Museums near The Museum of the Russian Icon

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

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.

4.3 km from here · Fadeyeva Street 4

· No. 65

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.

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

· No. 73

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.

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

· No. 63

Unusual · since 2009

The Chocolate Museum

niche

An industrial tour rather than a museum: the value is the walk into the working shop and the history of Einem. As a collection it is next to nothing, and we do not hide that.

A walk into the working shop where sweets are wrapped in front of you; the history of Einem and Krasny Oktyabr in original wrappers and advertising.

4.6 km from here · Malaya Krasnoselskaya 7 (entrance from Lobachika 1, bldg 1) · ·

· No. 41

History · since 2012

The Jewish Museum

significant

Come for two things at once: the Bakhmetevsky garage by Melnikov and Shukhov, a building of world significance, and the history of Russian Jewry told from inside as nowhere else. The holdings of originals are modest, and that is worth knowing beforehand.

The building itself — the Bakhmetevsky garage of 1926–1927, one of Konstantin Melnikov’s principal works with steel structures by Vladimir Shukhov; the Café on Basseynaya, a reconstruction of shtetl life.

5.4 km from here · Obraztsova 11, bldg 1a · ·

· No. 47

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.

6.0 km from here · Novodevichy Proyezd 1

· No. 75

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.

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

· No. 51

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.

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

· No. 9