Geniuses Lived Here

If you want to know more about Russian culture, visit these apartments of the famous people transformed into museums.

Geniuses Lived Here

Photo by KonRu on Pixabay

Let's start with the newest of the museums - Maya Plisetskaya's memorial apartment. There you will find an immense number of souvenirs from her fans from all over the world, works of art inspired by the ballerina and presented to her by famous artists and, of course, her wardrobe, which is definitely a style icon.

The memorial apartment of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is a small and bright house on the Old Arbat where Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova lived for a little more than four months, but this was enough to leave a memory for centuries. The museum staff tried to accurately convey the atmosphere of the past. On the ground floor, you can get acquainted with the architectural appearance of Moscow in the 19th century, see materials about Pushkin's relationship with publishers and other writers, and even find out how his bachelor party went, who was at the wedding, and what documents the newlyweds signed. On the second floor, there is a hall where Pushkin and Goncharova held the first family ball and their room.

The house-museum of Vasily Pushkin is a cozy wooden mansion. The great poet's uncle, Vasily Lvovich Pushkin, lived there. Alexander Sergeevich loved his uncle, he visited this house many times. The layout and interiors of those times have been restored in the museum; visitors can see authentic items of the 19th century - paintings, silver cutlery, furniture, and children's toys. 

The memorial apartment of Andrey Beliy is located not far from the Pushkin Museum. There Boris Bugaev (the real name of the father of Russian symbolism) was born and spent his childhood, school and student years. Many symbolists, for example, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Valery Bryusov, and Zinaida Gippius, often visited the neighbors of the Bugaevs, and friendship with them predetermined the future fate of the poet. By the way, the pseudonym Andrei Bely also appeared within these walls. The museum features more than four thousand items: family photographs, manuscripts, personal items, drawings, etc.

The next one is a very famous Bulgakov's apartment museum. From the writer's hat rack to sketches of “The Master and Margarita”, the apartment is full of mesmerizing details. The museum often hosts additional interactive activities in the form of temporary exhibitions and installations.

The apartment museum of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky is located in a 19th-century mansion. Here the scientist lived, worked and held meetings with Vladimir Lenin on the project of electrification of Russia. Among the exhibits of the apartment of the vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences are furniture, household items, personal belongings, and archival documents.

Sviatoslav Richter's memorial apartment is filled with the ambiance of this virtuoso pianist, it reflects his way of life and conveys the spirit of the times he lived in. It regularly hosts concerts.

Creations of the sculptor Alexander Burganov can be seen in various cities in Russia and abroad, and in major museums around the world. The museum "Burganov's House" is one of his masterpieces. The sculptor created a special architectural composition of the building. Inside, in addition to the exhibition of his works, there is a creative workshop where masterpieces continue to be born. It is the best place to understand the world of the artist and the atmosphere in which his creations appear.

In addition to an authentic picture of the life of the creative intelligentsia of the 20th century, the apartment museum of Apollinary Vasnetsov presents about 200 works of the artist and elements of his workshop.

Marina Tsvetaeva moved to the house where the museum in her memory is located now in 1914. The shabby building was planned to be demolished at the end of the 19th century, but one of the residents, with the help of social activists, saved the estate, turning it into the house-museum of Tsvetaeva. Here you can see books, photographs, letters, and manuscripts of Marina Ivanovna, the historical interior has been restored in the living quarters to preserve the atmosphere.

The memorial house-museum of Korolev is a house that academician Sergey Korolev received from the government as a reward for making the first artificial satellite to overcome gravity. He lived here until his death, and nine years later a memorial museum was opened in the mansion. The exposition was based on a collection donated by the academician's widow: Korolev's student notes, family photos and portraits, etc. An important part of the exposition is documentary archives, some of which were declassified only recently. 

Scriabin memorial museum is a place where the creator of light music spent the last years of his life. The composer was friends with many famous people: Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Boris Pasternak and Vsevolod Meyerhold visited his house at different times. In this house, the pianist created three symphonies for piano and orchestra, "The Poem of Ecstasy" and "Prometheus". The most interesting part of the museum is the musician's office with unique exhibits: a Bechstein piano, a library, and a color-light apparatus invented by Scriabin. 

The museum workshop of Dmitry Nalbandyan is located in the house where Dmitry Nalbandyan moved to in 1956. Demyan Bedny, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Mikhail Romm lived in the same house, the studios of the Kukryniksy, Nikolai Zhukov, Fyodor Konstantinov, and other artists were also located there. The collection of the museum contains more than 1,500 works by Nalbandyan: paintings, sketches, drawings, and photographs.

Today, the Visotsky House is a cultural and scientific center, where more than 1000 exhibits are located and educational and cultural events regularly take place. After the death of Vladimir Visotsky, it turned out that his fans had a huge number of unique photographs and records of personal meetings with him. The Taganka Theater was bombarded with letters from the artist's fans. An initiative group was created, which initiated the opening of the future museum, and in 1992 it was finally opened. 

A very famous director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, lived and worked for 17 years in the house, where the museum in his memory is now located. Stanislavsky and his wife were living on the second floor of the mansion, which was divided into the Opera Hall and the residential part with a bedroom, a dining room and an office. In the Opera Hall, the director staged "Eugene Onegin", in the bedroom he wrote books, and in the office, he held rehearsals with the actors. Nowadays everything in the house is restored as if Stanislavsky still lives in the apartment: you can see there the old parquet, majestic ceilings, and a creaky wooden staircase. Also, on the first floor of the museum, there is a unique collection of materials for the performances that Stanislavsky staged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The “Tchaikovsky and Moscow” museum is a house where Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky lived from September 1872 to November 1873. The name of the Russian capital appears in the name of the museum because it was the Moscow period that became crucial in the fate of Tchaikovsky. The museum exposition is based on personal belongings, photographs, drawings, letters of the musician, etc.

The apartment museum of Dostoevsky is one of the first literary museums in Moscow. The museum is located in the apartment where Dostoevsky spent his childhood. The interior of the museum was reconstructed according to the memoirs of his younger brother. The museum includes the personal belongings of the writer, his autographs, furniture, portraits of relatives, illustrations for books made by artists from different countries, and many other things.

Solzhenitsyn's apartment museum was opened in Moscow in December 2018. Nobel Prize winner Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn became the first person to tell the world in detail about Stalin's Gulag. The museum exhibits tell about the work of Solzhenitsyn and his life in Moscow in the 1970s. Visitors can visit the kitchen, where the writer met with friends to drink tea, and see his office and photo lab, where microscopic photocopies of his texts were created.

Text by

Anastasia Kochukhova