Museums near The Narkomfin Building

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.

900 m from here · Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane 11

· No. 76

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.

950 m from here · Malaya Nikitskaya Street 6/2 ·

· No. 71

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.

1.2 km from here · Nikitsky Boulevard 12a · ·

· No. 43

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.

1.7 km from here · Tverskaya 21 · ·

· No. 28

Art · since 1934

The Museum of Architecture

outstanding

The only museum of architecture in Russia and one of the few in the world. It holds fragments of demolished buildings — reliefs from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, details of the Sukharev Tower: things that exist nowhere else because the buildings do not.

The enfilade of the Talyzin house with its exhibitions; the Apothecary Office, 17th-century chambers where fragments of demolished Moscow buildings are shown; models of unbuilt projects, including material on the Palace of the Soviets.

1.7 km from here · Vozdvizhenka 5/25 · ·

· No. 53

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.

1.8 km from here · Prechistenka 12/2 ·

· No. 2

Art · since 1912

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

world-class

The Louvre and the Metropolitan hold more originals; what is unique is Tsvetaev’s cast collection — the only large teaching museum of the history of art in the world still intact and still working as intended. In Europe such collections went into storage in the 20th century. Add the Fayum portraits and objects from Schliemann’s Trojan hoards.

The teaching collection of plaster casts after antique and Renaissance sculpture — Tsvetaev’s idea, unmatched for completeness; the Fayum portraits; objects from Priam’s Treasure found by Schliemann at Troy; the Egyptian collection. The French 19th–20th century is in the Gallery at Volkhonka 14, on a separate ticket.

1.9 km from here · Volkhonka 12 · ·

· No. 20

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.

1.9 km from here · Prechistenka 11/8 · ·

· No. 7

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.

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

· No. 73

Art · since 1817

The Manege

significant

There is no collection; the value is entirely engineering — a column-free span of nearly 45 metres calculated by Betancourt, a monument of engineering thought with few equals in Europe. Everything else here is temporary.

The building itself: a column-free hall spanned by timber trusses of almost 45 metres, calculated by the engineer Agustín de Betancourt — a rare monument of engineering.

2.0 km from here · Manezhnaya Square 1 ·

· No. 19