Moscow Guide
The Zemlyanoy Gorod
Pushkin on the Arbat
Address: On the Arbat
Opening time: Wed– Sun 10am–6pm; closed last Fri of each month
Price: R80
A sky-blue Empire-style house enshrines the fleeting domicile of Russia's most beloved writer as the Pushkin on the Arbat Museum (muzey-kvartira A.S. Pushkina). In the spring of 1831, it was here that Pushkin held his stag night and spent the first months of married life with Natalya Goncharova. They then moved to St Petersburg, where Pushkin was later killed in a duel with a French officer whose advances to Natalya were the talk of the town. After Pushkin's death their apartment was preserved as an evocative museum, which is worth seeing should you visit St Petersburg. The Arbat museum, however, is strictly for manuscript buffs, offering few insights into their lifestyle other than a taste for gilded chairs – and they would probably have been embarrassed by the bronze statue of Natalya and Pushkin that now stands on the other side of the street, resembling Barbie and Ken dressed for a costume ball.
The kassa for the Pushkin Museum also sells tickets for the sparsely furnished Bely Memorial Room (muzey-kvartira Andreya Belovo; same hours; R80) in the house next door, where the Symbolist writer Andrei Bely was born and grew up. Originally named Boris Bugaev, he adopted the pseudonym Bely (White) to disassociate himself from his father – a well-known professor – and express his identification with spiritual values. Most of his novels were autobiographical and concerned with consciousness; visitors can see four graph-like charts, representing his material and spiritual lives, his friends and his influences (classified as good or evil), drawn by Bely.