Museums near The Water Museum

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.

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

· No. 63

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.

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

· No. 40

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.

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

· No. 8

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.

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

· No. 56

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.

4.4 km from here · Lva Tolstogo Street 21 ·

· No. 62

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.

4.5 km from here · Rozhdestvenka 12 · ·

· No. 48

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.

4.7 km from here · Nikitsky Boulevard 12a · ·

· No. 43

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.

4.8 km 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.

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

· No. 71

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.

5.4 km from here · Tverskaya 21 · ·

· No. 28