Moscow museums · House museums
House museums · since 1921
Tolstoy in Khamovniki
The Tolstoy House Museum in Khamovniki
A house in which nothing was reconstructed: the furnishings are its own, the objects are the family’s, and their placing follows an inventory taken while the owners were alive. There is no electric light here and never was — Tolstoy refused it on principle, so the rooms are lit as they were in his time, which for a house museum is almost unheard of. Anyone who has been to Carlyle’s House in Chelsea knows the effect and will find it carried further here: there the gas fittings survive, here there is nothing but daylight and a lamp. The literary display on Prechistenka answers the question of what he wrote; here the question answered is how he lived — and in his case that is the subject.
Minimum route
1–1.5 hours
Founded
1921
Ticket
from ₽500
What to see
The study with its low chair, cut down to the short sight of its owner, and the writing table. Sofya Andreyevna’s room. The hall with the piano at which Taneyev and Rachmaninoff played. The cobbler’s bench — Tolstoy made his own boots. The garden, which has outlived the century along with the house.
Minimum route — 1–1.5 hours for the essentials
A little over an hour.
- 10 minutesthe yard and the garden: a manor in the middle of a city, and it should be seen before the house.
- 30 minutesthe ground floor: the family rooms, the hall, the dining room.
- 25 minutesthe upper floor: Tolstoy’s study and bedroom, for which one comes.
Reference
About the museum
Tolstoy bought the house in 1882 and spent nineteen winters here, until 1901; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection were written in Khamovniki. It became a museum in 1921, with the furnishings kept entire.
The building
A wooden town house of the end of the eighteenth century with a later upper floor, bought when it was already old. A manor with a garden in the middle of a factory district: Khamovniki in Tolstoy’s day was an edge of town with a silk mill under the windows.
Good to know
Authenticity here means restrictions too: overshoes are worn, part of the way is over carpets, and the light is not switched on. The house is small, and a group is felt in it strongly.
What to read
Sofia Tolstaya, “My Life” — this house described from within by the person who ran it. After her, the rooms stop being a display. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.
ISBN 9780776619224
Getting in
How to get there
Metro Park Kultury, then about ten minutes on foot along Komsomolsky Prospekt and into the courtyards.
Tickets
The house and the estate 500 ₽; concessions 250 ₽. Garden and grounds only 100 ₽; concessions 50 ₽. A combined ticket to the museum’s three Moscow sites, valid three days, 1200 ₽; concessions 600 ₽. Free for everyone on the last Thursday of the month.
from ₽500
tickets online
When to go
A clear day before lunch. There is no electricity in the house, and in dull weather the rooms are genuinely dark — which is honest, but makes things harder to see. In summer allow time for the garden as well.
Contacts
Of interest to children
A memorial house asks that Tolstoy has been read. Before ten there is no point, and even then with reservations: looking here has to be slow.
· No. 62