Museums near The Borodino Panorama

Military history · since 1995

The Victory Museum

for enthusiasts

A memorial rather than a collection: its strength is the scale of the spectacle and the Hall of Remembrance, not the originals. By museum standards it is average, and you should know that before going.

The Hall of Glory and the Hall of Remembrance and Sorrow; six dioramas of the decisive battles; the open-air park of military hardware.

1.4 km from here · Pobedy Square 3 · ·

· No. 29

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, and Chekhov before he was moved.

2.6 km from here · Novodevichy Proyezd 1

· No. 75

Science and nature · since 1951

MSU Botanical Garden

for enthusiasts

The garden was laid out in 1951 together with the new university buildings on the Lenin Hills, and it is kept as a collection: every holding has its name, its count of varieties and its year. The flowering part by the gate is open to walk through on your own — lilacs, irises, roses, peonies, perennials. There are more than two hundred and fifty varieties of lilac here and about seven hundred irises; the tree peonies were bred in the university itself. Every plant here has its own name and its own provenance.

Lilacs: more than two hundred and fifty varieties, Russian and foreign; the display plot was laid out in 1974. Irises — about seven hundred, from bearded to bulbous. Roses, more than two hundred varieties. Peonies, more than three hundred, among them tree peonies bred in the university itself. Daylilies, about two hundred varieties, from the old ones to the present.

3.7 km from here · Leninskie Gory 1, bldg 12 · ·

· No. 99

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.

4.0 km from here · Lva Tolstogo Street 21 ·

· No. 62

Architecture and estates · since 2020

The Narkomfin Building

significant

The 1930 house by Ginzburg and Milinis is the transitional commune-house with which any conversation about twentieth-century housing begins: two-level units, a corridor every second floor, kitchen and laundry taken out of the flat. Le Corbusier knew this building and leaned on it in the Unité d’habitation at Marseille — the ribbon window, the pilotis and the interlocking sections are all here first. But expectations must be squared honestly: the restoration of 2017–2020 gave the house back to its residents, and the museum here is one restored unit, not a building. Looking is done from outside and in a single flat, by appointment.

A restored type F unit, furnished to Ginzburg’s drawings. The building itself: the residential block on columns, the communal block, the bridge between them.

4.2 km from here · Novinsky Boulevard 25, block 1 · ·

· No. 74

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.

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

· No. 56

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.

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

· No. 8

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 his design. A concert hall in the same house.

4.4 km from here · Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane 11

· No. 76

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.

4.6 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.

4.7 km from here · Prechistenka 12/2 ·

· No. 2