Museums near Museum of Folk Prints

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.

3.6 km from here · Prechistenka 12/2 · ·

· No. 2

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.

3.7 km from here · Prechistenka 11/8 · ·

· No. 7

Art · since 1969

The Tropinin Museum

significant

The Moscow portrait of the first half of the 19th century is nowhere else so densely gathered. The value is also in the origin: Vishnevsky’s private collection given to the city, a model of how Russian museums came to be.

Portraits by Vasily Tropinin and his Moscow contemporaries, work by serf artists, Russian Biedermeier. The quiet Zamoskvorechye lane and the house itself are half the pleasure.

4.0 km from here · Shchetininsky Lane 10, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 31

Unusual · since 1894

The Bakhrushin Museum

outstanding

A collection begun in 1894 by one private man and grown into the largest theatre collection in the world — so the museum reckons it, and it is hard to dispute: a million and a half items. Its value is completeness: Russian theatre can be followed here in sequence, from the serf stage to the present, rather than by isolated stars. The V&A holds the national theatre archive of Britain and shows it magnificently; the difference is that there the Russian line is a guest and here it is the whole subject. The designs by Golovin, Bakst, Korovin and Exter are, incidentally, first-rate painting — they merely happen to be filed under theatre. The main building reopened after a long restoration in 2024, and the make-up of the permanent display is worth checking before setting out.

Designs for sets and costumes by Golovin, Bakst, Korovin, Exter and Tatlin. Costumes and possessions of the great actors. Stage models. The archives of theatres and directors. Bakhrushin’s own house, built for the collection.

4.1 km from here · Bakhrushina Street 31/12

· No. 66

Art · since 2016

Museum of Russian Impressionism

outstanding

The term “Russian impressionism” is contested, and this is the only institution that investigates rather than illustrates it. The value is the exhibition programme: works come here from private collections that would otherwise never be seen.

Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov, Igor Grabar, Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky. The building is a converted cylindrical flour store of the Bolshevik factory — a rare case of industry turned into a museum.

4.2 km from here · Leningradsky Prospekt 15, bldg 11 · ·

· No. 51

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.

4.2 km from here · Krymsky Val 10 · ·

· No. 5

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.

4.5 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.

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

· No. 8

Science and nature · since 1993

The Water Museum

for enthusiasts

A departmental museum with working models of city infrastructure — an almost extinct genre. Worth seeing for anyone curious about how the city works underground; there is nowhere else in Moscow for that.

Working models of waterworks, from the Rostokino aqueduct to the present treatment plants; the history of the Moscow sewer in drawings and photographs.

4.6 km from here · Sarinsky Proyezd 13 · ·

· No. 39

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.

4.9 km from here · Lva Tolstogo Street 21 · ·

· No. 62