Museums near The Museum of the Russian Icon

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.

3.1 km from here · Prechistenka 11/8 · ·

· No. 7

Art · since 1918

The Museum of Oriental Art

outstanding

Western museums of the East were formed by colonial routes; this collection grew out of nationalised private collections and Soviet expeditions. Hence the Central Asian, Caucasian, Buryat and Chukchi sections that London and Paris lack: there the East begins with India and Egypt, here with what lay inside the country and next to it. That is the reason to come.

Central Asian and Caucasian carpets and metalwork transferred from the State Museum Fund; Iranian Qajar painting and tilework; Chinese bronze and porcelain, Japanese prints; a Korean section rare for Russia; Buddhist sculpture of Buryatia and Mongolia.

3.1 km from here · Nikitsky Boulevard 12a · ·

· No. 43

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.

3.3 km from here · Donskaya Street 9 · ·

· No. 79

Architecture and estates · since 1965

The Ryabushinsky Mansion

outstanding

The best surviving interior of Moscow Art Nouveau: Shekhtel built the mansion in 1900–1903 and thought it out down to the door handle, and the wave staircase with its jellyfish lamp is the thing for which one comes here instead of any museum of decorative art. What Horta did at the Hôtel Tassel and Mackintosh at the Glasgow School of Art — one hand over the whole building, from plan to fittings — Shekhtel did here, and here it survives with the fittings in place. Upstairs is hidden an Old Believers’ chapel that could not be shown openly, and it has come through. The memorial part — Gorky lived here from 1931 — is markedly weaker than the architecture, and that should be known in advance: one comes for Shekhtel, not for Gorky.

The wave staircase with its jellyfish light. Stained glass and the mosaic frieze of orchids along the façade. The Old Believers’ chapel on the top floor. Gorky’s study and library.

3.4 km from here · Malaya Nikitskaya Street 6/2 ·

· No. 71

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.

3.5 km from here · Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane 11

· No. 76

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.

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

· No. 56

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.

3.6 km from here · Tverskaya 21 · ·

· No. 28

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.

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

· No. 8

Science and nature · since 1706

The Apothecary Garden

outstanding

A garden in the middle of the city: five hundred metres to the Garden Ring, and the ground is not large. Founded by Peter I in 1706. Moscow had several such physic gardens, and every one of them except this vanished without trace, while the larch here, planted by tradition by Peter himself (an increment borer confirms an age of only two hundred years — our note), is alive still, though since a lightning strike early in the twentieth century it has hardly grown. The Palm House of 1891 is the centre of a tropical collection gathered over more than two hundred years.

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.

3.7 km from here · Prospekt Mira 26, building 1 · ·

checked 20 August 2026 · No. 102

Art · since 1981

The Museum of Decorative Art

significant

Lacquer miniature of four schools and propaganda porcelain — the objects by which Russia is recognisable in world decorative art. The material is first-rate; the display is not up to it.

Lacquer miniature — Palekh, Fedoskino, Mstyora, Kholuy; Soviet propaganda porcelain; toys of the peoples of the world; embroidery and samovars.

3.9 km from here · Delegatskaya 3, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 32