The literary museums of Moscow

Moscow museums

The houses where writers worked and the collections that keep what is left. A literary museum rarely wins you over with an object — it wins with a place and a detail, which is why it matters more than usual to know in advance what to look at.

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.

Zubovsky Boulevard 15, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 8

Literature · since 1928

The Dostoevsky Museum

significant

The first Dostoevsky museum in the world, opened in 1928, and the only place bound up with his childhood: here he was born and lived his first sixteen years, while his father served as physician to the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. The hospital beyond the window is not a background but a circumstance: the boy grew up among poverty and sickness, and half his books grow from here. In Doughty Street one sees where Dickens wrote; here one sees where a writer was made, which is a different question and a rarer exhibit. The collection is small and few family things survive, and that should be known in advance; the value here is the place itself.

The flat of a physician of the Mariinsky Hospital, recreated from the recollections of the writer’s brother. A few genuine possessions of the family. The view from the window onto the hospital yard, which Dostoevsky saw as a child.

Dostoevskogo Street 2 ·

· No. 78

Literature · since 2005

The Gogol House

significant

The only memorial museum of Gogol in the world, in the authentic walls of his last four years. The value is topographic: the room, the fireplace and the staircase give what no edition can.

Six memorial rooms; the fireplace in which, on the night of 12 February 1852, Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls.

Nikitsky Boulevard 7a · ·

· No. 4

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.

Prechistenka 12/2 ·

· No. 2

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