Museums near The Archives Exhibition Hall

House museums · since 1921

Tolstoy in Khamovniki

outstanding

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.

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.

750 m from here · Lva Tolstogo Street 21 · ·

· No. 62

Literature · since 1934

The Dahl Literary Museum

significant

The only museum built not around a single name but around literature as a process. Hence its strength — comparisons impossible in a house museum, and a fund of 700,000 items that makes such comparisons possible.

The permanent display Zubovsky 15: a house of science, literature and art, and the exhibitions on 20th-century Russian letters.

1.1 km from here · Zubovsky Boulevard 15, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 8

History · since 1896

Museum of Moscow

significant

A city museum — an ordinary genre in Europe — but the material is unique in scale: a million objects about one city. The value is also the Provision Warehouses by Stasov, a model Empire building rarely accessible from inside.

The permanent display History of Moscow: the archaeology of Moscow soil, town life, plans and views of the city by century. And the Provision Warehouses themselves, an Empire monument after Vasily Stasov.

1.1 km from here · Zubovsky Boulevard 2, bldg 7 · ·

· No. 56

Architecture and estates · since 1524

Novodevichy Convent

outstanding

After Kolomenskoye the second building of Moscow on the World Heritage list, and for wholeness of ensemble the first: a convent of the late seventeenth century has come down almost without rebuilding — walls, towers, gate churches, refectory. The Smolensk Cathedral of 1524 keeps sixteenth-century frescoes in their places and an iconostasis of a kind of which Moscow has two or three. What is not here is a museum in the ordinary sense: this is a working convent with a museum display, and what is open changes from season to season.

The Smolensk Cathedral of 1524 with its sixteenth-century wall painting and iconostasis. The walls and towers of the late seventeenth century — Moscow Baroque entire. The burial ground: Denis Davydov, Sergei Solovyov. Chekhov was buried here in 1904 and moved in 1933 to the new Novodevichy cemetery outside the wall.

1.4 km from here · Novodevichy Proyezd 1 · ·

· No. 75

House museums · since 1911

The Tolstoy Museum on Prechistenka

significant

The largest manuscript fund of any single writer in the world. The value is scholarly: you see how the text was made — Tolstoy rewrote a sentence ten times, and you can watch it happen. For the house he lived in, go to Khamovniki.

Manuscripts in Tolstoy’s hand, first editions, portraits and photographs of the writer and his family. The display follows the books, from Childhood to Resurrection.

1.8 km from here · Prechistenka 11/8 · ·

· No. 7

Literature · since 1957

The Pushkin Museum on Prechistenka

significant

There is no memorial Pushkin house in Moscow — he did not live here. The value is not authentic walls but a complete age: objects, books and portraits from which the Pushkin era can be reconstructed whole. For relics go to the Moika in Petersburg; for the era, here.

The permanent displays Pushkin and His Age (fifteen rooms of the manor house) and Pushkin’s Fairy Tales; first editions, portraits of his circle, everyday objects of the early 19th century.

1.8 km from here · Prechistenka 12/2 · ·

· No. 2

Art · since 1986

The New Tretyakov

world-class

The Russian avant-garde is the one Russian artistic system to enter the world canon on equal terms, and its largest collection is here. MoMA and the Pompidou show Malevich and Tatlin torn from their setting; here they hang beside what they rebelled against, which changes the reading.

Malevich’s Black Square, Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse, work by Kandinsky, Chagall, Goncharova and Larionov, the model of Tatlin’s Tower. Next door: the Muzeon park of dismantled Soviet monuments.

1.9 km from here · Krymsky Val 10 · ·

· No. 5

Science and nature · since 1716

The Mineralogical Museum

outstanding

A collection more than three hundred years old: it grew out of the mineral cabinet of Peter’s Kunstkamera and moved to Moscow with the Academy of Sciences. Some hundred and forty thousand specimens make it one of the largest mineralogical museums in the world, and for the systematics of stone it has no equal in Russia. The Vault at South Kensington shows a few dozen chosen stones magnificently; the point here is the opposite — the whole class, in order, with the ordinary specimen beside the extraordinary one, which is what a systematic collection is for. Come knowing that this is a scientific museum and not an entertaining one: cases, labels, no screens. Anyone who wants the telling needs a guided tour, and it must be booked ahead.

The systematic collection — the whole known mineral world by class. Ural malachite and rhodonite from the old crown holdings. Meteorites. Hardstone work by Fabergé and the Peterhof lapidary works. Large specimens of a size only museums of this age possess.

2.1 km from here · Leninsky Prospekt 18, building 2 · ·

· No. 63

House museums · since 1922

The Scriabin Museum

significant

A flat from which nothing was carried out: Scriabin rented it for his last three years and died here in 1915, and it became a museum in 1922 — almost without a gap. Furniture, books, piano and the fittings of the study are the very ones. But the chief thing is another: Scriabin conceived music together with light, and the trace of that conception survives in the flat — the colour score of Prometheus and the light apparatus. No other composer’s museum in Russia shows the idea and not merely the domestic life.

The Bechstein grand at which the last works were written. The study and the library with the owner’s markings. The colour score of Prometheus and the colour-light apparatus assembled to Scriabin’s design. The music room is on the ground floor of the flat itself; the concert hall is next door, in the Scriabin House.

2.2 km from here · Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane 11 · ·

· No. 76

History · since 1991

The Museum of Patrons

for enthusiasts

The only museum about where the Tretyakov Gallery, the Bakhrushin, the Shchukin and Morozov collections came from: about the people who paid for them. The subject runs through our whole list and is gathered nowhere else. What the Courtauld is to Britain — a private eye and a private purse turned into a public institution — the Moscow merchants were to Russia, several times over and within one generation. The rating is honest and not high: this is a private educational centre in an old merchant house, the holding is documentary and small, and there is no free entry at all, only by appointment. Come here after the great museums, having asked yourself whose money they stand on.

Documents, portraits and belongings of the Moscow merchantry of the nineteenth century. Material on the Tretyakov, Morozov, Bakhrushin and Shchukin dynasties. The house of Ivan Prostyakov, in which the museum lives.

2.3 km from here · Donskaya Street 9 · ·

· No. 79