Museums near The Archives Exhibition Hall

Lubok sheets of the 17th to 19th century, printing boards and a press, and work by living artists who continue the craft.

The studio with its original furnishings, and the views of old Moscow — historical reconstructions by which the medieval city is still imagined.

The upper floor is the studio the house was built for: high ceilings, wide windows onto the yard and the garden. Viktor Vasnetsov painted the Bogatyrs and Sirin and Alkonost here. Both went long ago to Lavrushinsky Lane. What stayed is The Poem of Seven Fairy Tales — seven canvases of 1901–1926, from The Sleeping Princess to The Frog Princess. Beside them are icons and peasant costumes from his own collection. His brushes lie in a birchbark box on the work table. Downstairs, two rooms survive almost intact. The dining room and the drawing room keep their furnishing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: furniture to drawings by Vasnetsov and Yelena Polenova, family portraits by his own hand. In the yard, on the brick fire wall, is the mosaic Christ Enthroned after his design. It was set early in the twentieth century in Frolov’s St Petersburg workshop and moved here in the 1970s.

The family’s own things: the oval sofa table, the bookcase, portraits of the parents and forebears, bronze candelabra from Andrei Dostoevsky’s collection. In the Dostoevsky’s World display — the sofa the writer bought in 1866, the writing desk from his last flat, an inkstand and his spectacles, a facsimile of the Gospel the Decembrists’ wives gave him in 1850. The view from the window onto the hospital yard, which Dostoevsky saw as a child.

Icons of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, gathered by the museum’s own expeditions. Royal doors and whole iconostasis sets. Fragments of wall painting. The Saviour Cathedral of the 1420s — the oldest building in Moscow, with remains of ornamental painting associated with Rublev.

Peter's larch, as the garden has always called it, stands in the middle of the arboretum. Beside it a pedunculate oak more than two hundred years old, limes past a hundred, and a rare weeping form of the Dahurian larch. The Palm House of 1891: palms, figs and pandanus at their full height. The Succulent House on the upper floor of the glasshouse block holds cacti, euphorbias, agaves and aloes, some of them among the rarest anywhere. The old pond with its water plants, the shade garden, the heather slope where the rockery used to be; the conifer slopes took a gold diploma of the landscape architecture prize in 2013.

The building itself — the Bakhmetevsky garage of 1926–1927, one of Konstantin Melnikov’s principal works with steel structures by Vladimir Shukhov; the Café on Basseynaya, a reconstruction of shtetl life.

A walk into the working shop where sweets are wrapped in front of you; the history of Einem and Krasny Oktyabr in original wrappers and advertising.

The Church of the Ascension, 1532. The Church of the Beheading of St John the Baptist at Dyakovo, sixteenth century, usually empty. The Front Gate with its display. Peter the Great’s cabin, brought from Arkhangelsk. Tiles and icons in the reserve’s exhibitions.

Halls of mechanics, optics, acoustics and electricity; a mirror maze; science shows to a timetable.