The State Pushkin Museum: Authentic Objects and Recreated Interiors

The State Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin Museum in Moscow presents several kinds of historical evidence: authentic belongings of the poet and his contemporaries, objects from the same period, and recreated interiors. They cannot all be interpreted in the same way. The mansion on Prechistenka retains the architecture of Pushkin’s time, but there is no documentary evidence that the poet visited this house. Pushkin’s Memorial Apartment on Arbat is in the house where he lived after his wedding, although the furnishings visitors see on the first floor have been recreated using historical evidence.

The distinction becomes clearer when we trace how the collection took shape and what its exhibits can establish. An etched portrait of the poet is the first entry in the 1958 acquisitions register; Pushkin’s own quill leads us to his study in St Petersburg; a childhood portrait reveals his early appearance, although the artist’s name is given with a caveat. The description of the exhibitions published by the museum, helps distinguish these histories and prevents a carefully assembled museum setting from being mistaken for an untouched interior from 1831.

How did the collection of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum begin?

The museum was established on 5 October 1957 and opened its first permanent exhibition on Prechistenka on 6 June 1961. These were two distinct events: the decision to establish the institution did not mean that a complete collection was already on display in its galleries. In the intervening years, staff received donations, studied objects and developed a narrative about the poet. The museum’s history explicitly lists its early acquisitions: the childhood portrait, a watercolour by P. F. Sokolov depicting M. N. Volkonskaya with her son, and N. F. Arendt’s medical case.

The reconstructed office of the first director, Alexander Zinovyevich Krein, displays ‘Exhibit No. 1’ — an etching depicting Pushkin, entered in the collection register in 1958. Its significance lies in marking the start of the museum’s collection records. Yet an image of the poet and an object he personally owned represent different kinds of authenticity: the etching itself may be a historical object, but it does not establish that Pushkin ever held it in his hands.

A tradition of donating to the museum developed under Krein. According to the museum, donations account for around a third of its holdings, which comprise more than 150,000 items. Private collections acquired include I. N. Rozanov’s library of Russian poetry and P. V. Gubar’s collection of books and decorative arts. This mix explains the institution’s broad scope: printed works and graphic art tell the story of how Pushkin has been read and depicted; furniture and porcelain illustrate the material culture of his century; and personal relics relate to specific people and events. It is useful to compare these categories, but they should not be conflated.

Why is the museum on Prechistenka not considered a surviving home of Pushkin?

The Pushkin Museum on Prechistenka occupies the Khrushchev–Seleznev mansion, built during the poet’s lifetime. However, the museum specifically acknowledges, that it has no document recording his visit to this house. The possibility of such a visit is based on the owners’ social circle and remains conjecture. The building’s historical significance therefore does not make it a confirmed Pushkin address.

Following the fire of 1812, Alexander Petrovich Khrushchev purchased the plot on Prechistenka in 1814. The new Empire-style mansion was built to a design by A. G. Grigoryev, with the involvement of D. I. Gilardi; the state historical and cultural assessment report names Grigoryev as the architect of the main house. Later owners included the Rudakov and Seleznev families, and the building served various purposes during the 20th century. In 1949, it hosted an exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, and in 1957 the estate was transferred to the new museum. The history of the house itself thus extends further back than that of the Pushkin exhibition.

The state rooms give visitors an authentic sense of the spaces inhabited by Moscow’s nobility in the early 19th century. Yet the furniture on display cannot automatically be assumed to have belonged to the Khrushchev family, nor can a room in the mansion be treated as the poet’s room. In the permanent exhibition ‘Pushkin and His Era’, which opened in 1997, the museum arranged around four thousand objects across 15 galleries, following the course of his life. Staff brought together objects from different locations and collections to explain the poet’s life, work and social circle.

Which object had a genuine connection to the poet?

Objects with a documented history of ownership or use provide the most direct connection. In the final gallery of the permanent exhibition, the museum displays a quill taken from Pushkin’s desk at his home on the Moika after his death, a lock of his hair, Chernetsov’s painting ‘Darial Gorge’, which hung in his St Petersburg study, and the medical case that N. F. Arendt brought when attending the wounded poet. The museum’s description links each relic to a specific place or event. The place where it is kept today does not necessarily coincide with the place where it was historically used.

The medical case is a particularly clear example of why an object’s acquisition history matters. It is connected with Pushkin’s final days, but arrived at the Moscow museum more than a century later: the museum states, that it was donated in 1961 by Professor A. A. Arendt. The object’s story rests on two pieces of evidence — its connection to the poet’s doctor and its later transfer to the collection. Omitting the second part would create the impression that the object had been in the museum since Pushkin’s time.

The quill and lock of hair are personal relics of particular significance; a portrait of a contemporary or porcelain from the same period serves a different purpose. They help us imagine the people, interiors and visual culture that surrounded the poet, but do not in themselves prove that he had contact with every object on display. This distinction is especially important in a literary museum: a well-designed exhibition creates a sense of closeness, while a historical connection is established through an object's provenance, dating and documentary evidence.

The distinction between an object belonging to the poet and one from his circle can be seen in specific exhibits at the museum on Prechistenka. On display in the room devoted to his travels around Moscow is a samovar from the home of Alexei Nikolayevich Olenin. The museum links it to the owner of a house Pushkin visited and states that the poet drank tea from this samovar. This is more substantial than the general description ‘an object of the period’: the object's former home, owner and connection to the poet's life are identified. However, the samovar did not belong to Pushkin and did not come from his apartment. The description of the room allows us to maintain this precision without diminishing the samovar's value.

Another piece of evidence is a mahogany writing bureau from the 1830s, from the Kazan home of Karl Fyodorovich and Alexandra Andreyevna Fuchs. The poet visited this family during his journey to places associated with Pugachev; the museum mentions this connection in its description of the room. Yet the account of his visit does not prove that he worked at the particular bureau on display. Such a claim would require separate evidence that he used this piece of furniture. The object documents the home and surroundings of people with whom Pushkin conversed, while the account of his journey explains why a bureau from Kazan has a place in an exhibition about his life.

Comparison with the relic from the study on the Moika establishes different levels of evidence. The museum links the quill directly to the poet's desk after his death; the samovar to the home of an acquaintance he visited; and the bureau to the home of people he visited, with no known connection to a specific action. All three objects are authentic and contribute to the historical account of Pushkin's life. What differs is the question each can answer. This approach has no need for a museum legend claiming that Pushkin must have touched every object in the display case.

Where in the collection is there a text in Pushkin's own hand?

The Moscow museum's manuscript department holds an original note written by the poet himself: a few lines in a list of books, which Pushkin requested for himself from the library at Polotnyany Zavod in 1834. The description of the collection identifies this autograph manuscript as a particularly valuable item among approximately two thousand manuscript materials. It provides direct evidence of the author's choice of library books: a researcher sees words written in his own hand, rather than a contemporary's account.

The collection also includes photographic copies of Pushkin's manuscripts, made for the Moscow museum from originals held since 1948 at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, known as Pushkin House, in St Petersburg. This material allows the handwriting and contents of a document to be studied remotely, but its provenance and physical status are different. A print on photographic paper or a digital reproduction does not become an autograph manuscript simply because it shows Pushkin's handwriting.

The manuscript collection includes original notes and letters by people in his circle: his parents, Sergey Lvovich and Nadezhda Osipovna, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Griboyedov and Nikolai Gogol. They do not stand in for the poet's own voice. They do, however, allow his network of literary and family connections to be explored through documents created by the people within it. For the museum's narrative, this distinction is more illuminating than simply counting manuscripts: it matters who wrote each line.

The same collection contains nineteenth-century manuscript albums in which owners and guests wrote poetry and prose, sometimes accompanied by drawings. An album offers evidence of how texts circulated in society; its presence in the Pushkin museum does not mean that every page was written by Pushkin. Museum classification distinguishes manuscripts in the author's own hand from those written by his contemporaries and from reproductions. This distinction is useful to bear in mind at a display case, where visually similar sheets may tell entirely different stories.

What does the childhood portrait reveal, and what are the limits of its attribution?

The portrait of Pushkin as a child was one of the museum's earliest and most significant acquisitions. It offers a rare opportunity to see an image of the future poet made during his lifetime. However, on the exhibition page the artist is identified as “presumably” Xavier de Maistre. That word matters: the portrait is authentic as a historical object, while its authorship remains a question of attribution. One statement does not invalidate the other.

In the rooms devoted to Pushkin's childhood, views of Moscow sit alongside portraits of relatives and family acquaintances, furniture and books from the turn of the nineteenth century. They provide a visual context for Pushkin's early life. The books by Plutarch and Homer on a small museum table point to the future poet's favourite reading; the museum does not claim that these particular copies belonged to the family. Visitors thus see a possible world of his childhood, alongside individual objects with histories of their own.

Which portraits were painted during Pushkin's lifetime, and which were created later?

The collection of paintings and original graphic works provides material for comparing images from different periods. The museum reports approximately 6500 works: portraits, town and city views, book illustrations and sketches for stage sets. These include images of the poet and his contemporaries made during their lifetimes, as well as works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists who knew Pushkin only through his writings, the visual legacy of earlier periods and cultural memory. The date an image was created is therefore no less important than the recognisable face it depicts.

In its overview of the collection, the museum lists images of Pushkin by X. de Maistre from the early nineteenth century, by I.-E. Vivien de Chateaubrun from 1826, and the “Yelagin Copy” of 1827. The name of the last work itself signals the complexity of the issue: an authentic work on paper may have been made after someone else's original. Meanwhile, the museum's page for the childhood gallery attributes the child's portrait to Xavier de Maistre only tentatively. Different descriptions express different degrees of certainty; in an article, it is wiser to retain this qualification than to infer definite authorship from a single brief list.

After the poet's death, artists returned to his image time and again. The museum names K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, K. F. Yuon, S. V. Gerasimov and other twentieth-century masters among them. Their works are authentic creations of their own time, but not evidence of Pushkin's appearance recorded during his lifetime. Comparing later portraits with images from the first third of the nineteenth century reveals both the man himself and the features that subsequent generations chose to emphasise in his cultural image.

A separate part of the collection is devoted to the poet's contemporaries and relatives. The museum highlights more than 250 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century miniatures in its painting collection; creating a portrait gallery of people from Pushkin's era is described as one of the aims of its many years of collecting. A miniature of an acquaintance of Pushkin helps reconstruct his circle and the artistic tastes of the time, but a particular meeting with the poet still needs to be established through a letter, memoir or other document. A museum portrait thus serves as evidence of a face and an era, while the biographical connection is established separately.

Why does the museum hold photographs taken after the poet's death?

The photographic collection supports research into Pushkin's relatives, friends, descendants and places associated with his memory. On the collection page the museum describes more than three thousand items and specifies that the collection's first acquisitions in 1958 consisted of 84 photographs of Ostafyevo from the 1920s. These are images of the estate associated with the Vyazemsky–Sheremetev circle, rather than photographs taken during Pushkin's lifetime. The collection began by documenting the memory of the poet's milieu a century later.

More than half of the collection consists of photographic portraits. It includes photographs of the poet's children Alexander, Grigory and Natalia, as well as members of the Vyazemsky family, Lyceum students and other contemporaries, taken in the age of photography. A portrait of someone who knew Pushkin has documentary value in its own right, even when made many years after their meetings. It shows the sitter's appearance at the time of the photograph, rather than in the year they met the poet. This gap in time changes how the caption beneath the display should be read.

The acquisition history of a series of 22 photographic cards depicting Decembrists is well documented. According to the museum, the series belonged to the historian S. N. Golubov and was donated by his widow in 1968; some photographs bear signatures and annotations by previous owners. The chain of provenance — sitter, photographer, owner of the series, donor — helps explain why a photograph is held in Moscow and which aspects of its history are corroborated by the object itself. All these photographic portraits, however, were taken after the Decembrists returned from exile under the amnesty of 1856.

The role of photography is particularly clear in the study of interiors that no longer survive. The museum holds early twentieth-century images of Mikhailovskoye taken before the main house was destroyed by fire in 1908. Such photographs do not directly show how a room looked in Pushkin’s time: many decades had passed between the poet’s lifetime and the photographs being taken. They do, however, record the condition of the building before its subsequent loss. For a historian comparing documents from different years, they constitute evidence in their own right, with a precise date and clear limits to the conclusions they support.

The photographic collection includes a daguerreotype of Prince Sergei Grigoryevich Volkonsky, made in Irkutsk in 1845; the museum notes a dedicatory inscription on the reverse. He was a contemporary of the poet, but the image was taken eight years after Pushkin’s death. Its date, technique and dedicatory inscription make the daguerreotype a record of Volkonsky’s life in enforced settlement and of the object’s subsequent history. The museum’s description provides no grounds for concluding that they were personally acquainted.

The same collection contains photographic reproductions of portraits of people in Pushkin’s circle made during their lifetimes; some of the original images have not survived. In such cases, the photograph is authentic as a historical reproduction, but the painting it depicts is accessible to researchers only through this intermediary. Where the original has been lost, the photograph preserves its composition and some details, but offers no way to examine the texture of the paint, the dimensions or later alterations to the canvas. This is why the label ‘photograph of a portrait’ is more accurate than simply ‘portrait’.

Which objects in the mansion’s galleries belong to the period, and what forms part of the museum’s narrative?

Much of the permanent exhibition on Prechistenka tells the story of Pushkin’s life and works through authentic objects that belonged to different owners. A portrait painted during its subject’s lifetime, a rare book, furniture belonging to an acquaintance of the poet and an early nineteenth-century decorative object may all share one gallery. All are historical, but the strength of their personal connection to Pushkin varies. Their arrangement together is a decision made by museum staff in the late twentieth century, rather than a preserved scene from his life.

For example, in the gallery devoted to the novel Eugene Onegin, everyday objects help visitors explore the clothing, domestic surroundings and habits of Pushkin’s contemporaries. Their purpose is to explain the cultural context of the story. In the section on his work on historical writings, books, portraits and images from the period reveal the sources and people connected with his literary work. The museum does not present any of these galleries as the untouched study of the author of Onegin. The title of the permanent exhibition refers to an ‘era’, rather than an ‘apartment’.

Krein’s recreated study introduces another historical layer. Its central figure is the director who assembled the collection in the second half of the twentieth century. Visitors see a desk set, a typewriter, his bureau and ‘Exhibit No. 1’. This gallery tells the story of the museum and the curators whose efforts brought together objects from different centuries. Here, the question of authenticity concerns the history of the museum as an institution, rather than Pushkin’s life.

How does the apartment on Arbat differ from the mansion on Prechistenka?

The house on Arbat has a documented connection with the poet’s life: before his wedding, Pushkin rented rooms on the first floor from Nikanor Nikanorovich Khitrovo and lived there with Natalia Nikolaevna during the first months of their marriage. The museum gives the date of the agreement — 23 January 1831 — and a rental term of six months. The exact date he moved in is unknown; by 10 February, he was already asking a friend to write to him at the Khitrova house on Arbat. On 15 May, the couple left for Tsarskoye Selo, so they did not stay for the full intended rental term.

Here, the historic location matters more than the familiar appearance of a room. After the Pushkins left, the house had other residents, changed uses and underwent alterations. In 1921, a theatre hall was fitted out on the first floor; later, the mansion was divided into communal flats. According to the museum, by the early 1970s the building housed 33 families — 72 people; the former drawing room had become a living space split over two levels. After such a history, it would be inaccurate to present the rooms as an interior preserved intact since the couple’s wedding in 1831.

The decision to establish a museum on Arbat was made in 1972, and in 1974 the house was added to the list of heritage monuments of national significance. The Memorial Apartment opened on 18 February 1986. Its first exhibition deliberately distinguished between the two floors: the ground floor told the story of Pushkin and Moscow, while the first floor was kept free of exhibits as a space of remembrance. This was one way of presenting the actual place where he had lived when little of its furnishings had survived. In 2024, the museum introduced a different approach to the exhibition.

What exactly was recreated in the apartment following the 2024 restoration?

Following restoration, the apartment on Arbat reopened on 6 June 2024 with displays on three levels. The lower ground floor is devoted to the history of Arbat, the ground floor to Pushkin’s life in Moscow, and the first floor to the rooms where the newlyweds lived. The museum explicitly describes the interiors on the upper floor as recreated. The word ‘memorial’ here therefore refers to the authenticity of the address and the events that took place there, rather than the survival of every curtain, every chair or the furniture arrangement from 1831.

The first floor displays the drawing room, dining room, study, boudoir, bedroom and pantry. The museum specifically states that the curtains were reconstructed using examples from the 1830s. This offers an honest guide to interpreting the display: a fabric can faithfully reflect the taste of the period while still being a new addition to the museum. The dining room, with its table laid, helps visitors imagine guests being entertained, but an arrangement assembled today is not the same as a documented record of the Pushkins’ table.

In recreating Pushkin’s study, the museum drew on a recollection by Pavel Vyazemsky. As a child, he visited the house on Arbat and later described a drawing room with wallpaper imitating lilac velvet. This is an account of one room he saw, rather than a plan of the study or an inventory of its furniture. The reconstruction combines an eyewitness’s words with plans of the house and decisions made by museum staff.

Have any plans of the house survived that shed light on the apartment?

The museum mentions plans of the house on Arbat dating from 1806 and 1836; architects used them during restoration in the 20th century. They provide a substantial basis for studying the building, but their dates call for caution. One plan was drawn before the Pushkins lived there, the other five years afterwards. They allow the layout of the house to be compared across nearby periods; on their own, they do not record where the writing desk stood in February 1831 or which possessions the couple brought with them.

The history of the house also reveals major breaks in the continuity of its physical fabric. The fire of 1812 almost destroyed the Khitrovo property, which was rebuilt by 1816. Pushkin rented the building after it had been restored. Alterations in the 20th century, its use as a theatre and its conversion into communal housing added further layers. The phrase ‘the very same house’ is therefore accurate in terms of the address and the building’s historical continuity, but needs qualification when referring to wall surfaces or the furnishings of a particular room.

How can you distinguish a family possession from an object that simply evokes the atmosphere?

The guide is the precise wording of the museum’s description. The ground floor of the Arbat branch contains personal objects associated with the Ushakov family, furniture belonging to the poet’s acquaintances N. I. Nadezhdin and M. P. Pogodin, and possessions of Pushkin’s descendants. Each group establishes its own connection: with friends, the publishing world or later generations of the family. None automatically becomes Pushkin’s property simply because it is displayed in his former home.

The gallery devoted to the marriage proposal displays objects and furniture from the Goncharov family’s Polotnyany Zavod estate in the Kaluga region. Their value lies in their connection with Natalia Nikolaevna’s family. But these objects originally belonged to another estate, so an object associated with the Goncharovs and one from the Arbat apartment are different categories. The museum can bring them together in a single account of the marriage, provided visitors understand what each exhibit actually substantiates.

There is also later evidence that is important to the history of remembrance. On the first floor is I. K. Makarov’s 1849 portrait of Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkina-Lanskaya. It depicts her years after the Arbat period; to take it as an image of the young mistress of the apartment in 1831 would be a dating error. This distance in time does not make the portrait less valuable, but it changes the question we should bring to it.

What new insights did the 2026 acquisitions exhibition offer?

The exhibition ‘New Acquisitions for the Collection of the A. S. Pushkin State Museum’ ran on Prechistenka from 5 September to 4 October 2026. On the project’s official page the museum described around a hundred selected exhibits and provided detailed information about some of the donors.

The museum identified the centrepiece as a portrait of Paul I dating from the latter half of the 1790s to the 1800s, painted by an unknown artist after Jean-Louis Voille’s 1789 original. In the staff’s assessment, it reflects the artistic culture of the turn of the 19th century and relates to Pushkin’s interest in this ruler. Its previous owner was G. P. Kositskaya, from whom the work entered the collection. Here, the study of provenance becomes clear: the sitter, the painter of the copy, the creator of the original portrait and the donor have four distinct roles.

The new acquisitions included the 1820s lithographs ‘A Dandy in a Droshky’ and ‘An Officer in a Sleigh’, made after originals by A. O. Orlovsky. They expand the collection of images of everyday travel in Pushkin’s time. The museum also acquired materials relating to 20th-century artists who explored portrayals of the poet in art. This selection reveals two strands of collecting: acquiring objects from the poet’s era and preserving the history of how later generations imagined him.

Among the acquisitions presented in 2026 is a 1933 edition of ‘Eugene Onegin’ with a presentation inscription from the artist Nikolai Kuzmin to N. S. Shepeleva, dated 24 May 1962. The museum states that Natalia Sergeevna Shepeleva, whose married name was Mezentseva, was Pushkin’s great-granddaughter, and that the copy came from the heir A. G. Sheludchenko. These dates and names explain the book’s value to the museum: it documents the later history of illustrating the novel, the illustrator’s connection with a descendant of the poet, and the journey of this particular copy into the collection.

The same exhibition also displayed newly acquired archival materials from the estates of the artists Tatyana Mavrina and Nikolai Kuzmin: documents concerning their education and membership of professional associations. These have no connection with Pushkin’s private life in the 19th century. They do, however, give researchers verifiable information about the artists who shaped visual representations of Pushkin in the following century.

How did the presentation of the Arbat apartment change between 1986 and 2024?

When the branch opened on 18 February 1986, the museum placed a literary exhibition on the ground floor and left the second floor without exhibits. Visitors entered a house documented as the Pushkins’ home, but saw no recreation of its domestic furnishings. After the second floor had been remodelled for theatrical use and the house converted into communal accommodation, the empty rooms helped visitors focus on the significance of the address itself.

Following the restoration in 2024, the new exhibition occupied twenty rooms across three levels. The second floor now includes a drawing room, dining room, study, boudoir, bedroom and pantry; the drawing room features curtains recreated from examples dating to the 1830s. Visitors can now see which rooms made up the apartment and how the museum interprets their functions. The description of the new display does not, however, establish that every chair belonged to the Pushkin family.

Comparing the two exhibitions reveals a change in the museum’s approach. In 1986, the second floor remained an empty space within the historic house. Since 2024, its rooms have presented the museum’s interpretation of the furnishings, based on building plans, Pavel Vyazemsky’s recollection and period objects. Each individual detail still calls for its own questions: has the original object survived, is its former owner known, and what document accounts for the exhibit’s place in the reconstructed interior?

How does this comparison change our understanding of the two museums?

On Prechistenka, the history of the building, the provenance of each exhibit and the arrangement of the galleries should be considered separately. On Arbat, the documented residence of the Pushkins sits alongside an interior created by museum staff using plans and recollections. By distinguishing between the address, the object and the way it is displayed, visitors avoid attributing every item in a display case to the poet and understand how much of the 1831 interior has been reconstructed.

This comparison can be continued beyond the museum galleries on the “Alexander Pushkin’s Moscow” tour of places associated with the poet: its route leads from Pushkin Square via the Church of the Great Ascension and the lanes around Arbat to the house containing the Memorial Apartment. The walk allows visitors to relate the poet’s documented address to the city as it looks today; the route description does not promise a visit inside.

Sources

1. The State A. S. Pushkin Museum: History of the Museum and Its Collection
2. The State A. S. Pushkin Museum: Main Building, Exhibition and History of the Estate
3. The A. S. Pushkin Memorial Apartment on Arbat: Exhibition and History of the House
4. The State A. S. Pushkin Museum: “New Acquisitions” Exhibition, 2026
5. The State A. S. Pushkin Museum: “Medicine in Pushkin’s Time” Exhibition
6. A. S. Pushkin State Museum: the Manuscript Room
7. A. S. Pushkin State Museum: collection of paintings and original drawings
8. A. S. Pushkin State Museum: photograph collection
9. A. S. Pushkin State Museum: the museum’s history in the 1950s
10. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report on the Khrushchev-Seleznyov Estate
11. ‘Alexander Sergeyevich’s Moscow’ tour: itinerary