Museums near The Darwin Museum

History · since 1997

Museum of Moscow Archaeology

for enthusiasts

A museum built around what cannot be moved: the 16th-century bridge piers stayed where they were and the building went up over them. That method of display is rare, and it is the reason to go down.

The white-stone piers of the Voskresensky Bridge of the 16th to 18th century — the museum was built around them; coin hoards found in the city centre; the everyday things of medieval Moscow.

8.1 km from here · Manezhnaya Square 1a · ·

· No. 15

History · since 1859

One of the first museums in Russia: it opened in 1859, thirteen years before the Historical Museum, and opened already as a reconstruction of boyar life — an idea unheard of at the time. What is to be looked at is not authenticity down to the nail but the conception itself: how the middle of the nineteenth century pictured the seventeenth, and what came of it. Barry and Pugin were building Westminster in those same decades, and the case is the same — a century imagining an earlier one and building it in earnest. The collection meanwhile is real: furniture, vessels, textiles, tiles. Together with the Old English Court two steps away, this is the best pair in Moscow about the city before Peter.

The sixteenth-century undercroft, the one genuine part of the building. The interiors recreated by Richter in the 1850s: the dining chamber, the boyarynya’s room, the light room. Tiled stoves, chests, vessels and textiles of the seventeenth century.

8.1 km from here · Varvarka Street 10 ·

· No. 77

Art · since 2006

The Museum of the Russian Icon

outstanding

For Ethiopian Christian art it is the only collection in Russia; for the Russian icon it competes with state museums. Add a circumstance almost unheard of anywhere in the world for a collection of this level: admission is free.

The Russian icon of the 14th to 20th century, from Novgorod panels to Old Believer painting; Ethiopian Christian art, the only such collection in Russia; a reconstructed iconostasis and post-Byzantine Greek icons.

8.1 km from here · Goncharnaya 3, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 54

Unusual · since 1991

The Bookplate Museum

niche

The only collection of bookplates in Russia — a field between graphic art and bibliophilia shown systematically nowhere else. The circle of admirers is narrow, the subject genuine.

Bookplates by Russian and foreign artists, miniature editions and micro-books, writing on a grain of rice and miniatures on ivory.

8.7 km from here · Pushechnaya 7/5, bldg 2 (2nd floor) · ·

· No. 40

History · since 1917

The Museum of Contemporary History

for enthusiasts

The collection is large, but the display is built ideologically and is unreliable as a source of knowledge — we say so plainly. The value is the building: this is the Moscow English Club, the one from the novels, and some objects such as the propaganda porcelain.

The building of the Moscow English Club — the club of Eugene Onegin and War and Peace, with the lions on its gate; Soviet propaganda porcelain; the collection of gifts to Stalin.

8.7 km from here · Tverskaya 21 · ·

· No. 28

Unusual · since 2007

The Arcade Machines Museum

for enthusiasts

The only museum where the exhibit works: the machine starts on a coin, and that changes the whole way of meeting the object. As a monument of late Soviet daily life it is precise and honest.

Sea Battle, Gorodki, Sniper, Safari — the machines work rather than stand behind glass; and the soda machine with a faceted glass.

9.1 km from here · Rozhdestvenka 12 · ·

· No. 48

Art · since 2015

The AZ Museum

significant

A one-artist museum, Anatoly Zverev, grown out of a private collection. Its value is not scale — the rooms are few and the works small — but the way of showing: an exhibition here is built as a statement, with sequence and light, rather than hung along the walls, and in Moscow that is rare. About Zverev himself an honest word is owed: an uneven artist, part of whose legacy rests on the speed of the hand rather than on depth, and his best things have to be picked out. The museum does not conceal this, which is why it is believed.

Painting and drawing by Anatoly Zverev from Natalia Opaleva’s collection. Exhibitions setting Zverev beside other artists of his circle. Work by Vladimir Nemukhin and other nonconformists.

9.3 km from here · 2nd Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street 20–22 · ·

· No. 73

Art · since 1947

The Rublev Museum

outstanding

The third collection of Russian icons after the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum, and the only one built as a museum of one subject: here the icon does not stand in a row of Russian art but is explained in itself, from the board and the gesso to the iconography. The holding was formed from things brought out by the museum’s expeditions from closed and ruined churches, and its value is the completeness of the line rather than single stars: famous names are almost absent, but the sequence runs unbroken from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. In Britain icons are met in ones and twos, in Byzantine rooms and in the trade; a museum where the subject has a building of its own does not exist there. The monastery’s Saviour Cathedral, in which all this stands, is the oldest surviving building in Moscow.

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.

9.5 km from here · Andronyevskaya Square 10 · ·

· No. 61

Unusual · since 1912

The Museum of Music

outstanding

One of the largest collections of musical instruments in the world and the only place in Russia where the instrument is shown as an object of history. One can go from horn and gusli to Murzin’s synthesiser, named with Scriabin’s initials — the machine on which the music for Solaris was written. Here too is kept the State Collection of unique instruments: Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati. The Horniman shows the instrument as ethnography and the Royal College of Music shows it as performance history; here both lines run in one room, and the electronic one continues them. One thing must be known: the collection is a working one, instruments are lent to musicians, and they are not always to be found in the case.

Instruments of the peoples of the world, from Russian gusli to the Japanese koto. The ANS synthesiser of Yevgeny Murzin, named with Scriabin’s initials. Autographs and manuscripts of Russian composers. The State Collection of stringed instruments, when it is in the museum.

9.6 km from here · Fadeyeva Street 4

· No. 65

Art · since 1965

Apollinary Vasnetsov Museum

for enthusiasts

Apollinary Vasnetsov’s reconstructions of old Moscow are not painting but scholarship: the artist made archaeological observations, and his views still serve as textbook illustrations. Here they hang in the flat where they were made.

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

9.8 km from here · Furmanny Lane 6, flats 21–22 (3rd floor) ·

· No. 13