Rooms with a view of Russian artistic history

“These are the actual steps up which Pushkin was carried after the duel,” says museum director Galina Sedova, guiding a visitor up brightly lit stairs that connect the ground floor (with a coat room, admission booth and small museum display) to the elegant 11-room flat in which Pushkin and his family once lived. The museum was established in the mid 1920s, in the early years of the Soviet Union, in part because anti-Bolsheviks who had fled the country shamed Russian cultural leaders into honoring the poet. The museum’s design and focus has been in an intimate dance with Russian cultural politics ever since.

In the early years, according to Sedova, the museum featured only seven of the original Pushkin rooms. “It wasn’t politic to emphasize the grandeur of Pushkin’s lifestyle in Soviet times,” she says.

(Mikhail Panov) - Fyodor Dostoevsky by Mikhail Panov, taken on June 9, 1880 in Moscow.

GoingOut Guide

Looking for things to do?

Select one or more criteria to search

Anything Events Bars & Club Events Book Events Exhibits Food Events Miscellaneous Events Music Events Performing Arts Sports Events Movies Locations Bars & Clubs City Services Hotels Miscellaneous Locations Movie Theaters Museums Music Venues Restaurants Sports Locations Stores Theaters Anytime Today This Weekend Next 7 Days Opening Soon Closing Soon Anywhere in D.C. area D.C. U Street The Mall Tenleytown Takoma SW Waterfront Other Southwest Other Southeast Other Northwest Other Northeast Logan Circle Georgetown Foggy Bottom Dupont Circle Downtown Columbia Heights/Mt. Pleasant Cleveland Park/Woodley Park Chinatown Chevy Chase Capitol Hill Brookland Anacostia Adams Morgan Maryland St. Mary's County Prince George's County Montgomery County Howard County Greater Maryland Frederick County Charles County Calvert County Baltimore Anne Arundel County Virginia Prince William County Loudoun County Greater Virginia Fauquier County Fairfax County Arlington County Alexandria

Kid-friendly

Free admission

Get ideas

The Soviet-era Pushkin was presented as a great Russian archetype, rather than an elite romantic figure who came from and satirized the nobility. The sexual intrigue that led to his fatal encounter with a man alleged to be his wife’s lover was downplayed. “His death was made a matter of social conditions, not an erotic duel,” Sedova says. Little emphasis was placed on the personal possessions, the furnishings, the historic details of the apartment, which was reconstructed based on letters and contemporary accounts from Pushkin’s time.

Times change, and especially since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the apartment has been more focused on recreating the ambience of Pushkin’s home. But it remains resolutely a memorial, with death its main focus. A sofa on which the poet supposedly died was tested for blood, and in 2010 — with great fanfare — Russian newspapers announced that it was Pushkin’s.

The apartment visit begins with the antechamber in which Pushkin’s coffin rested, and ends with the study, in which he died. The study, filled with objects that the artist had held in his hands, is the sancta sanctorum of most apartment museums.

“The idea, when you create a memorial apartment, is to make sure that the study isn’t eclipsed by any of the other rooms,” Sedova says. So the study is the richest with objects and memorabilia: a desk where he sat, an inkwell, a letter opener he often chewed, books and the sofa.

Not every apartment museum is focused on the memorial aspect, but most are haunted to some degree. In the museum devoted to Alexander Blok (the “silver age” poet who died in 1921), a glass case with a death mask and a religious icon stands where Blok’s deathbed was, and a vase of flowers is occasionally refreshed in front of it. Even if an artist didn’t die in the apartment that honors him, loss and absence are often in the foreground. A visit to the apartment of Feodor Chaliapin, the world-renowned opera singer who left Russia in the early 1920s, features a painting of the singer that supposedly sustained a crack — discovered by Chaliapin’s daughter at the moment the singer died in Paris in 1938. A tour of the capacious and beautifully appointed apartment ends in a large music room, where the disembodied voice of Chaliapin is heard singing, a poignant reminder of the singer’s self-imposed exile during the dangerous years of Soviet repression.