Museum of Literature.
Tickets
Adults 500 ₽; concessions 400 ₽.
from ₽500
tickets online
When to go
Weekdays, any hour. There are never crowds here, and that is probably right: the place asks for quiet.
Contacts
Of interest to children
The place requires that the books have been read. From 12, and then for older schoolchildren.
· No. 78