Museums near The Darwin Museum

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.

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

· No. 99

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.

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

· No. 63

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.

3.9 km from here · Novodevichy Proyezd 1

· No. 75

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.

4.8 km from here · Donskaya Street 9 · ·

· No. 79

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.

5.0 km 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.

5.4 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.

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

· No. 56

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.

5.6 km from here · Krymsky Val 10 · ·

· No. 5

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.

5.6 km from here · Pobedy Square 3 · ·

· No. 29

Military history · since 1962

The Borodino Panorama

significant

Roubaud’s panorama is one of the few survivors of a genre that was the summit of 19th-century visual culture and has almost entirely vanished. The value lies in the machinery of the spectacle, not in the subject: this is how people looked before cinema.

Franz Roubaud’s Borodino panorama of 1912: 115 metres of canvas in the round, 15 metres high. Next door, the Kutuzov hut where on 1 September 1812 the council of war decided to abandon Moscow.

5.8 km from here · Kutuzovsky Prospekt 38, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 9